by Mary Bowers
“She used to volunteer at my animal shelter when she was a kid,” I told him. “I haven’t seen much of her since she went away to college. That was years ago.”
“Oh, right, you run that animal shelter outside of Tropical Breeze, don’t you? Jeralyn loves animals. We’re going to get a dog, once we get settled. Maybe we can find one at your shelter.”
“Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?” I asked. I couldn’t help but smile. He smiled back. Now that we were smiling, I said, “How dare you accuse me of being in your room when you knew damn well it was Julie.”
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t want to admit that she’d been in there. It really was Julie – she really did come running out of my room?”
“Like a greased torpedo. Are you going to try to get me to believe you didn’t know she was there?”
“I don’t remember her being in my room. I swear on the heads of my future children, I am not having an affair with Julie Lang. I don’t know what she was doing in my room. I didn’t even know she was there until she threw the door open and ran for it. She must have been waiting until she heard you in the hall.”
“Wait – you want me to believe that a nearly naked woman came and lurked in your room while you were asleep, waited until she had witnesses, then came running out so she could get caught? I’m sorry, Ryan, I’m not following your logic here. In what world does that make sense?”
“Not in mine,” he said helplessly. “The only thing I can guess is that she’s trying to break up Jeralyn and me.”
I thought about it. “Has Julie been warm and friendly with you in the past? You know what I mean.”
“Oh, well, yeah.” He went all blinky and shruggy. “I wasn’t interested. She’s not my type. She’s my mother’s secretary, for god’s sake.”
“So what? Jeralyn is your uncle’s secretary. Julie is a very attractive woman, and you’ve known her a lot longer than you’ve known Jeralyn.”
“Julie’s not my type. She’s . . . cold. Like polished marble. Cold and hard and calculating.”
“You think she’s just after your money?”
“I don’t care what she’s after. I’m not interested. I’m in love with Jeralyn,” he said, a bit too loud. He looked around, lowered his voice, and repeated, “I’m in love with Jeralyn, but she won’t talk to me. She won’t let me explain. She went to you, didn’t she? She came into the dining room with you. You’re her friend. You can talk to her.”
I felt very old and wise and skeptical. Every cell on the left side of my brain was telling me to stay out of it, but every cell on the right was cheering for the young lovers. “If I get the chance, I’ll talk to her. But I’m not advocating for you. I’ll just tell her that you claim that Julie got into your room without your knowledge or consent and you don’t know why she was there. Is anything missing, by the way?”
He shook his head. “That was the first thing I thought of. I checked. Nothing is missing, and it doesn’t look like she was searching for anything.”
“Well, here’s some free advice: start locking your door.”
“Oh, trust me,” he said. “Before I go to bed, I’m pushing the dresser up against it from now on. Thank you, thank you, thank you! You’re wonderful.” He bussed me on the cheek.
“Don’t thank me yet. And if you break that girl’s heart, be afraid, young man. I have friends in the spirit world who won’t be stopped by a mere dresser against the door. You’ll never sleep in peace again.”
He grinned, turned away, stopped in his tracks, then came back with a more serious look on his face. “Is the castle really haunted? I mean, really? You guys are experts, right? I don’t believe in all that stuff, but what have you found out?”
I tried to come up with a sensible answer. Ed had come across the great hall to see what was holding me up, and hearing our voices, had come to a halt in the chapel doorway. Ryan looked from Ed to me and waited.
“I think there are echoes,” I said at last.
“Like, vibrations?” Ryan said. His face looked a little pained, and I had to give him credit for at least trying.
“Yeah, like vibrations,” I said.
“We’ll know more after our investigation is complete,” Ed told him, quite confidently.
We had started walking back toward the opening to the great hall as we finished talking, and Ryan stood at the threshold and said, “Well, good luck.” He looked up – way, way up – to the ceiling above the chandelier. “This is all going to be mine someday. I don’t want to bring my bride to a haunted castle. She’s going to have enough trouble with my living relatives.”
