Corpses & Conmen (Rosewood Place Mysteries Book 2) (15 page)

Midweek in Coopersville was hardly what Annie Richards would call a ‘bustling time.’ After living in New York City for the better part of two decades, it was impossible to compare the two towns. After all, Coopersville only boasted a population of just under two thousand people, most of which, like Annie, lived on the outer edges of the town, all spread out and nicely separated by lots of grass, trees, and wild spaces.

In the heart of town itself, there was a vibrant little community built up around small businesses and the parts of a town that kept it functioning: the post office, the police station, and a little further out, the elementary, middle, and high schools. Boutiques and specialty shops lined Main Street, branching out in spidery waves down quaint streets with names like Macadamia Avenue and Chockaree Road. The heart of the city had received a fairly recent renovation that saw a beautification of the old town. The police station had benefitted from this with the introduction of pedestrian benches and pretty floral landscaping.

Annie’s own realtor had a business just off of Main Street. Debbie Schipper had been helping pair home buyers and sellers for the better part of three decades. She seldom traveled further than the neighboring cities surrounding Coopersville, but she had all the work she could handle. The past ten years had seen a steady influx of northerners and retirees who dreamed of mild southern winters and friendly, smiling faces in their golden years. An influx of big businesses in some of the neighboring cities also meant a boom for Coopersville real estate, as many folks preferred the small town life to accompany their ‘big city’ jobs.

Annie had been happy to send Frank and Doris to see Debbie. She owed her realtor a huge debt of gratitude for helping Annie find and buy Rosewood Place so quickly. Debbie seemed to know the right people to make things happen in the real estate world, and Annie hoped that would mean that she’d make good things happen for the Martins, too, although she was well aware that, being from Up North, Debbie wouldn’t be quite as motivated to rush their buying process.

It was a well-known, little-discussed fact that although folks born and raised south of the Mason-Dixon line were as polite as punch to everyone they met, they prioritized their own when it came to filling up houses in genteel southern towns and communities. Annie knew that Debbie’s own daughter had married a boy from Indiana, so Frank and Doris at least had a sympathetic realtor in Mrs. Schipper.

While the Martins perused houses and barbecue menus, Rob and Kizzy spent the morning playing cards in the sitting room. Bessie, feeling guilty about leaving dinner until so late the day before, made sure that breakfast was over-the-top, a southern fried feast of eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits, gravy, grits, and country ham that would have given Cracker Barrel a run for its money. The young news anchor and the unemployed actress stuffed themselves silly on her home cooked goodness, then agreed that it was too hot to venture outdoors, but a deck of playing cards and plenty of good conversation was always a great way to waste a morning.

Alexander George returned to his room after breakfast. Before he went back upstairs he made a detour to the little library off the sitting room. Judging by the stack of books he carried, Annie reckoned they might not see him again until dinner time.

Annie would have loved to have spent the morning sipping coffee out by the pond, reading a trashy romance novel or even working through a sudoku puzzle, but the realities of running a bed-and-breakfast were staring her in the face, so she grabbed her cleaning supplies and her master set of keys and began making a pass through each guest’s room, running the vacuum cleaner quickly over rugs, sweeping a light scattering of dust bunnies and dried grass tracked in from outside, and gathering laundry from the guest rooms as well as her own family’s quarters.

For the most part, Annie liked to make the guests feel as if they were simply hanging out in their own homes, so she did allow them to do their own laundry if they wanted. So far, she’d only had to wash mostly towels, a few shirts, and just a handful of unmentionables, which were thankfully fairly harmless. After having been married for many years and a mother to a teenaged son, Annie knew the worst laundry horrors were likely yet to come, though she hoped that guests with hygiene problems opted to do their own laundry.

She spent a couple of hours upstairs, interrupted by quick visits to the laundry room and kitchen (some guests had a terrible habit of taking midnight snacks to bed and not returning the dishes to the kitchen). It crossed her mind that she wouldn’t always be so lucky with her timing. Most of the guest rooms were empty, which made cleaning much easier, but she couldn’t get into Mr. George’s room or Marie’s. The self-proclaimed psychic had requested that her room be left unattended, which was fine by Annie. She supposed that it only meant more work when the woman left, but Annie had no desire to upset her guest and no reason to suspect that Marie was making any sort of huge messes in the room.

