An Ex to Grind in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 5) Paperback – September 4, 2014

by Ann Charles

  Well, at least when Cooper didn’t have my phone.

  I’d received my phone back Sunday evening as promised. Fortunately, Cooper had been too busy trying to solve Ms. Wolff’s murder to join us for what I’m sure would have been a fun-filled family dinner.

  “This. Is. Violet.” I growled at the end for emphasis.

  A loud clanging rang in the background from his end of the line, sounding like twenty pans had all fallen to the floor at once. “GOOD!” he yelled. “IT’S YOU THEN!”

  “And it’s me now, too.” A sharp thwack, thwack, thwack came through the phone. I sat up, shoving my hair out of my face. The smell of pancakes and coffee filtered through my bedroom doorway, making my stomach growl along with my brain.

  “Where are you, Cornelius?” My volume increased to match his with all of the commotion in the background. Lurching out of bed, I shut my bedroom door. The kids didn’t need to wake up for another fifteen minutes.

  His reply was drowned out by what sounded like a saw cutting through wood.

  “I can’t hear you, Cornelius.”

  “HOLD ON!” he yelled.

  I dropped onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to figure out how I would broach the subject of the séance to Cornelius.

  The racket coming through the line began to fade. I heard a door shut and then there was silence.

  “There,” he said at a normal level. “Now you can quit shouting at me. Would you look at that! There are two ravens sitting on the fence by my car. I can never remember if seeing two ravens is a bad omen or good. My grandmother had a poem she’d recite to help me remember, how did it go …? I can’t remember.”

  I covered my eyes. “Cornelius, where are you?”

  “Goldwash.”

  Was that one of the casinos on Main Street? Or was that the Golden Spur? I needed coffee to clear the spider webs leftover from my nightmare about shrunken heads. “Where?”

  “Goldwash.” I heard a bird screech from his end. “It’s an old mining town in Nevada. Surely you’ve heard of the famous haunted hotel here in town.”

  “Can’t say that I have.” My eyelids snapped open. “You’re not trying to buy that hotel, too, are you?” His lack of funding had held up the sale I was working on for him for The Old Prospector Hotel, Deadwood’s own haunted playground. If he was trying to get money for another hotel and was screwing up my sale because of it, I was going to go down there to this Goldwash town and sic the ravens on his bony ass.

  “I wish!” he said. “But this place isn’t for sale. A friend of mine bought it years back. He’s fixing it up, hoping to make it a mecca for paranormal lovers. Buffalo was my inspiration for buying the hotel in Deadwood.”

  “Buffalo?” I scratched my temple. “You mean the buffalo down in Custer State Park inspired you to want to have a place here in the Black Hills?” I thought it was The Old Prospector Hotel’s ghost stories that had inspired him to come north.

  “No, Buffalo is the name of my friend down here, but did you know that the white buffalo is a sign of good luck? So is a desert tortoise. I think two ravens may be, too. Isn’t one raven considered a sign of impending death? Like a flying grim reaper?”

  “You know what? Just stop. Please. It’s too early for this.”

  “You sound tense, Violet. Have you been reaching your hand into dark places again? You really shouldn’t tour the shadowed recesses of your mind without me there to guide you.”

  Right now I was thinking about reaching my hand through the phone and beating him with his own hat.

  “When are you coming back to Deadwood?” I asked, cutting through the fog of befuddlement that rolled in whenever Cornelius came within my hearing range.

  “Is there a problem with the sale?”

  “No.” There was a problem with dead people, but if I came right out in the open about wanting to set up a séance with Doc, that could start a chain of events that might end up in some sort of negative social explosion for Doc. I waded in on my tiptoes. “The sale is going through without a hitch at this point, but I need to see you.”

  “Ohhhh. You’ve fallen in love with me, haven’t you?”

  His question stunned me into a total silence rivaling that of deep space.

  “I should’ve seen this coming. It happens all of the time.”

  Was he serious? “All of the time?”

  “Yes. Women get attached to me very quickly. My hypothesis is that it’s due to my ability to communicate with ghosts.”