He gave us a pained smile and pivoted toward the stairs.
“Come and sit down,” I said once Ryan was out of earshot. “I’ve got something to show you. It may change how you feel about our employer.”
* * * * *
“You shouldn’t have shown this to me,” he said. “It may prejudice the investigation. The old goat!” he blurted suddenly. “He’s old enough to be her grandfather!”
“I know. And just when I was beginning to like him.”
We were back in the great hall, whispering to one another on a love seat, glancing up from time to time to make sure Oliver wasn’t hanging over the balustrade, listening.
Ed tried to hand the note back, and I told him to keep it. He’s a meticulous record-keeper. He’s got the note in his file on the Castle Moon Experiment to this day.
He shoved it down into his messenger bag, looking around to make sure we had no witnesses. He doesn’t trust unlocked doors any more than I do, and he’d been carrying his field notes around in that bag ever since we’d arrived, probably even when he went into his own private bathroom.
“You’re probably right,” I said. “I wish I hadn’t seen it myself, because I don’t think I can look Oliver Moon in the eye again without letting him know what I think of him. How do you think this plays into the fact that he hired us at all? Because I still don’t buy that he brought us here to investigate a haunting. Did you hear the way he was joking about the castle and the dishonest way Horace made his money? He’s not afraid. Old Horace’s bust was sitting right there, listening, so to speak. If Oliver believed the shades of his ancestors were hovering around – and the famous birthday dinner would be the time and place if any occasion would – would he have been talking like that?”
“He was afraid of something when he talked to me on the phone, trying to convince me to take the job,” Ed said. “I don’t see that this love triangle plays into it at all. And if he’s sexually harassing his secretary, why would he want more witnesses around? And that note implies an ongoing situation, not a longing for one to begin. That was the letter of a hopelessly besotted man, and he was talking about marriage. He must have seen last night’s farce as an opportunity, and he wants to move in and seal the deal before those two can make up again. Taylor, my friend, I think you have to consider that, far from your friend Jeralyn being deceived by young Ryan, she may have been using him to get to his uncle. Disgusting as it is.”
“Jeralyn never even saw that note! Little Horace found it outside her bedroom door. Do you think she would’ve left it lying around if she had seen it?”
“Consider carefully, Taylor. After all, why wait for an inheritance when you can be a rich man’s wife right now?”
I glared at him. “Give it back. I want to read it again.”
“No. Somebody’s coming,” he whispered, just as Oliver Moon came out of the stairwell and asked us to step across for a meeting.
Chapter 13
I sat there in the gloom, glaring. I couldn’t help it. Ed had said it best: the old goat! If that note had been signed “R” it would have been free verse poetry, something tragic and beautiful. With the “O” at the bottom, it was just the droolings of a randy old man who should be ashamed of himself.
Oliver Moon was giving us our instructions for that night, and I barely paid any attention to him. Every no
w and then he would address me, and I’d give him a one-syllable response.
He didn’t seem to notice until the very end of the meeting.
We were to meet him at eleven pm, and his plan was to drag us down to the dungeon and have me handle objects one by one while Ed recorded my reactions and monitored my physical condition if I slipped into a trance. Again.
“I didn’t go into a trance,” I said flatly.
He allowed me that. “Should you have any reaction I cannot address appropriately and in a timely manner,” he said carefully.
“Whatever.”
“You’re upset about finding that my family is disgustingly human, is that it?” he asked me, sitting back, folding his arms and smirking at me.
“Something like that.” I didn’t want to talk about it. Then I did. “And what’s the idea of needling your sister like that? Have you really been trying to sell the castle?”
He chuckled. “Of course not. I hate to admit it, but I love the old pile.”
Ed goggled. “Then why do you antagonize your sister, who is obviously unstable?”
“Good question,” I seconded.
