The Gallery of the Dead (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 3) (11 page)

“You’re here to watch the shoot?” I asked.

“Oh, could I?”

“I’m sorry, but –“

“I already know Teddy,” she said in a rush.

“You do?” Misty said. “Oh, I get it. Cleaning his room one time and having him smile at you doesn’t mean you know him, Jane. He didn’t even remember to give you a tip.”

“I don’t mean that. I met him before, when he was filming
The Realm of the Shadows
in Denver. He gave me an autograph, and he was so nice! He treated me and my friends to hot dogs and everything. We all talked for a long time, and I know he’ll remember me.”

“Jane, dear, he’s a celebrity,” Misty said. “A chance meeting and a hot dog doesn’t mean you know him, and I’m sure he won’t want a lot of extra people in the way while he’s working.”

“Oh,
please!
I won’t get in the way, I promise! I’ll just stay inside the doorway of The Henriette and watch from across the gallery.”

“How do you know where we’re filming?” I asked.

“Oh, everybody knows! They’ve been talking about it all day.
Please
can I come, Miz Misty?”

“Well, we’ll have to ask Teddy, but I doubt it. There’s barely going to be room for me.”

“You?” I said sharply.

“Me,” she said very calmly. “I own this house. I invited you here. I want to see what you’re doing. I’m going to stay out of the way, just inside The Henriette.”

Amateurs were a distraction on a shoot, but as I believed in my heart that the real visitation by Cassandra had already taken place (and not where Teddy insisted on shooting), it hardly mattered.

“I suppose Paul is coming too?” I asked, not actually caring.

Misty laughed. “No, he’s out having a beer with some of your boys, and then he’s going straight over to Flagler Beach to watch mixed martial arts on TV with his buddies. It’s cute, the way he’s handling all this. He wants to act like he’s bored with them, but he can’t help being a little bit star-struck. I think that’s why he suggested the ghost show in the first place. He said it would help the business, as long as we’re haunted anyway, but he’s just as curious about celebrities as the rest of us are. Still, he tries to act like Mr. Cool. Kids!”

Paul was hardly a kid, but since she was his mother, I let it pass. But I thought I knew exactly what had happened when mother and son had discussed ways to stir up business and come up with the ghost idea. It was one of those things that had seemed like a good idea at the time. Then Paul had had to clean the rooms by himself and put up with Teddy, who treated him like a servant, and now he just wanted us to finish up and get out.

I shook my head, thinking of the customer base they were likely to get with this particular promotion. If Paul was tired of the ghost biz already, he was going to be out of his mind when the paranormal groupies started showing up and wandering around the house all night talking to the walls. Still, it had apparently been his idea. I didn’t see Misty as a creative thinker. Her end of the deal had probably been getting close to Teddy Force and his hypnotic eyes for a while. I was feeling very used at that point, but I had to admit, it was a mutual-user party, and everybody but me had known that from the beginning.

Transcribed from the dictation of Teddy Force

We saddled up at nine. Elliott and Jinx still weren’t back from their pub crawl, but I had called Elliott’s cell phone and told them exactly where I wanted their asses in precisely five minutes, and they were on the way.

The new jumpsuits were pretty hot, and as Lily watched me getting into mine, I could see the woman in her getting excited.

I’d been working the upper body, and when I buttoned the jumpsuit and took a look, there was a nice, sharp V from my shoulders to my waist. The lace-up boots are a pain in a warm climate, but the look wouldn’t be the same without them. I had thought about telling Misty to crank the air for the shoot, but then I decided against it. Seeing me get a little salty turns the girl-fans on.

For the first time I began to have doubts about the title we gave the show. I just threw it out there at a meeting with the backers, and
Haunt or Hoax?
seemed like a good idea at the time. But the question mark, which I figured we could use to express that extra element of mystery, just looked indecisive in the logo. Cartoonish. It was too thick and swirly, like it was made out of balloons. I made a note: redesign the logo to a simple H-o-H config of some kind. Ditch the question mark. We’re assertive. We’re decisive. We don’t do question marks. We do exclamation points.

I combed my hair back and stood still while Lily worked around my body, getting me wired for sound. She was breathing harder than she needed to by the time she was done, and I had to smile. Then she stood up and said, “I’ll never go to the beach without wearing sunblock again. Damn! I really got burned.”

She wasn’t fooling me. I touched her lips with a teasing little kiss and promised her something special after the shoot.

“You are not touching me after the shoot, or anytime soon, until my sunburn heals,” she said, pulling the shoulders of my jumpsuit even.

“We’ll see.”

