by Tamara Berry
“After all,” he’d said with a hearty laugh, “it’s not as though the poor guy’s going anywhere, is it?”
This was the result. An empty space where the body had been, a fake medium growing more overwrought by the minute.
“Of course I didn’t see him fall. By the time I got here, he was already dead.” I shove my foot out as if to prove it. My big toe feels swollen and throbbing, even though the wound is only visible as a slight puncture under the toenail. “I hit the broken stair. I came tumbling down. I would have probably broken my neck, too, but . . .”
“He saved you.” Nicholas’s flat tone gives nothing away.
“He saved me,” I agree.
“And then he disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Like a, er, wayward spirit, perhaps?”
I could scream in frustration, though I’m not sure who would be the intended recipient. These two blockheads aren’t helping matters any, but I can hardly blame them for not taking me seriously. After all, I’ve spent most of my adult life spinning wild fantasies about death and the afterlife. I’m literally the woman who cried ghost.
“What about all my equipment?” I ask, almost desperate. “And the stair?”
“Xavier,” Cal says with a cluck of his tongue and a shake of his head, his jowls wagging. “Always up to something. D’you think I should take Fern to stay in a hotel for a few days? She’s not up to this kind of emotional upset—fragile, that’s what she is.”
Nicholas must sense that I’m nearing the brink of my patience, because he asks Cal to go upstairs and inform the rest of the household that the dead body has turned out to be nothing more than the hysterical ravings of an overpriced medium.
“I’ll tell them you were sleepwalking,” Cal says in a kind voice. He pats me awkwardly on the shoulder, and I notice there’s a bandage on his thumb that I could have sworn wasn’t there last night.
An injury incurred while smashing electronics, perhaps? Pulling up broken stairs? Pushing strange men down them?
He sees my look of interest and quickly pulls his hand away. “One of those blasted birds pecked me,” he says. “Fern thinks I should get a tetanus shot.”
“But—” I begin, about to point out that the birds had gone nowhere near him.
Nicholas doesn’t let me finish. “But tetanus shots are for rusty nails, not animals. We’ll have the doctor out to take a look at you.” He casts an obvious glance down at my toe. “You and Madame Eleanor both.”
“No need,” Cal blusters as he backs away.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say at the same time.
Nicholas just laughs. “I thought as much.”
His diversionary tactic works, however, and Cal makes his escape. Nicholas waits only until the other man’s heavy tread leaves the top step before turning to me with one quizzically raised brow.
I don’t need him to voice his question aloud.
“This isn’t part of any kind of mystical plan,” I protest and hold my hands up as if to ward him off. “I woke up and found all my stuff smashed. I came down the stairs in the dark. I tripped on the broken step. I landed on a body. A dead body, Nicholas. I’m as sure of that as a person can be. He was still warm and . . .”
I want to tell him about the voice—about how it spoke to me, laughed at me. But, of course, I don’t. I’m trying to make myself more credible in his eyes, not less.
Unsurprisingly, my plea doesn’t work. That same brow remains raised, Nicholas’s pose casual in a way that seems one hundred percent fabricated.
“I swear it on my sister’s life” is all I say.
There’s no way of knowing whether or not he believes me. I’ve only been acquainted with this man for a few days, so he doesn’t realize what it means for me to invoke my sister in this way. Liam would know, and maybe Peggy from Happy Acres, but that’s about it.
And Winnie. Winnie would know.
“Alright,” he says before I have a chance to decide whether that voice comes from inside me or from the castle. He nods once. “Let’s say I believe you. You woke up and found your equipment broken to pieces and immediately decided to come downstairs. Why?”
My eyes widen in surprise at my own stupidity. “The camera,” I say. In all the drama of finding the dead body and rushing upstairs to get help, I’d forgotten the reason I came this way in the first place. “I installed a camera just across here.”