  “So you think that makes you a rock star in their eyes?”

  “No, of course not,” he said, as if I were the silly one this morning. “I believe that they see how good I am at communicating with ghosts and it appeals to their need to find a man whose communication skills are on an equal playing field with them. Time and again, women complain about how their husband or boyfriend won’t talk to them. I’m the answer to their prayers—the answer to your prayers.”

  Actually, he’d been more the cause of my nightmares.

  “Cornelius, I have not fallen in love with you, so it’s your lucky day.”

  “That would explain the two ravens.”

  At this point, I figured the best course was to continue with my initial reason for calling him last night and leaving a voicemail to get back with me ASAP. “I need to see you about a ghost.”

  “You have been reaching out, Violet. I knew it. I could feel the ripples in the other realm. Bad girl!”

  I hit my phone on the bed a few times. Doc owed me big time for this. “No, Cornelius, those ripples weren’t caused by me. But when you return, I’d like to discuss another meeting with you like we had up at Mount Moriah.” Just thinking about how I’d reached into the darkness and torn out that thing’s tongue still made me tuck in my knees and tremble.

  “You mean a séance, Violet?” I could hear the excitement in his voice. He was probably hopping around down there in Goldwash like a grasshopper in tall weeds.

  I cringed. “I’d prefer we call it a reaching out session.”

  “It’s more like a type of reaching inward therapy. Should we reserve the jail cell at the police station?”

  “No, we definitely should not.” Cornelius had been leaning on me to have a séance in one of the jail cells in Detective Cooper’s lair since he’d found out a prisoner had hanged himself there and was said to still haunt the place. I could only imagine the slew of nicknames I’d incur if I toted candles and an EVP monitor into the station and started talking to the walls.

  “I’d prefer to be in the privacy of your hotel suite again,” I told him. The last two séances—the only two I’d ever taken part in—had been in his hotel room. Mt. Moriah wasn’t really a séance, more of freaky-ass accident. “Only this time, Safari Skipper and her biker boyfriend can’t join us.”

  “Who will run my equipment?”

  “You said that it could practically run itself.”

  “That’s true, but there’s safety in numbers when it comes to the paranormal world.”

  Not in my experience. One seemed to be the magic number, unfortunately, but there were no witnesses to back up my story and keep me from appearing temporarily insane.

  “We’ll take our chances.” I’d surprise him with Doc’s presence. Since Cornelius was of the mindset the-more-the-merrier, he wouldn’t mind a third party attendee.

  “I’ll be back up there this weekend.”

  Good, that gave me time to prepare for this mentally so the anxiety wouldn’t strangle my heart in the meantime. “Call me when you’re settled in.”

  “I’m going to go catch one of those ravens and pluck a few of its feathers to bring with me for the séance.”

  “Excellent. I’ll pick up some eye of newt the next time I’m at Piggly Wiggly.” I wondered if he could hear how deep the sarcasm was flowing on my end.

  “Don’t waste your time, Violet. They don’t sell eye of newt there,” he said and hung up on me.

  I threw my phone down on the bed and
flopped back on my pillows. Conversations with Cornelius had a way of leaving me feeling like I was dangling upside-down from a tree limb.

  A door slammed out in the hall. Seconds later, the yelling began.

  “Dang kids!” I hopped out of bed, stomping out into the hallway to blow my whistle and play referee.

  Twenty minutes and two timeouts later, Addy and Layne marched down the stairs in front of me, heads lowered in pouts.

  “The kitchen. Now!” I said when we reached the bottom step, in case one of them thought they could make a break for it.

  Happiness awaited me in Aunt Zoe’s lemon colored kitchen in the form of caffeine and carbohydrates. Old man Harvey stood at the griddle watching pancakes bubble while Aunt Zoe poured two cups of coffee.

  “Good morning,” she said, setting one of the cups down in front of me. She pulled a plateful of pancakes out of the oven and placed it in the middle of the table. “Has the storm passed?”

  “What storm?” Addy asked, sliding two pancakes onto her plate.

