Was the poster real or a replica? I’d need to do a thorough inventory of the museum to understand exactly what Adele had and its true value. She’d need that information if she ever found a buyer.
I returned to the main room and the cash register. The plastic sheeting rustled. GD Cat sat in front of the plastic where Christy’s body had lain, licking his paws, unconcerned.
“I guess that means we’re ghost free,” I said.
He paused, fixing his green-eyed gaze on me, and then returned to his ablutions.
I unpeeled the information card taped to the seat of the paint-flecked rocking chair. It read: A presence has been felt in this chair donated by Gerald Winters. Visitors have reported seeing the chair rock by itself.
I raised my brows. It seemed silly, but I plowed on, getting acquainted with the objects d’spook under my purview: A colorfully painted magic scroll from Ethiopia believed to entrap evil spirits—How many are trapped inside? And what will happen if they’re released? A tattered copy of an occult journal from the nineteenth century. A Victorian mourning ring said to attract the ghost of the woman whose hair was woven into the band.
The museum was an Aladdin’s cave of the paranormal. I had to admit, it was an impressive collection.
The bell above the door jingled, and I scooted behind the cash register. Two Goth teenagers sauntered in, their faces unnaturally pale, their hair unnaturally black. The boy made a V-sign with his fingers, and I handed him two tickets.
“That will be …” I scanned down the list of instructions and choked. “Twenty dollars for the two of you.”
His girlfriend drifted into the Fortune Telling Room. He dug a handful of crumpled bills from the front pocket of his black jeans and handed me the money. I untangled the damp mass, and he followed Girl Goth.
“You gave me too much.” I held out a fiver.
He didn’t look back, waving a hand negligently over his shoulder. “Keep it.”
Shrugging, I dropped the cash in the tip jar. I turned the jar and read the label: Lunch Money for GD Cat. Our ghost detecting cat has been known to spot ghosts! Watch where he gazes!
Looking at the cat, I raised a brow. “Really?”
GD sneezed and followed the Goths into the Fortune Telling Room.
The plastic sheeting rattled, and a man in loose denims and a torn, paint-stained tee bounded into the room. From the tool belt slung low about his hips, I deduced he was Adele’s contractor, Dieter Finkielkraut. His brown hair was spiked as if he’d plugged his finger into an electrical socket, and his brown eyes gleamed. Tanned and muscled, it wasn’t hard to see how brokenhearted Adele had found him appealing.
“Hi! Are you Mad Dog Kosloski?”
I ground my teeth. Adele and her big mouth. Would high school never die?
He loped across the checkerboard floor, his hand extended. “I’m Dieter Finkielkraut, Adele’s contractor. She said you’d be opening the museum today. How’s it going?” He pumped my hand. His palm was rough from manual labor, but his grip was gentle.
“Two customers so far,” I said.
“I’d planned to start up the circular saw. Want me to hold off until they go?”
“Theoretically, customers will be coming and going all day, so there’s no point in delaying the noise. If anyone complains, I’ll tell them it’s the ghost of a lumberjack.”
“Hey, do you know if Adele’s coming in today? I wanted to ask her about some molding.”
The Goths wandered into the Creepy Doll Room.
“I’m not sure. The murder might have changed her schedule.”
“Murder?” His eyes twinkled. “Is she planning a murder mystery party for charity?”
I blinked. This was a small town, and murder was big news. I’d have thought word of Thursday night’s death would be all over. “You haven’t heard? Christy Huntington was found dead inside the Paranormal Museum.”
His eyes dulled. “Christy Huntington? Here? When?”
“Thursday night. Were you here on Thursday?”
“I’m here nearly every weekday.”
“What time did you leave on Thursday?” I’d no intention of playing detective, but finding Christy’s body had left me with an ugly, vulnerable hollow in my gut. I wanted things to be okay, for Adele to be in the clear. And I wanted to know why, if Dieter was here every weekday, he’d missed the cops in the tea room on Friday.
“I packed up Thursday around four thirty and headed up to Tahoe to get some snowboarding in on Friday. Just got back.”
“Did you see Christy when you left on Thursday?”
He shook his head. “The only person I saw was your grumpy neighbor, the biker.”
“If you just got back, I guess that explains why the police haven’t talked to you,” I said, uneasy. But why hadn’t the police at least called Dieter to set an appointment for an interview? He was a potential witness.
“Why would the cops want to talk to me?”
“The body was found here Thursday night. I’d imagine they’d want to know when you left, to help figure out when she died, or if you’d seen her around the museum. We had to tell them you had a key. One of the cops seemed to recognize your name.”
He hitched his jeans. “Oh? Who was it?”
“A detective named Laurel Hammer.”
He grinned. “Oh yeah. Me and Laurel go way back to her pre–Johnny Law days.”
“Were you staying at a hotel?”
“Why?”
“It’s been ages since I’ve been to Tahoe,” I said, deliberately vague. Oh yeah, I definitely had a flair for detection.
“Well, I was at a friend’s cabin,” Dieter said. “He gave me the key.”
