I shut the door with a soft click and perched on the edge of the chair beside his bed. “I could ask you the same thing.”
I thought I caught a glimmer of a smile. “Fair enough.”
“What were you doing at the Lilac House, Calvin?”
He hesitated, his eyes shifting from the ceiling to me and then back again. Staring up, he answered in a whisper, “I went to see … to talk to Rosie.” He tried to shake his head, but pain flashed across his face. His head was wrapped in bandages.
“Rosie?” I repeated. “So, you … you believe me?”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore.” He heaved a weary sigh and his eyes slid shut. “I couldn’t sleep so I drove into Beechwood. I don’t know why. I parked downtown and wandered the streets for a while, just thinking. I didn’t plan to end up at the Lilac House, but sure enough, that’s where I wound up. I still had my old key to the side door; I honestly didn’t think it would even work. Next thing I know, I’m in the house. I didn’t touch anything. Hell, I didn’t even turn on the lights.”
“Why not?”
Calvin hesitated. “I guess I figured that ghosts would prefer the dark.”
“Did you feel Rosie? Was she there?”
“I don’t know what happened.” Calvin took a deep breath and met my eyes again. “But someone was there, and unless Rosie has use of her hands, it wasn’t her.”
My pulse jumped. “What do you mean?”
“Someone pushed me down the stairs tonight. Just like—” his voice faded and his eyes closed once again.
“Calvin? Did they say anything?”
He inclined his head, eyes still closed. “I don’t know, what I thought I heard doesn’t make any sense.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “I think she said, ‘You deserve each other,’ but what would she mean by that?”
“She? Did you recognize the voice?”
Calvin’s brow creased. “It sounded like—” he broke off and looked up at me. “It sounded just like Wendy.”
“Wendy?” My heart slammed into hyper drive.
My phone rang; It was Lucas. A series of texts rolled in when I didn’t answer, and I cringed, imagining how angry he must be.
“I have to go,” I told Calvin. “I’ll come see you again, if you’d like.”
Calvin didn’t say anything.
I said goodbye and slipped from the room.
At the end of the hall, I rounded the corner and collided with Jason Keith. He was in uniform and looking at his phone, but barely looked up as he took a quick step back. He muttered an automatic apology and then did a double take. His eyebrows arched. “Scarlet? What are you doing here?”
“I was here to see Calvin,” I replied, thumbing over my shoulder toward his room.
His eyebrows dropped as they knitted together. “I didn’t realize you two knew each other.”
“Long story.” I sidestepped out of his path. “I really need to get going.”
“Wait, one second, while I have you. There was something I wanted to run by you.”
“Okay?” Every cell in my body was humming with anxiety. I needed to get back to Lucas and tell him everything Calvin had said. He would know what the next step was. It wasn’t like I had any proof to share with Jason and he probably already thought I was a few cards short of a full deck after our last meeting.
Not that it had stopped him from wanting to have dinner with me, which really said more about him than me.
He pocketed his phone and crossed his arms. “After your visit the other day, I was reading through the Rosie March case files.”
My eyes went wide. “Oh?”
“I didn’t expect to find anything.”
“But?” My voice went unnaturally high.
He hesitated and it was all I could do to keep from grabbing him by the arms and shaking the answers right out of him. Given that he had several inches on me as well as a good forty pounds, it probably wouldn’t play out in my favor. Instead, I bit down on my lip and forced myself to gather every ounce of patience I could spare.
“In the weeks before her wedding, Rosie had been to the doctor a few times. Her mother mentioned it in her statement. The officer taking it had asked if there’d been anything unusual going on, but she said she thought it was just stress—pre-wedding jitters maybe—but didn’t seem too concerned.”
“She left work early the day she died because she felt sick,” I added.
He started to say something else, but paused mid-sentence and stared at me. “How do you know that?”
Crap! Why couldn’t I be one of those brooding types that internalizes everything?
“It was in one of the news articles I read. I … uh … think it had a quote from her employer at the time, saying she’d left work early because she didn’t feel well. You know, one of those ‘If she hadn’t been sick, she might still be with us’ kind of quotes.”
Officer Keith watched me for a moment too long but then let his suspicion slide. He reached up and ran a hand over his jaw. “Well, anyway, I happen to know the doctor that oversaw her care after the fall. I took my concerns to him and he gave me his opinion.”
I leaned forward, hanging on every word.
“He thinks there might have been something more sinister at play than a fall.”
I drew my brows together, confused. “What?”
“Rosie was displaying signs of poisoning. Specifically, ethylene glycol poisoning.”
The term was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “What’s that?”
“Antifreeze.”
I reeled back, blinking rapidly to combat the surge of thoughts firing through my mind.
“It’s possible that while she sustained a head trauma, she might have still lived. Upon further review, the doctor thinks there’s a strong chance the poison had built up in her system and then mixed with the medications given to her upon admittance to the hospital following the fall. Of course, with the body twenty years in the ground, there’s not a way to prove the theory, at least not in a way that would ever be enough to stand up in court.”
“Unless we got a confession.”
