A Dash of Murder (Pecan Bayou Series)

by Teresa Trent

  “Aunt Maggie?” I called out. My voice sounded small in the expanse of the night. “Aunt Maggie, are you in here?” I shined my light into the car, but the car was empty. Maggie wasn’t there.

  I turned around and searched across the grass with my flashlight. I could see the fire at the Scout camp but couldn’t see my aunt sitting on any of the stumps around it. I walked to the edge of the woods close to where my little deputy was sitting by Tyler at the fire. I called over to him. “Zach? Have you seen Aunt Maggie?”

  Zach turned toward my voice. “Mom? Is that you?” He scrambled up from his seat by the fire and ran over with Tyler behind him.

  “Yes, it’s me. Did Aunt Maggie come over?”

  “Nope. We haven’t seen her since we left the haunted hospital.” Zach nodded and smiled. He was no doubt a legend with the Scouts now that he had entered a haunted place and penetrated a crime scene, all at the age of seven. They were probably building a statue of him out of Popsicle sticks at this very moment.

  I sighed. Aunt Maggie wouldn’t be happy if she missed her chance to mingle with the spirits on camera. Besides, I wasn’t going on a walk down those hallways by myself, that was for sure.

  Tyler jumped in. “Do you need us to help look for her? We are Scouts, ma’am, and trained to do this sort of thing.”

  Only because their members keep getting themselves lost, I thought.

  “No, I’ll find her, but thanks,” I answered.

  I trudged back to the “haunted hospital.” Stanley walked part of the way toward me.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  “No, and she wasn’t over at the Scout camp.”

  “Okay. Let’s check and see if she’s gone into the front part of the building. Maybe she was checking out some of the areas you were going to be walking in.”

  “Where was that exactly going to be again?”

  Stanley looked at a clipboard by the monitor. “Hallway C and the tunnel to the morgue.”

  I knew it. “I thought Howard was going to do that one.”

  “Yes, well he was originally slated to do it, but I switched it to you and Maggie. I wanted the best screamers in the dead tunnel.”

  Somehow I wasn’t in the mood to appreciate his humor. “Great.”

  “Howard just finished his segment. Let’s take a break on the filming and spread out to look for her. I’ll get Miss Ruby and the ladies to look on the other side. I bet they had no idea they would spend their night searching for lost people who were alive,” Stanley said.

  A few minutes later, I was inside the hospital with my flashlight as my only companion. Howard went upstairs to see if she was revisiting the crime scene, and I was walking through our assigned path, Hallway C and the dead tunnel. During the day, this hallway seemed much shorter and fairly harmless. Now, at night, every piece of peeling paint, every door hanging by one hinge, every shuffle of my feet seemed amplified. “Aunt Maggie?” How could it get so dark in one place? Somehow it had become darker than black. “Aunt Maggie?”

  I started down Hallway C with a half-dozen doorways on each side of me. What if she had been walking around and tripped over some debris and hit her head? She could have gone into one of these rooms searching out some sort of flickering orb or shadow, tripped over an old ceiling tile and hit the floor. There were still some pieces of rusty and broken furniture in many of these rooms that she could have fallen into. My mind started racing as I flickered my flashlight at the door immediately to my right. If something dreadful was in here, if there was something otherworldly, it could jump out at me from any of these doors. Suddenly I wished my aunt had asked me to help her with a regular old-lady hobby like sewing a quilt top or planting a prize-winning rose garden. But no, my aunt had to go off ghost-chasing. My aunt had to risk both her body and soul to this crazy idea.

  I took one step forward, and then way down the hall I thought I heard something. Had I heard the guttural sound of a throat clearing? “Aunt Maggie? Is that you? Are you all right?”

  I took another step and shined my light into the empty room with the handgun-bearing reflexes of a television cop. I scanned the room, only to be greeted by empty windows and part of a bed frame. No one was there. I walked over to the closet, its door hanging sideways. Also empty. I backed out just in case the ghosts that weren’t there were keen to jump me. I flicked my light to the other room on the other side of the hall and saw was an old curtain hanging from the window, stirring slightly with an evening breeze. Normally I would be through the roof to feel a breeze, but right now I felt a set of goose bumps uncomfortably spread under my skin.

  I heard a shifting further down the hall, and then full-on footsteps. There was a raspy noise that rattled me. What was this? I seemed to be spending all my time chasing after someone I had never seen running through this hospital. The term “wild goose chase” was flashing through my head as I picked up my feet. I ignored the pounding in my heart and high-tailed it down the hall. I just had to hope against hope nothing popped out at me like a five-dollar haunted house visit on Halloween.

  I ran down the hallway yelling, “Aunt Maggie? What is going on?” I turned the corner of the hallway, glad for once I didn’t hear the footsteps take the stairs, although running into Howard upstairs would have done a lot for my nerves right now. My flashlight beam now bounced against the walls as I ran, making shadows sway with each move. Who needed a fake haunted house when you could live it right here? The footsteps continued in front of me until I came face-to-face with one of the few closed doors in the whole joint. It was the door to the morgue. It seemed large and imposing as it had quietly waited for me at the end of the hallway. I stepped back from it.

  “Howard? Can you hear me? Stanley? Ruby? Ladies?” I wanted anybody in hearing range. I could faintly hear Maggie’s name being called throughout the hospital, but they couldn’t seem to hear me. As crazy as Maggie was about ghost hunting, I couldn’t believe she would go down the dead tunnel by herself.

  Even with the bats gone, there was no way I was going down this tunnel by myself. I scanned the area again with my flashlight. Maybe I could still get a volunteer to go with me. As I shined the light on the floor about three feet from the door, up against the wall, I could see a small black rectangular box. It was a walkie-talkie like the ones I had seen Stanley and Howard using. I grabbed for it.

  “Howard? Are you there?”

  I was greeted with static and some indistinct voices. The red light that came on when I pushed the button grew more and more faint with every button push. The batteries were dying. I was about to turn around and physically go find Howard or Stanley to go down the tunnel with me when I heard it. A thin, piercing wail that I knew instinctively – I heard Aunt Maggie scream.

  It was time to go down the dead tunnel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Aunt Maggie’s voice cut through the night. I felt panic rising up inside me. I tried the walkie-talkie again.

  “Howard? Stanley? Ruby?” I shouted into the walkie-talkie. “If anyone out there can hear me, Maggie is in trouble. We are at the dead tunnel.” Only weak static returned my call. I clipped the walkie-talkie to my belt and held my breath. Hopefully the bats had gone out for the evening. If not, I would have to run through them. I pulled open the door, half expecting the mob of bats to be still waiting there, ready to pounce. I waited for the assault, for the hundreds of little wings, feet and tiny teeth on my face and in my hair. I was greeted instead with a black, cold stillness. The bats seemed to be gone.

  Like so much of my life, here I was alone again with an extremely dark expanse in front of me. I don’t know why I kept getting myself in this situation. Clearly I was no good at it. The most important thing here was not my fear, it was Maggie. My dear, dear Maggie. Was she hurt? Was she in trouble? Did she fall and break a hip? Fear or no fear, I had to find her.

  “Aunt Maggie? Are you down there?” Down there, at the end of all this darkness, this concrete tunnel with no windows. I felt as if I was being sw
allowed up. I was going down this giant concrete conduit straight to hell.

  “Aunt Maggie? Can you hear me?”

  It was quiet now. No footsteps, no screams, just me and my fears. I knew I had to move forward, no matter what. I remembered I had a cell phone in my pocket and pulled it out to call my dad and as many people that I could think representing law enforcement in this town. I flipped open the comforting light of the phone to find I had no bars. I took a step forward. This time I couldn’t shrink back. I couldn’t call my dad. I couldn’t even choose not to.

  “Aunt Maggie, I’m coming,” I yelled and took off running down the pitch-black tube. There would not be one more body in this dead tunnel. My feet slapped on the cement as I began to see a faint light. I was running fast now as I yelled out her name. I was the bullet soaring down the chamber. I was moving at such speed, I was knocked back by the sudden impact of a face staring into mine.

