by Mary Bowers
“That would have done the job,” Roy said, nodding as if the concept interested him. “After I work a late night, I generally sleep until noon. Unless I’ve got a spirit medium coming over to talk to me,” he added with a pale smile. “By noon the house would’ve been full of carbon monoxide, and I wouldn’t have needed you to have a talk with Alan.”
Taylor steadied herself and told him, “They’re going to need you to swear out a complaint against him, Roy. He doesn’t have a good explanation for why he arrived by kayak, but with the rest of the story he’s telling, he doesn’t need one. He’s saying you invited him over and gave him the garage code.”
“I did not. I don’t know how he got that code. Oh. Probably from his father. Alan knew it.”
He hadn’t gotten the main point of what she was saying, so she repeated it. “You’ll have to say he’s lying. You’ll have to make a complaint.”
“Yeah, I know, I got you the first time. It’s something I’ve got to do, but not until tomorrow. Tonight, I’m going to sit myself down by the river and not let myself think about anything at all. You coming with me, Michael?”
Startled, Michael said, “Sure, if you want me to.”
“I do. And as for you, Taylor, you go to bed. I’ve had all the information I want from you for a while.”
“Whatever you say.” After a hesitation, Taylor went and gave him a little peck on the cheek, tried to think of something to say, decided there really wasn’t anything that needed saying, and went upstairs to bed.
Chapter 28
It was several months before Ed realized that Trixie wasn’t speaking to him.
When Dobbs came to visit him in January and Trixie came out of her house and fussed all over Dobbs while giving Ed the cold shoulder, it occurred to him that something might be amiss. There had been no baskets of biscuits lately, now that he thought about it. There had been no jarring yoo-hoos over the back fence. He’d been able to lower his garage door behind him and find himself alone with his car.
While not wanting to encourage intimacy, Ed was uncomfortable with anybody being angry with him.
When he said hello to her and she ignored him, he steeled himself and invited her to come in for a visit.
“Taylor is coming over,” he added. “She hasn’t seen Dobbs, here, in a while.”
“Come on in, doll,” Dobbs said in his overly-familiar way, and he guided Trixie into Ed’s house while Ed paused behind them and recounted his doubts about Dobbs and the ladies.
Summing it all up, he murmured to himself, “He’ll never learn.”
Turning to the south he saw Taylor’s white SUV coming up Route A1A, so he stood in the crisp January sunshine and waited for her to arrive.
When she got out of her car, he said, “You’ve become more blond.”
“It’s actually called gray,” she said. She hadn’t seen him since early November, and the sight of his upright posture, brushed-up white hair and shining wire-rimmed glasses melted her. Even though she knew he was uncomfortable with physical contact, she hugged him.
He misted up.
“Dobbs is here?” she asked, looking at the generic little sedan next to hers in the driveway.
“And Trixie, I’m afraid.”
“Uh oh. We kind of ditched her after we all went to lunch that day. She’s upset that we shut her out of the investigation, huh?”
Ed bridled. “My investigations are not free-for-alls, where the public is invited to join in and have a good time. She should have had no such expectations. Really! I may find it necessary one of these days to put that woman in her place.”
Taylor grinned. “Today is not that day, Ed. Be nice. I think she likes you. You know . . . I think she like-likes you.”
“I have given her no encouragement,” he said sternly.
“She doesn’t need any,” Taylor said, as Dobbs came to the door and asked if they were ever coming in.
“Trixie’s in the kitchen making appetizers or something.”
Gasping in horror, Ed made for the door while Dobbs came forward to Taylor with his arms open.
She gave him a hug and let him kiss her on the cheek.
“Same old Ed,” he said, looking at her affectionately. “And how about you? No bad effects from the séances?”
“I’ve been fine. You? Any new customers lately?”
He began to describe what he’d been doing since the Paradise Island investigation, which didn’t amount to much, but he made it sound exciting anyway.
* * * * *
“I found out what I could from the papers and the TV news,” Trixie said when they were all seated around the breakfast bar with coffee. “Of course, I wasn’t getting any real inside information.” Looking at no one, she pursed her lips and quietly sighed. “I know you all were a tremendous help to the police, but it still seems to me they wouldn’t have been able to prove anything if Kent Pissarro hadn’t been dumb enough to keep that prepaid phone.”
“He was planning to get rid of it as soon as he figured he’d never need it again,” Dobbs told her. He was sitting next to her, kind of a buffer between Trixie and Ed, and allowing her to put distressed hands anywhere she liked. Ed saw with his own eyes when she emphasized a point by dropping a hand onto Dobbs’s thigh, and there wasn’t even a flinch. “He figured before he could really be safe, he was going to need to get rid of Roy Angers, and if he’d managed to kill him that night, there wouldn’t have been a prepaid phone for the police to find.”
