The Ghost Hunter Next Door: A Beechwood Harbor Ghost Mystery (Beechwood Harbor Ghost Mysteries Book 1)

by Danielle Garrett

  Wendy nodded. “That’s how she met Calvin, her fiancé.”

  I noted that she left out the part where she’d just been sitting across from him minutes before.

  “I bet you miss her terribly,” I said.

  Wendy glanced down at her hands. “We did everything together.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Why does the production team want to know about Rosie? She lived at the Lilac House for less than a year. Surely there must be more interesting stories to be told about a century-old house.” Wendy tilted her head and my stomach sank. I was losing her. She was going to shut down.

  “We’re kind of, um, working our way backwards.” I leaned in and offered a sweet smile. “Tell me about Calvin and Wendy. We’ve had Calvin on the set. I only talked to him for a few minutes, but it seems like he and Rosie made the perfect couple.”

  “Oh, they were far from perfect,” Wendy said, her voice suddenly bitter. “She wouldn’t tell me, but I knew the truth about what she’d been up to.”

  Anticipation swelled like a balloon. “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Rosie was seeing her ex.”

  I blinked a few times, unsure I’d heard her correctly.

  “She didn’t think I knew,” Wendy continued. “But I overheard her on the phone. She said his name—Mitch. Mitch Calhoun. They were making plans for lunch or something. When I asked her about it, she denied the whole thing.”

  “Wow.” The information tumbled around my mind. “Was she going to leave Calvin? I mean the wedding was so close.”

  Wendy shrugged. “I don’t know. I told her she should. Calvin deserved better.”

  “Wait, did Calvin know? About Mitch?”

  “I didn’t tell him. I hardly think he would have been planning that weekend getaway if he did.”

  “So that was true?”

  Wendy narrowed her eyes slightly. “How did you know about that?”

  “Calvin told me,” I blurted.

  “Hmm. Well, as far as I know, he was telling the truth. He was going to take her for the weekend to a cabin his family owned up in the mountains. There was some hike he wanted to do.”

  A last-minute trip to a secluded cabin in the mountains. It definitely didn’t seem like the plan of someone who was planning on murdering his fiancé. But then again …

  Alarms rang inside my head. What if he found out about the affair and was going to arrange some other kind of accident for Rosie while away on the trip? He’d come back the grieving fiancé. No one would suspect anything. But then Rosie came back, lost her temper, and wrecked his plan. He had to improvise.

  “Wendy, were you there when Rosie passed away?”

  She shook her head. “Her mother was with her.”

  “Not Calvin?”

  “I think he was back at work. He wasn’t able to get much time off when she was in the hospital but he did visit her when he was able.”

  “Do you think he—” I stopped myself. “Sorry. Never mind.”

  Wendy shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve asked myself that question for twenty years. What if I’d just stepped out into the hall a moment sooner? Maybe I could have stopped him.” She realized that she’d been musing aloud and said quickly, “Not that I think he—”

  I held up a hand. “I understand.”

  Wendy reached for her coffee cup and rushed to stand up from her seat. “I’m sorry. That’s really all I know.”

  I started to thank her for her time but she was already gone, scrambling across the now-crowded shop and out the front doors.

  Ignoring my own coffee, I leaned back in my seat and sighed when I realized that I had more questions than I’d had when I’d first sat down.

  Chapter 16

  Gwen was still waiting at the consultation table when I arrived back at Lily Pond. I was barely through the door before I asked, “Does the name Mitch Calhoun sound familiar to you?”

  Gwen sat up a little straighter, her lips parted. I’d seen this look before—it was something akin to a bloodhound catching a whiff of a rabbit. “Councilman Calhoun, you mean?”

  “Councilman?” I squinted. “Mitch Calhoun is a councilman?”

  “He’s good friends with the mayor.” Gwen surged up and followed after me as I made my way around the front counter. “Why? What did you hear?”

  Wendy’s name-dropping suddenly made a lot more sense. She’d wanted me to know exactly who it was that Rosie had been seeing on the side. But why? It was over two decades ago. How could it possibly be relevant now? It was clear she disapproved of the whole thing, but why would she care all this time later?

