The room had a musty air from being sealed up so long—underlaid with another odor she couldn't put a name to. An almost sweet, sickening smell.
The room looked like a chamber in a haunted house.
It was cold, very cold.
Chills ran up and down her arms, but she was not sure if the chills were caused by the low temperature alone.
"Not exactly a homey place, is it?' Tyber came up to her, encircling her in his warm arms.
"These must have been Todd's grandfather's rooms." She walked over to an inlaid side table. Through the seventeen dust layers, she could still tell that it had once been a very fine imported Moroccan piece. "Some of this stuff is valuable. I wonder why Sasenfras wouldn't want to come in and get it. He could get some money for this stuff."
"At the very least, he could redecorate."
They both gave each other a look. That sixties furniture that he had in the shanty was horrible.
"Well, there's no accounting for taste."
"True." He grinned, his eyes trailing a path down the bright purple shirt and turquoise pants she had decided to wear.
"Not one word."
He put his hands up. "I didn't say a thing, baby."
Her lower lip pouted out. "No, but your look had a chapters worth."
"Aw, baby, I love your clothes." He encircled her in a bear hug. "They're you."
What was that supposed to mean? "Hmf." But she enjoyed the caress just the same.
"I wonder how much action that bed has seen."
"Tyber!" Zanita pushed away from him.
He realized how she had interpreted his comment. He chuckled. "No, no. It was just that, by all accounts, Todd's grandfather was quite a… swinger… in his day. I don't think Sasenfras's wife was the first dalliance."
"But she seems to be have been his last."
"How do you know that, Curls?" Tyber walked over to the bedside table and examined the dusty contents on the top. They were an eclectic mix of oddities. The Karma Sutra, some sex devices that even Tyber had a hard time figuring out, an old prescription bottle in the name of grandfather Sparkling and…
He grinned. A large peacock feather.
"Hey, baby, check this out." He held up the moth-eaten feather and waggled his eyebrows.
Zanita's mouth formed an O of amused surprise. As he was standing there holding up the feather, several of the filaments drifted to the floor one by one, then the rest suddenly all dropped off at once. Tyber was left holding nothing but a long quill.
Zanita burst out laughing. "Can't cause much trouble with that, now can you?"
He gave her the Evans "wanna bet?" look—a curved dimple and flashing eye.
"Better be careful." She wagged her finger at him. "If you knew what happened to Todd's grandfather after he played with that thing, you wouldn't be so smug."
"What did happen to the old reprobate?"
Zanita walked over to the closet and opened the door. A shower of dust and a scurrying sound resulted. She brushed her hand back and forth in front of her face to dispel the worst of the dirt. "Well, Todd said that according to family lore, his grandfather went out at night in his boat, not long after the dalliance with Sasenfras's wife, Winifred, began."
"Winnie Sasenfras?" Tyber shook his head. "Now, that sounds like a vixen to curl your toes."
"Hush. They say she had a certain
je ne sais quoi
. Anyway, apparently a gale sprang up and his boat sank." She peered further into the closet.
"Don't go rummaging through there," Tyber cautioned.
"Why not?"
"Because I just saw two pairs of beady yellow eyes sticking out from the tangle of cloth at the bottom."
"Eeee." Zanita jumped back two steps and slammed the door shut.
Tyber walked over to a connecting door and opened it to the next room in the suite.
Zanita glanced at the bed hangings, shocked to see lewd pictures under the canopy. "Todd told me they had a burial at sea, although he was only a few years old at the time and has no real memory of it. His grandfathers body was never found."
"I—wouldn't—say—that."
Zanita turned around swiftly. Tyber was poised in the doorway to the next room, frozen in place.
She ran up to him. "What is it?"
His chin gestured in the direction of a round burled walnut table in the center of a sitting room where he had trained the flashlight.
There, sitting at the table in a silk smoking jacket, was Todd's grandfather.
Unfortunately, he was a skeleton.
Tyber bounced the light off the faded brocade smoking jacket. On the table nearby was an elongated cigarette holder, the kind that was popular in the fifties and early sixties. Its cigarette had long since turned to a pile of powdery tobacco. He was facing the door to the sitting room.
"Dapper bag of bones, isn't he?"
"My god, Tyber, do you know what this means?"
"I have a good idea." Without touching the remains, he carefully examined the skeleton. After he was done, he glanced over at the table top, noting an empty teacup. Next to the teacup was a teapot. The contents had evaporated ages ago.
Tyber lifted the lid and sniffed. A faint scent assailed his nostrils. Almonds.
"Self-inflicted or murder?" Zanita asked.
"It looks like a natural death or suicide, but it's definitely murder."
"How can you tell?"
"My gut feeling and the way he's sitting in that chair. There are scuff marks on the floor beneath his slippers, like he was wrestling with someone or had been surprised by something. He was writhing and clawing at his robe, too; see how the ascot is skewed? If it was suicide, he wouldn't have been so actively fighting it. Of course, a heart attack would produce that reaction as well. But-I-don't-think-so."
She nodded. "How was he done in?"
"There is still the faintest trace of an almond scent in that teapot."
"Arsenic?"
"Probably."
"Poor Merville."
"Merville?"
"Mmmm. That was his name. Todd told me."
"Merville, you suave skirt-chaser, you." Tyber bowed to the skeleton.
A vase crashed to the floor.
They both jumped. Almost out of their skins.
"Apologize at once, Tyber! You've offended our spirit!"
