The Gallery of the Dead (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 3) (19 page)

Florence made a forlorn little noise, knowing she’d be left behind.

“We can’t,” I said. “I was just there.”

“So you’re going back.”

“The Diner’s quiet now. Let’s go there instead.”

Her green cat’s eyes narrowed, and she tauntingly said, “Why don’t you want to go to Perks, Ed?”

“Because she’s there,” I said, breaking under the strain. “She’s calling herself Whitney.”

Taylor backed up and stared at me. “Did you give yourself away? Does she know you recognized her?”

“Absolutely not. It was a tuna sandwich and I didn’t even care. I cut it short, checked out without looking her in the eye and made a point of staring at every other female in the room after that, but not at her.”

“You acted suspiciously,” she accused.

I remembered my ego-crushing moment and said, “I don’t think so. God, I hope not. If she takes off, we’ll never find her again.”

“And she may actually kill Teddy.”

“Don’t say that! Don’t even think that!”

Florence was crossing herself.

The way Taylor was staring at me made my legs feel like jelly. My confidence was slipping away, and I tried quickly to grasp the threads of my plan and knit them back together.

“What are we going to do now?” Florence asked.

Taylor and I both turned to her and said, “You stay out of it!”

“And stay out of Perks,” Taylor added.

“You think I’m too old –“ she began.

“Oh, stop,” I said. “Bernie already tried that. It didn’t work for her either. You’re staying out of it because we’re got enough players on the team already. Too many! And I do have a plan. Taylor, are you still in? Or have you lost confidence in me altogether?”

“Of course I have confidence in you, Ed, but we’re playing a game of life or death here, and we can’t fail, that’s all. What are you going to do?”

“Unfortunately, we need Bernie,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because she can get Sheriff Longley to come. We’re going to need him. When he hears my theory, he might be just a little bit skeptical, but if Bernie tells him to come, he will.”

“I get it. I get it,” said Taylor, nodding her head. “When do we move?”

“Let’s do it right after Whitney’s shift at Perks. If I made her suspicious, she still has to touch base before she takes off again, and we’ll grab her then. I’m going to call Ronnie and ask her when Whitney’s shift is over.”

“
I’ll
do it,” Taylor said, whipping out her cell phone. “You’ve been subtle enough for one day. We need to get the information without Whitney catching on, and without having to explain everything to Ronnie.”

I listened to one side of the conversation, admiring Taylor’s deviousness. Finally, she hung up and looked at me.

“Three o’clock. It’ll only take her five minutes to get back where she stashed her things. Then she might take off. We’ve got to move fast.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll call ahead to Bernie and tell her to get the Sheriff moving.”

Adding five minutes for her to walk home, we were at zero minus 97 minutes. And we had a lot to do in that 97 minutes.

From the Journal of Edson Darby-Deaver

Sheriff Kyle Longley stood in the living room of Bernie Horning’s house and stared at us. We stared back. Nobody was sitting down, not even Bernie.

“Are you absolutely sure about all this?” he asked me.

“We-ell – pretty sure,” I said.

“Of course we are,” Bernie and Taylor both said.

Kyle looked around at all of us doubtfully. “Well, if what you think is true, they’re going to come out fighting.”

“Not him,” I said. “He’s not a fighter. But you’re going to have your hands full with her.”

Just to confirm our theory, Kyle decided to watch as Whitney left Perks and see where she went.

“If she goes back to a motel or a girlfriend’s house or whatever, I’m calling the whole thing off,” he said, staring at me.

“She won’t,” I told him.

Because Bernie had sounded out of breath when she’d called him, he’d rushed over in his street clothes. Now he was glad he had; he wouldn’t have had a hope of discreetly following Whitney in his uniform.

We waited at Bernie’s house, getting on one another’s nerves and watching the second hand of her mantle clock.

At last a text came through on Bernie’s phone: “At TRP. She had a key. Holding our positions. Come.”

“She’s at The Royal Palm,” Bernie said triumphantly, after reading the text to us. “Ed, you were right. Let’s go.”

Kyle met us before we turned the last corner, out of sight of The Royal Palm, and asked, “How many other exits are there?”

“Well, there are French doors to the garden from The Violet Room,” Bernie said. “That’s on the west side, toward the middle.”

“We’ll find it. Any place else?”

“I haven’t been in all the downstairs rooms, but there’s no exit from the kitchen except into the apartment where Misty and Paul were living, at the back of the house. I assume that’s where they’re living now. It may have its own exit.”

“He said he was moving into The Ephraim,” I said. “That’s upstairs in the northwest corner. We’ll approach cautiously.”

“You’ll stay right here,” Kyle snapped. “I consider her showing up at The Royal Palm an admission of guilt. It’s just too much of a coincidence. You’ll follow us in after we’ve detained them, but only so you can take a good look and identify her for us. Did you get a really good look at her in the coffee shop?”

