by Shayla Black
“That’s perfect,” Jenna said, when he explained the call.
“I have to get to the autopsy,” he told her.
“And I’ll head to the mortuary.”
“Maybe you should come with me,” he said, recalling some of the dream.
“Don’t be silly. We need to move fast on this. There are so many people we’re going to have to interview, so much we have to find out. We have to divide the load. I know the mortuary, but we need to know the layout, how someone might have gotten in. That can only come from a visit.”
She was right and he knew it.
He still didn’t want to be away from her.
“Devin and Rocky will be here—”
“We can’t wait on them,” she said, frowning then smiling. “Sam, I’m a good agent. I was an agent before you were an agent, remember? I’ll be careful. I promise.”
He hesitated. “I had a nightmare,” he said.
“You did?”
“A boo-hag was after you.”
She smiled. “Sam, boo-hags aren’t real.”
“The one in the street was real. So we have to watch out.”
“I swear, I’ll be careful.”
“Maybe—”
“Sam, I’m good at what I do. And when you’re back from the autopsy, we’ll meet up and go together from there.”
He rose.
She was already up, heading to the shower. He started to follow her. She laughed, paused, and told him, “No time for that. I’ll be right out. We need to move this morning.”
“So you think you’re that irresistible?” he asked her.
She grinned. “In a shower, you’re irresistible.”
And she closed the door on him.
“Nice lip service,” he told her through the door.
“Lip service is later,” she said.
He grinned at that, stared at the closed door for a minute, and then gathered his clothing for the day. He couldn’t be unreasonable. He’d had a nightmare. Part of coming home, perhaps. And yet, in their world, nightmares could be real or, at a minimum, whispers of threats to come.
* * * *
“Hauntings and Hallucinations rents the space from us for the event,” Micah Aldridge told Jenna.
It was just nine in the morning but she’d arrived at the Mayberry Mortuary to meet with Micah. Sam had headed for the autopsy and his meeting with Gary Martin. Adam Harrison had performed his usual magic. The FBI wasn’t taking lead on the investigation—the situation didn’t warrant it yet—but they were to be given access to information and leave to investigate. She hadn’t met Martin and hoped that he didn’t intend to dismiss the death as a suicide with no possibility of foul play. Things were always easier when everyone cooperated with everyone else. Most of the time it worked that way. But every once in a while they hit a local law enforcement officer who was more proprietorial, not wanting federal interference.
“I have to admit,” Micah said. “I kind of loathed the idea of having something so schlocky here when we are trying to do real research. But bills have to be paid and we make enough from the Halloween rental to carry us through the year.”
She nodded. “Makes sense.”
She studied the beautiful old building. By daylight, the skeletons, spiders webs, and jack-o-lanterns all appeared to be just nicely arranged paper and props, nothing more. By night, with special lighting, the place appeared eerie, especially the cemetery surrounding it. When it wasn’t Halloween season, the place still cast a certain melancholy about it, a poignancy that perhaps reflected the shadows of lives gone by.
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” Micah asked.
“I took an historic tour when I was about fifteen,” Jenna said. “It’s been a while. But I would like to take a look inside.”
They entered through the foyer. Double doors led into a massive living room and to the ornate stairway that led up to the second floor. The living room was filled with creatures, spider webs, a giant tarantula, and other oddities. On one wall a painting had flesh when first looked at, but turned skeletal from a different angle. A grand piano, complete with a skeleton player, sat by the windows to the porch. By night, the interior lights would show him in an eerie symphony.
“They do a good job,” Jenna said. “Where are the stairs down to the basement?”
“John made it all possible,” a female voice said.
She turned to see a young woman entering from the foyer. Attractive, with a wealth of long dark hair and a pretty face, but her eyes welled with tears as she approached.
“I’m Naomi Hardy.”
“Jenna Duffy.”
“Naomi and John Bradbury worked hand in hand,” Micah said. “His death has been hard on her.”
Concern filled Micah’s voice.
“John was a true visionary,” Naomi said. “He went to shows across the country, always looking for the newest innovations in creepy, chilling, fun scares. But he insisted we keep some real history too, to go along with all the whacko legend and scary movie stuff. He was so good. Head of the artistic branch, and every year at Halloween, he managed this place himself. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
“I am truly sorry for your loss,” she said.
“Jenna is with the FBI.”
“You’re here over a suicide?”
“Elyssa Adair, who found the body, is my cousin,” Jenna said. “I’m really here to help her through this.”
The explanation seemed to satisfy Naomi.
“John had the best job in the world. But then he’d had such a horrible divorce. His wife should have been shot. He’d had some drug problems as a kid and she dragged every bit of that into court, destroying his reputation. He had a hard time getting over it. All his success, and he could barely see his own children.”
Which made the ex a definite suspect.
“Is the wife still around?” Jenna asked.
“No. That was the first thing the police asked. But she was nowhere near here. Home with the kids and she hadn’t seen John since their last court date, months ago. She went on TV. Blamed his past, his drug problems, everything on him.”
