“I need to call Uncle John.” Stephanie stated on the ride back to Huffington Manor. “He’s got some explaining to do.”
Clara heartily agreed, and her heart skipped a beat at the mention of John. The thought that he might have held something back from Stephanie didn’t sit well with her, and combined with what she’d learned from Celia, her intuition was starting to chirp.
She wasn’t sure if Stephanie knew about the date, but before she had a chance to say anything on the subject, Roma popped into the back of Stephanie’s town car and the temperature dropped ten degrees.
“Sorry about that. I’m still getting use to this whole ghost thing.” She apologized with one of her trilling laughs. When no one rushed to assure her it was fine, she said, “What am I? Invisible?”
Clara had to nod toward Stephanie before Roma caught on. “Oh, right.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Someone’s coming,” Roma warned about a half a second before Constance ushered Mason into the room, and when Mag muttered something snarky at her, the response set the housekeeper off on a search for the cold draft.
“Sorry.” Roma retreated to a corner to reduce her chilling effect on the living.
Clara rated a fleeting once-over from the new arrival before he turned his attention to Stephanie. “Sorry to show up unannounced, but I was out this way and I have those papers you wanted. The business agreements for the funds for Cheyenne. I just need you to sign on a few dotted lines and I’ll be on my way.”
While a delighted Stephanie scanned and signed each document, Mason sat quietly. Though his gaze kept straying toward Clara, he made no effort at engaging in small talk. As she handed each paper over, he carefully replaced it in the folder and waited for the next.
When she was finished, he offered a half-hearted congratulations on the new venture, and asked if there was any news from Brad.
When she said there wasn’t, he replied, “I’ll draw up the dissolution of agreement for Pets Alive this week.”
Aghast at the suggestion, Stephanie vehemently disagreed. “Why on earth would you do a thing like that? There are still animals in need of assistance, are there not? I wasn’t funding the program because my fiancé was director. Honestly, Mason. You’re getting to be as bad as Uncle John with the purse strings.”
“I thought, well, never mind what I thought.”
Clara’s phone interrupted whatever Mason might have said next, and she didn’t need to see Winifred’s number on the screen to know the call was important. The intuitive chill that ran from her gut down to her toes did that quite nicely, and had nothing to do with Roma’s presence.
Clara’s half of the conversation consisted of a few yeses and an okay, we’ll be right there.
She hung up, noticed the sea of expectant faces, and struggled with a dilemma. Should she just drag Mag out of there with some flimsy excuse, or tell Stephanie the news right now?
Best to go with the truth.
“That was Winifred from Pets Alive. Someone found Brad’s wallet, saw his business card inside, and figured he’d drop it off there instead of the police station. Winifred is holding it for us, and thought it best we break the news to Stephanie ourselves.” Clara explained.
“What do you think this means?” Pale, but holding herself together, Stephanie asked.
Mason answered before Clara could. “I think it proves Brad wasn’t the man you thought he was. He’s probably living it up somewhere under an assumed name.”
“If he didn’t want to get married, he could have asked for the ring back, and I’d have given it to him. I think changing his identity takes breaking up to a bit of an extreme, don’t you?”
It looked like Mason might argue the point, but he chose to go, and to leave Clara wondering why he didn’t tell Stephanie he was investigating possible misuse of the shelter funds. She’d have liked to ask him if he’d found anything, but she never had the chance.
“We’ll scoot over and pick it up, and come right back.” Clara promised, leaving Stephanie in Constance’s care.
Ten minutes later, with Mag at the wheel, Clara declared, “This changes things.”
Mag considered all the possible ramifications and none of them landed on a best case scenario. “It sure does.”
When they arrived at the shelter, Winifred explained how Brad’s wallet had been found on a roadside embankment heading north on the way out of town. The man who found it was from Port Harbor, and hadn’t realized how close he was to Harmony and a restroom when nature’s call became too persistent to ignore. He’d been looking for a secluded spot to relieve himself when he stumbled upon the wallet, and decided to do the decent thing and attempt to return it. Finding Brad’s business card tucked inside, he dropped the wallet at the shelter.
