by Joanne Pence
Paavo and Angie glanced at each other, then back to Chelsea.
Her face fell. “You’re right. It couldn’t have been Jack. He wouldn’t have scared me. He wouldn’t have run off.” She covered her face in her hands. “Good God, am I a fool to have believed Finley Tay? I just don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I just imagined the whole thing.”
“Can you think of anything said to you or that you overheard,” Paavo asked, “that made you feel uneasy in anyway?”
She rubbed her forehead. “Don’t we all feel uneasy with these deaths?” Her eyes began to tear again.
“What if whatever happened to Patsy,” Angie said slowly, “happened the same way? Someone might have been watching her, then grabbed her. She was awfully frazzled that last day before she disappeared. We all thought it was because of Running Spirit and Moira. But what if it was a lot more than that? What if the killer is after us, all of us, for another reason, a reason we haven’t figured out yet? He or she went after Finley, Miss Greer, Patsy, now Chelsea—”
“Angie, enough!” Paavo ordered.
Chelsea was close to hysterics. Angie patted her hand. “I’m sorry,” Angie said. “I just wanted to consider all sides of this, since the sheriff obviously doesn’t think it’s important to come here to protect us.”
“You saw the road, Angie,” Paavo said. “Even after it stops raining, he’ll have to dig his way in.”
“They could send a helicopter.”
“In this storm? And he has no reason to think there’s any emergency.”
“That’s just ducky. Before Butz bothers to think anything, how many more of us will have been killed?”
“Oh, God!” Chelsea wailed. “I want to go home.”
“We all want to go home.” Angie helped Chelsea put on her robe, then took her hand and pulled her from her bed. “You’re not staying here alone tonight. Come to our room.”
A flicker of relief lit Chelsea’s eyes, but she pulled her hand free. “No, I couldn’t intrude that way.”
“It’s no intrusion,” Paavo said. “Angie’s right. You shouldn’t be alone after this.”
“Thank you.” Chelsea picked up her pillow and hugged it against herself as she walked with Angie and Paavo down the hall.
Once back in their room, Paavo took his pillow from the bed and tossed it onto a chair by the fireplace. “You ladies get into bed. I’ve got a few things I want to check out.”
“I couldn’t take your bed,” Chelsea said.
“It’s all right. I wasn’t planning to use it tonight anyway.” He glanced at Angie and remembered his fleeting thought of making up with her when he first came up to the room tonight. It seemed like centuries ago. “Not much, at least.” He took his gun from the back of his waistband and put it on the nightstand next to Angie. “Keep this near, in case you hear anything strange.”
“A gun?” Chelsea cried. “Oh, my God.”
Angie couldn’t believe Paavo would leave them. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to check out her room. There’s got to be another way out of it. Men don’t disappear.”
Angie stood up. “I’m going with you.”
“Don’t leave Chelsea alone.”
Angie saw that Chelsea was still fixated on the gun. “I guess you’re right. But be careful.” She ran across the room, threw her arms around him, and kissed him.
Paavo held her close, then gave a single nod and left the room.
Paavo eased open the door to Chelsea’s room. Before entering, he checked to see if anyone was there or if anything had been disturbed. It appeared the same as when they left it.
Shutting the door so softly he could scarcely hear it latch, he tiptoed across the room to the dressing room. Carefully eyeing the way the clothes hung in the closet to see which might have been disturbed, the nap on the carpet to see where someone might have stepped, and the way the panels fit into the walls, he found the spot where a secret panel would be—if one in fact existed.
He racked his brain trying to remember the things he’d learned in robbery detail about the various kinds of doors and latches and ways to break into them. He remembered that a lot of them used a spring latch mechanism that simply required two spots to be pressed at once. Remembering that most people didn’t have the height or long arms that he did, he shortened his reach. All of a sudden, when he wasn’t even too sure which magic duo he’d touched, the panel sprang open.
