The Gallery of the Dead (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 3) (14 page)

“I didn’t know Taylor had a cat. Who cares, anyway?”

I didn’t have time just then to extrapolate, though. I was losing Teddy. His attention, always tenuous, had wandered off over the river, and I disciplined myself to compartmentalize the cat/goddess theory and get whatever else I could out of him before he brooded himself into a soggy heap.

“Did Misty tell you anything else, at any time?” I asked. “Lily mentioned at the production meeting that Misty had talked about the haunting when you took her out for dinner. I know you’re not as meticulous about record-keeping as I am, but can you remember what she said?”

“We’re done with The Royal Palm.”

“I know. Humor me, Teddy.”

“Oh, all right. Let’s see. She said the ghost walked at night. Like our girl Carmilla,” he added with a silly cackle.

“Carmilla wasn’t there yet.”

“I know that. Misty said she’d been awakened during the night, gone out to the gallery, felt a presence reaching for her and she was genuinely freaked out about it.”

“Did she say exactly what kind of a presence she felt was there? The father or the daughter?”

He thought about it. “A woman. Definitely a woman.”

“A young woman?”

“Naturally. Cassandra was young.”

“Right. Cassandra was young, but this presence – did she say it was Cassandra?”

“No. But who else could it have been? What are you getting at, Ed?”

I was getting excited, though I tried not to show it. “I think we’re onto something at the B&B, Teddy. Remember when you asked me to check the EMF meter and I was getting a reading in the gallery?”

“Ye-es.”

“I was standing over The Violet Room at the time. According to what Misty said to Bernie while she was giving her the grand tour, that room once belonged to an elderly relative of the Allen family.”

Teddy had held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Edson,” he said in a tired voice, “when you’ve been in the entertainment business as long as I have, you’ll develop a nose for a good story, and wandering old ladies have got nothing on suicides that are coming up on their hundredth anniversary. Where are your storytelling instincts?”

“I’m not interested in telling stories. I want to investigate and report on facts. ‘The entertainment business?’ Is that how you see what we’re doing?”

“That
is
what we’re doing. Wake up, Ed. We may be trying to achieve something with our show, but first we have to play the game. TV shows only exist so they can get people to sit still in front of their TVs long enough for the sponsors to sell them something. The show itself is just window dressing. We may have a higher purpose, you and I,” he said, putting an arm around me, “but in order to get people to sit down and watch – to be educated on the paranormal – we have to keep them entertained, or they won’t watch. See what I mean?”

He was right, of course, but I recoiled at the idea. “I don’t think I’m a good candidate for the entertainment business.”

“There’s that word again: ‘business.’ Here’s another one: ‘contract.’ I hate to keep bringing it up, so I won’t. You haven’t forgotten it, right, little buddy? I’m sorry if I’ve disillusioned you, and don’t go around quoting me, but stop spinning your wheels about The Royal Palm. We’re done there. We need to come up with something else.”

I stared at him until he dropped his arm from my shoulders. “You really don’t have a project that we can work on here at Cadbury House, do you, Teddy? You’re just hiding out from Jane.”

It was hard for him to admit it, but he finally did. He gestured vaguely at the house. “It’s that kind of a place. I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”

“Teddy, Teddy, Teddy. We’re trying to convince the producers that we’ve got a good concept, and our first few shows need to be blockbusters. We can’t wander around hoping something will happen. We need a
story
.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” he said snippily.

I felt that I was seeing beneath Teddy’s bravado for the first time. He was scared – for his show and for his life. And the man who was used to pulling rabbits out of hats with the greatest of ease was suddenly out of ideas. I clapped him kindly on the shoulder.

“Buck up, Teddy. I’ll come up with something. Taylor’s got a mystery dinner tonight so we can’t shoot anyway.”

“I know. I thought her customers might enjoy having us at the table with them, talking about the show, but Taylor says there’s not enough food to go around and we’d be too much of a distraction. Her volunteers might get thrown and forget their spiels or something. I think she’s got something against us, I can’t think what. Even my idea about letting her use Carmilla didn’t fly.”

“What was your idea about Carmilla?”