  I sipped at my coffee.

  “Scarlet!” Gwen barked. “What happened?”

  “I saw Wendy at the coffee shop. She was sitting with Calvin.”

  Gwen’s eyes were approaching dinner-plate size. “What were they talking about?”

  “I don’t know.” I frowned at her. “I don’t have the perk of being able to literally sit in someone’s lap unnoticed like some of us do.”

  “Right, right. Okay, well did they look happy to see each other? Calvin’s been on the East Coast for several years, right? Maybe they were just catching up.”

  “It was weird.” I paused, replaying the scene. “I couldn’t see her face from where I was standing, but it seemed pretty serious and intense. They did hug when they said goodbye. Although …” I trailed off for a moment. “It was quick.”

  “Safe to say the ex-lovers theory is off the table?”

  I shrugged. “Unless it ended badly and this was their first reunion. It did seem kind of one-sided.”

  “On whose part?”

  I tapped a finger against my lip and then gave a decisive nod. “His.”

  “Interesting!”

  I sighed. “It could all mean nothing, of course.”

  “So he left and you talked to her?”

  “I made up some lame story about being with the studio. She bought it, or at least I’m pretty sure she did. Anyway, she told me about Mitch. She said she overheard Rosie making plans with him on the phone in the days leading up to her death. She’s convinced that Rosie was cheating on Calvin, seeing her ex on the side.”

  “And you’re sure they used to be together? Rosie and the councilman?”

  I hitched a shoulder. “She called him Rosie’s ex.”

  “Wow.” Gwen floated away and then snapped back and soared just as quickly toward the opposite wall. Ghost-pacing. “This is huge!”

  “It might be,” I corrected her, but it was too late.

  Gwen was off to the races.

  Her words came rapid-fire, each one shifting around the puzzle pieces inside my head. “Mitch and Rosie were seeing each other on the side, weeks before the wedding. Calvin found out she was cheating on him, and in a fit of rage, shoved her down the stairs!”

  Gossip was her equivalent of food, the life force that kept her going.

  She stopped, looking to me for confirmation.

  “It feels a little like we’re discussing the latest episode of a corny soap opera, but I can’t argue that, at least in some ways, it fits. Wendy confirmed Calvin’s story that he was planning to whisk Rosie away on some last-minute weekend trip. Something about a family cabin. I hate to admit it, but when she said it, I couldn’t help but think that maybe he was …” I stopped myself. “No, never mind. It’s ridiculous.”

  “That he was planning to kill her on the trip?” Gwen exclaimed.

  “I didn’t say that,” I replied quickly. I twisted my hands together and avoided meeting Gwen’s eyes. The dark theory hung thick and cast an ominous shadow on the normally bright and airy shop. “We’re just being paranoid.”

  Gwen frowned but didn’t voice her objection. “Didn’t Wendy’s statement mention that she didn’t actually see what happened that day?”

  “Wendy didn’t see Rosie fall,” I replied, barely bringing my voice above a whisper. “She also mentioned that afterward
, when Rosie was in the hospital, fighting for her life, Calvin was back at work.”

  “How awful.” Gwen shook her head. “No wonder Rosie’s pissed off. Not exactly the actions of the brokenhearted fiancé.”

  I sagged down against the counter, burying my face in my folded arms. After a moment, I peered up at Gwen. “What am I supposed to do with it though? I can’t prove anything.”

  A slow smile spread over her face and she cocked a hip. “Well, if it was me, I’d start by calling your boyfriend. He can find out where Councilman Calhoun lives and you can go see if at least that part of Wendy’s story checks out.”

  “He’s not my—” I stopped and flapped a hand at her. There was no point in arguing. She saw what she wanted to see and there was no convincing her otherwise.

  Lucas had the name and address pinned down within the hour. It was actually kind of unnerving how easy it was for him to get his hands on the information. He picked me up after I closed Lily Pond for the day and we set out of town. Along the way, I caught him up on the day’s events. By the end, he was as edgy as Gwen.

