Текст книги "A Fright to the Death"

Автор книги: Dawn Eastman

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

36

“I think I should go talk to Kirk about this,” Mac said, and patted the notebook through his sweater.

“I’ll work on finding the key to the lockbox,” I said.

“How are you going to do that?” Mac asked. “Is this another pendulum thing? Are you going to get your aunt involved?”

“No! I’m not even going to tell her about the box,” I said. I didn’t add that I had to keep the information from her or risk losing a bet.

Mac lowered his voice and said, “Are you going to do that finding thing you do?”

I stopped in the middle of the hall. “What are you talking about?”

“I know you can find things.” Mac didn’t meet my eyes. “I’ve seen you do it.”

“You have?” I didn’t remember when I would have told him that I was tapping into that sense to find something. Ever since we had gotten back together after so many years apart, I had avoided discussing my . . . talents with him. When it came to talking about my psychic abilities I was a coward. Neila’s guidance had at least moved me in the direction of not outright denying them. But treating my “finding ability” the same way Mom treated the tarot deck or Vi relied on her messages from animals? I wasn’t there yet.

Mac put his hand to my cheek. “Of course I have. I think you’re incredible. Even though I don’t understand it, I recognize that you have a gift. You should use it.”

My heart started pounding. I couldn’t believe he was encouraging me to use a psychic method to help solve a case. He didn’t even have to write it in a note! Something had shifted between us and the relief I felt at not hiding that part of myself from him had me blinking back tears.

I swallowed hard. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He gave me a quick kiss and turned toward the back door to look for Kirk.

I wandered past the lounge, trying to focus on the key and where it might be. Not knowing exactly what it looked like made the process more difficult.

I glanced in the room and saw Isabel there with a small bundle of yarn in her arms. She smiled when she saw me.

“You caught me,” she said. “I’m glad you aren’t one of the knitters—I left them working on their projects to sneak down here and do my yarn bombing.” She held four or five furry knitted animals. I identified a fox, an elephant, and a monkey. She had already placed a small horse next to the horse statue.

“Wow,” I said. “That looks really complicated.” I reached out and she handed me the monkey.

“They can be a little fiddly, but it’s fun,” she said.

I gave the monkey back. “I’m having enough trouble with the scarf.”

Isabel looked around the room, presumably searching for a place to exhibit the animals.

I hated to do an interview without Mac, but this seemed like a perfect opportunity to ask her about Mavis’s accusation.

“Isabel, I need to ask you again about the night Clarissa was killed.”

Her smile faded and she nodded. “Should we sit?” She pointed at the couches by the fireplace.

She set her animals on the coffee table and sat back against the cushions. “How can I help?”

“A . . . witness has come forward reporting that you were seen leaving Clarissa’s room on the night she died.”

Isabel took a deep breath and let it out. She closed her eyes briefly. “I know who your witness is and I’ll tell you the same thing I told her. I did go up to Clarissa’s room that night, but I didn’t talk to her. She had made a remark about Teresa—that’s Mavis’s daughter—and how suicide was such a waste, and such a selfish act.” Isabel laced her fingers together on her lap and squeezed. “Mavis turned white as a sheet. I was furious, and on my way to my room to get my headache medicine I went to her room. However, halfway up the stairs I came to my senses. There was no reasoning with Clarissa and no way to appeal to her conscience because she didn’t have one. I went to my room to calm down and the rest is just as I told you before.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said.

“Thank you.” Isabel relaxed her hands. “Mavis and I got into a bit of a tiff over this whole thing. She told me she had seen me and that she would ‘cover’ for me. I couldn’t believe she thought I had killed Clarissa—and that she would offer to cover it up!” She shook her head. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, but I just thought it would confuse the issue.”

And that she would be a suspect, I thought to myself. It was starting to look like the entire hotel had visited Clarissa that night and they all had a reason to want her dead.

“Thank you for telling me about it now,” I said.

Isabel gathered up her animals and I left her in the lounge to continue her surreptitious placement.

Back in the hall, I leaned against the wall for a moment to clear my head. I would have to fill Mac in on Isabel’s story, but first I needed to find that key. Usually, I can visualize the item and then “zoom out” and see where it is. Instead, I kept getting a picture of Seth.

Seth couldn’t have the key, but I had been down this road enough times to just go with it. If I was seeing Seth, then I should go find Seth. Just like that tug to look in the wardrobe, I had to follow this hint.

I found him rather quickly in the front reception area. He sat on the couch staring out at the snow. I almost hated to disturb him. I was shocked he wasn’t already in the dining room since it was close to lunchtime, and it had been at least three hours since he’d last eaten.

As I got closer, I saw that he was petting the demon cat. I heard its purring across the room.

“If you sit down really slow, you won’t disturb her,” Seth said quietly.

I hated to disturb the crazy cat, so I sat down slowly on the chair across from Seth. The cat opened one eye and stopped purring. Seth scratched her head and she closed her eye and resumed her little motor noises.

“How did you catch her?” I asked. “It seems like everyone in the hotel has been trying to find her.”

“I just sat out here to listen to my music and watch the snow and she found me.” He smiled at the pile of fur in his lap. She rubbed her head against his hand.

“Maybe there are two cats, because that doesn’t look like the streaking, yowling, scratching cat I’ve seen before.”

Seth grinned. “It’s the same cat.” His smile faded. “She’s really scared.”

I didn’t realize Seth had the same affinity for cats as he did for dogs.

“What’s she afraid of?”

Seth shook his head. “It’s kind of strange—she’s just showing me pictures of things. Yarn, a room with yellow walls and flowers . . . tile with a pool of blood.” Seth looked at me.

“It sounds like the turret room—have you been up there?”

He didn’t answer right away. “No. Is it really bright during the daytime? She’s showing me a big patch of sunlight.”

“The windows face east and there are a lot of them, so it probably is bright.”

“She likes that room, but she’s afraid of it now.”

“Seth, did she see who killed Clarissa?”

Seth’s big brown eyes took on a faraway look. “She might have, but I’m not sure she realizes it. She keeps showing me yarn, balls of yarn in a basket, and a hand putting food down for her.”

He stroked the cat some more.

“I don’t know what it means,” he said.

I didn’t know what it meant, either. Maybe nothing. Maybe Duchess thought about yarn the way Tuffy thought about food—all the time.

Duchess continued to purr with her eyes closed. I continued to not see the key in my mind’s eye.

“Are you hungry?” I asked after a few minutes of listening to the purring.

His eyes lit up. He shifted position. Duchess hopped off his lap and stretched her back legs before jumping onto the windowsill. She sat looking out the window, tail twitching slowly.

“I did find this,” Seth said and held out his hand, palm up.

A small silver key glinted in his hand.

“Where did you find it?” I took it from him and looked for numbers or markings on it. It had to be the key to the lockbox.

“It was taped to the inside of her collar,” he said. “It was bugging her because it kept pulling her hair.”

I glanced at the cat. She kept her gold eyes trained on me while her tail slowly swept back and forth.

I wondered who else knew that she had the key the whole time. And knew what it was for. I tucked it into my pocket.

“Let’s go see if this key works,” I said.

“What about lunch?”

I grinned at him. “Soon.” I slung an arm over his shoulder and we headed upstairs.

37

We entered my room and I was relieved to see that Vi was absent and Seth wasn’t going to have to divert her and drag her down the hall. I hadn’t seen her since our encounter in the turret room and I didn’t want her rummaging in the lockbox. I asked Seth to guard the door and warn me if anyone approached the room.

I took the box down from the shelf by carefully covering it with a T-shirt to protect any fingerprints that might be on it. I doubted it would ever be necessary and recognized that much of our evidence had been tainted at this point. But, just in case.

I set the box on the coffee table, and Seth watched as I inserted the key in the lock. It turned easily and the lid popped up about half an inch. I opened the lid and peered inside. It was filled with cash. Most of it was twenties but there was one thick stack of hundreds. She probably had ten thousand dollars stashed in the box. I took the money out and stacked it next to the box.

“Wow,” Seth said from the doorway. He was alternately watching me and peering through the peephole.

A handwritten list of furnishings, statues, paintings, and art sat underneath the money. In the next column were numbers that I assumed were prices or estimates of value. I recognized some of the items as artwork and furniture from the lounge. I glanced at Seth.

“She was keeping track of how much the antiques were worth,” I said. “I wonder if this money is from previous sales, or the cell phones, or blackmail.”

“Blackmail?” Seth asked.

“She liked to collect secrets,” I said.

“It looks like she liked to collect money,” Seth said.

“I wonder if she was selling off some of the antiques in the castle?”

I flipped the pages to see if there was a list of “sold” items. There wasn’t. Just more numbers and items. I wondered if Jessica and Linda knew that Clarissa had assessed the entire contents of the castle.

“Someone’s coming,” Seth whispered.

I quickly repacked the box and I set it up on the shelf. I went to the door and listened with Seth. Mavis was talking to someone—probably Selma—and she stopped at her room and unlocked the door.

I went to the closet and pushed the box to the back where it had been.

Something was bothering me about the list and the money but I couldn’t quite pin it down. The back of my neck prickled and I struggled to make the connection.

“I think people are going down to lunch,” Seth said. He stood with his ear to the door.

“Yeah, let’s go,” I said. I pushed the key down into my jeans pocket and followed Seth into the hallway and downstairs.

The dining room was in disarray when we arrived. René’s hat was askew and he had a wild look in his eyes. He and Wally hastily set the warming pans on the buffet table. They had put out sandwich makings again, a crock of soup, and a large bowl of salad.

Wally brought pitchers of water, and had set up cans of soda on the drinks table.

“What’s up with the chef?” Seth muttered to me.

I shrugged and watched as they continued to set up. I glanced at my watch—it was a little after noon. Maybe René got thrown by being a few minutes late? I would be surprised if a couple of minutes made him so anxious. Especially with this group.

I approached him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Can I help with anything?”

He spun to look at me and I stepped back. He shook his head no.

“I think we have it under control now,” he said. “I was meeting with Jessica about the plan for next week if we can’t get our deliveries. I thought Emmett would set up the buffet, but he’s disappeared.” René held his hands out.

“What do you mean disappeared?” