by Amber Benson
“I suppose he’s right … this is his house,” Freezay said, looking thoughtful as he chewed on a thumbnail. Then he twisted his head in my direction and gave me a sly wink. “But from this moment forward, I’m in charge. And that means no one, and I mean no one, is leaving the Haunted Hearts Castle until I say so.
“Now that we’ve settled that,” Freezay continued, smiling, “I’m going to want to speak with everyone individually, so stay in the main house or on the nearby grounds because I don’t want to have to chase any of you down.”
Donald Ali’s departure had put a seed of disquiet in the group. No one wanted to stay at the Haunted Hearts Castle if there was a murderer on the loose—especially when everyone’s immortality was null and void for the remainder of All Hallows’ Eve.
Uriah Drood was the first to protest the enforced quarantine.
“I’m not staying here one minute longer than I have to,” he said, pulling his robe tightly around his middle and heading for the door.
“And how do you plan on leaving?” Freezay asked curiously. “Do you have a car?”
“Well, I … I …” Drood spluttered. “You know I don’t have a car. Who needs a car when they can just call up a wormhole?”
Freezay leaned against the mantel of the fireplace, arms folded across his chest.
“I have a car. I’m sure Donald Ali has a car, but you, my friend?” Freezay grinned. “You’re shit out of luck. No wormholes until midnight, so unless you plan on walking down to town, I don’t think you, or anyone else here for that matter, are going anywhere.”
Uriah Drood glared at Freezay, unhappy with the way he’d been shot down so succinctly.
“Anyone else want to argue the point with me?” Freezay asked.
There were no takers.
“Good,” he continued. “And let’s make one thing clear. I will listen to anything you have to say, but if you waste my time with bullshit claptrap, well, let’s just say, I don’t suffer fools gladly.”
“Freezay,” Jarvis said, indicating the drawing room, “why don’t we make this our interview room since everyone knows where it is?”
“Makes perfect sense, Jarvis,” Freezay agreed. “Now, first things first: Who discovered the body?”
I raised my hand.
“I did.”
“Me, too,” Runt added.
“All right, let’s clear the room, folks,” he said, dismissing everyone with a wave of his hand. “Then we can get this investigation on its feet.”
Everyone started to clear out, Runt and me included—but Freezay called us back.
“Not the two of you,” he said, pointing at Runt and me. “And, Jarvis, you’ll stay, of course.”
I watched as the rest of the group shuffled out, most of them probably going back to their rooms to get a little shut-eye, something I found myself really envying.
“It’s nice to see you again,” I heard Freezay say to Caoimhe as she made her way to the door.
“You, as well,” she said, smiling shyly at him.
“Things have been … good?” he asked, taking off his hat and running the brim through his fingers.
“Very good,” she said, nodding.
He swallowed hard, looking down at his hat.
“Good,” he said. “Well, I’m sure I’ll be speaking to you again shortly.”
“I’m sure you will,” she said mysteriously—and I watched, curiously, as Freezay followed her to the door, shutting it softly behind her retreating back. It was an odd exchange—and since I’d been having my own odd conversations with Caoimhe, I decided to file it away for more thought at a later date.
“My God, that’s a group,” Freezay said, once everyone was gone. “I was afraid if I didn’t get them out fast, they were going to get chummy and then I’d never be able to get them to do anything. Conquer and divide. That’s my mantra.”
With that said, he flopped down on one of the couches, looking very pleased with himself.
“So, you’re Calliope,” he said, taking in my unkempt hair and pajamas. “And you and Giselda, there, found the body.”
“I prefer Runt,” Runt said. Though her given name was Giselda, I’d coined the nickname “Runt” and somehow it’d just stuck.
“You and Runt found the body,” Freezay said, correcting himself. “Give me your first impressions.”
I looked down at Runt, not sure what my first impression had been, other than shock.
“She’s a Goddess,” Runt said quietly. “She smells like burnt sage and rose petals and that’s how all the others smell, too.”
“Do I smell like that?” I asked, but Runt shook her head.
“You just smell like you,” she said.
Freezay held up his hat for us to return to the subject at hand.
“I didn’t do it and neither did Runt,” I said suddenly—the realization that he might think we’d killed Coy hitting me like a bullet. “I mean she was dating my ex, Daniel, but that wasn’t a reason to cut her head off.”
“Calliope!” Jarvis squeaked, but Freezay only laughed.
“I don’t think either of you killed this woman,” he said, clearing his throat. “I knew your father very well—and I know Jarvis. And if the ex-faun over there says you’re aces, then I have no doubts. Besides, the whole supernatural world knows what you did for Purgatory and Hell—and it gives me a pretty good idea about the true nature of your character.”
