Killing in C Sharp

by Alexia Gordon

  Hardy’s smile made him look like a kid who’d just learned Santa was bringing him the bike he’d been asking for all year. “This new opera, it’s not a secret, is it? Can you give me a hint what it’s about? I promise not to post on social media. Can’t promise I won’t tell Mom.”

  “The premiere’s in a few weeks, so I guess it’s no secret. It’s called ‘Kastély.’ Aed based it on the Hungarian legend of a princess entombed in a castle wall as a sacrifice so construction on the castle could be finished in time to save the city from invaders.”

  “Zoltánfi Castle!” a voice exclaimed from behind them. “I know that place.”

  Gethsemane and Hardy turned to see the new speaker, a woman about Hardy’s age. She sported robin’s egg blue hair and piercings in every pierceable part of her head. “I did an investigation there before I joined the boys’ crew. Cree-pee. Some dude’s really writing an opera about the place?”

  “Wrote,” Gethsemane said. “It’s finished.”

  The blue-haired woman, who Hardy introduced as Poe, went on. “Dude must have a pair the size of the moon. I’m the first one to challenge a curse, but I’d sooner play in traffic than mess with Maja.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gethsemane said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Poe gawped. “You don’t know about Maja’s curse?”

  Gethsemane shook her head. “Not up on my curses, I’m afraid.” She had enough to keep up with with a garden-variety haunting.

  Poe sat on the edge of the coffee table. She leaned close to Gethsemane and lowered her voice, as if delivering classified information. “Maja was a Hungarian noblewoman—not a princess, by the way—back in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. She was rumored to be the most beautiful woman in the country. The smartest and kindest, too. She married the youngest son of the Zoltán family.”

  So far, this sounded like every fairytale ever. “Let me guess,” Gethsemane said. “Her mother-in-law, the evil queen, hated her—”

  “Nah, the baroness—not queen—was cool with her. Everything would’ve been okay if the Mongols hadn’t invaded.” Poe broke off. “Hey, Hardy, got a cigarette?”

  “I quit eight months ago, and you can’t smoke in guests’ homes, anyway.”

  “Forgot. I’m used to telling this story with a cig in one hand and a beer in the other.”

  Gethsemane gestured at the bar cart. “You can help yourself to whiskey if you tell me what happened with the Mongol hordes.”

  Poe accepted the offer. She spoke as she poured her drink. “The Mongols invaded and pretty much destroyed everything—pillaged, slaughtered, you get the idea.” She paused and sipped. “Hey, what is this?” She raised the glass to the light and studied its amber contents. “Liquid paradise.”

  “It’s bourbon,” Gethsemane said. “Waddell and Dobb Double-Oaked Twelve-Year-Old Reserve Single Barrel. From Kentucky.”

  “Say, isn’t that the bourbon Eamon McCarthy—” Hardy began.

  Gethsemane cut him off. “It’s a fresh bottle.”

  Poe ignored both of them, her story of invasion and destruction seemingly forgotten. She poured another glass of bourbon, sniffed it as if she knew what she was doing, took her time savoring several more mouthfuls.

  Gethsemane cleared her throat. “The Mongols?”

  Poe returned to her perch on the coffee table. “So, yeah, back to the Mongols.” She sipped bourbon. “Where can you get this stuff? It’s better than—”

  “Poe,” Hardy cut in. “Try and focus.”

  Poe sighed and drained her glass. “The Mongols. They wiped out everything and everyone they ran into. Wiped out practically the whole kingdom. But some people, the king included, survived. After the Mongols cleared out, the king granted pieces of his remaining land to surviving nobles on the condition they build a castle on the land to protect the kingdom, in case the Mongols decided to come back. The Zoltán family got some land and tried to build a castle, but every time the walls got yea high,” Poe extended her arm and held her hand above her head, “some disaster happened and destroyed whatever they’d built. They had to start all over again. This went on and on for, like, five years or something. The castle walls would not stand. Finally, the king threatened to take the land back and give it to someone else.” Poe stopped.

  “And?” Gethsemane asked.