Without waiting to see if he follows, I hightail it for the small shelf where I’d placed the last of my devices. It’s the best of all my hiding spaces, an inset in the rocky basement wall that I like to imagine once held all manner of herbs hung to dry. Whatever its past incarnation, it’s now a catch-all in the manner of kitchens everywhere—rubber bands, an unused glow stick, lonely playing cards with the corners nicked off.
And, of course, my little handheld spy camera. With any luck, it will contain footage of the grisly scene I recently fled.
“I ought to have Thomas clear that junk away,” Nicholas says over my shoulder. He’s standing much closer than I at first realize, his body warm and substantial in a way I find far too comforting than is good for me—especially since the last warm and substantial body near mine was no longer living. “Well? Do you see it?”
Oh, I see it. I pull the camera out from among the debris, the cracked plastic pieces trailing a frayed black cord.
I can’t understand why the sight of that cord makes me want to cry. Of all my broken and missing devices, this camera is the least expensive. It was the first piece of tech I owned, bought before I had any idea what I was getting myself into, a down payment on a lifestyle it’s too late to quit now.
But there it is, a bubble of anguish in my throat, a prick of tears not far behind.
“So much for that idea,” I say, dashing a furtive hand against my eyes. “Whoever killed that man was sure not to leave any trace behind. Look at the lengths he went to—he even took the body.”
Nicholas takes the broken camera from me and folds it in a handkerchief extracted from the pocket of his pajamas. I’m not sure what to make of that—either the gesture or the fact that this man sleeps with handkerchiefs within reach—but his voice is kind. “It can’t have gone far. You left for—what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Where did he go? How far can a body be moved in that amount of time?”
“Half a mile?” I guess. “How should I know? I’ve never moved a body before. He wasn’t very big.”
To Nicholas’s credit, he begins making an earnest assessment of the area. From the start, his search is more useful than Cal’s; he actually gauges the distance from the bottom of the stairs to the kitchen, and then from the kitchen to the servant’s entrance leading outside. Following his logic—that a body moved from its spot would most likely be dragged out the nearest door, I follow him. But my look of doubt matches his own when we find the door firmly shut. Opening it doesn’t help matters any, as there’s a heavy pile of mud on the doorstep that still bears the footprints Thomas and I made coming in yesterday. If anyone—living or dead—exited this way, they had to float to do it.
Now, floating entities aren’t as rare as you might expect. There’s a lot that can be done with wires, hooks, blasts of air, and the magic of angles—especially when it comes to levitation photos. Give me twenty minutes, a working camera, and a footstool, and I could make any number of bodies float out that back door.
The real deal, however?
“Up the stairs?” I suggest doubtfully. They’re too steep and dark and, at the moment, broken to make the idea a reasonable one. A new thought hits me and I groan. “Oh, God. You don’t think . . . the oven?”
Nicholas laughs outright. As if to prove how ridiculous I’m being, he systematically opens every cupboard door and pretends to look for a hastily hidden body. By the time he reaches the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, I’ve just about had enough.
“Yes, yes, it’s all very funny to you, but I know what I saw.” I know what I landed on, know what I heard. “He has to be around he
re somewhere.”
“Did you check the secret cubby?”
I whirl to find Rachel standing in the doorway, her feet planted in the exact spot where the man had lain less than half an hour ago. A gray woolen blanket is wrapped around her shoulders, and she suppresses a wide yawn, but her eyes sparkle for all her apparent sleepiness.
“Cal told me what happened,” she says by way of explanation. “I couldn’t resist. Did Xavier really murder someone?”
“No one has been murdered,” Nicholas says with a sigh. “Even if there was a body—”
“There was,” I put in forcefully.
“Even if there was a body,” he repeats carefully, “there’s no saying his death wasn’t an accident. You were careful on the step?”
She nods, still with that excited gleam in her eye. “I’m always careful on that step. Thomas warned me about it ages ago. Xavier likes to pop it up in the middle of the night when no one is around.”
“He’s done it more than once?” I ask, frowning. That isn’t in keeping with the rest of Xavier’s antics. I wasn’t kidding before when I ascertained that Xavier’s manipulations were mostly benign; it’s what makes me think Nicholas is right about this being an inside job, that someone in this house is playing tricks on everyone else. Those stairs, however, really are dangerous. Someone could get hurt.