  “It holds water, but I’m not sure there’s much we can do to prove any of it,” he said.

  “I know. That’s what I said too. It’s all circumstantial. There’s no physical evidence so, short of some miraculous confession two decades in the making, I don’t know how much good it’s going to do.” I stared out the window, watching the trees lining the highway zip by. I dragged in a sigh. “I really need to learn to keep my mouth shut. What was I thinking, promising her justice?”

  “You were having a Batman moment,” Lucas said.

  I glanced at him and caught a hint of a smile.

  He turned and our eyes met. “We’ll figure something out. There are only a few days left of filming. Maybe we can give her enough to keep her happy until the crew is gone.”

  “And then what? You think she’ll stop?” I frowned at the sharp edge to my voice. “I’m sorry, but that’s not how this will end. Once the crew is gone, the place will be turned over to the bed and breakfast management, so unless they’re prepared to market it as a haunted house, they’re going to have a tough time keeping it open.”

  Lucas tensed. “I thought it was the renovations she was opposed to?”

  I shook my head. “She wants to be left alone. Period. Whether they’re armed with a jackhammer or a rolling suitcase, she wants them out.”

  He dropped his head to one shoulder and then the other, stretching the kinks from his neck. “Well then, Mr. Calhoun better have something useful or we’re going to have to start talking about our other options.”

  I stiffened in my seat. He was right, of course; this couldn’t go on unchecked. If Rosie wasn’t willing to come to her senses and let the whole thing go, I was going to have to put the safety of the neighborhood and future B&B guests at the top of my priorities list and start researching ghost removal.

  Lucas took an exit off the highway and we rolled quietly through another small town. It appeared similar to Beechwood Harbor, except on a more opulent scale. The houses were double and triple the size of the homes in the quaint seaside neighborhood we’d come from. The shops looked the same—a small market, hair salon, pet store, bakery, and a few little restaurants and cafes—but they looked new, and even from the outside, it was obvious they catered to a different crowd than the low-key residents in Beechwood. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that at some point today, there’d been a woman strutting aisle three in a pair of five-inch heels, wearing an entire cosmetics counter worth of beauty products, and carrying a designer label bag with a teacup pup tucked in the oversized front pocket.

  That was a familiar world to me, the one I’d grown up in, but I had no desire to return to it anytime soon.

  Lucas steered us up an incline and the shops faded from view. The houses grew even larger and were more spaced out than the ones we’d passed on the way into town.

  “This is the place,” he said when we rolled to a stop opposite a sprawling mansion that dominated a good chunk of the hillside. In the dusky light, it glittered like a Mediterranean palace. Lucas let out a low whistle as he peered out the passenger window. “Damn, imagine the views you must be able to see off the backside of this place.”

  “No kidding.” I gathered my purse from the floor.

  “What’s the plan?” Lucas asked, shifting his attention to me.

  I drew in a deep breath. “You got your studio badge on you?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. Follow my lead.” I shoved out of the truck before he could ask me to elaborate.

  Which was good, because I had no idea what we were going to do.

  Mitch Calhoun’s driveway was steep enough that I was breathless halfway up. In between panting for air, my mind raced and churned through opening lines. Just like with Calvin and Wendy, there was no good way to broach the subject. The only reasonable excuse I had was the TV show. It was going to have to do.

  A tall man with a wiry frame stepped out of the house at our approach. “Mitch Calhoun?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes. And you are?”

  Lucas held up his security badge. “Lucas Greene. This is my associate, Scarlet Sanderson. We’re in town with Wildflower Studios, working on a property over in Beechwood Harbor.”

  Recognition dawned on Mitch’s lined face. “Oh, yes, I’d heard something about that.”

  Lucas told me on the ride over that Mitch Calhoun was sixty-two and divorced with three adult children. When he and Rosie were together, he’d have been nearly twenty years her senior. Not unheard of by any means, but I couldn’t help wondering if that had played a part in their eventual break-up.