“I thought it’d be fun to send her over to the cemetery and have her just come slowly out of the fog, but Taylor said she just wants to give the customers a little thrill, not a massive coronary. So we’re out of it. She wants us to stay out of sight in the library upstairs. She’s ordering pizza for us,” he added in an aggrieved voice.

“Well, I won’t be staying for pizza. I’m going to go home and research possible anomalies for us to investigate on the show.”

“You’re going home?”

“I’m going home.”

“Because we are done at The Royal Palm. Forget about going back to Tropical Breeze.”

“I realize that it’s no longer possible to do a show there. I get it. I’m going home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“All right, Ed, but keep your cell phone turned on. I may want to call you.”

“Right.”

I was definitely going home. Right after I did some more research in Tropical Breeze on The Royal Palm.

As I drove away, I had the feeling of invisible chains falling away from me. I don’t know why, but I felt liberated, leaving Teddy behind me, dead in the water (so to speak), while I went forward with my own project. As I drove, I played the recordings of two of my interviews: the one of Bernie’s report about her chat with Misty, and the one I had made while I talked to Jasper at sunset. I even let it play through the parts where he was singing, and I was touched all over again at the change in his voice after the sun had set.

Yes, there was something there that I had dismissed. Since I was driving by his little bungalow anyway, I pulled over at Jasper’s place.

From the Journal of Edson Darby-Deaver

I knocked on his door, but there was no answer. I didn’t know if the man had a car, but I did know he had a second home: the beach. I walked across A1A much more carefully than I had when I’d followed him across the first time, and took the walkover all the way over the dune to the beach.

It was not the kind of day that you advertise in brochures. The fogbank lay offshore and was creeping inland again. I thought about the atmosphere the fog would create for Taylor’s mystery dinner that night and smiled, but for beachgoers, it wasn’t so nice.

Between A1A and the beach itself, a distance of about a city block, the temperature dropped almost ten degrees. The fog had thickened around me so that it seemed to contain me. I couldn’t see another soul, and the gray ocean was menacing. Out of such a fog, from this very ocean, sea monsters had once lifted their heads, streaming with water, and gazed at the land with yellow eyes. Perhaps their progeny were still out there.

The wind from the northwest was clammy, and I had almost made up my mind that even Jasper wouldn’t be on the beach that afternoon when he came out of the fog like a wandering gnome.

“You got any new songs for me?” he called. I was happy to see that he was without his guitar.

“No, I’m still singing the same old song,” I quipped.

He had a small, hysterical eruption that I interpreted as laughter. By that time he had reached me, saying, “It’s no day for a walk on the beach. Sit yourself down over there.”

He was pointing to the stairs coming down from the walkover, and I went with him and we sat on the third stair.

This man might be crazy, but this time around I was forewarned: he was also crafty. I started recording the interview immediately.

“Well, what’re we after today?” he asked.

“The walking lady.”

His squinty eyes opened wide for a moment, then he softly chuckled. “I wondered how long it was going to take you to catch on. Thought maybe you never would. So you figured it out after all.”

“I think so. The Royal Palm is haunted, just not by the Whitbys. There’s somebody else. Just what did the walking lady die of – do you know?”

He shrugged. “She was all wore out, that’s all. Tired and confused. You ghost guys think some people get to haunting because they don’t know they’re dead. I think we got one of those over at the Whitby House.”

“When did this start?”

“Are you dense? After she died! They found her dead in her bed one morning, peaceful and sweet, and then she got herself up and walked the house anyway, just left her body behind in the bed.”

“When was that?”

“About ten years ago. After the old lady died, the Allen family stopped coming. They don’t know, I guess. They kept me on as caretaker, and I’m probably the only one who does know about her. Now you do too. And maybe that Misty woman run across her, but she would’ve just got it all muddled up with the Whitbys. Anyway, the Allens kept coming long after the girls was grown, because the old lady liked it here. She wasn’t always cold, like she was up north, and she liked the house. They gave her her own room, you know. Made it up just for her.”

“What was her name?”

“Violet.”

“The Violet Room.”

