Dancing with a Ghost

by Angela Pepper

  Tilda began coughing. It took a moment for her to compose herself. She came all the way into the room, grabbed an empty beer bottle from the top of the coffee table, and chucked the remainder of her cigarette into the dregs.

  She looked at Lee and then at Katie. “Would you two please excuse us? We have Onassis family business to discuss.” She looked right at Lee. “In private, Lee. No listening at the door.”

  Lee headed toward the door.

  “Wait,” Tilda said. “What were you really doing on my computer today?”

  “Checking the weather,” Lee said, wide-eyed.

  “And that's your tell,” Tilda said. “Katie's got her lisp when she lies, and you've got that stupid look of yours.”

  Marco began to chuckle. “Naw, he looks that stupid all the time.”

  Tilda cuffed her son across the forehead lightly. “Not now.” She raised her eyebrows at Katie and nodded toward the door. The art babies were dismissed.

  Katie left quickly, along with Lee. Behind them, Tilda called out, “I'll talk to you both at dinner, which will be in thirty minutes!”

  “Not likely,” Katie said under her breath.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Katie was sitting on her bed, staring at the contents of her suitcase when someone knocked on her door.

  “It's me,” Lee said. The door opened, and he came in. “The cab's on its way,” he said.

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “I sure am, Detective Mills. Very observant. Was it the suitcase?” He gave her a playful smile as he set his suitcase down with a loud thunk.

  Katie nodded for Lee to come over and sit on the bed next to her.

  As soon as he did, she climbed onto his lap and gave him a flirty smile.

  “You're feeling pretty good,” he observed. “Did you take something powerful for your busted nose?”

  She kissed him. “It's not busted,” she lied. Her nose hurt like hell, but she needed something. She kissed him again, and reached into his pocket. He squirmed and made an excited noise.

  She closed her fingertips on the burned bit of yellow material that was in his pocket and yanked it out without him noticing.

  She pulled away from the kiss and stepped back, away from him.

  “That's it?” He grinned. “We've still got a few minutes before the taxi gets here.” He tilted his head to the side. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  She pointed to the contents of her open suitcase on the bed.

  “What's that?” Lee yanked Katie's sweaters aside. He swore under his breath.

  “Evidence that you lied to me.”

  In a whisper, he said, “That’s Clive's yellow jacket.”

  She gave him a steely look. “It's somebody's yellow jacket. And it doesn't look like it's burned up.”

  He got to his feet and started edging around her, toward the door. “And why do you have that jacket?”

  She put one hand on her hip and used the other to wave the burned yellow scrap at him. “You answer my question first, Lee. Why did you show me this burned scrap?”

  “To get into your pants. Duh.”

  “That's it?”

  He held both hands up. “I swear to God. Please don't hurt me. I won't tell anyone you have the jacket.” He mimed zipping his lips.

  She whisper-yelled, “Lee, someone planted the jacket in my suitcase!”

  “Who?”

  She threw the burned scrap at him. “Who do you think? The person who killed Clive Kingfisher. There's a murderer right here at Spirit Ranch.”

  Chapter 28

  The words hung in the air.

  There's a murderer right here at Spirit Ranch.

  Lee continued to stare at Katie, his mouth hanging open.

  “And it's not me,” she added.

  He jolted as though waking up from a trance. “Well, it's not me,” he said.

  “I know. That's why I'm telling you.”

  “How would you know for sure?” He edged away from the door and returned to her bed, where he sat next to the stack of clothes and the yellow jacket. “It's nice that you trust me and everything, but how do you know I'm not a killer?”

  She shook her head. She didn't know. Maybe because he thought it was a game? He had burned a piece of yellow plastic to manipulate her into getting closer to him. If he'd actually killed someone, he wouldn't have been so cavalier. Plus her gut told her Lee was no killer, and that counted for something.

  “Which I'm not,” he said. “Honestly. If I find a scary spider in my room, I can't even kill it. I coax the spider into a cup and take it outside.”