  “If you’re scouting out new neighborhoods, I’ll save you the time and tell you that no one on this street is in desperate need of a designer,” Mitch said, offering a tight-lipped smile. His dark eyes shifted to me. He had the kind of eyes that didn’t miss much. One sweeping glance and I felt like he’d memorized every detail of my appearance.

  I cleared my throat. “We’re actually here to speak with you, Mr. Calhoun.”

  He slipped his large hands into the front pockets of his chinos. “I see.”

  Lucas took a step forward. “Would you mind if we came inside?”

  The councilman eyed us but then turned up the corners of his lips into a cordial smile and gestured toward the front door. “We’ll have to be quick. It’s poker night over at Mayor Casson’s house.”

  We followed Mitch inside and if the exterior of the house was enough to make me do a double take, the interior was swoon-worthy. Every detail was seen to with care and consideration: soaring ceilings, gorgeous tile work, and priceless tapestries and art pieces. It was like walking into an exclusive gallery somewhere along the Riviera.

  Mitch led us past a formal living room and into an adjoining study. The smell of old books mingled with the salt-tinged ocean air drifting through an open window. Even before I sat down, I knew I could spend hours in the room and still not see everything I wanted to.

  “Please, take a seat.” He gestured toward one of two long leather couches before he went to a bronze and marble bar. “Can I offer either of you a drink?”

  Lucas shook his head. “No, thank you.”

  Mitch glanced at me. “Just water for me,” I said. “We won’t take up too much of your time.”

  “What is it you’d like to ask me about?” he asked, turning his back to us as he prepared himself a drink.

  “Rosie March,” I answered.

  Lucas winced. I could almost hear him thinking lead balloon.

  My eyes snapped from his reaction to watch Mitch go still, the corded muscles in his back freezing in place for a moment before melting smooth again. He turned to face us, swirling the ice in a tumbler of glittering amber liquid. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”

  Mitch retrieved a bottle of expensive sparkling water and held it up. “Would you like a glass?”

  “The bottle’s fine.” A fizzy
pop sounded as he used a bottle opener to lift the cap. He crossed the room and handed me the chilled bottle. “Thank you.”

  Mitch took a seat on the opposite couch and leaned back. “Rosie March and I dated for a little over six months.”

  “After the relationship ended, did you keep in contact?” I asked.

  His lips twisted into a scowl. “You’ve been talking to Wendy Harmon, haven’t you?”

  I tilted my head. “Wendy mentioned that she thought you and Rosie were seeing each other in those final weeks leading up to Rosie’s death.”

  “Wendy was mistaken. Rosie was engaged and while I’ll always look back on our time together with fondness, I have more self-respect than to get involved with a soon-to-be married woman.” Mitch went to be bar and poured himself another finger of bourbon. “We were planning on getting together for lunch, but it was just as friends.”

  I took a swig of water. “Did you know Calvin at all?”

  Mitch’s jaw clenched, revealing a pulsing vein at his temple. “I knew enough.”

  Lucas and I exchanged a dark look.

  Mitch turned to face us and braced one hand against the bar. “He wasn’t good enough for her.”

  “Did you tell her that?” I asked.

  “Of course!” Mitch threw back the contents of his glass for the second time and eyed the crystal decanter. He decided against a third drink and abandoned his glass on the bar. He moved to stand behind the couch and braced himself against the back of it, leaning in slightly. “Calvin didn’t want Rosie, he just wanted a wife. Ask anyone! He didn’t even have the decency to stay with her at the hospital after her accident. When I heard about the fall, I went to see her. I sat by her bed and read the paper to her and told her all of the things we were going to do when she woke up. Where was he?”

  “At work?” I offered.

  Mitch scoffed. “He would have found a way to be there if he’d wanted to. At least he bothered to show up for the funeral.”

  “Mr. Calhoun, did you ever think that maybe what happened to Rosie wasn’t an accident?”

  Mitch’s eyes went a shade darker as they locked onto mine. “What? No, of course not! It was an accident. Everyone said so: the doctors, nurses, everyone.”