“I was looking at the tuna sandwich,” I said. “I didn’t want to tip my hand.”

“Yeah. Well, you wait here until somebody comes to get you. Are we clear?”

Taylor and I nodded, and Bernie saluted.

“You behave,” he told her before walking away.

As soon as he was out of sight, I whipped out my cell phone.

“Barnabas? It’s me. It’s over. You can send him down to The Royal Palm now.”

Taylor and Bernie were staring at me. “Jinx?” they asked at the same time.

“Yes.”

“He wasn’t in it with them?” Taylor said.

“No. They tried to frame him. I think he deserves to be here when they go to jail. He may have a few things he’d like to say to them.”

She puffed at me. “You and Barnabas were hiding him. Why?”

Since we had a few minutes, I explained. “I was sleeping on the couch when he tried to sneak out of Cadbury House that night. I knew he was innocent, and if the police caught him, he’d spend quite a while in jail or at least under suspicion until Carmilla resurfaced – if ever. He felt sure he could make it off the grounds without being caught, so I called Barnabas and explained the situation, and he agreed to help. He drove over in the middle of the night and picked Jinx up. Barnabas kept him hidden in his own apartment for a couple of weeks, but after a while Jinx couldn’t stand being cooped up anymore. He started sneaking out. We were afraid he’d get caught. Nobody in town had really seen much of him, but he’d gone to the bars and been friendly with people, so we concocted a disguise and Barnabas pretended he was a new employee.”

“Not much of a disguise. I saw through it the first time I looked at him.”

“But that’s the point, Taylor. You were looking for him. Most people figured he was gone for good.”

“Why didn’t you tell me he was innocent?” she asked, sounding hurt.

“I didn’t think I needed to. I explained my theory to you, remember? I never thought you’d really suspect him.”

Just then a young man in uniform came around the corner and said, “Y’all can come on in now.”

We followed him, and Taylor got close to me and quietly said, “Well, you can explain it all again. I don’t see why Jinx couldn’t have been in on it.”

“They didn’t need him. I thought you understood that.”

“All right, Mr. Darby-Deaver,” Sheriff Longley said with what I could only think was excessive formality. It sounded extremely close to sarcasm. In view of the fact that they had confirmed my theory already, I resented it. “Let’s go through all this once and for all.”

“Happy to,” I said, pushing my glasses up. I wasn’t nervous. The house was just a little warm.

I hadn’t expected to give speeches. I had expected to come in and find Whitney with a Carmilla-like wig on her head, say, “Yes, Officer, that’s her,” and be done with it. But apparently the police have more sophisticated methods these days. Almost any woman with that wig on would look like Carmilla, the sheriff pointed out before going off on things like facial recognition and recordings of Carmilla’s face from her music video gig.

Jinx had arrived on cue, joining us at the door, and the police had allowed him in with us. He was still wearing his disguise, but I think Kyle Longley recognized him. He seemed mildly interested, but decided to wait.

Paul and Whitney and Carmilla and Jane were all sitting on the antique Chesterfield in the living room, but only two people were there: Paul and his wife. At the time I didn’t know what her real name was, but it turned out, in fact, to be Whitney. Carmilla, who had come into The Royal Palm as a stranger, had been Paul McBain’s wife all along.

“Now, Mr. Darby-Deaver,” Kyle Longley said, “why don’t you explain your theory to us.”

I did, succinctly. “They were never trying to kill Teddy,” I said. “They wanted to kill Misty all along.”

I thought that about covered it, but when I didn’t go on, there were protests.

“Edson!” Taylor said finally. “You go ahead and explain the whole thing. Start with Misty buying this house.”

“Oh, all right, if I must.” I took a deep breath and plunged in. “Misty’s husband died, leaving her with an inheritance and insurance money, a tidy little sum, but not a fortune. Before Paul found out what she was doing and could stop her, she had gotten up to her ears in debt buying her dream house. She’d loved this house her entire life, and with a crushing mortgage and an extremely vague business plan, she could just manage to buy it. Knowing his own mother, Paul doubted she’d make a go of it, and he was afraid she’d run herself so deeply into debt there would be nothing to salvage if they waited. Paul and Whitney, here, were down on their luck. Whitney had a good job, but she’d lost it, and Paul wasn’t working at all, or if he was, he wasn’t making much money. So they decided they had two options: convince Misty to sell this house and get herself out of debt so they could get their hands on some of her money, or kill her, so they could inherit everything. They chose the second option.”

“What good job?” Kyle asked. “You said Whitney had a good job. Doing what?”

“Being Carmilla,” I told him. “A late-night video show hostess. It was supposed to be the stepping-stone to better things, but it didn’t pan out that way. After she was fired she did a few parties and special appearances. Teddy had been after her for his reality show, but at the time she hadn’t been interested. But when she found out he was planning to do a show in Tropical Breeze, it gave her an idea.”