“And a murderer would have walked free!” (Hand on thigh.) “I can hardly stand the thought!”
Dobbs actually patted her hand as if he liked it there and murmured words of comfort.
Ed, unable to bear it, turned to Taylor, who was sitting on the other side of him. “You were right about Kent’s ploy with the missing car key. Jessamine texted him, confused and upset, asking if he knew where the key was. He said no, but it wasn’t long after that that she told him it had magically reappeared. When you look at in retrospect, it was blindingly obvious. Even her story about seeing Alan’s ghost – I realized she’d cribbed it from the story Wendy had told her about seeing her grandmother’s ghost. She hadn’t expected me to put her on the spot, asking for specific examples of her haunting, so she repeated a ghost story somebody else had told her, and dredged up Kent’s story of the car trying to kill him. She’d been convinced she was being haunted, but nothing had actually happened to her, other than some lights going on and off.”
“Were they able to figure out anything else from that text thread?” Trixie asked, forgetting to grope Dobbs.
Ed fondly indicated Taylor, as if she were his prize exhibit. “My friend here was right about all her conjectures, ending with the tryst that Kent and Jessamine had on the beach the night she died and starting with their affair becoming serious enough for them to need the secret cellphones to communicate. At first, there were traces of guilt in their texts. By the night Alan Pissarro died, it was obvious that they had had enough of him. Jessamine texted Kent that Alan was getting drunk again, and wouldn’t come out of the media room. At one point, she heard him moving to the master bedroom and she texted, ‘He’s opening the gun safe. What am I going to do?’ and he replied, ‘I’m almost there. Hang on. Open the lanai door so I can get in, and then stay out of the way.’”
“‘I love you,’” Dobbs added. “Don’t forget that part.”
“Yes. Professions of love. More from Jessamine than from Kent, but there are some from him, too.”
“No emoticons on his part,” Dobbs pointed out. “That’s significant.”
Ed blinked, then doubtfully said, “Perhaps. But it makes for rather poignant reading, going through those texts. They have a subtext, if I may call it that. The current of passion, even desperation, from Jessamine is tragic, especially near the end, when she thought Dobbs was going to walk out on her. By that time, Kent had her terrified of Alan’s ghost. Much more than she had been when she consulted me. He worked her up to a fever pitch
about it.”
“Sad,” Taylor said. “It was sad, what he did to her, using her like that to get revenge on his father.”
“Was that what it was all about?” Trixie asked. “Revenge? For the divorce?”
Taylor was nodding. “I’d say so. Kent was wildly bitter, consumed with hatred. For all his macho appearance, he really is a mama’s boy. He was outraged at what his father did to her. Why Jessamine never picked up on the fact that he was outraged at her, too, is anybody’s guess.”
“A woman in love,” Trixie said. “There’s no one more blind.”
“I guess,” Taylor said.
“And it’s all thanks to your psychic gifts that he got caught,” Dobbs said, leering at Taylor. “If you hadn’t sensed that Roy Angers was in danger and gotten him out of harm’s way, he’d be dead now, too, and nobody would know who killed him.”
“I didn’t know anything that everybody else didn’t know,” Taylor said. “I wasn’t using any psychic gifts. It was obvious at the séance that Roy was hiding something. Somebody with a guilty conscience would have taken what he said differently, maybe think Roy was promising to get revenge for Alan’s murder. And Kent might have taken it that his father would protect him, his own son, even after being murdered by him, and would tell Roy to ‘do nothing.’”
“Still,” Ed said, “you must admit you intuited some of the solution psychically. You didn’t seem to know who the murderer was until after the séance.”
“That’s just because Teddy mentioned what a success the Haunt or Hoax? shoot had been after you said nothing had happened. I never got a chance to think it all over until after the séance, when we talked to the cops that night. And then right away you admitted you’d caught Teddy perpetrating a hoax. I realized there was something there that must have been used against Jessamine, too. But by whom? Alan was dead. Why didn’t she know about the security system in her own house? I knew there was a hidden presence working against her, and it was probably a lover. That’s the way Jessamine worked, after all.”
“So you don’t think the séance was a success?” Dobbs asked.
“Oh, I think it was a success, but not the way you mean. We pulled together a kind of group therapy for Wendy. She seemed to work out all her anger, and decide that Alan would have come back to her, if he’d had the chance. I think that’s making her happier.”
“What’s making her happier,” Trixie said, leaning forward to see Taylor beyond the two men, “is realizing that she’s been in love with Roy Angers for some time now, and that wasting all her energy hating Alan had kept her from realizing it. That’s what I call a happy ending. He’s selling his house on Paradise Island and moving into her house, just up the block from The Big Catch, and going back to his roots, where we all belong, no matter how rich we get.”