  “I believe you,” she said. “As for Clive, it might have been an accident after all. That's what the cops said. They were only asking questions to be thorough.”

  She looked at the yellow jacket on the bed and frowned.

  He picked up the jacket and checked the pockets. They were empty. Katie had already checked as well.

  “It was no accident,” Lee said. “Someone was captured on film, coming back down the mountain wearing Clive's coat. And they hid it inside your suitcase.”

  “Why mine? Why not yours?”

  He shrugged. “You showed up here under an alias. Plus there's the whole thing with your roommate going missing. All sort of shady stuff.” He raised his eyebrows and stared into her eyes. “Did you put her necklace in Marco's room to mess with his head?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I've never been in that suite before tonight.” She crossed her arms. “We are in deep. Something's going on, and we need to get away from this place. Immediately.”

  Lee tilted back his head and looked down his nose at her. “Not so fast. If you're getting set up, leaving here is going to look bad for you.”

  She laughed nervously. “But I haven't done anything wrong.”

  “That's what all the tough chicks in prison say.” He smirked.

  She kept her arms crossed and gave him a sarcastic smirk right back. “I ain't goin' back to the big house,” she joked.

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  Lee rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe it wasn't a setup. Maybe the killer just needed to hide the jacket quickly before that cop showed up to search the place.” He snapped his fingers. “Marco. He's the one who took Officer What's-her-name around to search the place.”

  “You mean Officer Kendall,” Katie said. “But she was with him the whole time. He couldn't have hid the jacket when she was right there with him.”

  He nodded slowly. “Right. But the family and the housekeeper got back here before we did that day,” Lee said. “They could have hid it then.”

  Katie nodded in agreement.

  Lee bounced eagerly on the edge of the bed. “Plus, didn't you say someone snuck into your room on Monday night?”

  “They could have been stuffing the jacket in my suitcase,” Katie said. “It could have been any one of them.”

  “Any one of them? Even Holly?”

  “Sure. You saw how awful he was to her,” Katie said. “Plus you saw yourself what Holly's like when she snaps. She might have been retaliating for whatever happened all those years ago when she got her face messed up. She was riding horses with Clive when it happened.”

  “What about Tilda?” Lee put his hands behind him on the bed and leaned back casually, as though they were having an intense study session and not discussing motives for murder.

  “It could have been a crime of passion,” Katie said. “We know from the hairs on his pillow they were fooling around at some point. Do you think she found out he lied about his wife being out of town?”

  “Or maybe he tried to break it off with her. Told her he was heading down to Mexico to join the ol' ball and chain.”

  Katie started to pace, hoping it would help her think.

  She stopped and asked Lee, “What was Tilda talking about just now in Marco's suite? Something about having to clean up his messes? Do you think she lured Clive up there and shoved him of
f a cliff as a favor to her son?”

  “Blood is thicker than water,” he said.

  “What do you think Marco did?”

  Lee shrugged. “He had your friend's pendant. Maybe he's a kleptomaniac.”

  Katie wrinkled her nose. Was Lee making fun of her and the confession about her unorthodox methods of collecting lip balm?

  Lee silently stared at her, his eyes wide and unfocused. He didn't look terribly bright at that moment. In fact, he had the same stunned expression he'd had when Tilda had accused him of fibbing—his stupid look. Was he lying?

  “Oh,” he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Taxi's here.” He blinked at her. “Should we go straight to the bus station, or hit the sheriff's office first with our, um, evidence?” He folded the yellow jacket and put it back into her suitcase.

  “I don't know. Let's just get in the car and go. We can think along the way.”

  Lee looked down at his phone. “The driver must have already been in the area when I requested a ride.”

  “Good,” Katie said with a heavy sigh of relief. They were leaving, and not a minute too soon. “Do you still have that USB drive?”

  “Unless you picked my pocket completely,” he said. “That was quite the kiss. You could have done anything to me.”

