“Of course. What happened?”
Our words spilled out explaining who this mysterious ghost could be and why he was haunting the bed and breakfast. We were telling the officer about the possibility of the second ghost being Laura’s father when he held his hand up.
“Hold on, ladies. What’s this business about a second ghost?”
My face reddened as I related Henry’s acquaintance.
The officer motioned them to the front porch. “Let’s have a seat and I want one of you to tell me everything you did this morning from the time you left your home and started down the path over there.”
I nodded and retraced our steps, this time including how scared we got when the temperature changed and the leaves twirled around us.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“Maybe because we felt a little loony?”
“Janie, I want you to show me where you were standing when the leaf incident happened.”
“Hold on a minute. I need to know what you make of all this.”
The officer tapped the porch with the heel of one of his boots. “Ladies, I don’t know what to make of it, but I have something to tell you before we go out on the path.”
“More?”
“Yes, we found two items close to Mrs. Banish’s body.”
I was anxious. “Yeah, yeah, what?”
“There was a .69 caliber Harpers Ferry Rifle and a mini ball.”
“What does that mean?”
“They were used by the Army during the Civil War and probably belonged to the Confederate soldier you’ve been talking about.”
Anxiety clouded my face. “If that’s true, then Henry was signaling us with the leaves.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Then what?”
The officer motioned two of his men to come along. “Take us to where you were when the leaves caused a commotion.”
I felt a familiar pressure on my shoulder. I didn’t know what this meant, but if Henry was the dead girl’s father, what did he want with me now? I pulled away wishing for an end to this business.
After I pointed out the general area of the ‘leaf commotion’ as the officer had called it, I hurried back to the front porch and waited. I was sure the spinning leaves were a sign, but a sign for what?
* * * *
Several days later and after enough activity to keep everyone on old Taylor Road satisfied for a long, long time, our mystery was solved, but there was a problem. Since so many years had gone by since the incident, I, along with Cathy and the police, had to be satisfied with our own ending to the story. I was sure Riley was right—Laura’s father, Henry, wanted to keep his little girl to himself and only agreed to the marriage to appease his daughter.
He followed the soldier the night he left, shot him, and buried him on the property—that’s what the leaves were all about. The soldier was trying to tell me to dig until I uncovered his bones. The soldier couldn’t return after the war, Henry made sure of that, but he didn’t count on his daughter giving up on life. When he found her hanging from the rafters, he was devastated. On his deathbed, he vowed to avenge her death.
Apparently Henry stayed on in the house and when I bought it, his ghostly spirit was renewed. He was happy with the prospect of a new daughter—someone he could play jokes on, someone he could protect.
Then, the soldier’s ghost reappeared and Mrs. Banish was on the scene. Henry had to get rid of both of them—Mrs. Banish was easy, she could be scared to death, but the soldier? He didn’t want him messing around with me, his new daughter. He had killed him once—he could do it again.
DO WAH DIDDY DIE ALREADY by Pauline Baird Jones
Luci Seymour eased her little 4x4 into the garage, and did it without scraping anything. Clearly she was in that zone place that normal people were always talking about and she liked it. It was the zone.
As evidence, look at Luci’s Aunts’ Bed & Breakfast. It had been open for three months now and, contrary to Mickey’s expectations, no one had died—not even of food poisoning.
That was probably because Luci had hired a new cook-cumhousekeeper-cum-au pair, though she still missed Louise. Saffron talked. A lot. Of course, she hadn’t killed anyone either, and Luci’s three-year old adored her—so much so, she wanted to have multi-colored hair, too. So far Mickey was holding out against that, but Luci’s money was on their daughter wearing him down. He was pretty much wrapped around her tiny pinkie.
Luci still had trouble wrapping her brain around the idea that her aunts’ housekeeper, Louise, had been the one who killed Miss Gracie all those years ago, leaving her to haunt the house in typical Seymour style. No real surprise the denouement had been mixed up in the birth of her and Mickey’s daughter. All the aunts, dead and alive, had put in a bid to have the little girl named after them, but it seemed right to name her after Miss Gracie.
Mickey had been afraid the now-dead aunts would start haunting them, too, but while they hadn’t completely passed into the next life, they didn’t seem inclined to hang around the way Miss Gracie and Delaney, Mickey’s former partner, did.
Luci had toyed with the idea of using their gentle haunting as a selling point for the business, but the two ghosts had decided to take a vacation. Since Miss Gracie hadn’t left the house in over fifty years, she’d certainly earned it and Delaney went where Miss Gracie went. He’d been smitten with her before he got shot.
She missed them and she missed Louise, who was out on bail, awaiting trial. Mickey wouldn’t let her come back to work. Men were so unreasonable. It’s not like she’d killed anyone else. Okay, so she thought she’d killed someone else, which is why she’d killed Miss Gracie, but she hadn’t actually killed her former boss when she pushed him down the stairs for groping her. And she hadn’t held Luci hostage that long. When labor started, she stopped. For all Luci knew, being held hostage had started her labor, something she was very grateful to get going. She’d been pregnant for like, fifty months or something.
