by Mary Bowers
He put his spy satchel on the table and began to pack up.
“So that’s it?” Dobbs asked in an injured voice. “We just quit for now? Hey, guys, it’s all fresh in our minds. We should push ahead. I’m for pulling an all-nighter.”
“I was young once, too,” Ed said, finally giving his pupil a smile. “After my first séance, I didn’t sleep for days. And you know what? I ended up with all kinds of wild ideas that turned out to have nothing to do with anything, in the final analysis. Only five weeks later did I understand what the spirit had meant by ‘time wrinkles.’ It was quite amusing. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Learn patience, Dobbs. If you’re going to be a paranormal investigator, you’ll need it. Good night.”
They left The Marvelous Dobbs sitting at the dining room table, staring after them.
“Let her sleep as long as she needs to tomorrow,” Ed told Michael as they walked to their cars outside. “I won’t call until you let me know she’s up and is herself again. I recommend dry toast and sweetened coffee at breakfast; nothing more. If you need anything, of course, I’m at your disposal.”
Taylor waited inside the SUV while Michael put Bastet’s pet carrier into the back. Once he was in the car with the doors closed, Taylor turned on him. “If I don’t get this dress off I’m going to go crazy! It itches! I feel like ripping it off and riding home in my bra and panties.”
“Don’t hold back on my account,” he said, and he put the car in gear and drove away from the Pissarro house.
Chapter 24
The next morning at 7 am, Michael sat at the breakfast bar watching Taylor wolf down scrambled eggs, a baked cinnamon apple, coffee and heavily buttered toast. He was due on the golf course for his regular foursome’s tee-off time at eight, but he had plenty of time to make it. He was enjoying watching Taylor eat, partly because she was enjoying it so much herself.
“Dang,” she said between bites, “the next time I do a séance – if ever – I’m brown-bagging it. Those TV crews eat like deranged teenagers. And séances make me hungry.”
“So, are you going back to Paradise Island today?” he asked.
“I guess I have to. I don’t want Dobbs upsetting the client until his check clears, and Dobbs is bound to be indiscreet. My take on Roy Angers is that he never hesitates to stop a check.”
“I suspect that indiscreet is Dobbs’s middle name.”
“No, it’s Marvelous,” she told him, and they grinned at one another. “What do you make of that kid, anyway?”
Michael sipped coffee before answering. “I think he could pass for Teddy Force’s younger, smarter brother, only he’s genuinely interested in the paranormal and Teddy’s just using it.”
“Yeah, I get that impression, too. And smarter, in that kind of person, can mean more trouble.”
He leaned over and kissed her. “Keep that in mind, okay?”
“Yup. Speaking of Dobbs, I’d better have Ed call him and make sure I’m on the guard’s list for Paradise Island today or I may have to paddle in by kayak myself.”
“Good idea. Ed will enjoy waking him up early. I bet he’s the type that sleeps until noon.”
“Late afternoon, I’d say. He was revved up and ready to go after midnight last night.”
The housekeeper, Myrtle Purdy, had been working in the kitchen all this time, grim and silent. When Michael poured a cup of coffee into his travel mug and left, she settled down against the cooking island and looked at Taylor. She didn’t say anything for a few long minutes, so Taylor finally said, “What?”
“You’re letting that Edson Darby-Deaver get you involved in something weird again, aren’t you? Don’t give me that look. You know what I mean. Those people killed one another. It’s over. Leave it alone.”
It took Taylor a moment to sort that out. “You mean Jessamine Pissarro killed her husband, and then he returned from the dead to drive her to suicide?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Everybody knows that. Smart people don’t talk about it. Just leave it alone. The scales are even again. You don’t need to be doing seances and meddling with things you don’t understand.”
“I did it for Orphans. I got three big donations for it. Besides, that kind of thing is for entertainment purposes only. Everybody knows that,” she added, pleased with the counterpunch.
Myrtle regarded her cynically for a few more minutes, and Taylor refused to be drawn again. She went back to finishing her coffee.
Finally, Myrtle said, “Sometimes I think you actually believe that.”
When Taylor shot a look at her, Myrtle turned away and began to clean up the breakfast dishes.
* * * * *
As Taylor was walking out the door of Cadbury House, Ed called her cellphone.
“I’m not waking you, am I?” he asked anxiously. “If so, just hang up on me. I won’t mind.”
Taylor laughed. “I’ve been up for over an hour and I just had a lumberjack’s breakfast. What’s up, Ed?”
Once he was assured she wasn’t feeling frail, (“Frail?” she’d said. “Have you ever known me to be frail?”), he told her why he’d called.
“Dobbs was in a sort of talking coma when I spoke to him just now. Honestly, I don’t feel I can trust him to call the guard box. He fell back asleep as soon as we finished the call; I’m sure of it. So I was compelled to call Roy Angers directly and tell him you had some follow-up questions and would he please have you put on the guard’s guest list for this morning.”
“Damn,” Taylor had said. “I’d rather have tried to make it look like I’d been at the Pissarro house for some reason and decided to pop on over to see if he was satisfied with the results of the séance. This makes it more official, and I wanted to be sneaky about it.”