He stopped smiling and got serious, as if he’d let something slip out. “Just make sure you attend to your business tonight. And what I said last night still goes. In fact, tonight, it’s more important than ever. I’m aware that you guarded my door after I went to bed last night, Mr. Darby-Deaver. I appreciate it. I don’t know how long our researches will keep us out of bed tonight, but do not allow yourselves to become separated from me, no matter what happens. Someone may try to create another diversion.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He ignored me. “And if we should retire early because some further comedy has been performed for our benefit, I ask that you guard my door again.”
Ed nodded, a touch bewildered.
I wasn’t bewildered. “What are you hoping for tonight? To catch another half-dressed secretary running around in the dark? Maybe tonight, you can be the one to catch her instead of Ed, here. Then you can wrestle around with her a while, groping.”
“I was not groping!” Ed said, blinking and gasping and staring at me. “Really, Taylor!”
“That little scene with my nephew and that woman aroused your self-righteousness, I’m afraid.” Oliver said to me. “Please don’t immerse yourself in it. It doesn’t become you. Self-righteousness doesn’t become anybody. Tonight, things may be different. Don’t let yourselves become complacent. You can go now.”
I flounced out. Ed pulled together the notes he had spread around in front of himself on Oliver’s desk and fumbled along after me, a lame coda to my magnificent exit.
* * * * *
In the watery gloom of the great hall, Ed looked at me closely and said, “You should get some sleep.”
We both remembered my episode of sleep paralysis – or my visit from Orion, take your pick – of the day before, and Ed actually apologized. Never having had a paranormal encounter himself, he seems to think people who have need to be handled carefully or they’ll suddenly lose their minds.
“I’m going to go see if I can help in the kitchen,” I told him. “I may as well do something useful around here.”
He was nodding, gazing at me earnestly. “Manual labor is helpful, I believe, in taking one’s mind off traumatic things.”
“I am not traumatized,” I said, “and if you see Bastet, tell her I’m getting another goddess to work with. She’s been no help at all.”
He popped his eyes, clutched his satchel to his bosom and all but crossed himself as I spun around and left the great hall.
I went steaming along through the series of little-used rooms and was standing in the butler’s pantry before I knew it, listening for voices in the kitchen. Instead, I heard the mechanical hum-and-swish of the dishwasher. It was a big letdown. I needed girl-talk just then, and I was pretty sure Julie would have left most of the work for Charlotte and Jeralyn. A good gossip with those two was just what I needed, but I’d missed all the fun. The kitchen was clean and orderly and quiet. As I walked over to the dishwasher, I realized that even that wasn’t making much noise. It just made the room feel lonely.
I had a full-immersion flashback of those happy times after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, working with the grown-up women in the kitchen, wrapping up leftovers and scraping dishes, deep in conversation while somebody (usually me) stood at the sink, elbow-deep in soapsuds. The men would be off in the living room watching football, drinking highballs and smoking like chimneystacks, talking about boring stuff like passing yards, while we girls talked about the really important things, like what Mrs. Barrett said to Mrs. Martin about her husband. (When I was a kid, I had no idea what my grown-up neighbors’ first names were.)
Dishwashers have spoiled all that. You shove the dishes in and turn the thing on, and then, worse-case scenario, you have to go watch football.
Anyway, nobody was in the kitchen. I wandered hopefully into the servant’s dining room. It was awfully quiet, but I figured they might have lingered over their own meal. But no. Nobody on the terrace either. I might have sat out there and enjoyed a peaceful hour looking at the ocean, but the pounding of the waves on the rocks was doing something to my nerves. When I heard the door onto Maxine’s balcony sliding open, I tiptoed back into the house.
I walked back through the pantry and found myself staring at Horace and Orion, still sitting on the mantel, waiting for me to cross the beam of their combined, dead stares. I set my face at the music room and sailed straight ahead.