Tyber gave her a patient look. "Baby, just because this man was murdered doesn't automatically mean he's a card-carrying member of the haunting set."
A picture fell off the wall, slamming onto a sideboard. It knocked off several knickknacks while raising a cloud of dust.
"Just do it!" Zanita hissed.
"Fine. But I still think it was caused by the sudden vibrations of our footsteps, as well as our intrusion in a rat-infested area that has been undisturbed for a long, long time."
She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped her foot.
He faced the skeleton and swept him another bow. "Merville, I apologize." As he straightened up, his flashlight swept the right edge of the table top. Something was there. Tyber walked over to get a better look.
"Be careful," Zanita cautioned in a little voice. Skeletons in smoking jackets did not inspire a warm fuzzy feeling as far as she was concerned.
"I will, baby." Tyber thought the warning was rather sweet.
He trained the light over the spot. The dying man had tried to write a word in the once polished surface of the desk. Undisturbed all these years, it was still perfectly legible. As he was dying, Merville had penned the word Dam.
Tyber thought it was an apt evaluation of the man's situation. He pointed it out to Zanita.
"Do you think he was cursing his murderer with his last breath?" she asked.
"Looks that way."
"He left the N off."
"I don't think he was worried about spelling at the time, sweetheart."
She shivered. "If he was cursing someone with his last breath, no wonder he haunts the place."
"Too bad he never got to tell us his murderers name. Would have made this a whole lot easier."
"Hey, what's this here?" Zanita gingerly peered over the skeleton's shoulder. There was a faded piece of paper on the table in front of him. Next to it was a small lock box. Merville must have taken the paper out of the box and laid it on the table to look at it. "I wonder if he took the paper out before or after the poison hit him."
"I don't know, but the answer to that will be crucial. Whatever is on that paper was important enough to him that he kept it under lock and key." He pointed to the key next to the open box.
Zanita examined the yellowed piece of paper. A series of numbers were scrawled across the top. "52329625 223105 2225 52351910186235," she read out loud. More numbers followed in a scroll pattern down the page.
Tyber looked over her shoulder. "Well, what do you know?"
"Is it the combination to some kind of safe, do you think?"
"Nope. It's a code."
"A code? Of what?"
"That is what I am going to find out." He very carefully lifted the ragged sheet of paper, hoping it wouldn't fall apart. It held together.
"This should give us some answers, I think."
Zanita nodded. "Poor Todd. What do we tell him?"
"Nothing for now."
"What?" She turned and gazed up at him. "We have to let him know about his grandfather. And we should call in the police; there was a murder here. There's no statute of limitations on murder."
"Baby, we need to keep this to ourselves until we figure out what happened here. Once everyone knows about the murder, our advantage will be lost. Merville's waited this long for justice; he can wait a little while longer."
She nodded, seeing the logic in that. "Does that mean we have to leave by dumbwaiter as well?"
He winced, rolling his sore shoulder muscles. "I'm afraid so."
They walked back into the bedroom, both glad to be out of eyeshot of that macabre skeleton. It reminded Zanita of that spooky Disney ride through the haunted house where all the ghosts were seen stationary in one place, then suddenly began to cavort about. Only Disney was fantasy and this was real. She shivered.
Tyber's hand rested on her shoulder. "He can't hurt you, baby. I'd never allow it."
Zanita smiled up at him, patting his hand on her shoulder.
As they made their way to the dumbwaiter, Tyber noticed a painting on the sitting-room floor, its front facing the wall. It was obvious by the faded wallpaper above it that someone had taken the picture down and turned it away from sight.
Which meant that it was a clue.
He knelt down in front of the canvas backing. "Wonder who or what it is?"
"In this house it could be anything." She hugged herself, warding off a sudden chill.
"Wanna take bets it's the femme fatale Winnie?" He winked at her.
Somehow the name "Winnie" and "femme fatale" seemed a contradiction in terms. Zanita giggled. "I say it's himself."
"Then why turn it around to face the wall? Bad hair day?"
"Uh-uh. Whoever did him in didn't want the portrait watching as the dark deed was done."
Tyber rubbed his jaw. "Bet?"
"Okay." Zanita toed the old carpet. "If I win, you willingly go on the next investigation with me."
He winced. "Ouch. That's steep."
She almost pushed him over with her foot but he grabbed it in time.
"All right," he conceded. "But if I'm right, you take belly dancing lessons."
Zanita blinked. "Belly dancing lessons?" Where had that come from?
A truly wicked smile inched across his sensual face. "Ahuh."
She raised an eyebrow. "I see Merville is not the only one with secret fantasies."
He blew her a kiss.
"Okay, you're on, but no feathers."
He laughed out loud. A rich sound of enjoyment. "Agreed; no feathers." He gave her a calculating glance out of the corner of his eye. "That'll be the next bet," he murmured to himself.
"What did you say?"
"I said, 'it's a good bet.'"
She didn't believe that for a minute. Not from this pirate.
They both were horrified when Tyber turned the picture around.
And not because one of them had won the bet.
There, painted in deep, lustrous color, was an enormously fat black cat. A pink tongue lolled from its mouth. It was the exact image of Hippolito.
Zanita gasped. "It couldn't be."
Tyber's brow furrowed. "How many cats could look like that?"
She glanced at the bottom right corner of the work. The painting was titled, signed, and dated by the artist: Merville's Folly, Winifred, 1964. "So Winnie painted this. I wonder why it was taken down from the wall and turned over."