Tears welled in Naomi’s eyes, which she brushed aside before asking, “What are you doing here at the mortuary?”
“Tying up the loose ends.”
Naomi shrugged, as if uninterested. “If you’ll excuse me, we’re reopening tonight and now it’s all on me. Micah, I’ll be down at the ticket booth if you need me. Jenna, a pleasure to meet you, even under these circumstances.”
She and Micah walked upstairs. Without darkness and actors, all of the haunting paraphernalia seemed worn and sad. Micah pointed out what was usually the tarot card reading and séance room. Another bedroom was used for psychic testing. She was interested in the entire layout, but really wanted to get to the basement to see if she could sense or feel anything. Elyssa wasn’t lying. John Bradbury had appeared to her. But it would be helpful if that ghost would speak with her or Sam.
“Is there only one entrance to the basement?” she asked.
Micah nodded. “From the house, yes. The stairs are in the back of the kitchen. There’s also an entrance from the back driveway that slopes down to a door. I guess it made for easy deliveries when the place was used as a funeral home.”
Micah seemed fine about going down to the basement, but then again, he’d been alone here when she arrived. If the place was haunted in any way, Micah certainly didn’t care.
She followed him to the ground floor landing and around the grand staircase to a door and more stairs that led down.
“It’s a mess,” Micah told her. “The police moved just about everything. Naomi will be taking over as manager and she’ll see to it that everything is in order before tonight.”
“Reopening already?” Jenna asked.
He shrugged. “I’m truly sorry. I liked John. He was a great guy. But life goes on and we have to pay the bills.”
“Yes, I guess so,” she murmured.
“The stairs are fairly narrow,” Micah said. “In the old days, the dead came in through the back entry, and the coffins went back out that same way. Hauntings and Hallucinations carries some major liability insurance and we have strict rules about how many people can come through at one time. We’re not the responsible party here, just the lessor, but we don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone. Well, dead is bad, but the poor guy did himself in. You know, I saw John every day for the last couple of months and I had no idea he was so depressed.”
Jenna didn’t reply or correct him. Better to stay silent.
They’d reached the basement. The long stone embalming tables remained, each piled high with Halloween decorations. The police had indeed made a mess.
Micah pointed. “In the nooks and cubicle areas we have motion-activated creatures and characters. You can see the giant alien there, the werewolf over here, the vampire and mummy. That crazed killer over there scares the bejesus out of most visitors. Over there is where it happened.”
She studied the cubicle, empty except for a giant iron hook that had long been attached to the ceiling above. The rope by which John Bradbury had hung had been removed, but the black lighting set up by the haunted house company remained. She thought that the basement, with its stone foundation pillars, wooden beams, and strewn paraphernalia seemed not eerie, but sad. The soft lighting made if look almost as if surrounded by a red mist. She walked over to where Bradbury had died.
“What were these crevices for?” she asked.
“I really don’t know.” He paused. “Poor John.”
She stood still and wished Micah wasn’t with her. Some alone time might be beneficial here.
“The exit from the basement is over this way,” Micah said. “We have visitors leave the house via the basement and walk back up the path to the parking lot when they’ve finished the tour.”
He walked toward the back door.
Jenna hovered a moment, waiting, standing still, trying to imagine what had gone on when Bradbury had died.
“Jenna?” Micah called to her.
“Coming,” she said.
She waited another few beats, then turned to join him at the exit.
And it hit her.
A movement in the air, a change in the temperature, the sense that they were not alone. She felt a brush against her cheek, and heard a whispered voice in the red mist aura.
I did not die by my own hand.
* * * *
The autopsy happened down in Boston where the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was located. Sam was pleased to discover that the medical officer on duty was Dr. Laura Foster, a woman he’d worked with several times when he practiced law in Boston. She was bright, determined, and good at her job. There was even a Salem connection. Laura was the descendant of a woman accused of witchcraft during the craze. Her ancestor wasn’t hanged. Instead, she died of the horrible conditions in the jail where she was held.
Detective Gary Martin was there too. He was pushing fifty, with short-cropped steel-gray hair. When he’d shaken hands with Sam, Martin had expressed surprise that the FBI had interest in an apparent suicide, but seemed to accept Sam’s explanation that they were involved only because of family.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” Martin said. “It’s that you can never be sure of anything. With John Bradbury, it certainly appears he killed himself.”
“It could have been made to look like suicide,” Sam said.
Martin appeared skeptical. “Like I say. Anything’s possible. Maybe the autopsy will tell us something we don’t know.”
They stood off to the side while Laura Foster went through the preliminaries, then made a Y incision in the chest and dictated her notes. Death appeared to have come from a broken neck. Otherwise, John Bradbury had been a healthy, forty-five-year-old man, with a strong heart and clear lungs. The last meal remained in the stomach. Clam chowder, white fish, greens. Everything was recorded.
When she stopped speaking, Martin asked, “Suicide?”
“Could be,” Laura said. “But, I doubt it.”