He pushed the panel open as far as it would go—it was hinged on one side like a door—and went into the passage. No lights or light switches. In Chelsea’s room there’d been a gaggle of candles of varying sizes and thicknesses, arranged in a circle on her dresser. He went into the bedroom, picked up the largest, and lit it.
Back in the passageway, he saw that the walls hadn’t been finished but showed the beams that held the building’s structure.
As he descended the stairs, he felt more and more like a character in a Vincent Price film. At the bottom stood a panel much like the one he’d entered from. He placed his fingers along the edges near the spots where the spring locks had been placed upstairs and pushed. The panel sprang ajar and began to turn.
“What’s that?” Chelsea asked as she sat up on the bed, clutching the blanket to her breast.
Angie stopped stoking the fire. Her fingers tightened on the poker. The rain had stopped, and now soft keening sounds could be heard. “Someone’s crying.”
“Elise Sempler,” Chelsea whispered.
“Or someone in the inn trying to make people believe in ghosts for their own crude purposes—like what happened to you tonight.”
“No, it’s real.”
As abruptly as it started, the sound stopped. “I guess she’s gone back to sleep,” Angie said. “We should, too.”
“I think the sound came from outside,” Chelsea whispered.
“Let’s take a look.” Angie shut the off lights in the bedroom to better see and the two crept to the windows. As they neared, the cries began again. She found Chelsea’s hand and held on tight.
A misty, whitish glow appeared at the edge of the cliffs, then disappeared almost as quickly. A few seconds later it appeared again, but only for an instant. This happened three more times before it disappeared altogether. The cries were heard twice more. Angie watched, fascinated, unsure what she was seeing.
“It’s Elise!” Chelsea exclaimed. “And seeing her proves that Jack is here. Maybe it was Jack in my room.”
Angie frowned. “If it was Jack, he sure isn’t the man you thought he was.”
Paavo stepped into the library. He’d always thought tales about secret passageways in old houses were a myth. He learned now that he’d been wrong. Someone, who was it? had said old Ezra Sempler was a survivalist. Was that why he had secret passages and panels put in the house? What else had he built here?
He opened the door to the hall and looked up and down. No one was there. Creeping down the hall toward Finley and Moira’s quarters, he heard voices.
“I don’t care what you say!” It was Moira.
“You can’t blame me for this, Moira. It’s your fault. All of it is,” Running Spirit said.
“I hate you!”
“Do you, now? How can I believe that when you asked that I come here and head my own ashram?”
“I never did any such thing!” Moira’s voice was indignant.
Running Spirit gave a low, crude snort. “Finley told me all about it. How you’ve wanted me all these years. How we have to get Patsy out of the way.”
“Anything between us was a lifetime ago. You made your decision then. It’s taken a lot of years, but now I can thank you for it. You did me a big favor.”
“Bitch!”
“How articulate of you.”
“I’m warning you, Moira. This inn is the answer to a lifetime of dreams. I won’t give it up. Do you understand me?”
“This inn will be mine soon, and I’ll throw you out of it.”
“Yours? The bank’
s, you mean. Without Patsy’s and my backing, you’ll lose it even faster than Finley would have. With Patsy’s money, I’ll get it—and anything else I want. Including you.”
“How do you know Patsy’s dead?”
“She’s got to be. There’s no way she wouldn’t be with me if she was still alive.”
“You’re so damned arrogant. Same as ever.”
Paavo heard Running Spirit’s loud laughter. “Good night, Moira, love. Pleasant dreams.”
Paavo ducked back into the shadows. Moira’s “Go to hell,” reverberated in the hallway as Jeffers left her room, chuckling to himself.
Paavo quietly entered his bedroom. The glow from the fireplace was the only light. He tiptoed over to the bed.
Angie and Chelsea lay back to back, fast asleep. He stood and watched them for a moment. The thought struck him that that might have been what Jack Sempler was doing, just standing there watching her sleep, when Chelsea woke up and saw him. God, he thought, he was likening his actions to those of a ghost. This place had to be getting to him.