  It looked red and somehow disfigured, with eyes too bright staring out at me.

  It was the face of Dr. MacPhee.

  “Dr. Mac!” I fell into his arms. I was relieved to see him but was unsure as to why he looked so strange.

  “Thank God you’re here.” I ran through my words gasping for breath. “I think my Aunt Maggie’s in trouble.”

  “I think she is, too.” His answer was strangely calm. He tightened his grip on my arms and propelled me through the door and onto the floor of the morgue. As I went down, I felt something hard and cushy all at the same time. From the moan I heard, I knew I had just landed on Aunt Maggie.

  “Unbelievable, you people. You just had to pursue this, didn’t you?”

  “Dr. Mac?”

  “Dr. Mac?” He mocked me using a falsetto. “Oh, Dr. Mac can’t you help my dear old Auntie? She wants to do this half-assed ghost hunt in the old hospital. Oh, Mac, you’ve always been there for me.”

  Aunt Maggie stirred beside me. I could see a gash on her head. There was a battery-powered lantern glowing on the far side of the room. The beige ceramic tiles that lined the wall shone in the glow of it. I could imagine many years ago this being a clean and glistening place instead of the dusty bat-filled haven it had become. There was a hole in the roof where the bats had made their entrances and exits over the years. In the corner of the room, there was a square metal box rusted with age. It reminded me of the pizza oven down at Dominic’s Flying Pizza in town. There was one door that hung precariously on what was left of a hinge. It had to weigh fifty pounds, judging by the thickness of the metal. Inside was what looked like a concrete mass with what I was sure was a skeletal hand and arm sticking out of it. It was as if the skeleton were reaching out toward anyone walking by. When I looked back at Dr. Mac, I could see he was holding a Colt 45 automatic and pointing it right at us. Being the daughter of a policeman, I instantly recognized the pistol with the black, boxy shape.

  “People in this God-forsaken town are way too nosy. Bunch of whiners,” Dr. Mac continued his high falsetto as he mimicked his patients. “Help me doctor, I can’t pay you. Help me doctor, my husband left me.” He walked over to the metal box with the bony hand reaching towards him.

  “This little gal here was a whiner. Let me formally introduce you to Mrs. Vickie MacPhee, my first wife. She hailed from the great state of Mississippi. She was dirt poor, white trash, came from a town called Farley’s Ditch. That’s right, a town named after a ditch. She came from the kind of people nobody takes notice of or particularly cares about. Did you know that after I killed her, not a soul, not a single solitary person came looking for her? Not one. She’s a throwaway, so I threw her. You see, I was an orderly out here at the hospital. Back then I called myself Roy.”

  “I was fresh out of the service and always looking for an angle to get out of being the poor country bumpkin that I was. I thought I had hit pay dirt when I found a young lady on the hospital ward with the last name DuPont. As in the DuPont family of enormous wealth? Everyone knew the DuPonts were loaded, and here I had found one lonely, quite unattractive DuPont looking for her knight in shining armor. Sadly, it seemed her family didn’t have much to do with Miss Vickie, so I swooped in to rescue her. I courted her for one week and then announced I was so hopelessly in love I wanted to marry her. My, my, but she was taken aback. Who would have thought here she was confronting death, and she gets a marriage proposal? Back then, I was afraid I would spoil everything if I asked her just exactly what her bank balance was. It was a life lesson, you could say. It wasn’t until after I married her that I found out she was just another disgustingly poor person like myself.”

  “And then, miracle of miracles she got cured. Cured! She couldn’t even afford to pay her own hospital bill. I moved her into my apartment and continued working out at the hospital until it closed. I hated her. I hated everything about her. After the hospital, I got a job out at the local country club where I met my present wife, Lillian. Her maiden name was Lillian Chambers. Doesn’t that just drip with money? This time I checked her out and found out her daddy was one of the richest men in Pecan Bayou. Luckily, her daddy didn’t return the favor and check me out in reverse. I told her that I was a struggling college student between scholarships and that above all else I wanted to go to medical school.”