“There’s money in it,” Winifred said as she handed over the wallet. “This whole things seems a bit fishy to me. My intuition is screaming.” She spoke the last sentiment in a hushed, conspiratorial tone.
Clara couldn’t help but agree. “Thanks so much, Winifred. We’ll take it from here, and we’ll keep you in the loop.” She could scarcely believe that of all people, one of Penelope Starr’s henchwomen had finally conceded that the Balefire sisters were worthy of this level of trust. It was about time, and maybe it meant they were making headway in the coven. Clara vehemently hoped so, because being at odds with the people she was supposed to trust had taken a toll.
***
“Ha, I told you there was danger, and this proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt!” Appearing out of thin air, Roma hovered over the rear seat and gloated.
Mag’s blood pressure rose by a few points. “We haven’t proven anything yet, Roma. Don’t get your panties in a knot before we have more information.”
Roma blew a raspberry in Mag’s direction, “Ghosts don’t wear panties. At least, I don’t think.”
Mag scowled at her. “That wasn’t really the point. This is serious.”
Clara slapped the wallet into Mag’s waiting hand while Roma poked her head in between the seats for a better look.
Sure enough, there was over one hundred dollars in the billfold, several credit cards and a debit card, his driver’s license, and a photo of Stephanie tucked inside.
Mag’s nose twitched and she raised the wallet to her face and took a big sniff. “There’s blood trace on the leather.” She said with certainty. “Just a drop or two.”
“How on earth do you do that?” Clara asked, having observed Mag’s senses at work before, when they had been involved in another murder investigation.
“Years of practice. Blood leaves a metallic scent, and a sort of aura to the trained eye.” Mag was more than proud of the abilities she’d honed over the years, but not in any huge rush to fill her little sister in on the events that had made it necessary to cultivate such a skill.
If Clara had an inclination that Mag felt that way, it would have made her blood boil. They hadn’t been kids for over two centuries, and while Mag’s protective nature was sweet and all, it was also downright irritating.
“Like I said,” Roma gloated, “Danger.”
“Trouble is,” Mag continued, “There’s no definitive way to prove it’s Brad’s blood. But something tells me Stephanie isn’t going to take that nuance into consideration, and I can’t say I blame her. It looks bad.”
“Don’t tell her about the blood. What could it possibly help?” As Clara pulled back onto the main road, Roma threw her opinion into the mix and started an argument with Mag that lasted the whole way back to Huffington Manor and required her to turn the heat up to compensate for the chill.
They found Stephanie pacing the garden nervously, and to stop any further comments from the peanut gallery, Clara took the lead. She showed Stephanie the wallet and broke the news as gently as she could. “I’m sorry, but we’ve discovered something and I don’t want you to panic.”
“When someone says not to panic, it usually means that’s exactly what you ought to do,” Stephani
e commented dryly. “Hit me.”
“It doesn’t look like it was stolen because the contents appear intact, but we there appears to be blood trace on the leather,” Clara said, laying it on the table.
Stephanie’s face crumpled, along with her put-together facade. Clara knew exactly where her mind had gone—straight to, of course, the most horrific possible conclusion—that Brad was dead. She couldn’t help but think the poor woman might be right.
“Now I wish he really had just left me. That would be better.”
Clara wrapped her arms around Stephanie in a show of comfort. “There’s still no body, and it’s possible the blood wasn’t even Brad’s. There’s still hope.”
“Not for me.” Stephanie lamented, marching back into the house where a newly returned Cheyenne was tucking into a chicken salad sandwich while Constance puttered around making yet another pot of tea.
“Constance, call the police. Tell them I’m ready to turn myself in.” Eerily composed, Stephanie gave the order. Convinced of his death from the beginning, it was as if finding proof let her gather the shattered bits of her grief into a numbing ball of calm at her center.
