The Inn (14 page)

R
ichard found everyone in this whole house suspicious.

As they climbed the steep narrow stairs to the attic, all sorts of thoughts were running through the chief's mind.

Jack Devlin was sure acting questionably. He seemed to know more than he was telling about the missing Priscilla Morton. And it appeared that both his wife and Priscilla's boyfriend suspected something had happened between the two of them the night before.

But that meant that both Annabel and Neville might be suspects as well. They would both have had a motive for doing harm to Priscilla, if indeed they had discovered she'd been fooling around with Jack.

Just why they would have followed that with an attack on the old woman, however, did not make any sense.

And where the hapless Paulie Stueckel fit into all of this, Richard as yet had no idea.

But he did know that Annabel had been very angry at both Cordelia and Zeke. Had she killed both of them, but only had time to hide Zeke's body?

If that was the case, her enthusiasm for searching the house didn't make any sense at all.

The chief had to admit he was stumped.

He reached the attic door and gripped hold of the knob. It was locked, all right.

“Adam,” he said to his deputy. “Give me a hand.”

The two policemen pressed their shoulders up against the door.

“Stand back,” Richard shouted down to the others on the steps behind him. He turned to Adam. “Okay, on the count of three.”

Adam nodded.

“One, two, three!”

They both rammed their shoulders against the door. It rattled but did not pop open. Strange, for such fragile old wood.

“Again!” Richard shouted.

They positioned their shoulders once more.

“One, two—”

But just at that moment, the door opened. And there, standing in the doorway, grinning up at them, was Zeke.

“W
hat's going on here?” the old man asked.

Annabel pushed forward on the stairs. “Zeke! Where have you been? We've been looking all over!”

The wizened little caretaker shrugged. “There was all that noise coming from the parlor and I couldn't sleep.” His eyes twinkled as he looked around at all of them. “I often come up here when I need some quiet for my nap.”

Stepping out of the room, he closed the door carefully behind him.

“Now,” Zeke asked, “what are all these people doing here?”

Chief Carlson looked at him intently. “We're trying to find out what happened here this morning,” he said, “and locate a couple of people. We thought maybe they might be in the attic. We've checked everywhere else.”

Zeke looked from him over to Annabel. “Seems a lot has happened since I went in to take a nap,” he said.

“Zeke, Cordelia's dead,” Annabel told him.

She watched his reaction. He placed a hand over his chest and declared, “It can't be!”

Quickly, Annabel detailed how the old woman had been found. Zeke kept shaking his head in surprise and grief, but Annabel didn't believe him. She thought he'd already known that Cordelia was dead before he went into that attic.

“But that's not all,” Chief Carlson added. “A guest in this house and a young man doing work down in the parlor can't be found. I'd like to go up into the attic and look around.”

“Oh,” Zeke said, “I was just up there. I can assure you no one is there. It's just an empty, dusty, old attic.”

“Still, I'd like to see for myself,” the chief said.

Annabel watched Zeke. She saw the unease in his old yellow eyes.

“Well,” the caretaker said finally. “If you insist.”

He turned around, opened the door, and led the group inside.

“Maybe the rest of you should stay back,” Carlson said, turning around to the others.

“No way,” Annabel told him. “This is my house now. I'd like to see what's in here.”

The chief shrugged his consent.

Annabel followed him into the dark, musty space. The deputy was close at her heels, and Neville came last. The room was fit into the point of the roof, so that it was impossible to walk up straight except in the very center. Moving off to the far ends of the room necessitated lowering one's head as the slant of the roof decreased. The place stunk of mold and something else—sweat, Annabel thought. There was only one dim, unshaded lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, which cast a pale amber light over the room. Annabel scanned the darkness, allowing her eyes to adjust.

The first thing she discerned was a small cot tucked into the far corner. Everywhere there were boxes and chests. An old dressmaker's dummy gave her small fright when she looked at it, thinking it for a second to be a person. And then her eyes alit on something very strange. A small, cracked toilet in plain view.