After finishing the upstairs cleaning, Annie grabbed a can of diet soft drink from the fridge and headed out to the back porch for a break. She hoped that Rory wasn’t busy working on his latest project or finishing off repairs to the deck. She thought it might be nice to sit and chat with him about--she realized with a start that she didn’t really have anything in mind to discuss with him, she just felt like hanging out and feeling some normalcy again. It had been such an odd, stressful week, despite the joy of seeing her hard work come to life in the bed-and-breakfast.

The spring-loaded screen door slammed shut behind her before Annie realized that she wasn’t alone on the screened-in porch. “Mama, Miss Robichaud, I didn’t know y’all were out here.” Annie cringed at how easily she’d slipped back into her southern drawl after only a few months back in the south. “Birdwatching?” she asked, noting a small pair of binoculars and a book about wildlife lying on a table between the two seated women.

“Oh, Annie! Come here and look at this bird,” Bessie greeted her. “I swear I just saw one of these sitting right on the edge of the deck down there.”

Annie glanced at the deck. It looked as good as new thanks to Rory. He was nowhere to be seen, so she assumed he must be with Devon out in the barn, playing with the dog or working on his designs for the new groundskeeper’s lodge.

“Which bird is that?” Annie asked, following her mother’s pointing finger to a picture of a pretty little green and yellow bird with a blue face.

“It’s called a Mourning Warbler,” Bessie replied proudly. “I don’t think these are too common around these parts, at least not during the summer. The book says they migrate south in the fall,” she added with an expert nod.

Marie sniffed. “It’s here because it’s in mourning, I’m sure.” She smiled at Annie, then glanced at Bessie. “Should we ask her now, Bessie?”

Annie looked at her mother, who looked just a little bit guilty of something. “Annie, dear, I’ve been thinking.” Bessie thinking too hard about anything wasn’t a good sign, but Annie didn’t interrupt her to say so. “All these strange things we’ve had going on around here--the fire, the guests getting sick--don’t you think it’s odd?”

Annie wiped condensation from her unopened can of drink against her shirt, leaving a dark streak of moisture. “Well, yeah, I’d say it’s pretty odd,” she replied sarcastically.

“I’ve been discussing it with Marie, and the more that I think about things, the more I think that it couldn’t hurt to use her, well, her
services
,” she said, emphasizing the last word.

Annie could feel the heat seeping through the screens from outside. How on earth was her mother not dying out here in this heat? “What on earth are you talking about?” Her response came out crabbier than she’d meant it to. Annie made a mental note to be more careful when responding to questions or comments about her guests’ careers in the future.

“Well, why don’t we let Marie try to talk to Mr. Ross and see what it is he wants from all of us?” Bessie took a sip of her peppermint tea and licked her lips. “After all, it’s what she does for a living,” she added.

Annie pulled a chair over to the little table where the other two women were sitting. It wasn’t meant to seat three people, and she hardly had room to sit her Diet Coke, but she plonked it down anyway. “Well, Mother, I’m not sure that would work. You know, because he’s dead and all.”

Marie inclined her head slightly. Her frizzy hair moved in the warm breeze that blew across the porch. “I can still communicate with him, Annie. I just need something that belonged to him so I can call him over from wherever he’s hovering,” she replied simply, as though she’d just explained how to bake a cake or change a lightbulb instead of how to talk to a dead man.

“I’m sorry, Marie, but I’m just not sure about that. I don’t know how I feel about that sort of thing,” Annie replied, struggling to find a way to say no that wouldn’t offend the psychic. She was proud of herself for at least not laughing at the suggestion, but she couldn’t find a way of telling Marie that she didn’t believe in communicating with spirits without cracking up in laughter.

Bessie put her hand on Annie’s arm. Her skin was soft and cool against Annie’s own. “Let’s not say no just yet. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, and it couldn’t hurt anything, could it?”

“Yes, it could,” Annie replied. “It could freak out our guests and give us the kind of reputation that we really don’t want to have,” she said firmly.