“I’m serious, Teddy. It hurts!”

“Oh, yeah, babe,” I said in a low-down dirty voice. “I love it when you talk like that.”

She looked at me that way she does. “Grow up, Teddy.”

I would’ve loved to keep up the foreplay with her, but I heard the rest of the team getting ready in the gallery. You never leave the minions alone for too long. They go off in all the wrong directions, and when I heard Ed piping up about something, I decided it was time to stop playing with the kitten and get serious.

“Later, babe,” I told her, striding out of the room.

She followed me, muttering, “You are such a
jerk
sometimes.”

“Are we all here?” I said, counting heads and coming up with too many. “Misty, I’m sorry, but –“

“This is my house,” she said firmly.

“Yeah, you said that before, but –“

“This is my house, and I’m going to watch the show.”

These repressed types can be like mules. They’re not too bright, and you can’t appeal to logic or a sense of fair play. They just want what they want when they want it.

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Just stay out of the way. And who’s this?”

There was another one, same type as Misty but younger, and dressed like something that usually sleeps on a park bench.

“Hi, Teddy,” she gushed. “Remember me?”

“No.”

“Oh, sure you do,” she giggled. “I cleaned your room yesterday. I’m Jane. You bought me a hot dog in Denver.”

“Uh huh. Lily, will you give her an autographed picture and show her out.” I needed to get my head into battle mode, and they were messing with my attitude.

“No, Teddy, I want to stay.
Pleeease?
I’ll stay out of the way, I promise.”

“This is my house –“

“Oh,
fine
, just keep her out of our way, or you both have to go. I mean it, Misty. We can’t conduct a serious investigation with a bunch of groupies hanging around. Hey, Elliott, get over here,” I said, getting down to business.

When I noticed the fan club following me around the gallery, I turned and gave them a look, and they skittered away into an empty bedroom. No need to get nasty. One look and they get it.

Wyatt signaled to me, saying, “I need to kill the house lights and see how my mix is going to work.” He was setting up what he calls his “moonglow” light mix, and wanted to see the effect in the gallery. It’s something special, gentle and bluish. It smoothes out shadows and wrinkles and gives our eyes an eerie luminescence. I love it, but in a place with too many light-colored walls, it can bleach everything out.

As soon as the lights went down, Porter came scrambling up the stairs in the dark with a girl trying her best to hold onto the leash.

“Thanks for bringing him,” I told the handler. “Is that everybody? Where the hell is Carmilla?”

Ed was helping Angie (her name came back to me at last; I had met her the year before, and I have a pretty good memory for names), and I could hear him muddling around introducing Lily as my fiancé and assistant, which was completely inappropriate. We were working. When we were shooting, Lily was my assistant, nothing more. The personal stuff happens during play time, and I like to keep a nice, sharp line. It’s the kind of thing Ed just doesn’t get and never will. I scowled at him, and caught the dog handler giving me a dirty look, why I couldn’t imagine.

“Where’s Carmilla?” I said again, making it a direct question to Ed, but it was Lily who answered.

“When I gave her our shooting schedule she made some crack about being a professional and not needing a pep talk. She’s in her room, sleeping. Don’t worry. She’ll be out before we begin.”

“Go get her,” I said. “We don’t have any prima donnas here.”

“Oh, no, Teddy,” she said. “I wasn’t hired to tangle with vampires.”

I took a moment to believe this was happening. Then I said, “What’s wrong with you? Are you mad at me or something?”

She gave me the look. I had no idea why. Then she walked away and started talking to Elliott about something.

I would straighten her out later. Being my fiancé did not give her the right to talk to me like that in front of the crew. Next, I turned to Ed. “Go over there and knock on Carmilla’s door.”

“You’re closer. Knock on it yourself.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “What’s the matter, are you afraid of her?” I meant to challenge the man in him.

“Yes.”

So much for the man in him.

“Will
somebody
go wake up Carmilla?”

“We don’t need her yet anyway,” Jinx said, shuffling his feet.

“Are you
all
afraid of her?” I asked incredulously.

“Aren’t you?” It was Ed.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m not afraid of any woman.”

I glared at Ed, then looked at the closed door to Carmilla’s room. At this point it had become a power thing. I was just about as likely to go meekly knock on that door as I was to take a flying leap across the gallery.

“Oh, Teddy, let me!” Groupie #2 said, hippity-hopping down the hall. “I’ll get her for you.”

“Jane, you stay here,” Misty said, pulling her back. “
I’ll
go get Carmilla for Teddy.”

This was too much. I could see my carefully crafted show imploding before we could even get started. I glanced at Wyatt to make sure he wasn’t filming; all I needed was to get on-line someday and see
this
being passed around the internet. He held up his empty hands.

“Don’t look at me, boss,” he said, lounging against the wall by his equipment. “I know when to hit the Record button, and this ain’t it.”

The groupies were still on the move, and I went down the other side of the gallery to cut them off. At the same time, the idiot who was handling Porter let him get away from her. He immediately went after my boots, gargling and chomping.

“Porter!” she yelled, throwing herself on the dog and getting tangled up in my feet right along with him. She pulled with everything that she had, but she wasn’t strong enough to control him. By then Porter thought it was a game and he kept lunging until he finally managed to get his teeth into my bootlaces and we all went down.

“Oh, Teddy, are you all right?” the Jane person asked.

Nobody – not one single warm body – from my own crew was trying to help.

Meanwhile, Porter had managed to get his tongue into my mouth, and I started retching and spitting while Angie wiggled all over me trying to get at the dog. I tried to shove her off, and she caught me in the head with an elbow.

“Oh, here, let me help you,” Jane said, coming at me like she was going to jump onto the pile.

I lost it.

“Get the hell out of here, you stupid broad!”

Jane reared back, cannoning into Misty, and both of them stared at me like I’d turned into a werewolf.

“Teddy, that wasn’t very nice,” Misty said.

“
Will you both get the hell out of here?
” I yelled, finally losing it. “And you –“ I said, pointing at Jane, “I don’t care if I did buy you a hot dog – I probably just felt sorry for you because you looked so pathetic. Get out of my sight – you’re making my eyeballs hurt. If I have to keep looking at you, I’m going to go blind.”

She stared at me, and her forgettable face changed into a mask of fury. When it hit me, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured it out before.

This was my stalker. I knew it. It all made sense. She’d wormed her way into the bed-and-breakfast just so she could get close to me, and now she was looking at me with the face of pure evil. The moment our eyes connected I could see that she knew I’d figured it out. She lunged for me. The damn dog was still out of control, and the idiot from the shelter was only making things worse. In the surreal atmosphere of the moonglow light mix, I saw Jane coming at me with a knife in her fist.

I was helpless on the floor, paralyzed not by fear but by the damn dog. The knife in her hand was small but thick, the kind you use to skin an apple, and in that half-second I could see light flashing along its sharpened edge. I realized that nobody but me could see it and I started screaming.

It was Misty who stepped in to defend me.

“Jane – STOP!” she cried, grabbing her from behind.

Jane turned on her and the two women struggled against the gallery railing as the rest of us watched, horrified.

Jane had Misty pinned with her back arching over the railing. Finally my crew began to move, but it was too late. Most of them ran around the long way to avoid the blockade Porter and I were making on the floor, and the one who came the shorter way (I think it was Wyatt) fell over us.

I could tell the moment Misty lost the battle. It seemed to happen in slow motion, but it was only a fraction of a second in real time. She had those damn high heels on, the ones she’d bought to impress me, and against that low railing, she was off-balance. She tipped, she tilted, Jane punched her in the neck with the knife, and Misty went over and down.

Stupefied, we recoiled as the murdering maniac made a terrific leap over me and Porter, toppled the moonglow lights, tripped over the power cord, plunged us into darkness, and disappeared in the dark.

Thoroughly disoriented and unable to hear anything over Porter’s barking, we panicked. By the time the lights came on again, Jane was gone.

Somehow, Wyatt got the light back on, but it was aimed at the floor. It was a nightmare tableau of under-lit faces and struggling bodies and Porter lunging at anybody who came near me. Somebody managed to get the flashlight app going on his phone and started sweeping it around the gallery, giving split-second glimpses of bodies in motion inside looming shadows.

I finally got untangled from the dog and rolled away. Angie braced herself against the wall holding the leash and looking shell-shocked.

I yelled at somebody – anybody – to go after Jane while I pounded down the stairs to see if Misty had survived. When I lifted her limp figure into my arms, I saw in the confusion of moving flashlights that there was a dark puddle on the foyer’s marble floor. My hand, beneath her neck, was warm and wet.

When I pulled her up, I could see where she had been stabbed. The blood had stopped pulsing, and I knew she was dead.

Suddenly Ed was beside me, dazed and staring.

“Is she dead?” he asked.

“She meant to kill me,” I said, still unable to take it in. “She brought a knife. She wasn’t an innocent fan who just wanted to watch us film the show. She came to kill me, and Misty got in the way. Misty gave her life to save mine.
Now
will you believe I have a stalker?”