“But shouldn’t you suspect everyone?” I asked.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I tend to trust my gut when it comes to people and their psychological motivations. Very infrequently am I wrong.”
“Okay. If you say so,” I replied, taking him at his word. “So, first impressions. It’s a mystery how the murderer got in and out. Runt and I were in the bathroom the whole time and we didn’t hear a thing.”
“The water was running and it was pretty loud,” Runt added.
“Good, good,” Freezay said, nodding as he spun the bowler hat around on his pointer finger. “Now, how would the two of you feel about helping a very astute detective, like myself, actually, during the course of his investigation?”
“Hell yeah,” I said, excited to actually be a part of the action rather than sitting around waiting for someone else to do the solving.
“Me, too!” Runt chimed in.
I looked at Jarvis, not really needing his approval, but kind of wanting it anyway.
“If you’re careful, and you stick with Freezay, then I think it might be the safest thing given the situation,” Jarvis said, resigned to us helping the detective with his investigation.
And with that settled, we moved on to the first order of business: seeing the last place Coy had called home.
Daniel’s room.
sixteen
“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel … two beds for one night? Seems a little prudish to me.”
Freezay, Jarvis, Runt, and I were standing just inside the doorway to Daniel and Coy’s room, in what amounted to a near mirror image of the one Runt and I’d been given on the other side of Casa de la Luna. The only difference was that there were clothes everywhere, suitcases (five of them) in various states of disarray, underwear draped across the bedside lamp, curlers plugged into the electric socket next to the bed that were still on and set to “High”—it looked as if a fashion tornado had hit the room and left it for dead.
“I guess that makes me a prude, then, Freezay,” Daniel said, embarrassed by the state of chaos Coy had created on her side of the communal space.
I stared at Daniel, a wellspring of hope filling my heart. If he hadn’t wanted to sleep in the same bed with Coy, then maybe they hadn’t been that serious after all. I mean, what normal person made their lover sleep in another bed while they were on a hot, romantic getaway?
Answer: no one in their right mind!
“Separate beds, that sadly, no one will get to use,” Freezay said, walking through the disaster area and picking up random bits of detritus Coy had l
eft behind.
When he got to the underwear, he retrieved a pen from the night table, using it to spear the lacy undergarment through the leg hole and lift it from the lampshade. He raised the bit of lace to his nose and sniffed, cocking his head.
“Very interesting,” he said.
Very gross, I thought.
“What did you find?” Jarvis asked expectantly. I think he was hoping Freezay had solved the crime with one sniff of a pair of panties.
“Our victim ate asparagus sometime in the past twenty-four hours.”
Daniel caught my eye and I knew exactly what he was thinking: Freezay was as crazy as a loon.
“And she was also an immortal. There are traces of burnt sage in her scent, which is all over this room,” Freezay said, using the pen as a fulcrum to pinwheel Coy’s underwear in a circle around his head. “A telltale sign of immortality, as Runt pointed out. So we know her death could only have been brought about by two means: Either someone knew her immortal weakness and planned this murder … or it was an accident, her killing an unintended consequence of something else.”
“How can you know that?” I asked, raising my hand like a schoolkid.
“Why, it’s very simple,” the detective said, spinning the underwear so fast it flew off the tip of the pen and sailed across the room. “We assume her immortal weakness isn’t something as pedestrian as decapitation—”
Distracted by something he’d seen poking out of one of Coy’s suitcases, he paused mid-sentence to pick his way through the mess, throwing open the suitcase lid and extracting what intrigued him from its innards.
“This is fascinating,” he said, holding up a blue foil package bearing the words “Bubu Lubu” in bubbly white script, the image of a white ghost in a red scarf skittering happily underneath the font. He ripped open the top, extracting a long brown log from inside the foil packet and popping half of it into his mouth.
“Just as I expected,” he said, his mouth full. “Delicious.”
He finished off the piece in his hand and pulled another one from the package, eating that one, too, before crumbling the empty packet into a ball and throwing it back into the suitcase.
“As I was saying,” Freezay continued, wiping his mouth. “Assuming the murderer didn’t use her immortal weakness to kill her and since her appearance at the dinner wasn’t planned—”
“How did you know that?” Daniel said, genuinely shocked by Freezay’s pronouncement.
“The tags and receipt in the suitcase,” he said, pointing to the same suitcase he’d just opened. “They’re from a store downtown—one I know well—and the date is yesterday’s.”
He pulled a crumpled receipt from his pocket, brandishing it for us to see.
“Did you grab that when you opened the suitcase to get the candy thing you just ate?” I asked.
Freezay shrugged.
“I saw the receipt first, the candy was a surprise.”