  * * *

  The taxi driver was the same friendly, seventy-year-old man who'd driven the pair of art students there on Sunday and also on Tuesday.

  He gave them one of his easy smiles as he stepped out to help with luggage. “We meet again,” he said cheerfully.

  Katie stared for a moment at the man's sprinkling of white hair over his head and his tight gray beard. Short of being picked up by her own family, she couldn't think of anyone she was happier to see. She was leaving Spirit Ranch, leaving its stench of death. The night surrounded them, but the familiar face of the driver felt like a beacon of light at the end of a tunnel.

  She was so relieved, she found herself hugging the driver like a long-lost friend.

  “Good to see you again, too,” the driver said, chuckling as he hugged her back. “Things have been rough around these parts lately?”

  She pulled away and composed herself. “Things haven't been great,” she said.

  Lee interjected, “We still owe you fare from the last trip. I haven't forgotten.” He rubbed his palm on his jeans before offering his hand to the older driver. “I'm Lee Elliot.”

  “And I'm Eddie,” the driver said, offering his hand. He looked directly at Katie. “Remember how you called me Steady Eddie?”

  “Right,” she lied, shaking his hand.

  “And I do apologize, miss, but I forgot your name,” he said.

  “Katie.”

  “Nope. That's not it.”

  She forced a laugh and handed over her suitcase for the trunk. Lee was taking out his laptop before tossing his old suitcase on top of hers.

  They all got into the cab, with Katie and Lee sharing the back seat once again.

  “Let's get going right away,” Lee said, glancing at the door of the house. They hadn't let anyone know they were leaving, let alone said goodbye.

  The driver, Steady Eddie, caught Katie's eyes in the rearview mirror. “You're hurt,” he said. “One of your eyes is swelling up.”

  Katie had almost forgotten about her banged-up nose. The bleeding had stopped, and now it was numb. The bones at the bridge had made a crackling sound earlier, when she'd wiggled it.

  “I'll be okay,” she said.

  “I hope you don't mind me asking, but something's going on,” the driver said, still making eye contact through the rearview mirror. “You never got that trouble of yours cleared up, did you?”

  Lee squirmed impatiently next to her. The vehicle still wasn't rolling. Katie looked at the door to the house, expecting it to burst open at any minute and pour out crazy.

  “I'm fine,” she said. “Really. Can you just drive, please? Take us to the nearest bus station. Is there one in the next town, or do we need to go all the way to Albuquerque?”

  Eddie laughed lightly as he put the car in gear and started it rolling. “You kids these days. You smoke too much pot. It's no good for your memory.” He caught Katie's eye in the rearview mirror. “I can take you to that bus station in town, if it's what you want.” He checked the road ahead, flicked on the high beams to light the straight dirt road, and caught Lee's eye. “How about you, Mr. Smooth?”

  “The bus station for both of us,” Lee said. He had his laptop open already, plugged into his phone with a cable to give him mobile internet access.

  To Katie, Lee said, “No more flights out tonight, so I'm opting for the bus. I'll go with you as far as you like, and see you get home safely. It's no trouble. I don't have any other plans for the next few days, as you know.”

  “Uh, sure,” she said. “That sounds fun.”

  He clicked a few keys on his computer and turned to stare at her. “Tilda was right. You do have a lisp when you're telling a lie. You don't want my company, do you?”

  “Lee, I'm sorry. I'm just so mixed up right now. We'll exchange information. We'll stay in touch.”

  He turned back to his screen. “Especially since we're involved in an investigation together.”

  She gritted her teeth. They didn't need to be involved in anything, if they didn't want to. She could throw the yellow jacket in a dumpster and put the whole mess behind her.

  An image on the laptop screen caught her eye. Lee was looking at the photos of Darlene and Clive that he'd taken from Tilda's computer.

  After a moment of clicking through the lurid images, Lee said, “This is brilliant.”

  “Brilliant?” Her esophagus burned. “It's horrible. Beautifully shot, of course, but yuck.”