Mickey’s real grievance against Louise wasn’t the murder. No, he was mad at her for not talking for all those years. He thought she couldn’t talk and used the chalk and blackboard for a real reason—not because Louise was afraid if she talked she’d confess what she did.
He’d only lived with the squeaky chalk for a couple of years. Louise had to live with it for most of her life. Wasn’t that punishment enough?
Luci squeezed out of the truck and leaned over the side of the bed, digging through the grocery sacks, looking for the items that needed to go into the freezer. It wasn’t the same freezer her aunts had kept in the garage for so many years.
Mickey had hauled that one to the curb before the last aunt was cold in her grave, even though Louise had cleaned it very thoroughly after the body was removed. Okay, so it had been a naked body and it was kind of icky to think of the frozen, bare buns against the bottom, but it still worked. Seemed a waste to buy a new freezer when there were so many other things they needed to buy.
If finding bodies was the criteria for getting rid of something, then the bougainvillea should be history, too, but it was still blooming in the garden. And they still had the chimney in their bedroom. And that chair in the sitting room…
Luci paused to think. Yeah, she was pretty sure that was all the locations bodies had been discovered—if she didn’t count the spot in the garden where Miss Gracie had been killed, but there was some dispute about the actual spot. Luci had studied the crime scene photos, but the garden had changed a lot in fifty-plus years.
Usually Luci could think about Miss Gracie and she and Delaney would materialize close by. She missed them, but they deserved a vacation, now that the house had central air conditioning. Their death chill had been a godsend during August. The pair planned to be back in time for Halloween, though.
Luci had some ghost hunters booked. With any luck, the aunts would put in an appearance, too. Mickey had booked himself into a cop convention in Vegas for that weekend. Fam
ily reunions made his eye twitch, particularly if most of the family in attendance was dead.
Luci lifted the lid of the freezer and tossed the frozen stuff into the wire basket fixed near the top. She turned back to the Nash to get the non-freezer stuff and was actually bending to pick up a sack when what she’d seen finally registered.
She stopped. Started to turn around—stopped.
Did she really want to verify what image her eyes had sent to her brain? Because if she’d seen what it seemed she’d seen…
Mickey’s eye was going to start twitching again.
And they’d need a new freezer.
* * * *
“You all right, Miss Luci?” Saffron tipped her brightly colored head to the side, then flopped it to the other. “You look like you seen a ghost?”
Luci blinked a couple of times, then shook her head. A ghost wouldn’t be a problem. She was used to seeing ghosts.
“I’m fine.”
For now. Not only was there a body in the new freezer, it was one of her guests. The guy in the Miss Weena suite. Charles Stewart. He’d checked in early for the mystery weekend, but she’d bet money he hadn’t planned on being the body.
While Luci mused, words bubbled out of Saffron’s mouth, a wandering discourse that took her from the time she thought she’d seen a ghost, through some gastric distress, eventually arriving at the recipe she wanted to try out for breakfast tomorrow. When she paused for air, Luci broke in.
“I need to call Mickey.” She didn’t want to call Mickey. She could call her dad, but he tended to twitch worse than Mickey. And he and Lila were babysitting Gracie. She looked at her watch. If she hurried, they’d be at the zoo until CSI finished with the crime scene.
She started down the hall to her little office, but just as she reached the door, the front door opened and—Charles Stewart came in—minus the bullet hole between his eyes.
Luci felt her eye twitch.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Ross. Beautiful day, isn’t it, but a tad on the chilly side?”
“Yes.” Luci felt herself nod and sort of smile.
“Thought I’d pop back and grab a sweater.”
He started up the stairs, but paused part way up to look back and say, “By the way, thank you for the Benadryl. Those fire ants are really nasty!”
“Yes, they are.”
He turned and continued on up the stairs, his bite-dotted foot in view for what seemed like a long time. Luci noted that the bites looked like pimples now.
He passed from view and she heard him unlock the door to his suite and go inside. She looked back the way she’d come, then turned and retraced her steps. Once again in front of the freezer, she hesitated, before lifting the lid.
No body.
Apparently he’d climbed out and gone to get his—sweater.
* * * *
Mickey looked at Luci, wondering if he needed to be worried. She was awfully quiet this evening.
He’d been anxious she wouldn’t be happy giving up law enforcement when Gracie was born, but then she’d decided to do the bed & breakfast thing. Then he’d been concerned about how that would work out, having strangers in the house, as opposed to just having strange people in the house. But so far it was going fine. Even the most annoying guest had a hard time making any headway against Luci when she went Seymour. And she seemed happy with the project.
Their private quarters were isolated from the guests and with his schedule, he was lucky to see his girls, let alone any guests. Gracie was already in bed this evening. She’d stirred when he bent to kiss her round, flushed cheek, then subsided back into her intense, three-year-old sleep.
He found he didn’t mind the late supper with his wife. She looked the same as the first time he saw her, standing in the airport looking around, her green eyes wide and interested. Her dark hair was a bit longer than back then perhaps, but her jaw was still square and determined and her mouth still lush and full and very kissable.
And he knew for a fact that her legs still stopped traffic.
