The Gallery of the Dead (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 3) (6 page)

Transcribed from the dictation of Teddy Force

Things were pretty quiet after that, and I thought about going over to Don’s Diner for something to eat, but I’d been there before and it’s just a greasy spoon. Misty was out. She had an appointment or something. So I decided to rummage around in the kitchen for a snack while I waited until the only decent restaurant in Tropical Breeze would be open. It’s called Thirty-Nine. Nice place. Not New York-nice, but definitely better than Don’s Diner. If my fiancé got to The Royal Palm by then, I’d take her along; otherwise she could meet me there. She texted me that she was in town earlier in the day, but she was fooling around on Locust Street somewhere. She likes that kind of thing.

Ed was out sniffing around. He’d probably come to the meeting tomorrow with reams of paper and expect us all to read it. The man was a walking headache, but I wasn’t worried. I’m used to controlling situations.

I found a fresh chocolate cake in the kitchen, just sitting there, so I sliced off a couple of pieces and ate them with my fingers. It was pretty good, but it could’ve used a bittersweet ganache. If Misty was going to get serious about running the place, she’d have to take some cooking classes.

Lily got there just as I had brushed myself up and was leaving for Thirty-Nine.

“So, where’s this Misty?” she said, ignoring the fact that I had dressed to go out. She was in her gypsy look, as usual, and before I could suggest she get dressed, she buzzed by me, asked where our room was, and was halfway up the stairs.

“First one at the front,” I yelled up at her. “It’s dead ahead as you get to the top of the stairs. And wear something nice. We’re going out.”

“Oh, Teddy, can’t we just relax for once?” she said, dumping her backpack on the floor at the top of the stairs and looking down at me over the railing. “There’s this great little diner in town that we won’t have to dress up for. I bet half of Tropical Breeze will be there. We’re not going to be in town long, and this will be a chance to get the local gossip. Did you know they call themselves Breezers?”

I made a face. “Meatloaf, instant mashed potatoes and Breezers? What do you take me for?”

She made a face back at me. “I know just what you are, and
I’m
going to the diner. I’m too tired to change.” She hoisted her backpack and disappeared into our room.

Just about that time, Misty came in the door and I did a double-take.

She had been to her stylist, or what they probably called the “beauty parlor” in this town. Her hair was about three shades darker, and somebody had done a professional make-up job on her. She was wearing a purple dress that added a few shades of color to her pale eyes, and carrying shopping bags from someplace called “Sharla’s.” She set the bags down and twirled for me, tripping a little over her new high heels. I whistled.

“Do you like the color?” she asked, patting her hair. “My natural shade is such a nothing brown, and I’ve always wanted it to be a definite
color
. I thought I might go blond, but at the last minute, I told Tony I wanted to go dark – very dark. He absolutely agreed.”

“It’s definitely a color,” I said. She beamed.

Lily came bouncing down the stairs then, and paused when she saw Misty preening herself. I introduced them quickly, and Lily lit up, coming down to the foyer and shaking hands. She’s a friendly little thing.

Time to teach my lady a lesson.

“Misty is looking so beautiful tonight, I thought I’d take her out for dinner,” I said. “How does Thirty-Nine sound, Misty?”

“Oh, that would be wonderful, Teddy! I’ve never been there, and I’ve wanted to ever since they first opened.”

Lily stood there blinking, and I signed off with her and took Misty out the front door before she could say anything.

“You might want to get Misty’s shopping bags out of the foyer,” I called over my shoulder. “She uses the old housekeeper’s rooms, behind the kitchen. Just set them down anywhere in there.”

Don’s Diner my ass.

From the Journal of Edson Darby-Deaver

The drive north on A1A was slow. Not all our snowbirds had gone back north yet, and the closer I got to St. Augustine, the more traffic there was. But between Tropical Breeze and my home on Anastasia Island there is only one traffic light, and I expected to make good time, once I got Jasper out of the way. If he wasn’t home, I’d just forget about him. There wouldn’t be time to look for him again before we had to do the show.

From Bernie’s description of his house, I found the place right away. I executed a U-turn and parked in front of his tiny house, across the road from the beach.

There was no doorbell that I could see, and I never got a chance to knock on the sea-green door. A man’s voice called to me from across A1A, where there was a walkover to the beach and a pair of face-to-face benches.

“That car for sale?” he yelled.

“What, this one?” I said, pointing at it.

“Yeah, that one. I
love
vintage cars. She’s a real beauty.”

“Beauty” is a word that I’ve never heard anybody use about my car since the day I drove her home new in 1991. She’s a green Geo Metro 5-door, gets 53 mpg and has never given me a moment of trouble. Well, very little trouble. Just that thing with the head gasket, but usually she gallops like a happy little pony, and I feel no need to go faster than she can manage. She doesn’t come up to speed on the expressway for ten or fifteen seconds. Maybe twenty. But I don’t take her on the expressway much anyway.