Turning away, he crossed the room to the little rose-colored chairs and sat. After removing his shoes, he tried to curl his six foot two inch body onto one chair, his feet up on the other, in some way comfortable enough to be able to sleep. No matter how he twisted or turned, some part of him didn’t want to fit.
He finally put a spare blanket on the floor, his pillow on top of it, then lay down.
As he listened to the sound of Angie’s and Chelsea’s deep, sleep-filled breathing, he imagined the reaction of the guys in Homicide if he told them he’d spent a night in a secluded inn with two women in his bed. His old partner, Matt Kowalski, would have bombarded him with jokes and innuendos, not paying any attention to Paavo’s explanation of what actually had happened. But Matt was dead now, gunned down just a few months before. Paavo had been off-duty that night, and Matt had died on the street, all alone.
If ghosts were as real as Chelsea and everyone else in this place seemed to think, he’d have liked to see Matt’s ghost. If nothing else, he’d have liked the chance to tell Matt how much he missed him, to tell him he was the best friend Paavo ever had. He’d have liked the time to say good-bye.
Hell. His eyes shut as he tried to push the thought away. There was no such thing as ghosts.
22
No one but Chelsea cared about eating breakfast, Angie realized. The others seemed to stay up most of the night and sleep away the morning—except Moira, who never seemed to sleep at all. Wasn’t that a trait of zombies? With this crew, anything was possible.
Force of habit and misplaced duty caused her to join Moira, once again, in the kitchen to assemble the same boring breakfast of soy coffee, oat bran muffins, granola, and orange juice.
Paavo and Running Spirit gulped down hot coffee, cold orange juice, and then left to continue their search for Patsy. Martin, Bethel, and Reginald didn’t show up at all, while Chelsea ate two muffins and a bowl of granola. Her fright last night had increased her appetite.
Since Martin and Reginald were still asleep, Angie wondered if one of them might have been Chelsea’s nightwalker. On the other hand, she didn’t know when Running Spirit had left Moira. It wouldn’t have surprised her to learn that Moira threw him out of her room, leaving him more frustrated than ever, and as a result, he went looking for Chelsea, thinking she’d welcome the attentions of a live man. But she couldn’t imagine Chelsea being an object of lust for Robinson Crusoe while still on his desert island, let alone for Running Spirit.
Angie decided she’d reserve judgment on what the nightwalker meant to do with Chelsea, if anything, until she learned who he was. None of these men could be potential rapists. But then she couldn’t see any of them, or the women either, as potential murderers. Which just went to show how poor a judge of character she must be.
After the kitchen was straightened up, it was time for Moira to change the bed linens and do what had become her usual routine of cleaning for her small battery of guests.
Meanwhile, Angie went to visit Chelsea, who had gone back to her own room. There Angie discovered that not only had Paavo found a secret passageway in Chelsea’s room last night, but he had been in there while breakfast was being served and had put slide bolts on it so that no one else could use it to break in.
“He’s so clever,” Angie said proudly. “Cute, too. At least to those of us who like our men tall, dark, and handsome with baby-blue melt-your-heart-away eyes, rather than pining for ghostly apparitions.”
Chelsea agreed. “For a man, he is nice. He also showed me how to spring the secret lock.”
“Really?” Angie was impressed. “He’s a regular Houdini. Show me.”
Chelsea slid back the bolts—one high and one low on the panel—then, as Angie watched, she hit the sensitive points and the panel sprang open. They pushed it open further, then, holding up candles, peered into the spider-infested passageway.
“How disgusting,” Angie said. “Paavo actually went in there? It’s all full of spiderwebs.”
“I know,” Chelsea said. “I was going to try using it, but I think I won’t. Paavo said it just went down to the library, where there’s a door like this one.”
“If that’s all, I’ll take the regular route,” Angie said.
She soon left Chelsea to do just that, deciding she ought to figure out what to serve for lunch before she got involved in anything else.
The first floor of the inn, as far as Angie knew, was empty except for Moira, who was dusting the drawing room.