Pandemonium erupted with Cheyenne and Constance shouting down the idea until Mag put her fingers in her mouth and let out a piercing whistle. “No one is calling the police until a body turns up.”
Leave it to Mag to say the least sensitive thing in any situation. Neither tact nor diplomacy came easy to her, though she could access both if she wanted to. She rarely did.
“What my sister meant to say”—Clara pinned Mag with a stern look—“was, let’s not get hasty until we’ve examined all the facts. First of all, we now know Brad left the house in the morning, not in the middle of the night, and he was upset about something. That changes everything.”
Her face becoming more remote by the second, Stephanie said, “It changes nothing. I watch him die every night in my dreams.” And now Clara worried what had looked like calm might be shock. It was time to pull Stephanie back to reality.
“Did you and Brad have a fight the night before he disappeared?” Tone sharp, Clara whipped out the question and snapped her fingers to hurry the answer. It was the same trick she’d used on Harold’s ghost.
“No.”
“Were you cheating on Brad?”
“No.” Finally, some fire bled back into Stephanie’s eyes.
“Would he cheat on you?”
“No. And I resent—”
“Were you on good terms with him when you went to sleep?”
“Yes.”
A few more questions later, Clara hit her with the money shot.
“Did you kill Bradley Graham with a paperweight?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Stephanie was the only one in the room who seemed surprised by the admission.
“Good, I didn’t think so,” Clara said, brushing off her hands. “Now, we can get on with figuring out what happened to him.”
***
The front door of Stephanie’s house closed with a loud bang, and John burst into the library where the three women (and one currently invisible ghost) were gathered.
“What’s going on? Is everything all right?” He asked, his eyes skimming over Clara completely in his haste to find out why his niece had sent a 9-1-1 message. “I was in a meeting, and my cell was off.”
Stephanie allowed herself to be swept up in a concerned hug. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, but we needed to speak to you as soon as possible.” She recapped the conversation with Pete and the discovery of the wallet once John had greeted Mag and Clara and taken a seat around the coffee table.
“I wish I could say I’d seen him that morning, but I didn’t. I had a breakfast meeting and didn’t get to the office until almost ten-thirty. Did Pete say what it was Brad wanted to talk to me about?” John’s eyebrow quirked when he asked, and his foot tapped the floor while he waited for Stephanie to answer.
She sighed. “No, he didn’t. I was hoping you’d have some idea.”
John’s face clouded over. “I wish I had a different answer for you, but I don’t. Do you think it might be time to put this to rest? It looks pretty cut-and-dried to me. I know it hurts when someone doesn’t feel the same way about you as you do about them, but the best thing to do is move on. You’re a beautiful, generous woman, and you deserve someone who can see that for himself.”
Stephanie’s eyes welled with tears, and Clara could sense sadness, anger, and frustration rolling off her in waves. Mag felt it too, and was more than mildly curious to find out what might happen if Stephanie threw Miss Manners’ book of etiquette out the window and actually said what she was feeling for once.
“Thank you, Uncle John. I’ll take that into consideration.” Mag was sorely disappointed when Stephanie tamped down her reply, turned her back on the room, and stared out the window with her arms crossed.
John held up his hands in surrender and bowed his head. “I guess I’ll leave you ladies alone.” He shot a pointed look in Clara’s direction.
“I’ll walk you out.” Clara offered, following him to the door.
When they were alone, John’s shoulders slumped even further. “I don’t know what else to do. I feel just as helpless as I did when her parents died. It practically killed Buffy too, but we had to be strong for Steph. I’m glad you and your mother are here for her; it means a lot, and she could use some female attention.”
“We’re happy to help,” Clara replied. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but all her lovely, warm feelings for him had evaporated during the walk from the sitting room to the door.