“Is he rich?” Ed asked. “I’m not sure his restaurant is doing all that well.”
“It’s doing fine,” Trixie said with the confidence of somebody in-the-know. “The construction loans were paid off a long time ago, there’s no franchise fee, and business is good, if not as great as it used to be when he had the only place on the beach. Game nights, you can’t get another person in there with a crowbar. And he owns all the real estate around The Big Catch for the whole block fronting on Route A1A. Don’t you worry about him; he’s doing fine. And Tiffany and her young man, too.”
“That’s right,” Taylor said, “they decided to go ahead with the wedding after all. So Britt gets his chance to be the gentleman barman, just like he wanted.”
“The only one who lost out,” Dobbs said, “is Ed, here. His client turned out to be the murderer. No paycheck, I’m afraid.”
“I never expected one,” Ed said stiffly. “I wasn’t in it for the money. I was in it to set my mind at ease about Jessamine’s death, and now that I know it wasn’t suicide, I know I couldn’t have saved her.”
“You still feel sorry for her, though, don’t you?” Taylor said.
He hesitated but finally said, “I do. She used other people, and then she was used herself, and I don’t think the kind of woman Jessamine was could have lived her life any differently. It was probably bound to happen to her. You don’t destroy lives and expect there won’t be any consequences. But yes, I feel sorry for her. She was like a panther, who needs to kill other animals for survival; she couldn’t help herself.”
“Well I don’t feel sorry for her,” Trixie said. “She was an adventuress in the worst sense of the word. She got what she deserved. And as for you, Ed, I forgive you.”
“For what?”
“For shutting me out the way you did. In fact, I’m going home right now and making a whole pan of Banana Delight, all for you.”
He seemed about to protest, but at the mention of Banana Delight, he stopped himself. He didn’t even shrug her off when she patted his shoulder as she passed him by.
* * * * *
Dobbs stayed so long that Taylor could see Ed getting worried he’d have to put him up for the night. But around the time it started to get dark out, Dobbs got up, stretched, and said he had a client to see in downtown St. Augustine, a woman who had stated that she was a vampire and therefore couldn’t meet with him in the daytime. She wanted to be cured. Did Ed have any research on the subject?
Of course he did.
Ed beetled off to get it while Taylor told Dobbs, “Don’t let her get too close to your neck.”
Ed came out of his office fifteen minutes later, after running his copier continuously, and handed his spy satchel to Dobbs.
“Here, you take this,” he said. “It’s more your style. The research is in there. Don’t try to read it while you drive.”
Dobbs took the satchel as if it were a container full of magic. “Really? I’ve been drooling over it since I first saw you with it. I wanted to get one for myself, but I couldn’t afford it.”
“Take it, please,” Ed said. “Merry Belated Christmas.”
Ed endured another hug and then walked Dobbs to the door.
Returning to where Taylor was standing, Ed seemed relaxed for the first time that day.
“I guess I should be leaving, too,” she said.
“Come into the office first,” Ed said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
She became wary, but followed him down the hall and into the office.
“This is for you. Read it when you are able, but do not destroy it. It’s important.”
She took the file folder of print-outs and glanced at the top one.
“Mark Smeaton, musician and dancer, court of King Henry VIII,” read the heading. She closed the file.
“He was accused of having intimate relations with the queen, and executed,” Ed said.
“I don’t want to hear anymore.” She looked distressed, and seemed about to dump the file on the desk, but at the last moment, she held onto it. “Why did you do this? I don’t want to know.”
“Isn’t it important? He’s your spirit guide.”
“No, he’s not. I let go of him. He can’t do it.”
“I see,” Ed said. “You told me he was fragile. After reading his history, I’m not surprised.” He walked to the credenza behind his desk and picked up a strange-looking helmet with goggles. “This is not a complete success, but I did think I saw something on the lanai. I tried it out, while Dobbs was out of the way. He’s a nuisance, but I think he has talent.”
“What is it?”
“I call it the Full-Spectrum Clarifier. It pierces a larger spectrum of light than our eyes can perceive. I believe I saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“Your Mark.”
“He’s not my Mark. It was just that house – all that security, with somebody hovering over it on the internet, controlling things from afar. That’s what gave us the feeling that the house was alive.”
He smiled indulgently. “Plausible. I’m sure you’d rather think that, anyway.”
“Good-night, Ed. I’ll see you around.”
&
nbsp; She left him standing in his office, holding the Full-Spectrum Clarifier between his two hands. Gazing at the device, he murmured, “I believe you will.”
The End