But as she neared the kitchen, she heard some noise coming from it and froze. Utensils in a drawer rattled as it was being shut, then the refrigerator door was opened, then closed. It could be any number of people, she told herself. Someone from the outside could have come in, or from upstairs could have come down. She shouldn’t feel so skittish.
Still, she stepped up to the kitchen door very carefully, ready to run if anything looked the least bit untoward. She held onto the door frame and slowly bent her head forward, just enough to see inside.
Danny stood at the counter. He had a small paper bag, and she watched as he cut a thick slice of cheese from a brick, put plastic wrap around it, and put it in the bag, following it with an orange. When he glanced up and saw Angie in the doorway, he snatched the bag of food and stepped back.
“What are you doing?” Angie walked toward him. “You can eat with us if you’re hungry.”
“Oh.” He bit his bottom lip. “I was going to go looking for that lady myself. And when I got here I felt a little hungry….”
“You don’t have to hide. No one would care if you wanted to take any food.”
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
“That’s hard to believe.” She was going to have to confront Moira about the boy and why she didn’t want him to be known to these people.
“See you. Bye.” He grabbed the sack and ran off.
Angie didn’t bother about lunch, but went back to Chelsea to convince her that the two of them ought to go out and look for Patsy. Everyone else, it seemed, was already doing so.
Paavo sat alone in the kitchen, eating toast, three eggs that he’d fried for himself, and having a cup of reheated soy coffee. One thing he could say about soy coffee—reheating didn’t make it any worse.
It was long after breakfast. He’d just come in for a break from the Patsy search, felt hungry, and wasn’t about to trouble anyone for food. Particularly not Angie.
Moira stepped into the room. “Oh, I didn’t think anyone was here.”
“I helped myself,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
He saw that she hesitated near the doorway. “Join me?” he asked. There was a lot he wanted to ask her about, but yesterday the pain of her loss had been too fresh. Today she looked a bit better.
“All right.” She filled a teakettle with water and put it on the stove to heat. After placing her favorite herb tea mix on the counter, she
began rummaging through the back of a cupboard. “Ah. Success.” She held up a tea bag. “Lipton’s.”
He grinned. “Lady, you’ve made my day.”
She got out the cups, then sat beside Paavo at the counter, silently watching him eat and waiting for the water to boil. He knew she didn’t mind the silence—would probably relish it, in fact.
Why did he know that about her? Was it just because she looked and acted so much like Sybil, or was there something more to this woman, another dimension that he was open to? Good God, but he hated how he was thinking that way more and more these days. He’d probably go back to Homicide as a goddamned Edgar Cayce or something. Might help with a few tough cases, though.
The tea was ready just as he finished eating. She placed his cup in front of him. “I’ve wanted to ask you about your brother,” he said, “and if you have any idea why this happened to him.”
She folded her hands. “I’m not terribly surprised.”
Her words surprised him. “You’re not surprised he was killed?”
“Not really. To Finley, people were like mice, and he was a very big, very clever cat.”
He heard both bitterness and sadness in her voice.
“You’re saying he treated people here that way? You?”
“All of us.” She dropped her hands, drawing deep breaths as she tried to find her composure, then she stood to leave. “Excuse me.”
He took her arm. “Tell me about it. If someone here killed your brother, or harmed Patsy…” He didn’t have to list the dangers any of the rest of them might be in. “Is there anyone that you suspect? Is there anyone who particularly hated him?”
“Hated him? I guess the one who hated him the most was me.”
“You?” Was she saying she killed him?
“I didn’t do it. Despite some very unpacifistic ideas I may have had from time to time about doing just that. But I’m sure others have felt the same way. All the investors wanted to kill him.”
“Why?”
“He duped them. Every one of them. He found out what their dreams were, and he played with them, holding their dreams and hopes out like bait. The people you see here are the ones who reached for that bait. He hooked them and reeled them in. Now they’re stuck, bleeding, dying. And they hated him for it.”