  “The one causing all of the thunder upstairs.”

  “Duh, Addy,” Layne said, his mouth full.

  Harvey flicked Layne’s ear. “Didn’t you learn anything this mornin’, boy? Don’t mess with girls before they’ve had their feed. The only thing ornerier than a sore-toothed grizzly bear is a hungry woman.”

  “Bite your tongue, old man.” I hit the buzzard with a mock glare since I didn’t have a wooden spoon handy. “You’re outnumbered by hungry women this morning.”

  He grabbed two pancakes and dropped them on the plate in front of me, tossing three pieces of bacon on top. “Eat.”

  “I can’t put all of this away.”

  “Cut the crap, girl. Doc isn’t here, so you can fill your gullet. Besides, you’re gonna need a full stomach to face off with my nephew this mornin’.”

  Detective Cooper had called last night while I was washing dinner dishes and ordered me to be in his office first thing this morning. As he’d warned back at the Galena House, he had more questions for me. My flat out NO! was met with a slew of cursing. After we’d traded a few terse insults, I’d proposed his interrogation take place at an offsite location, aka his house. I’d also insisted on Harvey coming with me since he’d been standing right there next to me in that apartment when we’d found Ms. Wolff. Cooper agreed, saying he could kill two birds with one stone that way. As high strung as he was these days, I hoped he was using a turn of phrase and didn’t plan on aiming his loaded, authentic Colt .45 bedside lamp in my direction.

  “Why are you going to see Detective Cooper?” Layne asked in between slurps of orange juice. “Is this about that foot I found in the tree last summer?”

  “No.” I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to find out why there’d been a bare foot with mistletoe stapled to it hanging from a tree on the hill behind Aunt Zoe’s house. Nor did I want to think about it while eating bacon. “It’s about something else.”

  Layne was an ace gumshoe who couldn’t be distracted with a handful of candy like his sister. A few weeks ago, he’d brought home a library book on the art of spotting clues that a person was lying. Ever since, I’d had to be on my game when he drilled me with questions ranging from if I’d hidden the superglue from him again to how long I planned to keep dating Doc. He hadn’t been happy with either answer, even though I’d told the truth.

  “Kelly’s dad wants us to come over for pizza tomorrow night,” Addy said.

  “You and Layne can go if you promise to listen to whatever Jeff tells you to do.”

  “He wants you to come, too, Mother dear.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Layne said. “He just wants to make Mom his girlfriend.”

  “That’s a good thing,” Addy said.

  “I already have a boyfriend, Adelynn. How many times do we need to go over this?”

  “Why can’t you have two boyfriends?”

  Harvey snickered. “Because boys don’t like to share.”

  Speaking of sharing, I frowned over at him. “Did I see that black Jaguar leaving Miss Geary’s drive again this morning?” The rumble of the engine had drawn me to my bedroom window, wondering if Doc had pulled up. I’d gotten there too late to see the driver through the shaded windows, only his taillights.

  Harvey flipped a pancake and smacked it. “Yep, you did. Looks like that poacher is back settin’ his traps.”

  That was too bad. I was hoping Miss Geary had had a change of heart and kicked her new man to the curb. Ever since she’d sent Harvey and his suspenders packing, he’d been sleeping over at Aunt Zoe’s. When he wasn’t mooning over Miss Geary through the window, or cursing at her new stallion, he was nosing in on my after-bedtime moments with Doc.

  There was nothing like a busybody old man sitting on the end of the sofa to dampen the mood. It was too bad they’d shut down the brothels in Deadwood. I’d pay for company for him at this point to score some alone time with Doc.

  “You didn’t answer me, Mom,” Layne said. “Why do the cops want to talk to you?” He lowered his fork and eyed me closely, his lie detector vision activated. Maybe I should have bargained to take him with me to Cooper’s instead of Harvey. He’d really give the detective a run for his money.

  I shrugged. “He wants to ask me some questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Probably his house,” I lied, holding steady eye contact. “You know I’m selling Detective Cooper’s place for him.”