“We don’t have to involve the others,” Marie piped up. “In fact, the fewer people we have, the better. We could limit this to just the three of us, that’s enough people to provide the spiritual energy that I need to complete the ritual.”

“Ritual?” Annie’s eyebrows went up.

“Seance, communication ritual--call it what you like. I just need something that belonged to the dead man and I can ask him why he won’t leave you alone.”

“Why do you think these strange happenings have anything to do with ghosts?” Annie asked. “Ghosts don’t usually need to use lighter fluid to start fires,” she challenged.

“Ghosts, as you call them, use whatever they can to get your attention. Don’t you think it’s odd that the only part of the deck that was burned was the part near where the body was discovered?” Marie asked. “And what about the fact that only Kizzy and Rob have been sick? They were the last ones on the deck the night that Mr. Ross died,” she added.

Annie was in no way convinced that either of those two incidents were in the least bit supernatural, but she was curious about why on earth Marie had her heart set on speaking with the ghost of the dead man.

“Your mother told me that you were locked in the cellar the day of the storm.” Marie’s words pulled Annie to attention. “Don’t you wonder how on earth that could have happened when everyone else in the house was together in another room?” she asked, arching one eyebrow. “Something in this house is trying to communicate with us, Annie. We’d be foolish not to listen.”

The hairs on the back of Annie’s neck gave an involuntary shiver. “Even if I agreed that you could do this, I’m afraid that I don’t have anything that belonged to the dead man.”

“Annie, what about the package?” Bessie’s voice was hopeful. “If we had that, we could use it, couldn’t we?”

“I don’t think so. When that package arrives--if it arrives--we’ll have to turn it over to the police. You can’t just open packages that don’t belong to you, even if you think you can use what’s inside to ask the dead person who killed him.” Annie popped the top on her can and took a long sip of her drink. She glanced at the binoculars on the table again. “Wait, are those Dad’s?”

Bessie blushed slightly. “Yes, you remember when you used to go birdwatching with him? I kept them for Devon. I thought he might like to have something that belonged to his grandfather some day.”

“We wouldn’t have to open it,” Marie interjected before Annie could say anything else. “The package, I mean. I would simply need to hold it during the ceremony. As long as he had some sort of attachment to the item, it should work.”

“Didn’t you say it was meant to be a gift for his mother?” Bessie asked.

Annie didn’t want to discuss the matter anymore, but she didn’t want to shoot her mother and Marie’s plan down without some small mercy. It bothered her that her mother actually put stock in Marie’s words, and it worried her more that she’d bothered to dig out her father’s binoculars which, to Annie’s knowledge, had been packed away in a box at the back of her mother’s closet since they’d moved into Rosewood place six months before. She hoped that Bessie didn’t actually believe that Marie could communicate with the dead, and she prayed that the woman hadn’t already put some twisted idea of trying to reach Annie’s father from beyond the grave into her mother’s head, too.

“Let me think about this, okay?” Annie wouldn’t commit to an answer, but she wouldn’t give an outright ‘no’ to their idea, either. If Bessie wanted to find some sort of closure in a silly ceremony, maybe letting Marie try talking to Lou Ross--and failing--would let the old woman down gently. “I’ll talk to you about it later, okay, Mama?”

Annie waited for Bessie to nod in agreement, then she rose and took her drink from the table. “I think I’ll go put this on some ice. Y’all don’t sit out here too long in this heat, okay?”

Annie left the two women sitting with their tea and headed back into the house, stopping long enough to fill a glass with crushed ice and the remains of her drink. Her stomach grumbled despite its heavy breakfast, and Annie was surprised to find that it was after noon. She put a straw in her glass and headed for the privacy of her office so she could think over her mother’s latest request.

Annie felt something brush past her leg as she pushed the door open. TigerLily. She looked down just in time to see the feline shoot past her and head for the kitchen. “How in the heck do you keep getting in here?” she yelled after the cat, then laughed at herself for bothering to ask. TigerLily was like the anti-Houdini of cats. She could get into all kinds of trouble, but she never seemed to be able to escape it.