“Yup. It’s always been done up in purple colors since the Allens owned it. The new lady just put a new rug in, that’s all. She’s dead now, too. Murdered. Maybe she’s walking too by now. Side by side with old Violet. You think of that?”

I wiped the mist from my glasses. “One ghost at a time, Jasper.”

“Complicated situation, huh? You was there when it happened.”

“I was.”

“Over she went, just like Cassie.”

“No,” I said firmly, “not like Cassie. Cassandra threw herself over. Misty was pushed. She was murdered.”

He looked at me steadily, with the only sane expression I’d seen on his face so far. “You gonna get her? The one that done it?”

“Yes,” I said confidently. “I know all about it. I just have to prove it.”

“And find her? ‘Cause the police haven’t.”

“I’ll find her. I know how. But that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about. Tell me about Violet.”

He shrugged. “Nothing to tell. We all come to it, if we’re lucky enough to live that long. The people that matter to you fall away, one by one. Then you want your old friends back, and maybe you don’t want the new friends so much. So you turn in on yourself and you get lost in the memories, and you pull yourself out of today and wander around in yesterday. We start walking in another place, and when the change comes, we just keep on walking. That’s what you ghost hunters think, anyway, isn’t it?”

“I think you put it rather well. That’s exactly what we think. So Violet suffered from dementia at the end?”

“I don’t know if you’d call it demented. Seems to me it’s perfectly sane, spending your time in a better place than the one you’re in, talking to the people you love, even if they’re not there anymore. You seen Violet yourself?”

“No. Have you?”

“I have.” He was silent for a while, staring blindly into the fog. Thick patches of it were drifting in the air, sometimes obscuring the ocean altogether, and wrapping us in an eerie quiet. “There’s no harm in her,” he said with an involuntary shiver. “She don’t mean no harm.”

“But it’s a little scary anyway, isn’t it?”

He didn’t speak for a moment; he just nodded. Then he said, “What’s natural for her isn’t natural for me, I guess. She didn’t come to you?”

“Ghosts never do.”

“You try too hard.”

“Perhaps, but I do think I have documented proof of her presence. I was standing over her room when she registered on my EMF meter.”

“You got a ghost meter?”

I assembled the usual mini-lecture on the EMF, but stopped myself from going into it. I didn’t know what I had. We postulate that a living presence, with or without a physical body, registers an energy field – a life force, if you will – but it’s postulation only.
Something
registered on my meter. That was all I knew.

In answer to Jasper I just shrugged.

He nodded. “Keep that in mind.”

“Keep what in mind?”

“You’re not as smart as you think you are.”

Again I had to stop myself. I have two college degrees, various certificates from study courses, and have given many seminars and written many books. And I still don’t know exactly what I know.

I was saved from having to give him an answer by the sight of eight riders on horses coming silently out of the fog and walking along the edge of the ocean. Through the cold mist, they looked like migrants from another time, breaching our world for only a moment. Even in riding helmets and boots, they were anachronistic. The manes and tails of the horses were limp with the damp, and they looked ahead of themselves without curiosity, stepping quietly along and nodding their heads.

I watched a light-colored one melt into the fog ahead of the others. One by one they walked away into that other world. I looked back at Jasper. The mist had crept up on us, and I could see cold droplets in the air between us. I shivered.

“Did you bring her with you?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Miss Green and Lovely.”

I blinked. Then I said, “Oh, you mean my car.”

“She got a name?”

I hesitated. I’d never told anybody my silly name for my car. It had been just between me and her. But for some reason I went ahead and told him, “It’s Petronella.”

He nodded solemnly. “Good name. I like ‘er.”

“Thank you. I like your name for her too. Miss Green and Lovely. Very appropriate.”

“Watch it, boy,” he said, looking away. “If you keep on like that, I might just get to like you.”

I was careful not to smile. “Wouldn’t that be awful?”

He looked straight ahead. “Turrible.”

I went into town and talked to Bernie after that, and she confirmed what she’d told me before. I suppose I didn’t really need to stop at her house, but I like to see her. It was Saturday, which was her day off.
The Beach Buzz
comes out on Friday, and for a day or so she doesn’t have a deadline staring her in the face.