“You went alone?”
“Yeah, there’s no special lady in my life.”
Drat. So it would be tough to verify his story. Dieter had a key to the tea room—he could have killed Christy and then left for Tahoe, but what was his motive? “Did you know Christy well?”
“No. She’s outta my league. I mean, was outta my league.”
We stared at each other.
“How was the snow?” I asked.
“Icy.”
My conversational gambit exhausted, Dieter departed. The whine of a circular saw pierced the air, and the Goths fled the museum.
A jowly businessman in a threadbare suit sidled through the front door. A customer!
I smiled, reaching for the tickets. “Welcome to the Paranormal Museum.”
“Uh, yeah. Is Dieter here?”
Sourly, I pointed toward the plastic curtains with my pencil.
“Thanks.” He hurried through them.
Between researching the museum’s assorted oddities online, I relieved visitors of their ticket money. Saturday should have been a big day for sales. Although there was a steady trickle of guests, I couldn’t see earning a living off the place if I bought it. Maybe if it had a gift shop, or a way to bring in repeat visitors. I could put a round table in the center of the room with things for sale. Or Dieter could build some shelves near the cash register to sell tarot cards and stuff. What that other stuff might be, I had no idea. Paranormal Museum postcards? Did people even send postcards anymore? And why was I thinking about this when the odds that I’d buy the place were practically nil?
A weedy-looking man in wrinkled khakis and a gray button-
up shirt slouched in. His youthful face was carved in a hangdog
expression, his single mark of distinction. Otherwise, he was Mr. Average—average height, average weight, sandy hair, brown eyes. He’d be an ideal bank robber, his identity fading into a million other averages.
I smiled. “Welcome to the Paranormal Museum. Tickets are—”
“I’m not here for a ticket.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m here to see where Christy died.”
�
��Then you’ll have to leave.” An ache throbbed behind my left eyeball. I’d already driven off two reporters. The P.T. Barnum in me told me that no publicity was bad publicity, but it seemed icky, and Adele had enough problems.
The circular saw screamed. I winced, regretting that I’d told Dieter to go ahead with the work.
“You don’t understand. Christy was my …” He gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Your …?”
“We were friends,” he said. “I can’t believe she’s gone. It’s denial, I guess, the first stage of grief. Do you know what happened?”
“The last reporter told me he was her brother. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten to remove his press pass from the Stockton Crab Feed.”
The man pulled a wallet from his back pocket and dug out a business card: Sam Leavitt, Esquire.
So Sam was a lawyer. If the business card was legit. He looked like a harmless young professional, clean cut in business casual.
“Wow. I’ve never met a squire before,” I said. “Is your horse parked outside?”
“It means—”
“I know what ‘esquire’ means.”
He swallowed again. “Christy was my girlfriend,” he said in a low voice.
My breath hitched. His girlfriend? Could I be any more insensitive? But what about Christy’s engagement to Michael? “Christy told me she was seeing someone else.”
“My girlfriend once,” he clarified. “Then she dumped me for Michael St. James.”
I leaned closer, feeling an unwilling twinge of sympathy.
“I couldn’t blame her,” he said. “He’s rich. Successful. I’m a struggling lawyer, just starting out. At first, Christy and I had so much in common. And then her law career took off and mine flatlined. We were doomed.”
He leaned closer. His breath smelled of onions and Tabasco. “What happened?” he asked, his fists clenched. “Were you the one who found her? If I find the person who did this …”
The museum had gone quiet, and I realized we were alone. I looked for something to put between me and Sam besides the counter, not liking the glitter in his eyes. If Christy had jilted him, had Sam killed her for revenge? I shifted the cat’s tip jar in front of me as a barrier.
“I don’t know what happened.” I stared at the door, willing a customer to walk in, anyone. But the museum remained depressingly empty. Even the cat had abandoned me. “What do you think happened?”
He sagged. “I don’t know. Christy was so sensitive and smart.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Smart and sensitive were not two adjectives I’d have applied to Christy, but I hadn’t known her well. “If you have information, you should talk to the police.”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? What do you think they’ll do?”
The answer to that seemed obvious. Was there something I was missing? “They’re investigating the case.”
Brow wrinkling, he looked around the museum. “I can’t believe she got killed in a place like this. Christy was very conscious of appearances. She would have hated being found in a paranormal museum.”
“If she felt that strongly about it, she shouldn’t have broken in.”
“Broken in? She would never have broken in! She was committed to law and order.”
I doubted that, but it was true that a key to the tea room had been found on her. How had she gotten her hands on it? And were there more keys floating around?
“Haunted chairs, creepy dolls,” Sam said. “Christy would have found them tacky.”
“I’ll have you know that we have a genuine spirit cabinet used by mediums in the nineteenth century to defraud customers.” My research that morning hadn’t been a total waste. “We also have a Victorian-era spiritoscope designed to catch frauds. The spiritualist movement was an important and much over-looked period in American history.” Okay, I made that part up. But it could have been true.