She looked over at Chief Carlson. She saw that he was taking it all in as well.

“My little hideaway,” Zeke told them. “Sometimes, when all our guest rooms are booked, I'll give up my own room and come up here to sleep. Or when there's too much noise downstairs, I'll retreat up here to nap.”

The chief and deputy were looking around the place, lifting boxes, moving crates. It was clear that there was nowhere to hide, and that no one was up here.

So where were Priscilla and Paulie?

If Zeke was telling the truth, and he'd retreated up here to nap after confronting Chad and Paulie in the driveway, then he wouldn't have seen anything. But why did Annabel feel certain he wasn't surprised when she told him about Cordelia's death?

From the way Chief Carlson was looking at Zeke, it seemed he shared Annabel's suspicions.

“All right,” Carlson said. “I'm going to have my men search the woods surrounding the house for any signs of Paulie and Ms. Morton.”

“I'll help,” Chad volunteered.

“So will I,” Neville echoed.

“As will I,” Zeke added.

“Just a moment,” Annabel interjected. “I think Zeke needs to explain why he accosted Chad and Paulie in the driveway and tried to bribe them into not taking the renovation job.”

“Ms. Wish,” the chief said, “I'll question Zeke on my own about that.”

“Well, I have nothing to hide,” the old man added. “Cordelia is—was, I mean—very sentimentally attached to this house. She felt very strongly that it shouldn't be changed and butchered up.”

“But she asked Mr. Devlin and Ms. Wish to come up from New York and take the place over,” Carlson said, eyeing him. “Wouldn't she have expected them to make some changes?”

“She felt they were moving too fast,” Zeke said simply.

“You and I will talk more about that,” the chief said. “For now, it could very well be that Mrs. Devlin's death was a tragic accident and that Paulie and Ms. Morton had nothing to do with it, and that their disappearances have a logical explanation.”

“Maybe they're off in the woods enjoying a little romp,” Zeke offered.

“It's twenty-one degrees outside,” the chief said. “And Ms. Morton's coat is still on the hook.”

The old caretaker just shrugged.

“Come on,” Carlson said to Deputy Burrell. “Call into the station and get a couple of other men down here. We'll divide up the woods.”

The men began trooping back down the stairs. Annabel hung back, so she could say something in private to Zeke.

“Are you telling everything you know?” she whispered.

“Honest to goodness, Miz Wish.”

She held his eyes for a long time. Then she, too, made her way back down the stairs.

N
eville's mind was racing.

As he clomped across the frozen earth, brittle twigs snapping under his feet, he struggled to make sense of how much everything had changed in the course of just a few hours. Yesterday he'd been thrilled that they'd soon be on their way to Florida. He'd only made this pit stop because Priscilla had wanted to see some ghosts. She had, and she was happy and satisfied, and Neville looked forward to a good, relaxing, fun time in Disney World, riding Space Mountain, and lying around the pool.

Now Priscilla was gone, and no one knew where she was.

Some worker was gone, too.

Had they run off together?

It was possible. After watching Priscilla flirt with Jack last night, Neville supposed it was possible that Priscilla was bored with him and might take up with another man she deemed more exciting. Ever since they'd started dating, Neville had known Priscilla was out of his league. She was far too pretty for a plain, acne-scarred guy with a gut who was nearly ten years older than she was. It had been three years, but Neville had fully expected Priscilla to throw him over for some hotter guy at some point.

That she had not done so, Neville figured, had less to do with any feelings she had for him than for the simple reason that she just simply couldn't be bothered. Priscilla was never man-hungry. She didn't really like sex all that much—which was a shame, Neville thought, with that killer body of hers. Priscilla would have much rather been out kayaking, or bird-watching, or hunting for her stupid ghosts. Neville had a feeling that she stayed with him only because he grudgingly went along with her quirky interests, not because she much cared about him, or the whole concept of having a boyfriend.

But maybe there were times she longed for something more. Maybe she secretly ached for a big, strong, virile man to come after her—which hardly described Neville. But it did describe Jack Devlin, and maybe he had awoken a passion in Priscilla that she herself had never known was there.