“The Haunted Bed and Breakfast,” Taylor said.

“Precisely. Misty had bought an old house with a tragic history. Teddy wanted to hire Carmilla. So Paul convinced his mother to approach Teddy and tell him the B&B was haunted so they could get on the show. But really, it was so Misty could be killed during the confusion of a ghost hunt. Carmilla had no apparent motive to kill Misty, and Paul had a perfect alibi: he was in Flagler Beach watching TV with his friends.”

“I always did think that alibi was convenient,” Bernie said. “It’s the only time he left town at all while he was living with his mother. He was
always
here.”

I managed to stay on point, despite the constant interruptions. “It was essential that Misty demand to be present that night in the gallery, and if she hadn’t thought of it herself, Paul would have encouraged her to. Then all Jane had to do was loiter in the gallery and make sure nobody went into Carmilla’s room and saw that nobody was there. In the event, nobody wanted to go wake up Carmilla; she had intimidated everybody too much. If anybody had approached the room, Jane would have caused a distraction.”

“Why did they come up with Jane in the first place?” Jinx asked. “It meant she had to always cover up the fact that she was one person playing two roles. Why develop another persona?”

I turned to him. “Dressed conspicuously as Carmilla, she was unlikely to get very far. And Carmilla had a real identity – she’d worked for a television station and her records would have shown that she was married to Paul. They didn’t want anybody investigating Carmilla, so they gave us Jane, who would immediately disappear because she didn’t exist. Let the police hunt for her; they’d never find her. Misty was having trouble getting help to clean the rooms, so Jane was sure to be hired if she claimed to have housekeeping experience. She was careful to look obsessed with Teddy from the moment she came in. That was also the moment to see if her disguise was going to work –
before
they committed a crime. If Teddy recognized her as Carmilla, they’d pass it off as a set-up to show her versatility as an actress. And if Misty recognized her as Whitney (they had met, you know), I’m guessing she would have said she wanted a chance to regain Misty’s trust before she revealed herself and asked to come back into the family. But nobody penetrated the disguise, so they went ahead with the plan.”

“She never actually did clean any rooms, did she?” Taylor asked.

“Just one – Teddy and Lily came a night before everybody else. But if she had any trouble looking like she knew what she was doing, Paul was there to help. And Paul was also there to give the police a false set of Jane’s fingerprints from her cleaning supplies. Those prints are probably from the check-out clerk in the store where he bought those supplies. He would have carefully selected the right clerk: somebody young, clean-cut, and of course, female. He brought the supplies home and carefully put them away so there would be no new prints on them. If Carmilla’s were found on anything, well, she was in the house anyway. But in fact, the police never even took our fingerprints. They were looking for Jane, and Paul had given them things that he said had Jane’s prints on them.”

Sheriff Longley spoke up. “How did you know Paul was married, or that his wife was an actress?”

“He told me,” Bernie said. “I reported the conversation to Ed. Paul had made some remark about how he could have gotten his wife a role on a reality show if she’d just stuck around. I guess that must have gotten Ed started on his theory.”

I nodded. “That and the fact that they overplayed their hand. It struck me that they had used a clumsy ruse to show that Jane always carried clean clothing in her backpack. Bernie was right: it’s hard to spill a liquid out of a spray bottle, yet she spilled enough to make a permanent stain in the carpet. It was meant to show that Jane was in the habit of keeping a change of clothes with her. Then, when a set of clothes were found in her bag, it wouldn’t be so obvious that they were the clothes Jane had been
wearing
when she murdered Misty. After all, Jane couldn’t be running around naked after the murder. That was the plan as Paul knew it.” I looked at him hard. “But your wife took it one step further. You didn’t know she was going to stab your mother, did you?”

Whitney snapped her head around and stared daggers at her husband. When he said, “No,” the cop behind her had to restrain her.

I went on looking straight into Paul’s eyes. “She wanted to make sure your mother was good and dead, so she stabbed her in the jugular vein before throwing her over. People sometimes survive falls. All you two needed was a paraplegic to take care of and a mountain of hospital bills. But people don’t survive bad falls and massive blood loss. You were genuinely shocked when you saw your mother’s blood in the foyer, weren’t you?”

His lips trembled and he looked away. “The blood,” he whispered. “It made it all so
real
.”

“It hadn’t seemed real up until then, had it?” I asked. “Whitney was going to do all the dirty work, and then you’d get your mother’s house, sell it, and live happily ever after. Your mother would fall and die, quick and painless, and it would all be over. The blood changed things for you, didn’t it?”

He wasn’t looking at me now. He was looking at his wife. “Why did you have to stab her?”

“Shut up!”
she hissed.