The old man was dodging across the street by then, stopping traffic with an upheld hand, trusting blindly that he wouldn’t be hit. A mass of black leather and hair whizzed around him on a motorcycle and screamed something I made no attempt to understand, and the old person made it to my side of the street without being killed. Astonishingly.

He came up to my car and gazed at it with a kind of rapture, not bothering to look at me.

“Three cylinders?”

I agreed.

“Who needs more than that?” he asked.

“Not me.”

He reached out a calloused old hand and said, “Put ‘er there, brother. Anybody that needs more than three cylinders should be smoking stronger stuff. Five speed manual. My, my, my. It don’t hurt to do a little of the work yourself, getting a car down the road, am I right? Help the old buggy out, know what I’m sayin’?”

He was still shaking my hand, and I began to be sorry I’d stopped. He’s obviously been out in the sun too long. And people who need constant affirmation are just tedious.

“Edson Darby-Deaver,” I said, wanting to move the interview along. If he’d been smoking his “stronger stuff” today, he’d be of no use to me. “I understand you were once the caretaker of the Whitby House when the Allens owned it?”

He came closer, interested in me and not my car for the first time. His leathery face was fractured by a thousand wrinkles and burnt by the sun until it was like mahogany wood. His white hair, what was left of it, was long and waved in the wind, and his eyes were a watery brown with yellowish whites and a permanent squint.

“Name’s Jasper. It ain’t the Whitby House no more,” he informed me. “Some fool woman turned it into an arm-and-a-leg hotel. That’s what it’ll cost you to stay there – an arm and –“

I had grasped his meaning in the first place, and I cut him off. “Look, I think I may have made a mistake in coming here.”

“Why’d you come then?”

“Bernie Horning sent me to you. I’m researching the history of the Whitby House.”

“Then you’re in the right place. Let me get my guitar.”

“What? No . . . .“

He popped into the front door, which apparently he had left unlocked while he was wandering the beach, and I just stood there open-mouthed, too polite to do the sensible thing and leave. He was back while I was still hovering on the doorstep, and he said, “Okay, let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“To the beach. Sunset’s in ten minutes. We can watch it both ways – the real thing in the west and the reflection in the east, over the ocean. Do you live around here, kid?”

“What? Yes. On Anastasia Island. Who are you calling kid?”

“And you don’t know when it’s time to go watch the sunset?”

He turned suddenly like a possessed gremlin and plunged into traffic, waving the guitar in the air as if he were going to bat the cars away with it. For reasons that still escape me, I followed. Two cars had almost deployed their air bags stopping for him, so I went ahead and crossed while the drivers were still recovering.

“We can sit right here,” he said, indicating the benches at the head of the walk-over. “No, not next to me. Over there, so you don’t hit my guitar.”

I sat across from him and put my messenger bag beside me on the bench. Out of habit, I started my voice recorder, though I had pretty much lost hope.

“It’s over there,” he said, as he started to strum.

“What is?”

“The sun, fool.
Oh, once I had a lady fair, and round and round she led, If I ever see that gal again, I’ll kick her in the head.
Come on, join in!”

“I don’t know that song, and I don’t want to.” I glanced across the street at my car. I hadn’t locked it, and now I was glad. I would be leaving soon. Yet something was making me stay. Not Jasper’s nails-on-chalkboard voice. I didn’t know what.

He sang another stanza, which was worse than the first. I won’t reproduce it here. Then he suddenly asked me, “What about ‘er?”

“Who?”

“The house. What about ‘er?”

I looked at the recorder skeptically and debated turning it off. Before I did, I decided to at least make a stab at it. “There were two suicides in the house. As a result of those deaths, is it your belief, or have you had experiences indicating, that the house is haunted?”

He laughed, making a sound even worse than his singing. “Nope. Next!”

I assumed he meant next question. “Do you have any information about the suicides of Cassandra and Ephraim Whitby, other than the bare fact that they took place? In your unique position as caretaker, you may have knowledge beyond what is generally known to the public.”

“You must be all wore out by the end of the day, son, just from talking in circles. You might get better results if you let other people talk instead. Yeah, I know about ‘em. What do you want to know?”

“Exactly where did they take place? Where in the gallery, I mean.”

“Up in the hall by the railing. Up in the hall, and over she went. That’d make a good song. Write it down for me.”

I did, not wanting him to go on and on about it.

“It’s that time,” he said, sweeping his gaze across me and the world, and going out to sea. “The light’s quieted down and the shadows are gone. Even you look pretty in this light.” He cackled, but more softly, as if the beauty of the dusk had a hold on him.

I tried to regroup. “She fell from the gallery – do you know exactly where in the gallery? By what part of the railing?”

“Right over the front door. Say, why don’t you tell that Misty to put a brown spot on the marble, right inside the front door. Say it’s Cassandra’s blood, that can’t be scrubbed away. Write that down.”

“No. So she fell in front of the door. I see.” As usual, Teddy had been wrong. “Do you know how tall Cassandra was?”