As if she felt his gaze, Luci looked up, her quick smile sending a shiver down his back, despite six years of marriage.
“How’s the new partner working out?”
Mickey frowned, then shrugged. “He’s okay.”
He missed Delaney. Didn’t understand why he and Miss Gracie had to take a vacation. It’s not like they got tired. The dead didn’t get tired. And they couldn’t send postcards telling their friends where they were. Even dead, Delaney was the best partner he’d ever had. Actually, in some ways he was a better partner now that he was dead. The ability to pass through solid objects, such as walls, gave them a definite edge against the bad guys.
“They’ll be back.”
Mickey looked up. “I know.”
Luci grinned. “No, you don’t. Every time they go anywhere you worry they’re going to go toward the light.”
Mickey grinned reluctantly. “What if the light sucks them in?”
Luci’s brows arched. “It didn’t suck the aunts in.”
Mickey tensed, his hand going to his cell phone. It was still there, not under the phlox. “Have they been back?”
He was always afraid they’d come back and do something to his computer. Or his television. Or the air conditioning. They’d been anti-technology in life. Didn’t expect dying to change that.
Luci shook her head, her lips curving up again.
“You worry too much.”
“Is that why you’re not telling me what you’re worried about?”
Her eyes widened.
Even after six years, she thought that just because he was a guy, he was totally clueless. Every now and again he got a clue. It was one of the requirements of being a homicide detective.
“You know I have ways of making you talk,” he added, arching his brows devilishly.
Now Luci grinned. “Really? Cool.”
“That’s why you won’t get to see them until you talk.”
She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Not sure there is anything to tell.” She frowned, tracing a pattern on the tablecloth with her finger. She looked up, her expression rueful. “You worry about Delaney going toward the light, while I—worry about becoming my aunts.”
“Eccentric? Or…crazy?” He covered her hand with his and pulled her onto his lap.
“Crazy. Let’s face it, I’m already eccentric.”
She had a point.
“So, what makes you think you’re crazy?”
She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed.
“I thought I saw a body in the new freezer. Charles Stewart. The guy in the Miss Weena suite.”
“But you—didn’t?”
“When I came inside to call you—he came in. Said he was cold and needed a sweater.”
“I’m guessing you went and looked in the freezer again— and…”
“No Charles Stewart.”
Mickey frowned. It wasn’t like Luci to make a mistake like that. Granted, she was eccentric. All the Seymours were, but Luci also had a large dose of her cop dad in her genetic make up, as leavening for Seymour weird. And she was a fully trained police officer. She’d been chief of police in Butt Had, Wyoming, for three years prior to their marriage.
“How long were you in the house?”
“Maybe five minutes. Stopped to talk to Saffron for a minute.”
Probably more like ten. Saffron was the polar opposite of Louise—though Mickey didn’t miss Louise’s chalkboard—her method of communication—or the sound of her chalk against it. Just thinking about it sent a chill down his back again.
* * * *
“Just close your eyes and let yourself relax.”
Mickey’s voice was calm and reassuring in her ear and Luci tried to quiet her mind. Her thoughts tended to spin in several directions at once. She’d never been that good at focusing.
“You’re opening the lid to put your stuff away. Now open your eyes and look. Are they in the same place you put them?”
L
uci did as directed, staring down into the freezer, trying to keep the memory of what she’d done in front of her mind.
“As far as I can remember, it’s the same.” The freezer had some baskets that she’d piled her stuff in. The body had been under them. If someone had—moved it, all they’d have needed to do was lift out the baskets, then replace them. And if Charles Stewart were actually dead. Which he wasn’t. She looked at Mickey. “At least he wasn’t a naked hallucination.”
“That would actually make more sense than one of your guests,” Mickey pointed out. “That would be a flash back.”
“But he’s not dead.” She looked at the house. The light was on in Miss Weena’s room. “Not even a dead man walking. Just a man getting ready for bed.”
She turned and slipped her arms around his waist. She liked hugging him. Her knees went weak. Who’d have thought she’d go nuts for a crisp, clean guy with blue eyes? Not that she expected to go nuts for any guy. It had been a long-standing family tradition for the Seymour women to eschew marriage for a life of extreme eccentricity.
Luci’s feet had been firmly set on the family path until she ran into Mickey and found herself wondering if traditions could be set aside—if a Seymour woman could change.
The answer to both questions had been a resounding yes— thanks to a pointed nudge from her dead aunt, Miss Gracie. She’d given up true love for tradition and died to regret it. Happily, she’d found romance in the afterlife with Delaney after he got shot.
Luci leaned her cheek against Mickey’s chest, listening to his heart thumping in her ear.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not believing I’m crazy.”
He kissed her. “One thing I’ve learned from hanging around you, the obvious answer isn’t necessarily the right one. In fact, the obvious answer is probably the wrong one.”
He hugged her.
“Let’s go to bed.”
* * * *
The next morning, Luci decided to take care of Charles Stewart’s room herself. Not that she planned to snoop through his belongings, but maybe she’d see something that would tell her a little more about the guy.
Dead and Breakfast Page 4