  “One sec.” Poe hopped up and went back to the bar cart. Replenished, she returned to the table and continued her story. “Baroness Zoltán consulted a fortune teller. The seer told her she had to encase one of her daughters-in-law in a castle wall. If she did this, the castle would be built within the next three months and the walls would stand forever.”

  “That’s whacked,” Hardy said.

  “Yeah, the baroness thought so, too. She wasn’t a psycho, and she wasn’t crazy about the idea of sacrificing a daughter-in-law, but she had eight. Killing one, compared to losing them all, plus her sons and her grandkids, to torture and mass slaughter in the next invasion, seemed like the lesser evil.”

  “How’d she choose?” Gethsemane asked. “Lottery? Show of hands?”

  “Some versions of the story say she was supposed to sacrifice her eldest daughter-in-law, but she liked the eldest best, or the eldest was pregnant or something, so the baroness offered Maja, the youngest, instead. Some versions say Maja was the choice from the jump. Long and short of it, the baroness tricked Maja into going to the construction site where seven of the sons, all of them except Maja’s husband, entombed her in the castle’s stone walls.”

  “That’s a horrible, horrible story,” Gethsemane said. “Opera-worthy horrible. Probably why Aed chose it as the basis for his new work. However, it’s not a curse.”

  “The curse.” Poe punctuated her words with a finger jabbed in Hardy’s knee. “Maja uttered the curse with her dying words. She swore revenge on the entire Zoltán family, from generation unto generation. She said Castle Zoltánfi would, indeed, stand forever, but the family would fall. She promised her spirit would come back and murder the firstborn son of every branch of the family. A keeper of promises, she delivered: the baroness’s firstborn, the heir to the title, died by impalement on the first anniversary of Maja’s death. Then the firstborn sons of all the brothers died gruesome deaths: disembowelment, beheading, you name it, and always on the anniversary of Maja’s murder. To this day, in every generation of the Zoltán family, the firstborn son dies of unnatural causes on the same anniversary.” Poe drained her glass. “Which is next Thursday.”

  “What happened to Maja’s husband?” Hardy asked. “The eighth brother? Why didn’t he stop his siblings from killing his wife?”

  “They waited until he was out of town to do the deed. When he came home and found his wife dead, he took their daughter to a convent to be raised by nuns, then threw himself off one of the castle’s parapets.”

  “I don’t think Aed Devlin has to worry,” Gethsemane said. “He’s Irish, not Hungarian. And he’s the third of five brothers.”

  If asked to describe Poe’s grin, Gethsemane would have called it “devilish.” “The curse has a second part,” the blue-haired woman said. “A fifteenth-century addendum. By then the Zoltán family were social outcasts. No one wanted to marry into it. People ridiculed and whispered about them. Playwrights and poets considered their story fodder. Authors and composers who catered to the lower classes wrote bawdy plays and drinking songs about them. The then-baroness, named Maja after the infamous legend—”

  “How’s that for tempting fate?” Hardy whispered to Gethsemane.

  If Poe heard him, she ignored him. “—decided to put an end to the shame. She practiced folk magic, and she modified her vengeful ancestor’s curse. She decreed that if anyone ever wrote about, sang about, preached about, or publicly spoke about the Zoltán family curse, they would die in the same way as that Zoltán generation’s eldest sons. She also swore a wa
sting sickness would claim the lives of any firstborn male who listened to or watched a performance of the doomed piece.”

  “Did it work?” Hardy asked.

  “Oh, did it,” Poe said. “Vlad Nagy, the Duke of Toth’s favorite court musician, composed a ballad based on the legend. Right in the middle of the premiere performance, a freak wind blew out of nowhere, circled the banquet hall, whipped the duke’s entire sword collection off the wall, and sent all the swords flying at Vlad. Every. Single. Sword. They cut him to ribbons. Three days later, the news arrived that the heir to Castle Zoltánfi died when a gang of assassins jumped him in an alley and cut him to bits. And Vlad wasn’t the only one to suffer Maja’s wrath. Both the duke’s eldest and Vlad’s eldest contracted a mysterious illness within moments of Vlad’s death. They stopped eating, they couldn’t sleep. They transformed from the dukedom’s finest specimens of young manhood to withered, bedridden shells in twenty-four hours and were both dead in a week. And—”

  Hardy raised a hand. “Enough. We don’t need to hear anymore. Isn’t talking about curses supposed to be bad luck?”