In the end, I decided to find the library and see if there were any books to read (besides Maxine’s; there was bound to be a collection of her first editions in there), but I couldn’t remember seeing one. In the end, I realized I couldn’t find it because Horace had neglected to put a library into the castle. “Figures,” I thought.
So I went up to my own room, got out my e-reader and pulled up an Edmund Crispin. I needed a laugh, and I’d already read Wodehouse into the ground. Within fifteen or twenty minutes my gears had been shifted, and sometime after that I drifted off to sleep with a smile on my face.
This time, I didn’t have any dreams at all, that I can remember.
* * * * *
There was no dinner that night. All the Moons seemed to have gone to ground, and in fact, right up until the time that Ed and I came down for our evening with Oliver, we didn’t see anybody at all.
He was waiting for us in the great hall, and got up when we came in through his own office; the route through there was the shortest way, and we half expected to find him there. He came striding at us and silently pointed us to the front stairs, and off we went.
Ed tells me we got some good stuff that night. He also tells me Bastet was with us from the get-go.
I’d like to say I earned my fee that night, and I’d also like to say I didn’t go into a trance, but Ed’s got the proof that I did.
But the fact is that from the time I turned around and looked down, at the moment that Oliver snapped on the yellowish light inside the stairwell, to the time I woke up in my bed the next morning, I have no memory.
Ed played his recordings for me. That’s definitely my voice on them. And there’s a collection of vague facts about the Moon family that I rambled on about, which I didn’t know I knew, but anybody could have gleaned from the Internet in advance, if they’d wanted to. I hadn’t. I didn’t know that stuff. But I couldn’t prove it in a court of law, and I couldn’t be bothered to try.
Ed said Bastet was worried about me. I don’t believe it. She never has been before, and from the moment we set foot in the castle, she had abandoned me. Only a few strands of her black fur that I found on the clothing I wore that night kept me from believing that she had been there at all.
Nobody came running through the castle without their clothes on.
Nobody got caught perpetrating a hoax.
And the stuff I came up with as I handled the Moons’ collection o
f debris was uninteresting in the extreme. I mean, who cares that this is the pair of roller skates that Adela Hanford Moon was wearing when she fell and broke her ankle? Not me. But that’s my voice on the recording, talking about it. Sounding like a drunk.
Only two shocking things happened that night:
(1) Oliver Stratford Moon, our employer, told me that I had made a believer of him.
(2) Fawn Moon Hixon fell, or jumped, to her death from the balcony of her bedroom to the terrace below. Charlotte found her there the next morning when she went out to clean the table for breakfast.
Chapter 14
It was inconvenient, to say the least, that I couldn’t remember anything about the night before, but at least I had a digital alibi. Ed had five hours of video of me, meandering on and on, with occasional questions or comments from Ed and Oliver, which gave us all alibis for the time Fawn died.
The Medical Examiner decided she had fallen sometime between two and three in the morning, and was dead within the hour. She probably never regained consciousness. Ed, Oliver and I had settled down and started recording at 11:30 and hadn’t given up and gone to bed until after five. By the time Ed took me to my room, looked me in the eyes and decided I was all right, and left me on my bed with all my clothes on, Fawn was already growing cold on the stone surface of the terrace, two stories directly below my room. I found out later that her room was the one just underneath mine. Maxine’s room was just below Ed’s. Both Fawn’s and Maxine’s rooms had balconies with stone railings that were classically beautiful, but would have been too low to be legal if the castle were being built today. I’m 5’ 10”, and when I went out onto Fawn’s balcony later on, the handrail came to just about the point of my hip bone. Fawn was a few inches shorter than me, but it wouldn’t have taken a flying leap for her to get over the railing. Or much of a push.
Ed was the one who first told me what had happened, and gave me the further bad news that my old friend Detective Marty Frane was downstairs conducting interviews, and would eventually want to see me. Ed had already shown him parts of the recording that vindicated us, but Frane still wanted to see me. Of course he did. For old time’s sake.