I think of the man’s body and gulp. Someone already did.
Nicholas seems to share my concern, his brow lowering. “Have you ever seen it up like that before?” he asks.
“Well, no. But you know Xavier mostly leaves me alone.” She shoots me a look of triumph. “He likes me best of all the family. I’m his favorite.”
“You’re everyone’s favorite, brat,” Nicholas says with real warmth. “Now go back upstairs and mind your own business.”
There’s that pang again—the almost-jealousy, the feeling that I’m all alone in this world of my own making. I’ve been around a lot of dysfunctional families in my day—including my own—and this one is proving itself to be just as strangely antagonistic as the rest of them. Yet I can’t help recognizing that there’s genuine love here, too.
“Does that mean you’ve already checked the cubby?” she asks, ignoring his command. “I used to hide there all the time when I was a kid. I think there might even be a stack of Nancy Drews and a flashlight still inside.”
“What cubby is this?” I ask.
Rachel turns her wide, blinking violet eyes on me. “The one under the stairs, of course. They used to keep wine under there, I think. There are panels all along one wall with racks built in. It’s where I’d hide a body, if I needed to in a pinch.”
I expect Nicholas to be laughing again, mocking us for our romantic flights of fancy, but he’s watching Rachel with an intensity that sets my heartbeat skittering. “I thought it was bricked up years ago,” he said. “In fact, I distinctly remember ordering it to be done.”
“You did.” Rachel laughs. “But Mum took the money you gave her for the builders and went shopping in Paris instead. You ought to know better than to give her cash straightaway.”
Nicholas tells Rachel to stay exactly where she is as he pushes aside a shelf lining one wall of the alcove to the left of the stairs. Given the sharp turn halfway up the steps, it makes sense that there would be a crawlspace under there. I hadn’t noticed it before since the door is located behind the shelf, which holds various pots and pans that look as though they don’t get much in the way of use.
Secret passages, lost smuggling tunnels, kitchen hidey-holes . . . is there nothing this place doesn’t have?
Unfortunately, all of my earlier enthusiasm for intriguing architecture has disappeared. Now that the moment has arrived, I find I’m not too keen on coming face-to-face with the ghastly spectacle of death again.
The body itself wasn’t terrible. Landing on top of it isn’t going to be my favorite memory of this adventure, but I can’t overlook the fact that it saved me from serious injury—possibly even my own death. That the body disappeared isn’t catastrophic, either. Like most of the mysteries around this house, I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical, scientific explanation behind it.
It was his eyes. That’s the thing I can’t seem to shake, the picture that moves across my vision every time I blink. Those blank, glazed eyes were so much like Winnie’s.
Lost. Gone. Dead.
I decide to stay where I am and keep Rachel company at the foot of the stairs, even though the girl is far more excited than terrified at the prospect of Nicholas’s search. We listen, standing still, as the door scratches open and Nicholas steps out of our line of vision.
“Uh, Madame Eleanor?” The formality of my name matches the formality of his tone.
“Yes, Mr. Hartford?” I reply, equally precise.
“Could you perhaps join me for a moment?”
I think of those eyes and wince. “Is it an absolute necessity?”
There’s a slight pause. “Yes.”
There doesn’t seem to be any way around it, especially when Rachel looks at me with something approaching disappointment. Of everyone in the house, I’m the one who’s supposed to be most accustomed to death, the one who can confront the cloudy organs of vision without shuddering. I take her hand and give it a reassuring squeeze, as though my concern all along has been her well-being, not my own.
“You have nothing to fear. Whoever this man is, I don’t sense that his spirit lingers.”
“Oh, right,” she says, as if the thought of another ghost haunting the house hadn’t occurred to her. “I’m sure that will make Mum happy.”