Only one thing didn't fit. She hadn't disappeared with Jack.

Jack was very much in evidence. He insisted that they'd gone their separate ways after doing whatever they did last night.

The person who'd gone missing with Priscilla was a mason, this Paulie Stueckel guy, who, from the descriptions Neville had heard, was hardly what one would call virile. He was pudgy and kind of goofy-looking, and perennially stoned on pot.

That didn't sound like the sort of man who could turn Priscilla's head. Still, both of them were missing.

But the man's truck was still there. If Priscilla had left with him, they'd gone by foot, or somebody else—a taxi?—had picked them up. But why wouldn't she have taken her coat? Her wallet? Her money? Her passport?

It was all very strange.

Looking behind bushes and clumps of cold, hard, bare trees, Neville had a sense that something terrible had happened. Priscilla wasn't going to be found. At least, she wasn't going to be found alive.

He dreaded calling her mum and dad. They'd never liked Neville all that much. Thought he was too old, and not good looking enough, for their daughter. They'd sneered at the idea of this holiday to America.

Suddenly, his thoughts were shattered by the sound of voices up ahead.

It was Deputy Burrell. He was calling to the chief.

“Come here! Quick! I've found something!”

Neville ran.

R
ichard Carlson knew what he was looking at the moment he peered down into the box of firewood on the side of the house.

The gray, splotchy thing lying on top of the wood that looked like a deflated balloon was in fact Roger Askew's right hand.

“Call forensics back here,” Richard shouted over at Adam. The deputy immediately began pressing keys on his phone.

Staring down at the hand in the wood box, Richard considered the fact that Roger's entire arm, not just his hand, had been hacked off. So if this was indeed Roger's hand, someone had also taken the trouble, at some unknown point, to sever the arm at the wrist.

Richard didn't know for sure that this was Roger's hand. But it likely wasn't from one of the two missing people. The thing in front of him was a few days old, and starting to decay. Richard's gut told him that this was Roger's hand, and that he'd been right to wonder if Roger's death was somehow connected to the cold murder cases at the Blue Boy Inn.

Annabel came around the corner and peered down inside the wood box. She let out a gasp and covered her face with her hands.

It was that little gesture that told Richard that Annabel was guiltless in all this. She was genuinely horrified. Sometimes Richard experienced what he called “psychic moments,” in which he seemed to get a direct line into people's thoughts. He figured lots of cops would know what he was talking about, the moment it becomes obvious some witness is either innocent or guilty. His training as a police officer had left him sensitive to the slightest tic in a person's expression, or a gesture of their hands, or the way they said a word. Sometimes he couldn't put his finger on exactly what had swayed him one way or another. It was just as if, in that moment, he saw inside their heart and knew their truth.

Of course, he'd never base an arrest or an acquittal on such intuition. He would continue to gather hard, direct evidence before making any kind of final decision. But he'd never known his gut to be wrong when he experienced one of his “psychic moments.” And what his gut was telling him right now was that Annabel Wish had nothing to do with Cordelia Devlin's death and knew nothing about the locations of Paulie Stueckel and Priscilla Morton.

She was looking up at him, distress and revulsion and despair written on her face.

“This will just bring all the stories about murder and death back to the Blue Boy,” she said, near tears. “We were trying so hard to put all that behind us. . . .”

“I'm sorry, Ms. Wish.”

She looked in again at the hand and shuddered. “Whose hand is it?”

“I . . . I don't know.” Richard closed the lid of the wood box until the county forensics team could get there. “But I think it's safe to say it's neither of our missing persons.”

Neville had arrived and seen the hand for himself. “Well, thank God for that,” he said.

“Find anything else in the woods?” Richard asked the Englishman.

Neville shook his head. “Not a thing.” He furrowed his brow as he looked at the police chief. “I don't have a good feeling about any of this.”

Richard didn't reply. But he didn't, either.

In fact, he had a very bad feeling. A very bad feeling indeed.