  “Why is Harvey going with you then?”

  I shrugged, lifting my coffee cup too quickly and banging the rim into my front tooth. “He wants to visit with his nephew,” I said, rubbing my tooth with my finger.

  “That sounds fishy.” His eyes narrowed. “Last night, you yelled you wouldn’t go unless he let Harvey go, too.”

  “I didn’t yell.”

  “Yeah, you kinda did, Mom,” Addy said.

  “What have I told you kids about eavesdropping on my phone calls?” I said more defensively than I meant to.

  My total lack of privacy these days thanks to two children who were unhappy with my having any kind of love life, an over-protective bodyguard sleeping on the couch each night, and a damned chicken who found my bed “just right” had me snapping my teeth at flies.

  “Hmmm, that seemed extra defensive.”

  I nodded at Layne’s plate. “Eat your breakfast, son.”

  He took a bite, his eyes still on mine. “I wasn’t eavesdropping on purpose. You were yelling so loud I couldn’t hear the TV.”

  “Yeah?” I stabbed three pieces of pancake onto my fork. “Golly gee, I’m so sorry to have interrupted your regular programming.”

  “Sarcasm, too.” He set his glass down and pointed his fork at me. “Guilty! In the last few minutes, you’ve shown five of the top seven signs of lying.”

  I swallowed the wad of pancake and syrup. “What sign is this, Snoopy Snooperson? You’re grounded!” My voice sounded strangled thanks to the frustration knotting my throat. I didn’t need this shit from Cooper, let alone my son.

  Addy laughed, which earned her a punch in the arm from her brother.

  “For what?” Layne asked me, his voice whiney.

  Now who was being defensive? “For grilling your mother at breakfast.”

  Addy stuck her tongue out at her brother.

  “Knock it off Adelynn Renee or you’ll be grounded, too.”

  “What! What did I do? He’s the one who punched me.”

  “She started it when she—”

  Aunt Zoe let out a shrill whistle, silencing both kids. I needed to practice my whistling.

  “Layne, don’t you have library books to turn in today?” When he nodded, she pointed at his plate. “Take that to the sink and go get them.”

  Layne shoved the last bite in his mouth and did as told, racing out of the room after shooting his sister a wrinkled upper lip.

  “Addy,” Aunt Zoe zeroed in on my daughter. “You promised you’d clean up the chicken’s cage this mo
rning and fill her feed bowl. You know what happens if you don’t follow through on your word, right?”

  Addy gulped the last of her juice, scooped up her plate, and deposited it in the sink on her way over to the basement door. “Don’t leave without me, Harvey.”

  “You better get those tail feathers moving, kid,” he said, pretending to chase after her with the spatula.

  With my children gone, peace and quiet returned to my world. I covered my face. “I’m a shitty mother.”

  “What are you jawin’ about?” I heard the chair Addy had left scrape back and then creak. I peeked out as Harvey began scooping forkfuls of pancake into his mouth.

  “You are not a shitty mother,” Aunt Zoe said, reaching over and tugging my hands away from my face.

  “Baloney! In seconds, you were able to redirect their aggression and get them busy doing tasks that I have to tell them to do five times before they even acknowledge I’m speaking.”

  “It’s only because I’m not you. Kids are wired not to hear what their parents are saying half of the time.”

  “Make that ninety-nine percent of the time,” I corrected.

  “Those two kids are lucky to have you,” Harvey said.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Was that an actual compliment, old man?”

  “Yemph,” he spoke through pancake then washed it down with a gulp of coffee. “But don’t get used to it. Your noggin’ is big enough with all of that hair.”

  “Leave my hair out of it.” I pinched his arm. “You sure you have time to take the kids to school today?”

  “You mean in between shoving food in my mouth here and listening to the birds?”

  “Don’t you need to go out to your ranch, take care of your herd or something like that?”

  “I already did that. Some of us don’t wait for the sun to rise to get our lazy asses out of bed.”

  “Violet,” Aunt Zoe traced the rim of her coffee cup with her finger. “I was looking through my old German dictionary last night.”