While she tried to figure out why, she lost track of the conversation. “—Friday night?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I was asking you out, and apparently not doing a very good job of it.”
“Can I get back to you on that? I think there’s something … I need to check my schedule. I’ll call you, okay?” She couldn’t say yes until she’d had time to explore her sudden ambivalence to him. “I’m sorry. There’s a lot going on, and I think Stephanie needs me.”
The confusion on his face mirrored her emotional state, but she turned and went back inside, anyway.
Things were in quite a state when Clara returned to the library. Roma whizzed overhead, her edges blurring as her excitement notched up another level.
“We’ve got another lead.” Roma exclaimed.
“We’ve got another lead.” Stephanie had no idea she was repeating Roma’s statement. “Maybe not a lead, but it’s something. I remembered Pete said Brad’s fists were clenched at his sides when he walked away from his truck. That means he wasn’t holding onto his briefcase, and that is one thing he would never leave behind.”
Still caught up in whatever had just happened with John, Clara tried to focus.
“I’ve already called Pete, and he confirmed Brad wasn’t carrying anything when he picked him up, but he was poring over those files all evening before I fell asleep that night. They weren’t on his bedside table, and I haven’t seen them since. Those files might be the key to what happened to him, or at least give us a clue. We’ve got to find them!”
“It’s something,” Mag allowed, “Let’s split up and look for them. Maybe we can get Constance to help. She knows this place far better than Clara or I do.”
“Can’t you just, I don’t know, conjure Brad’s briefcase to your hand?” Stephanie asked.
In the interest of saving time that would be spent listening to one of Mag’s diatribes about how magic worked, Clara answered for her sister.
“It doesn’t work that way. We have to know where an object is before we can call it to us. Even if it were that simple, we wouldn’t be able to tell where it had come from, and Brad’s hiding place might have some significance.”
Stephanie accepted Clara’s explanation and called in Constance, who jumped on board immediately and agreed to help look for the files Brad had been working on the night he disappeared.
“You two start in the bedroom and search the upstairs. Constance and I will take the bottom floor.” Mag suggested.
An hour later, after every nook and cranny in the downstairs had been explored, Mag made painful progress up the stairs to spend another hour helping continue the search.
“Try to think like Brad,” she offered helpfully. “Where would he hide the briefcase?”
Looking more disheveled than Mag had seen her, Stephanie threw herself backwards on the bed and offered a tart reply. “Why thank you; I’d have never thought of that on my own.” The snark warmed Mag’s heart and gave her hope.
“He’s a man. Men are a lot like children, they tend to shove things under the furniture.”
“First place we looked.” Clara swiped her forearm across her forehead to clear the sheet of sweat.
“Found it.” Roma sang out. “Top of the wardrobe, hidden behind the decorative trim. It was the mention of kids that made me look. If they’re not hiding things under the furniture, they go for on top.”
A sound piece of logic which Clara parroted when, as the tallest of the two Balefires, she reached a questing hand past the molding, and triumphantly pulled out the briefcase. “Found it,” she sang, and handed it to Stephanie.
“I’m nervous to see what’s inside. This could be the key to everything.” A tentative finger pressed the latch. “It’s locked.”
“Because that would be too easy.”
With Constance downstairs, and safely out of sight, Mag used magic to pop the lock, and then came the moment of truth.
Taking a deep breath, Stephanie opened the briefcase and pulled out a stack of manila folders. She fell silent as she leafed through the files, and then frowned.
“These have nothing to do with the shelter,” She noted, surprised. “They’re records from Huffington Foundation.”
Mag shot a sharp glance in Clara’s direction. The question of whether he’d been plotting some nefarious plan to siphon funds from Pets Alive had been answered, but now Mag’s suspicion that he’d been attempting to swindle money out of Stephanie rose to the top of the list of possibilities. What other reason he might have had to be delving into her finances was quickly answered as Stephanie put her Yale MBA to use.
Haunted by Murder Page 13