Sam was listening carefully.
“I’m not a forensics expert,” she said, “or a detective. The rope was taken and bagged as evidence yesterday. I saw it. From the way it was tied and the way he hanged, I can’t see how he could have slipped it around his own neck. Also, these abrasions here, on the side of the neck. They suggest he was dragged while the rope was in place, choking him.” She pointed at the body. “Marks here suggest he was digging at the rope before he died. This man was fighting and kicking. That’s what broke his neck. He died fast, much quicker than simple strangulation.”
“If he killed himself,” Martin said, “he might have been fighting to the end. Perhaps regrets?”
Laura shook her head. “I can’t say definitively death was by his own hand.”
“So you’re calling it a murder?” Martin asked.
Sam remained stoic, practicing something he learned a long time ago as a trial lawyer. Never let them know what you’re thinking.
“I can’t call this a suicide,” Laura said.
“Just great,” Martin said.
So much for an open and shut investigation.
“I’m sorry,” Laura said. “I’ll be doing more testing, but I suggest you start investigating this as a murder.”
“Can you give us a time of death?” Sam asked.
“No more than sixteen or seventeen hours. So I’m saying between the hours of two and four, yesterday afternoon.”
Martin left the room.
“He didn’t want a murder,” Laura said to him.
“No one ever does. Thank you for being stubborn.”
“I’m not being stubborn, Sam. You know me. I call it the way I see it.” She hesitated, nodding to her assistant, who was waiting to sew up the corpse. “It’s just science—and justice, right?”
“Absolutely.”
He stepped closer to the body. Sometimes, though not often, the dead could be reached by simple touch. But John Bradbury’s spirit was not with them in the room.
He thanked Laura again.
“I hate it when people use Salem,” she said. “When they do something like this, stringing a man up as if he was one of the victims from the old witch craze. It’s mocking at its worst. Ignore Mr. I-Want-A-Suicide out there and catch this killer.”
“Martin’s not a bad guy. He was just going with what appeared to be obvious. The word was out that John Bradbury had been having a bad time lately. An excellent candidate for suicide. But we owe it to him to find the truth.”
She nodded. “Glad you’re on this, Sam.”
He left the room. Martin had already stripped off the paper mask he’d worn inside. Sam did the same.
“Who the hell murders a guy like that?” Martin asked. “And how did you know?”
“I didn’t,” Sam said. “We’re involved only because of Jenna’s cousin, Elyssa.”
Martin shook his head. “I guess that’s your story and you’re sticking to it. You Feds gripe my tail. You just come and go as you please, sticking your noses into what should be a local matter.”
Sam tried to be diplomatic. He’d dealt with this attitude before. “We help local authorities solve a crime. That is all our jobs, right?”
“Yeah, I guess it is. You do know that I didn’t want this to be murder. It’s Halloween season. Patrol cops are going to have their hands full with corralling a ton of costumed drunks. Now there’s a murderer running loose among them.”
Sam pictured the boo-hag again from last night.
But no boo-hag had sucked the life out of John Bradbury.
No.
That poor man had been murdered.
Chapter 5
“During the afternoon, the only people here would have been me, Jeannette Mackey, John Bradbury, or Naomi Hardy,” Micah told Jenna. “There are deliveries during the day. And when we’re not open, the doors are supposed to be locked. Of course, we’re open durin
g the day in the afternoons for tours, but only if we have tours. They’re by appointment only during October. That’s not to say that someone might not have left a door or window open.”
“No security cameras or alarm system?” Jenna asked.
“Yes, there’s an alarm.”
Whoever killed John Bradbury had done so in the afternoon before six o’clock since, by then, the actors and guides had reported and there were people coming and going from the basement. She asked Micah about who might have been at the mortuary that afternoon.
“It should have been locked. The only people there were the usual day workers. That’s myself and Jeannette Mackey. During the season, it included John Bradbury and Naomi Hardy. I’m not sure when I first saw Naomi that day, but Jeannette and I both came in around eleven. I didn’t see or hear anything. John had talked about taking a day off, so we assumed that he had. To be honest, while we like to be the “real” psychic deal and distance ourselves from Halloween hokum, it’s all a little bit fun. So we like being a part of it. Participating. Watching.” His voice drifted off. “We went through all of this with the police that night. They were dumbfounded that so many people who worked here, and then so many attendees went through, before anyone realized that our swinging corpse was real. There was always a corpse there and things are supposed to look authentic.”
“And the police have said that you can reopen tonight?” Jenna asked.
He shrugged. “It seems part of the attraction now. You can rent the room in Fall River where Lizzie Borden hacked her stepmother to death. You can rent the room at the Hardrock Hotel in Florida where Anna Nicole Smith died. And someone died, at some time, in a good percentage of the homes in New England.”
“I think it was more than two nights after before you could rent either room,” she said. “So the people who should have been here during the day were you, John, Jeannette, and Naomi. And there is a security system. So if someone broke in, you should have known it?”