“I know it, but it can’t be helped. The more I get to know Dobbs, the less I trust his professionalism, or at least his maturity.”
But Ed had done Dobbs an injustice. When Taylor pulled her SUV into the Pissarro house driveway, Dobbs had been watching for her. As soon as she was parked, he walked out the front door to greet her and gave her a cup of coffee.
“So Ed doesn’t even trust me to make a simple phone call,” he said, genuinely hurt. “When I called the guard box, he told me Roy had called him already. I guess that’s all right. You guys don’t know me yet. As Ed would put it, in the fullness of time, I fondly anticipate a day when the bonds of our friendship will be as chains of steel, or something like that.”
He grinned, young, handsome and bleary-eyed under a mop of sun-streaked hair. Taylor couldn’t help but grin back. He was so attractive, and his little speech had been so much like Ed at his worst that she yielded to his charm. “Yeah, something like that,” she said. “Let’s go into the house. I’m sure my client is watching us right now, and I don’t want him to think he’s the only thing on my mind this morning.”
“Oh, right,” Dobbs said, becoming purposeful and striding beside her back to the front door, making nonsense conversation and gesturing at the house as if he were describing something deadly serious.
“Where are you sleeping, by the way?” she asked as he opened the door for her, fully expecting him to say, “The master bedroom.”
But he steadied himself and said, “In the media room. In Alan Pissarro’s favorite recliner. Not that I get much actual sleep.”
“Wow. That’s asking for trouble. Especially if . . . listen, Dobbs, I have a question for you, and I’d like an honest answer. Were you and Jessamine Pissarro . . . ?”
He closed his eyes and lowered his head. “You’ve been checking me out on the internet. I have to do something about that woman’s postings; they’re going to ruin me, and I didn’t do anything wrong. I was absolutely professional with her, I swear. She wasn’t exactly the ideal client to me, and that was the problem. I have never had an affair with a client in my life, and I never will. And after this experience, I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never put myself in a vulnerable position like that again. No more sleeping over in a haunted h
ouse, at least not alone with the client.”
“Good for you, but that doesn’t answer my question. Were you having an affair with Jessamine Pissarro?”
“No. I didn’t want to, and she didn’t want to either. She had other things on her mind.”
“Oh, yeah, her husband’s ghost. You think she really believed?” When she got a cynical look from him, she stopped. “She didn’t?”
“Oh, I think she did. That’s not what I’m talking about. She had something going on with somebody, I don’t even know what or who. After a while I began to suspect she had a lover, but I wasn’t really sure. I would find her talking on her cellphone with somebody, but she never wanted me to be able to hear. She’d change her whole demeanor if I came around a corner suddenly and caught her on the phone, and I could tell she was acting – talking too loud, being obvious about pretending she was talking to a woman and not a man. I even got hold of her cellphone one time when she wasn’t around and looked through her calls log to see if I could figure out who she was talking to.”
“Really!”
“Yeah, I know. Pretty low. But I couldn’t help myself.”
“No, I mean really, and attaboy. Who was she calling? Did you tell the police about this?”
“She must have been careful about clearing the calls log – texts too – because I could never find anything. And as for the police, they thought I was the boyfriend. I told them about it, but I don’t think they took me seriously. But this is the thing . . . she was talking to whoever it was the night she went off to the beach and never came back.”
“You told the cops that?”
“Of course I did! When I got back from Chattanooga, that is. That’s probably why they didn’t believe me. When they came to the house to inform me, I was already gone, and they jumped to some really nasty conclusions because of it.”
“That was stupid, making a run for it like that.”
“I didn’t know she was dead! I wasn’t making a run for it, I had already quit. Look, this is how it all went. Nobody will listen to me!” he said, breaking off in exasperation.
“I’ll listen to you. Just settle down and give me a try. I won’t even interrupt.”
He glanced at her doubtfully, then he started. “I had already made up my mind I was ending the investigation and going home. We weren’t getting any results. At first there was an incident where the lights all went on at once in the middle of the night, and one time when I was in the house alone, music came on for no reason.” He stopped and looked at her sideways.
“Like it did when the Haunt or Hoax? shoot was going on?”
“Well, yeah, just like that.”
“You were in on it, weren’t you?”
He hesitated, watching her, then finally he broke. “I’m not an idiot!” he said, a little wildly. “I figured out right away what was going on in this house. Somebody was playing tricks on Jessamine. She never realized what was happening, but I know about home security apps. I looked around and found the control box, got into Alan Pissarro’s computer with his password – he kept all his passwords and PINs on the back sheet of a day-planner, like you are NOT supposed to do – found the website for his security provider, used his PIN to download the app to my phone, and voila, I was in charge.”
“And you didn’t tell Jessamine?”
“I was trying to tell her when she blew up at me and we had a fight that night. I don’t think she understood what I was talking about, or she didn’t want to believe me. She just thought I was trying to make excuses for not ridding her house of a ghost.”