  “Don't you get it?” Lee gave her a surprised look. “Tilda's biggest complaint is that male art critics are always deeming her work to be sexual, to be about her own sexuality. All of her work. Even a painting of a skull in front of a mountain. They insist on calling it sensual or some crap, and you and I both know they'd never do that to a male artist.”

  Katie tried to swallow down the burning in her throat. “So now Tilda's taking sex photos? How's that supposed to make things better?”

  “These are brilliant,” he said. “Look again. And read the titles on the file names. They're not finalized yet, I'm sure, but they're all variations on the same theme.” He pointed to the file name. “The Art Critic and His Darling. An Art Critic Encounters Beauty. An Art Critic Only Knows How to...” He stopped before uttering the dirty words.

  Katie realized why Clive Kingfisher was in the pictures. “Clive isn't supposed to look good in these,” Katie said. “He's the beast. And Darlene is the beauty that gets destroyed by his greed.” She paused, letting it sink in. “These are brilliant.” She shook her head. “Poor Darlene.”

  Up in the front seat, the cab driver slapped the steering wheel. “Darlene! That's the name you told me before.”

  Lee closed his laptop. “What's that? Who told you about Darlene?”

  Steady Eddie turned to give Katie a friendly grin through the seat rests. “That's your real name, ain't it? Darlene. And you gave me a kiss on the cheek the first time we met, because it was my birthday, and you felt sorry for me having to work on my birthday.”

  Katie leaned forward in her seat, straining to see the identification posted at the front of the cab. The laminated card contained the man's name and identification number, but no birthday, because it wasn't his driver's license.

  Even so, she had a date in mind.

  “Eddie, is your birthday September the twenty-seventh?”

  “Close. It's the twenty-eighth. That's when I turned forty,” he said, chuckling. “Every year, I turn forty on September twenty-eighth, coming on thirty years now.”

  Katie turned to Lee. “The twenty-seventh is the last time I saw Darlene. It's the day she packed her bag and left the dorm. If Eddie saw her on the twenty-eighth, that means she was here, in New Mexico. She
must have taken the bus and slept on it overnight.”

  Lee's eyes widened. He closed his laptop. “We need to go to the police.”

  “With what? The yellow jacket that's inside my suitcase? No way.” She shook her head. “They're going to think it was me. That I came here to get Tilda to delete the photos, and that I went crazy on Clive. Revenge or something.” She felt a hysterical sob rising in her throat. “They'll get my medical records. They'll talk to my psychiatrist and find out...” She clamped her hand over her mouth.

  “Find out what?” Lee's eyes got even wider. In a whisper, he asked, “Did you do it, Katie? Did you...” he mouthed the rest of the words. Kill Clive Kingfisher?

  “I don't think so,” she said.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes without speaking. Steady Eddie had gotten distracted by a weather forecast on the radio and wasn't paying attention to them.

  Katie took the ankh necklace from her pocket and studied the silver symbol in her hand. The interior of the taxi was nearly as dark as the desert outside the windows, but the little charm glinted anyway.

  Tilda's words echoed in her head. “The secret is to paint what you see. And to paint what you see, you must first see what you see. Not what you think is there or expect to see.”

  Katie had come to New Mexico to get away from the ghost that haunted her. Not to find Darlene's path. And so, because she wasn't looking, she hadn't seen the connections between the points, until now.

  First there'd been the cabbie she'd never met before, seemingly recognizing her. Like others at their school, he'd mixed up the two girls because of their similar appearance. And he'd made reference to it the first time she'd met him at the airport, but she'd dismissed it. Because it wasn't what she was looking for.

  Then there was the housekeeper, telling Katie, “But he said there was only one. And that's why we canceled. That's why we sent a refund.”

  And then Tilda, asking Lee if he'd been frightened by the sight of “a floating pile of garbage” in the river.

  More small details came into focus, illuminating a larger picture. You can't paint the fleas until you paint the dog.

  The necklace in Marco's bedroom.

  His hiking boots on Clive's feet.