  Poe shrugged. “Don’t think so. Anyway, I’m almost done. Since about the sixteenth century, no one’s even been able to finish a play or book or composition about Maja. Bad things happen if they even try. Careers implode, marriages dissolve, they develop disfiguring and fatal illnesses, you name it. Maja’s curse is even more unlucky than the Scottish play. And, same as with the Scottish play, some people won’t even speak the curse’s real name. They call it the Jinx.”

  “You spoke about it,” Hardy said. “At length.”

  “But I,” Poe said, “only chase ghosts. I don’t write about them.”

  The Jinx. “The ridicu—” Gethsemane began, then bit it off. She used to define ridiculous as a belief in ghosts. Look at her now. Instead she said, “Maybe the curse is broken. Aed’s already written the opera. He hasn’t been dismembered, stabbed, set afire, or grown a second head.” True, his career had imploded and his marriage had disintegrated, but he hadn’t written the opera yet. “He has one or two last-minute tweaks—”

  Poe’s devilish grin returned. “Then he hasn’t finished it yet. Has he?”

  “Sheesh, Poe.” Hardy frowned at his colleague. “Do you get off on the thought of some poor guy having his guts ripped out just because he wrote a play or a song about a woman who’s been dead for eight hundred years?”

  “I just don’t like the idea of a man profiting from the suffering of a woman.”

  Hardy stood and gestured at Poe. “When feminism meets sociopathy. I’m going to go check with Kent and see where we’re at. Hopefully we can knock off for the evening.” He frowned at Poe while he spoke to Gethsemane. “That drink at the pub sounds like a great idea about now.”

  Poe perked up. “Pub? You’re going to a pub? Can I come with?”

  “No,” Hardy said.

  “Sure,” Gethsemane said.

  Hardy stared at Gethsemane. “You want to hear more blood and gore?”

  Gethsemane shrugged. Solving murders had improved her stomach for blood and gore. “The Mad Rabbit has a way of making people forget about death and loss and the bitter tears of disappointment.” She nodded toward Poe. “Once she gets a pint in her and someone picks up a fiddle and gets a sing-along going, thoughts of vengeful ghosts will be as far from her mind as Earth is from Jupiter.”

  Hardy and Poe both snorted.

  “You don’t know Poe,” Hardy said.

  “I don’t sing,” Poe said.

  “You’ve never been to the Rabbit,” Gethsemane countered.

  Kent appeared in the doorway. “Rabbit? You’ve seen an animal ghost?”

  Gethsemane laughed. “The only animals people see after a night at the Rabbit are pink elephants. The Mad Rabbit is the local pub.”

  “A pub crawl?” Kent clapped his hands. “I’m game.”

  “Not much of a crawl,” Gethsemane said. “Only the one pub.”

  “I thought we were going to track down the local clergy and get the religious perspective on the Carraigfaire hauntings,” Hardy said.

  Kent looked at his watch. “It’s kind of late. Tomorrow’s Sunday. We’ll attend services and speak to the priest afterwards.”

  “A few hours at the pub, Kent,” Poe said, “and you’ll need to go to church for more than just research.”

  Kent scowled at her, then tapped at his smartphone. “Father Tim Keating, right? He’s the parish priest?”

  Gethsemane guessed he meant the questions for her. She nodded. “You might find him at the Rabbit. He’s a pretty broad-minded priest.” And a better paranormal expert than anyone in this room.

  “We’re done for the night?” Hardy asked.

  A woman appeared in the doorway behind Kent. Her silver hair pegged her around the same age as Aed and Headmaster Riordan. Her close-fitting t-shirt and jeans showed she wore her age better than either of the men. Chronologically, she could have been Kent’s mother, but the way her hand caressed his shoulder suggested her feelings for the blond ghostbuster were anything but maternal.