The detective was quick, his mind moving a thousand miles a minute, processing the information his senses collected and coming up with logical presumptions based on what was inputted. I decided that he and my baby sister, Clio, would get along like gangbusters; they both worked on a level I could barely comprehend.
“It’s true,” Daniel said, pulling the chair out from under the desk and sitting down heavily on it. “I invited Coy to come yesterday morning, though she’d been pestering me for weeks for the invitation.”
“And why did you invite her on such late notice?”
A deer caught in a truck’s headlights couldn’t have looked more uncertain than Daniel did about answering the detective’s question.
“We don’t have all night,” Freezay added, frowning.
Daniel sighed, shoving his hands into the pockets of his pants.
“I met Coy when I was staying with Callie in Manhattan—”
I tried not to show my shock, but I couldn’t believe Daniel had been spending time with another woman when he’d been my houseguest. That little shit!
“It was very benign … at first. She worked for a Mexican import-export company and was only in town occasionally. She stayed in a place not far from Callie’s when she was in the City and I would run into her at the little coffee place down the—”
“That was my little coffee place!” I cried, even though I knew I was going to have a hard time establishing ownership over a public business.
“Anyway,” Daniel continued, embarrassed. “It was all very friendly, but I could tell she wanted more, and then when she found out I was coming to this, she kept pushing me to invite her.”
“How’d she know who you were?” I asked, feeling very catty about Daniel’s “benign” little friendship with Coy.
“I knew there was something supernatural about her—and the community is very small,” Daniel hedged, but Freezay saved him from having to explain any further.
“And now we know why she bought the dress she was murdered in only today and not previously,” Freezay agreed. “She brought lots of possibilities, but someone with her personality wouldn’t have been satisfied with any old thing. She’d want something new and shiny to show off in.”
“That’s what I’d do,” I said. “I mean, as a girl who likes clothes, which is a passion Coy and I obviously shared.”
Freezay nodded, pocketing the receipt again.
“I would agree with that assessment wholeheartedly, Calliope. It does take one clotheshorse to know another.”
Normally, I would’ve been up in arms over that kind of comment, but Freezay had a way of disarming me with one knowing smile.
“That’s pretty astute,” Daniel said to Freezay. “Deductive reasoning, right?”
“Deductive something,” Freezay said, picking up a beaded bag from the floor where Coy had dropped it. “Tell me again how you found the body?”
He was looking at me then his eyes shifted to Runt, who’d plopped down on a pink faux fur coat Coy had left in a ball next to the bed.
“Both of you tell me again,” he said again, snapping his fingers.
I stood up straighter, looking at Jarvis, who nodded.
“There’s something we didn’t tell you before,” I began, “in the drawing room.”
“Yes, I know that,” Freezay said, unclasping Coy’s beaded bag so he could look inside. “Go on.”
Jarvis nodded for me to continue.
“Well, as Death, apparently I’m in charge of the original, fully annotated manuscript of How to Be Death … you know, the one that’s written in Angelic script and that no human can touch and is supposed to be a legend, but isn’t—”
“Go on,” Freezay said again, sticking his face into the beaded bag, so he could look for who knew what inside it.
“My dad gave it to God for safekeeping when all the shit hit the fan a few months ago—”
Freezay dropped the bag on the bed, stepping over a mound of clothing so that he was standing directly in front of me. Then he took my hand in his and raised my fingers to his heart.
“Though your father was a true friend, I didn’t feel the need to travel to your doorstep and share my grief with you,” Freezay said, pressing my palm against his chest. “He knew I loved him and that was all that was important to me.”
He dropped my hand, his speech finished, and stepped back over the mound of clothing so he could return to his beaded bag. Acting as if we hadn’t just shared an emotional moment together, he picked up the bag and stuffed his hand into its beaded guts.
“You did send a card,” I heard Jarvis say from the doorway where he was standing. He abhorred a mess and Daniel’s room was disgusting.
Freezay nodded his agreement.
“I did, didn’t I? Were there kittens on it, cavorting with a ball of string?”
“Yes, that’s the one,” Jarvis said.
“And when you opened it up, it read: ‘When you lose a four-legged member of your family, it’s as if a part of your heart dies with them…’?”
I stare
d at Jarvis. Was this guy serious? Sending me a pet sympathy greeting card in response to my dad’s death … weirdo!
“I liked that card,” Freezay said as he ripped the black silk lining out of the beaded bag, pulling out a jade arm cuff carved into the image of a double-headed serpent. “This, though, I don’t like so much.”
“It’s so cold,” I said as Freezay dropped the piece in my hand, the weight of the jade heavier than I’d imagined.