  “My only problem was I had to do something with Vickie here. It was so easy, you wouldn’t believe it. Her energy level never truly returned after her illness, so I told her that she had to have a daily hot toddy with a dash of liquid vitamin stirred in. Actually, she only needed one. The one I filled with cyanide. Did you know she smiled at me as I handed her that steaming cup of poison? Trusting until the end, dumb bitch. After she died, I brought her out here to the cooler in the morgue. The tuberculosis hospital didn’t keep bodies for long, maybe a day or two, but then they sent them off elsewhere. They kept them in this here cooling unit. I put a lock on the door and got the hell out of here. I always meant to come back, but to tell the truth, it all unnerved me a bit. Every cadaver I operated on in medical school made me think of her, decomposing and stinking out here. I couldn’t make myself come back, no matter how hard I tried. I just hoped that someday they would bulldoze the building and her with it. I filed for a divorce on the grounds of abandonment, and then a year later I married Lillian.”

  “Her daddy wasn’t that keen on me until he knew I was a potential doctor for his sacred family tree. That old fool not only let me marry his daughter, but he paid for medical school.”

  Dr. Mac walked over to the square box containing the body of his wife encased in the crumbling concrete. “It sealed up so tightly, even with the electricity not running. I felt sure someone would find her, year after year after year, but strangely no one did. It really was as if she was an invisible person. Frankly, there were times when I actually forgot about her being out here. No one came looking for her, and no one ever found her body. No one, that is, until Oliver Canfield.”

  I looked over at Aunt Maggie, whose eyes were now open. She didn’t stir but sat quietly, listening to the unraveling of the many years of deceit.

  “What a piece of work that one was,” Dr. Mac continued. “He was nosing around out here and actually pried off the door to the cooler. When what to his wondering eyes should appear,” he shook his head to emphasize each word, “but my dear ol’ Vickie here. Surprise!” He jumped at me as if he were a crazed birthday clown. “I’ll say one thing for that Canfield guy – he was clever, very clever. He just wasn’t as clever as I was. This is a man’s game, and he was a mere boy. He thought he had one up on me because he took the wedding band off her finger. Inside was inscribed Love, Roy. I don’t go by that name anymore. It’s a country-sounding name, don’t you think?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “Yes. You see, here I go by Dr. William R. MacPhee. It sounds much better, doesn’t it? It seems Canfield had done title searches on several pieces of property here in town, and from that he picked up on my middle name. He took that ring from her bony finger and put it on his fat little finger. I do
n’t know how he got it on there. I had to use oil from the gun to pull it off of him. Of course, he was dead by then, so he didn’t struggle much. He asked to meet me, right here in this hospital. But I guess you know that part because you found him!” He laughed at his own joke.

  “He knew I killed her, but that was when I was a young fellow. I mean, look at me. I’m an old man who delivers babies and puts casts on little leaguers. What a sweet old guy I turned out to be! I simply walked through the woods from the hospital while the nurses thought I was taking a short nap. They wouldn’t dare disturb me, dear old Dr. Mac. I hid the gun in my belt, under my jacket. I told Canfield to meet me in Room 227, knowing about the hole in the wall. We used to joke that was the real employee’s lounge. We could hide out there and avoid changing bedpans and helping all the coughing, weak people stretching out their hands to us. They were disgusting, always retching up bile.” He grimaced.

  “So Canfield walks up to me, spouting all of this rubbish about how he knows I killed my wife but I could pay him a million dollars and he’d forget all about it. I just couldn’t let that happen, you see. I had created this perfect life and had put Vickie way, way behind me. He was quite surprised when I pulled my Colt out of my jacket. I shot him, and then the son of a bitch laughed at me. He tells me that I’ll never get her out. He encased her in concrete. It was his guarantee she would stay right here. I shot him again and stuffed him in the wall, and even though I hated the thought, I ran down to the morgue and found my Vickie settled into a bed of concrete. Canfield had outsmarted me.”