“And afterwards, instead of coming forward with the information, you used it to your advantage. During the Haunt or Hoax? shoot, you lent your cellphone to Teddy Force. Just racking up a few points with a guy who could return the favor by getting you on a TV show, right?”
“Ed didn’t know anything about it,” he said earnestly. “You gotta believe that. He’s as straight as an arrow. He’s as honest as the day is long. He’s as pure as the driven snow.”
“He’s as innocent as a baby,” Taylor said, “and even he could see that Teddy was hoaxing somehow.”
“Yeah, Teddy’s not too good at that. If he’d let me . . . well, it’s his show.”
“So you found out that the house was rigged, and that’s why you decided to end the investigation and leave?”
“That’s one reason. The other was – and you can believe this or not if you want to – Jessamine was the kind of woman who couldn’t help herself. She was used to getting her way by seduction; it was the only way she knew how to relate to a man, and that’s not what I was here for. I want to build a career, not find a sugar-mama. I don’t want anything to do with an investigation that’s phony from the get-go. After what happened with that girl in Atlantic City, my reputation would never recover if I took another hit over this investigation.”
“Yet you got Teddy to conduct his investigation here, knowing he’d put it on TV, where lots of people could have figured out what was going on.”
“Yeah,” Dobbs said, “well, that was his look-out. He’s the one with the reality show, the recognized expert in the field. I’m not going to tell him what to do and what not to do.”
“But you’ll throw temptation in his way and let him ruin his own career. Did you ever stop to think how this would have affected Ed?”
“I’d never do anything to hurt Ed. Never. I worship the man. But his reputation is blast-proof. Other paranormal researchers may make fun of him, but they respect him, and nobody would ever believe he’d be part of a hoax. That just couldn’t have happened.”
“Yes it could. People don’t just make fun of him, they’re jealous of him. They’d be happy to see him ruined, right along with Teddy Force.”
“I’d never have let that happen,” he declared. “I would have stepped forward and admitted my part in the hoax and told the world that Ed had nothing to do with it. I would have taken whatever was coming to me, but I would have protected Ed. I’d do anything for Ed.”
“I want to believe you, Dobbs,” Taylor said. “I really do. But first you tell me that when you took off the night Jessamine Pissarro died you had no idea she was actually dead, and then you immediately admit to a hoax. Either you’re a man who stands on principle and leaves a nice cushy job when it starts looking squiffy, or you’re a dishonest man who’ll cheat if he thinks he can get away with it. Which is it?”
He leveled with her, looking straight into her eyes. “It’s both, I guess. Look, I’m not perfect, but if I was really a bad dude, I’d never come out and admit to a hoax, would I? Believe me, Teddy Force never will. Drag up whatever evidence you want, he’ll lie to your face and never break a sweat. Now you said you’d listen to my side of what happened that night and not interrupt. Are you going to give me a chance or aren’t you?”
“Okay, go. Nothing but the honest-to-God truth this time.”
“Nothing but the truth, I swear. I had already decided to leave Paradise Island that night. It’s a nice set-up here, but like I said, I’m trying to build a career. So the way it started that night, I sat her down and began by saying we were making no progress and it was time to throw in the towel. Well, she right away got mad and we had that fight. She cried, she hollered, she pleaded, she tried to make me feel guilty for leaving her alone with a ghost in the house. Finally, she went upstairs to calm herself down – she really went up to fix her face. Her mascara was running. When she came down again, that was cleaned up and she had lipstick on. Then she tells me I got her so upset she had to take a pill while she was up there – trying to make me feel like a dog – but I told her, ‘Whatever.’ So now she needs to take a walk on the beach to cool off, and we’ll finish talking about it when she gets back. I try to stop her, but she won’t listen. She didn’t want to fight anymore, she says, and we’ll sit down like grown-ups and talk when she gets back, when we’ve both calmed down. The next thing I know she’s walking out the front door and telling me to stay right here and
count my sins, or whatever.”
“She didn’t want you to quit?”
“No. She said she was afraid to stay in this house alone. When I went to the door and tried to get her to come back, she had that cellphone plastered to her ear and she just turned around and gave me the finger. At that moment, I was done with the whole thing, you know? I went back into the house and started packing. As soon as she came back I was going to tell her I was leaving and then get into my car and go, right then, in the middle of the night, only she never came back. I waited up until after 1:00 and when she still wasn’t back, I called 911. I was damned if I was going to go out there in the dark and look for her myself. I figured good enough for her if they found her laying on a beach blanket underneath some guy she didn’t want anybody to know about. I never thought they’d find her dead! I just called the cops and cleared out. I couldn’t believe it when Tiffany called and told me they’d found her dead. And then right away the cops called and asked me sweetly if I’d be kind enough to come back and give them an interview. I guess I could’ve made it complicated for them. After all, I was in another state at the time. But I had nothing to hide, and I told them I’d come right back, and that’s what I did.”
“And you still have no idea who the boyfriend was?”
“I’m still not sure she had a boyfriend, but she was being secretive about something. A boyfriend just made the most sense to me, I guess, knowing what kind of woman she was.” He hesitated, then shook his head. “I thought I had an idea what was going on, but it doesn’t make sense.”