Jason’s eyes narrowed a twinge. He looked past me toward Calvin’s room number. When they shifted back to mine, they were full of suspicion. “What are you up to, Scarlet?
“Not a thing,” I replied. “I really appreciate the information, but I do have to run.”
Without waiting, I hurried down the hallway, but came to a sudden stop at the end. I turned back. “Jason?”
He craned his neck around to look back at me.
“Is the investigation being reopened?”
“That’s not up to me, but I’ll be presenting it to Chief Lincoln. He might want to review what little evidence there is and decide if it’s worth some man hours. But, like I said, I’m not holding out a lot of hope. We have no way of collecting evidence from the scene or the body at this point. Her symptoms could be written off as a complete coincidence.”
“Or it could have been murder,” I muttered under my breath.
Chapter 19
“Nice vanishing act,” Lucas growled when he met me at the curb where I parked my van for the second time that night.
I shut the driver’s door. “I was gone for what, twenty minutes?”
“Come on,” Lucas said. “The last officers are packing it in. I’m to lock up and leave the house alone. But—”
“Lucas, it wasn’t Rosie!”
His brows arched. “How do you know that?”
“I went to the hospital to see Calvin.”
“You did?”
I planted my hands on my hips. “Yeah. Where did you think I went? To hit up a twenty-four-hour Starbucks or something?”
“I thought maybe you needed some supplies,” he replied. He pressed his lips into a thin line. “I called you here to get rid of the ghost, not to play detective. I thought you were done with that, anyway.”
I waved a hand. “Are you going to shut up and listen to me?”
<
br /> Lucas cocked an eyebrow and crossed his arms. “All ears.”
“It was Wendy!”
That got him. He blinked in rapid succession and dropped his arms. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah, exactly! Calvin said someone pushed him down the stairs and a voice said, ‘you deserve each other,’ and he said the voice sounded like Wendy’s.”
“But why? What would her motive be? And how on earth could she have gotten into the house?”
“Maybe she followed him in?”
“Then how did she get out?”
“You were out in the van when you heard the scream, right? It had to have taken you a few minutes to get inside.”
Lucas inclined his head, agreeing.
“She could have slipped out the same way they came in. Calvin said he used his old key to the side door; the one between the house and the detached garage.”
“That still doesn’t explain why,” Lucas pointed out.
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Lucas nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”
We took Lucas’s truck a few streets over and parked across the street from Rosie’s mother’s house. The lights were off and the car I’d seen parked out front the night I’d gone chasing after Rosie wasn’t there.
“Okay, so now what?” I asked him. “We can’t just walk up, ring the doorbell, and ask her if she’s broken into a house and shoved someone down a flight of stairs in the last twenty-four hours.”
Before Lucas could make a suggestion, a car rumbled around the corner and my heart leapt into my throat. “That’s the one I saw here the other night,” I hissed, making a stabbing motion at the windshield of the truck.
Lucas cut the engine and killed the headlights. “All right, hold back.”
The car pulled into the spot and Wendy got out. I sucked in a quick breath and reached for the door handle. “That’s her.”
“Scarlet, we have to—”
It was too late. Lucas’s warning was cut off by the sound of my door closing and I was halfway across the street before he was out of the van.
“Wendy! Wait!” I called out.
Wendy stiffened and slowly turned. She cocked her head as I stepped into the light from the street lamp a few yards away. “What are you doing here? Are you following me?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, I am.”
Lucas caught up to me and Wendy gave him an assessing look. “Who are you?”
“He’s head of security for the TV show working over at the Lilac House. Have you been by lately? They’re almost done with the renovations.”
Wendy paused. “No, actually. I prefer not to go to that neighborhood anymore. I’m sure you can understand.”
“Hmm.” I nodded and then glanced up at Lucas. “That’s odd, isn’t it? Tell me, Wendy, do you have a twin?”
I shifted my gaze back to hers and watched her eyes grow wider.
“A twin?” She shook her head and attempted a throaty laugh. “No.”
I held out my palm to Lucas. “Mind letting me borrow your phone? We can pull up that footage and show Ms. Ferris here her doppelganger. See, Lucas has that whole property rigged up with security cameras and someone who looks just like you was spotted there about an hour ago, sneaking into the house through the side door.”
Lucas gave me a wary look. He knew I was bluffing. If there’d been footage, he would have mentioned it already.
I flipped the phone around so that Wendy could see the screen. Eight windows showed the feed from the various camera angles on site.
“This is ridiculous,” she said with a huff, even as she recoiled from the phone. She pivoted on her heel and started toward the front door. “I don’t have time for this.”
I took a step forward. “I know about the poison, Wendy.”
She froze and stiffened her spine.
Lucas gave me a wild look, his eyes alight with questions.
“You killed Rosie March, your best friend, twenty-some years ago, and tonight, you tried to kill the one man who’s always loved her.”
Wendy shuffled forward, her feet moving as though they were encased in cement. “You’re crazy. This is harassment! Get off my property!”
I smiled. “As far as I know, this isn’t actually your property, is it, Wendy? Mrs. March still lives here, doesn’t she? I suppose we could knock on the door, wake her up, and see what she would have to say about this video footage we have of you following Calvin into the Lilac House moments before he was pitched down a flight of stairs.”