“How tall? Who cares? I don’t know. Her daddy was tall. Yes, I do know. I seen a picture of her over at the Historical Society. Go look, if you want to. You’re that ghost-hunter guy, right? The one everybody says is such a pain in the ass? You’re always looking things up. Surprised you didn’t go over to the Historical Society in the first place. Her daddy was a six-footer, and she was only a couple inches shorter. Mama was short. Hetty, they called her. Only had the one child. She was a pretty thing, that Cassie.”

His remark about the Historical Society had stung. That had been a glaring omission, quite unlike me, and I can only plead the Teddy defense: anybody who spends too much time around Teddy Force gets confused.

“So,” I said, “with the railing being low, and Cassandra being tall, it could’ve been an accident, correct?”

“There she goes.”

“What?”

“The sun. She’s down now. Yellow’s all gone, and all that’s left is the purples and the blues and here comes the dark. Cassie Whitby jumped, it weren’t no accident . . .
Sleep my pretty, and listen for the lark, Sleep like an angel, unafraid of the dark. Stars shine upon you and also the moon, and if you should need me I’ll be with you soon.”

His voice had suddenly become eerily beautiful, nothing like the reedy screech of a few minutes ago. Though still thin and high and worn-out, his voice had become tender, as if the falling darkness had broken the spell on this tricksy little elf and changed him to a sad old man. I listened, enchanted.

When he finished we were silent for a while. Then I said, “That was lovely.”

“I know. It always is. Anything else you want to know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, here’s something you
should
know, whether you want to or not.” His face was indistinct in the dark, and the traffic which had been fairly steady, had dried up, so there were no headlights to shine on him.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“All your life you’ve been wrapping yourself up in things that don’t matter, covering yourself in chains and blinding your own eyes. Stop and look around yourself sometimes. It’s a pretty world, and we don’t get to stay in it for long.”

I started to tell him that I’d devoted myself to things that mattered very much: life and death. But I stopped myself. That wasn’t what he was talking about.

“See there? Look to the ocean,” he said. It was a dark night, and the uneasy sound of the breaking waves suggested a breathing beast, heaving and restless beyond the bluish dune.

“Smell that?” He inhaled deeply, and so did I. Tangy and salty and dirty and clean all at the same time.

He strummed a few chords, gently and softly.

“I think I know what you mean,” I said at last. “But I’m not sure I can change.”

I heard a phlegmy chuckle. “You cain’t. But just think about it sometimes. Just think about it. Give yourself a moment, sometimes.”

“I’ll try.”

“And write down that stuff I just said. Can you write in the dark?”

“Yes. I have to do that a lot in my line of work. But I’ll remember it. I don’t need to write it down.”

“I don’t care if you remember it or not. Write it down and give it to me. I’m not that deep, usually. It’ll make a good song.”

I couldn’t help but smile. He had almost been nice – even fatherly – but he’d caught himself in time.

I gave him the paper on which I’d made his notes.

“I want to thank you for your time, Jasper. You’ve been very helpful.”

“No I haven’t. And I’ve always got the time. You didn’t interrupt the sunset. Nobody can.”

“Well, at least you confirmed something for me that I’ve suspected all along. The Whitby House is not haunted.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Oh, come on!, That’s practically the first thing you told me, other than that you liked my car.”

“That’s right, you do have a great car,” he mused, as if reevaluating me. Then he said, “I did not tell you that house ain’t haunted. I just said the Whitbys ain’t haunting it.”

“Oh, please, Jasper. It amounts to the same thing.”

“If you say so.”’

He looked away and went back to strumming his guitar. I left him there, disappointed. He just had to be cantankerous. For just a moment there I’d seen the melancholy poet he really was, and I’d begun to like him.

I felt strangely calm when I got back into Petronella (my nickname for the Geo). I have heard that second-hand smoke can affect you this way, but the man hadn’t been smoking anything when I’d been with him. Still, he may have had a fug about him that I’d failed to detect. It’s not like me to be calm.

I normally don’t answer my cell when I’m driving, but the road was suddenly deserted and I saw that it was Florence calling, so I answered.

“Well, I did what you wanted,” she began breathily. Then,
sotto voce
, “This is so exciting, interviewing people for the
investigation
.”

“I appreciate the effort, Miss Florence.”

“Well, it was no effort at all! I haven’t talked to little Nancy in just ages, and she was so surprised to hear from me. And she wanted to know all about the haunting over at the Whitby House. She was over there lot when she was a little girl and never even knew!”

“So she and her friends were in the house, then? Misty, too?”

“Yes. I asked about Misty. You were right. Her maiden name is Howard.”

I inhaled deeply, trying to remain calm. “And she went to pajama parties at the Whitby House when she was a girl?”

“Yes, only they call them sleep-overs now. And she also told me she’s still in touch with one of the Allen girls. Rita Allen, only her name is Rita Garnett now. Divorced. No kids. And Nancy gave me Rita’s number and I actually talked to her!”