Sam looked unconvinced. “She loved art galleries, but this isn’t art.”
Now he was just being rude. This was a paranormal museum, not the Met. What did he expect? “A rotating macabre art exhibit is planned,” I said stiffly. “The Creepy Doll Room would be a perfect space. Four windowless walls ideal for displaying exhibits, and a skylight above for natural lighting.”
His eyes widened. He blinked rapidly, backing away. “Macabre?”
“Or arcane. It’s not just a paranormal museum,” I said, pointing to the row of old photos, “it’s a capsule of our community.”
“That’s … that’s …”
The bell tinkled over the door and I turned to it, relieved. “Welcome …”
My brother walked inside, chic in jeans and a cream-colored fisherman’s sweater.
The welcome died in my throat.
I was busted.
five
My brother did a double take, his cornflower-blue eyes bulging. “Mad? What are you doing here?”
For a wild moment I thought of racing around the counter and pretending to be another visitor. But I’d been caught fair and square. “Nothing.”
“Wait, you’re not working here?”
My heartbeat grew loud in my ears. “I said I hadn’t made a decision yet!”
“You mean this is the museum you were telling me about?”
“It’s a perfectly proper museum.” My voice was shrill. I winced, hearing myself parrot Adele’s words.
Shane doubled over, howling with laughter.
Sam’s gaze ping-ponged between the two of us. He raised a finger in the air. “I’ll just …” He hurried from the museum, banging the door behind him.
My brother wiped his eyes. “The Paranormal Museum? Wait until Mom hears.”
“You can’t tell her,” I hissed. “I’m doing a favor for Adele.”
“What does Adele have to do with this? I wouldn’t have thought it would be her thing.”
“She owns the building now, and the mayor wants the museum kept open.” I straightened. “It’s the second biggest tourist attraction in San Benedetto.”
“What’s the first?”
“Duh. The wineries.”
“But the wineries aren’t a tourist attraction. They’re multiple attractions, which puts your museum pretty far down the list. Are you more popular than the flaming Christmas Cow, or is that number one?”
“Since the Christmas Cow flames but once a year, the museum beats it. And I told you, it’s not my museum.”
“Whatever. This place is awesome. Where’s the cat that sees ghosts?”
“He comes and goes, and right now he’s gone. You’re out of luck.”
The cat strolled in from the tea room and twined himself around Shane’s legs. Traitor. If GD Cat expected a penny of that tip money, he’d better develop opposable thumbs.
Shane bent and ruffled his fur. The cat arched his back in ecstasy.
An old man ambled in, his cabby hat pulled low over bushy eyebrows. “Is Dieter here?”
“Through there.” I jerked my head toward the plastic-wrapped opening to the tea shop.
“Thanks.” He hurried through.
“Busy place,” Michael said. “Hey, you hear about Mel’s gig at the Bolshoi?”
I nodded.
“It’s not La Scalla,” he said, “but she’s moving up. She’ll be disappointed you won’t be in Moscow to hear her sing.”
“It’s not my fault I … ”
“Quit?”
I couldn’t tell him I’d been fired. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
When I said nothing, he said, “I won’t be there either, if it makes you feel better.”
“Where will you be?”
He shrugged. “The State Department’s talking about a new posting. But I’m not sure where yet. I’m glad at least one of us is here for Mom.”
I looked down at the cash register. None of us had been in the States when our father had died, and it felt like a failure.
Adele bustled through the plastic sheeting, a cardboard carrier with four cups of coffee in one hand. Over her other arm swung a kelly-green purse. Its color exactly matched her ’60s-style miniskirt. She plunked the coffee on the counter. Straightening her brown turtleneck sweater, she turned to my brother, arms wide. “Shane!”
He hugged her. “Good to see you, Adele.”
She stepped back. “Mad didn’t tell me you were in town. What do you think of the museum?”
He laughed. “Weird as ever.”
She handed me a paper cup and some sugar packets. “Mochaccino for you, Mad. I know it’s your favorite.”
“Thanks,” I said, surprised by the gesture. I peeled off the plastic lid and inhaled the aroma of coffee and chocolate. Heaven.
“Shane, how do you feel about Ethiopian?”
“Love it.”
She handed him a cup.
Dieter bounded into the room. “Do I smell coffee?”
“Not that you need any caffeine,” Adele said, “but here’s your double espresso.”
“If you didn’t know Shane was here, why did you bring an extra coffee?” I tore open the sugar packets, dumped them in, and stirred.
“I always get one extra, just in case. It’s only polite should you have an unexpected guest.” She threaded her arms through Dieter’s and Shane’s. “Let me show you our plans for the tea room.”
I watched her lead the men out of the museum area. When the plastic sheeting closed behind them, a muscle between my shoulder blades released. Was I jealous of Shane’s success? I hadn’t been when I’d had an international job of my own. I blew out my breath. I was a small, small person.
As penance, I called my mother. She picked up on the second ring.
The Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum (A Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum Mystery) Page 4