Slowly, Wendy spun back around, her face beet red. Even from a few paces away, I could see she was shaking. Whether it was from fury or terror, I wasn’t sure.
I held up Lucas’s phone, the screen still showing the live feed from the cameras positioned around the Lilac property. “It’s all right here, Wendy.”
“Rosie got what she deserved!” she hissed, her voice nearly unrecognizable. “She got everything she ever wanted. A rich boyfriend, her dream wedding, a gorgeous house. And did she appreciate any of it? No! All she ever did was complain. She started seeing Mitch and I knew Calvin was going to be heartbroken. I tried to warn her. I really did.” She stopped and a snort of laughter ripped from her. “She was such a liar. I couldn’t let her ruin Calvin’s life.”
“So you started slipping antifreeze into her food?”
Wendy’s eyes lit up. “Rosie was obsessed with losing weight for the wedding. It was all she ever talked about—fitting into that damned dress. We went for long runs every day and afterward, I’d get us each a sports drink. The antifreeze blended right in. She never knew. At first, I just wanted her to suffer. I thought maybe she’d get sick enough that she’d call off the wedding and I could save Calvin from her. But it wasn’t working fast enough. The wedding was two weeks away, so I upped the dosage.”
“That’s why she came home from work that day?”
“She came in ranting and raving at Calvin. He didn’t push her down the stairs,” Wendy laughed again. “She did that to herself. Fumbling and tripping. She was too busy screaming to realize she missed the top step. Calvin tried to save her. Fool!”
Lucas shook his head. “If you were on Calvin’s side, why follow him tonight? Why try to hurt him?”
Wendy scoffed. “He’s still in love with her.”
“And that’s a capital offense?” I asked.
Wendy rolled her head back. “I tried to help him. Don’t you see that? I tried to tell him that Rosie was trouble. He should have thanked me! But no—all these years later, and he can’t even stand to be around me. I had to beg him to see me for coffee, and when we said goodbye, he practically ran out of that shop.”
She stopped and looked down at her feet. “I loved him. I really did. All I needed was a chance to tell him. When we had coffee, I took his cell phone from the table. He wasn’t looking.” She scoffed and shook her head. “Probably wishing he was anywhere else. Stupid! You’re so stupid, Wendy.”
Lucas gave me a dark look. The woman was coming unhinged before our eyes.
“I called his hotel and left a message for him at the front desk. He called me from his room and we made plans to meet up so I could give it back. I wanted to tell him how I felt. All of these years.”
Wendy paused and rocked back and forth.
Lucas moved closer to me.
“What did he say?” I asked Wendy, ignoring the concerned look on Lucas’s face.
Wendy’s eyes snapped to mine, a crazed glint made them shine. “He didn’t want to talk. He thanked me for finding his phone and he left. So, I followed him. When I saw him there, outside that damn house… ,” she trailed off, her gaze swinging up and down the street. “He got what he deserved,” she added, her voice a harsh whisper.
“You’re going to prison, Wendy. For the rest of your sorry little life.”
Her eyes narrowed.
In a flash, she reached into the bag hanging from one shoulder and produced a knife. The street light glinted off the blade
as she raised it in an arc. All at once, she flew toward me.
My mouth dropped open, a scream ripping from me.
An impact knocked me sideways and I hit the ground. My shoulder slammed into the pavement of the driveway so hard my teeth bashed together.
Stars danced before my eyes, but through the haze, I watched as Lucas twisted Wendy’s arm, knocked the knife out of her reach, and took her down to the ground.
“Scarlet? Scarlet, are you all right?” Lucas’s commanding voice cut through the fuzziness.
“I’m fine.” I nodded and rubbed at my shoulder. “Please, just tell me I used the right app and got it all on tape.”
Lucas and I stayed long enough to give our statements and hand over the damning recording of Wendy’s confession. The police—including Jason—had dozens of questions, but eventually they released us and Lucas drove me home. He made sure I was all right to be alone and only drove away once I was upstairs locked in my apartment. I waved from the window and watched him go down the block.
The following morning, Gwen dropped in to get all the dirt firsthand. Naturally, she’d heard of Wendy’s arrest through the town’s gossip mill but wanted all of her questions answered so that, like a pollinating bee, she could go forth and spread the word. Most of the stories and theories floating around town were slightly off track, but the gist of it was correct. Everyone knew that Wendy had murdered Rosie March, a sweet girl that a handful of residents still remembered even though she’d been killed over two decades before. The word had also spread that Wendy was the one behind the attack against Calvin. There was no mention of me or ghosts and I was happy not to bother correcting anyone. Not that most of them would believe me even if I came out and told the truth, anyway.
The madness was coming to a close and I was content to move on.
Gwen fluttered off not too long after filling me in on the latest gossip. I didn’t ask where she was headed but knew she’d circle back later that evening and give me updates. Hayward and Flapjack were battling it out in the living room, arguing about something, so I took my favorite mug downstairs to the shop to have my morning cup of joe.
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