Nicholas clears his throat in an obvious and commanding manner, so I pick my way over to where he’s hunched, peering into the cubby with his cell phone outstretched in flashlight mode. Even in that position, which would make any other man look at a disadvantage, he seems cool and detached, almost as though he’s examining a horse for purchase rather than a dead body.
“Do you recognize him?” I ask.
“Er, no. I doubt even his mother could in this particular state.”
“What?” I nudge him out of the way. “He was perfectly intact when I landed on him.”
Nicholas lifts an arm to hold me back—a gesture I will forever be grateful for. That hand prevents me from barreling into the dirt-lined hole under the stairs, from thrusting my face inches away from a body in such an advanced state of decay it’s practically a skeleton.
“Holy hypnosis,” I cry, taking a step back with a hand pressed to my nose. I’ve spent enough time ousting dead rodents out of walls that the sweet, sickly smell of rotting flesh no longer overpowers me, but nothing could have prepared me for this. “What the devil is that?”
Nicholas turns his head just enough to appraise me. “I thought it was your corpse.”
I lift a finger and point. The body—the skeleton—in question is little more than a heap of bones held together with fraying, leathery bands of flesh. “You think I landed on top of that only to brush myself off and go in search of assistance? Are you delusional? My corpse was clean. New.”
“Oh, dear,” Nicholas says and straightens. “This can’t be good.”
He closes the door mere seconds before Rachel’s head pops around the corner. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “Did you find him?”
“Rachel, I need you to go upstairs and call the police. No, don’t ask questions, and no, you may not open that door and see for yourself. Tell them they’ll need to bring the coroner.”
Rachel wrinkles her nose. “Why does it smell so awful?”
“I believe that qualifies as a question” is the polite reply. “And if you happen to see Thomas around, please send him down. We’ll need someone to stay here until help arrives to make sure nothing is, ah, moved again.”
“I can stay,” I offer.
The look Nicholas gives me is long and careful and, frankly, insulting. I’m about to tell him that not only do I not lie about finding bodies in stairwells, but I also don’t m
ove said bodies around, but Rachel pipes up before I can leap to my own defense.
“Thomas isn’t here,” she says. “Remember? It’s his long weekend. He left after getting rid of the birds last night.”
“Blast,” Nicholas says, even his curse more of a calm rejoinder than an actual outburst. “I’ll have to stay down here myself. Madame Eleanor, do you think you could relay the news without alarming the family any more than is necessary?”
“I don’t know.” I’m needled to retort in a fake, syrupy voice. “It’s such a great opportunity for me to create widespread hysteria and panic.”
“Then just do your best,” he replies, ignoring my sarcasm. “And try not to touch anything on the way back up the stairs, will you? If you happen upon another body . . .”
Despite the fact that this man is doing everything in his power to goad me beyond my endurance, I can’t help asking. “What, Old Nick? How would you suggest I deal with the next one?”
He laughs. “Check to see if its throat is cut. One of these poor bastards had better be Xavier, or we’re going to end up being haunted forever.”
Chapter 13
“Miss—Ma’am—Madame—I’m going to need you to walk me through it one more time.” The policeman sitting opposite me in the parlor makes the command in polite tones, but I can tell it’s only a thin façade. He doesn’t look at all the way I’d expect a small-town English cop to look, which might account for my strong feelings of antipathy toward him. He’s neither tweedy nor bumbling. He’s sharp and thin, like a weasel, wearing a bright yellow vest and sucking on his fifth cigarette since he got here. Also, his name is Peter Piper. I cannot and will not respect a man named Inspector Peter Piper.
“I’m not sure what else you want to hear.” I push my half-empty cup of tea underneath his cigarette to catch the ashes. “I already told you that I woke in the middle of the night to find all my equipment smashed to pieces. There was one last camera in the kitchen, so I headed down to check.”
Inspector Piper uses his ash-covered fingers to flip through his notebook. He stops on a page that looks, to my upside-down view, as if it contains a drawing of a donkey. “Ah, yes. That’s what has me in a puzzle. Why did you put a camera in the precise location where the body was later found?”