  Kent smiled down at her. “I think we’re done. We have a plan for interviews tomorrow. Ciara and Poe can get some interior and exterior shots of the cottage in the morning light. Hardy, after church, you take the tech crew up to the lighthouse and see where we can set up some cameras, maybe some EMF pods, and digital recorders. I understand the ghost sightings occur primarily at the cottage, so we’ll do our actual stake out here, but we still might catch some EVP or EMF surges up there. Have I lost you, Gethsemane? EVPs are—”

  “Electronic voice phenomena and EMF stands for electromagnetic force.” She had told him she watched the show. She studied Ciara. She remembered seeing her in the flux of people who’d invaded Carraigfaire earlier but couldn’t recall actually meeting her. She offered the silver-haired woman her hand. “We haven’t been introduced. Properly, I mean.”

  Ciara kept one of her hands on Kent’s shoulder and shook Gethsemane’s hand with her other. “Ciara Tierney.” Her brogue sounded less musical than the local dialect. Gethsemane couldn’t place it. “Poe and I are the crew’s still photographers. Pleased to meet you. Properly, I mean.”

  “Quitting time means pub time.” Poe twisted her blue mane into a bun and secured it with a scrunchie produced from one of the innumerable pockets that dotted her cargo pants. “You guys ready?” She directed the question to Kent and Ciara.

  Kent touched Ciara’s elbow. “I think we’ll skip tonight’s party.”

  Poe protested. “But you said—”

  “We’d love to go,” Ciara interjected. “I bet the craic will be ninety. We don’t want to miss out on the hooley, Kent.”

  Kent’s hand moved to Ciara’s waist. “It’s late, Cee.”

  “We need some local color for the show,” she said, “some flare. It’s what makes us different from the other paranormal shows. What better place to pick up local color than the pub? Ma always used to say gossip flowed through pubs and churches like water through cheesecloth. Since I prefer to leave the church-going to Hardy, I vote for a night at the former.”

  Hardy flushed.

  “Is the pub haunted?” Poe asked.

  “As far as I know,” Gethsemane said, “the only spirits in the pub come in bottles.”

  “As far as you know.” Poe phrased it as a challenge. “Maybe there are ghosts no one’s told you about. Maybe you haven’t asked enough questions.”

  Gethsemane Brown hadn’t asked enough questions? She’d been accused of much since she arrived in Dunmullach, but not asking enough questions didn’t number among her sins. A couple of people had tried to kill her to stop her from asking questions. “You’re welcome to try your luck,” she said to Poe.

  “Skill,” Poe countered.

  “Skill, luck. Either way, here’s a tip: buy a couple of ro
unds first.”

  “All settled,” Ciara said. Kent’s hand moved from her waist to his pocket. “Down to the pub, first round’s on the crew. We’ll pry loose a few secrets before the night’s through. You driving, Hardy?”

  Three

  “You’ve got mad parking talent, Hardy,” Poe said as Hardy wedged the crew’s rented SUV into a space designed for a Mini.

  Gethsemane, Poe, Ciara, Kent, and Hardy climbed out of the vehicle. They had—Ciara had—invited the rest of the Ghost Hunting Adventures crew to join them, but everyone else begged off, citing the need to call family back home or get to bed early. The four paranormal investigators followed Gethsemane to the Mad Rabbit.

  Muted noise from the pub crowd bled out to the street through the closed front door and hit them with a blast when Hardy opened it. Gethsemane led the way inside, through throngs of locals, over to the bar where she elbowed her way to the counter. She greeted the barman by name. “Hey, Murphy. Any chance of getting a table?”

  The stout publican mopped his glistening forehead with a bar towel. “See for yourself. Place is bloody packed.”

  “Bet Father Tim hears lots of confessions tomorrow.”

  “Including his own. He’s here.” Murphy jerked his chin toward where Father Tim sat in a corner with the church secretary and sexton. He’d worked his way through a pint. Gethsemane caught his eye and waved.

  “Who’re those fellas?” Murphy asked. His gesture included Ciara and Poe.

  “Don’t laugh. They’re part of the paranormal investigation team Billy invited to Carraigfaire to capture proof Eamon’s ghost haunts the cottage.”

  “Was Billy ossified when he made that deal? Or perhaps not the full shilling?”

  “More like mad at me and—” She almost said “Eamon.” She glanced over her shoulder to see if Kent and the others stood within earshot. “Mad at me and wanting to mitigate his losses. Hank Wayne’s deal would have netted Billy a huge payout.”