I took her over to Don’s Diner and I told her my theory about Misty’s murder. She paid close attention, and in the end she agreed with me: Teddy was still in danger.

The diner was moderately busy. It’s never really empty, even in mid-afternoon when lunch is over and dinner hasn’t begun.

She ordered a tuna sandwich on toast from the senior menu, and I got my usual chicken noodle soup and garden salad. Bernie ate my crackers.

While she was mulling over my theory, we were suddenly joined by a lovely, fifty-something woman in a tight-fitting white dress.

“Hey, y’all, mind if I join you?” she said. “I got about twenty minutes to eat and then I gotta fly. Open house beachside at 3:00.”

“Of course not. Nice to see you, Rocky,” I said, thinking it was a stroke of luck. She was on my list of people to see.

Rocky Sanders is a real estate agent, red-haired, blue-eyed and hyperactive. I happen to know her twin sisters, who have a housekeeping business. They “do” the gated block of houses I live in on the beach in St. Augustine, and are a 2-headed vortex of gossip, but Rocky’s all right. She doesn’t make me nervous, even though she’s about my age, eligible, and beautiful. I’m not her type.

More to the point, she was Misty McBain’s real estate agent in her purchase of the Whitby House.

Rocky ate at the diner every day, (her office was right next door), so she managed to place her order from across the room by nodding at DeAnn, the waitress.

While DeAnn went to the kitchen pass and yelled “Order in!” Rocky leaned across the table and said, “What
happened?
”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said formally. “I know Misty was a client of yours. My condolences.”

She nodded impatiently. “Thanks. I liked her. How did she manage to fall from the gallery? She wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she was together enough to keep herself from falling over a railing.”

“She didn’t fall,” I said. “She was pushed.”

I gave her what details I decently could, holding back my suspicions. I’d already revealed them to Taylor and Bernie, and that was enough. Knowledge, in this case, was dangerous.

Once she had her chef’s salad and was busy eating, I was able to get in a few questions of my own. I set my recorder on the table, but Rocky was used to me by then, and only grinned at Bernie knowingly.

I began subtly. “Did Misty look at many properties before she settled on the Whitby House?”

Rocky made a little circle in the air with her fork. “A few. She told me up-front that she was planning on opening a B&B, and most of the properties around here are either rental condos or single-family homes. Not many mansions around, and she wanted to stay in the Flagler Beach-Tropical Breeze area. I did get the idea she was especially interested in the Whitby House all along, though. It had been up for sale for a while, but the asking price was a little rich for her. Well over a million. I think that’s the only reason it took her so long to make up her mind. She finally went ahead and took the plunge, thinking the business would pay for itself.”

“Did she mention having been in the house before you took her there?”

“Yes. She’d been there for parties or something when she was a little girl.”

“And she knew the legend of the suicides?”

“Everybody does. She said that didn’t bother her. In fact, she said she hoped it was haunted, because she wasn’t afraid of ghosts.”

“She said that?”

Rocky nodded, chewing.

“Did she mention getting the creeps while you were in the gallery?”

“You know, as a matter of fact, she did,” Rocky said, pausing her meal for a moment. “I’d forgotten about that. But it wasn’t in the gallery. It was in the back bedroom, the purple one.”

“The Violet Room?” Bernie asked. We exchanged glances.

“That’s the one. Everybody knows the Whitby suicides happened in the gallery, but she didn’t say anything while we were up there. She was just looking around and making the kind of comments you’d expect from somebody thinking about renting the rooms – mostly about how she could work in extra bathrooms.”

“What did Paul think of the house?”

She gave me a sly look. “Why don’t you just come out and ask, Edson? No, Paul wasn’t there. And he wasn’t at the closing, either. Every day, Misty said she hoped he’d come and help her, real doubtful-like, like she knew she couldn’t handle the business alone. So I was happy for her when he did show up, but I figured if he’d been around while she was house shopping, he would have stopped her from buying that one. Word is he doesn’t like the place. I’m gonna get chummy with him, in case he needs a real estate agent soon.” Checking herself, she added, “I guess he’s going to like it even less now.”

“Yes.”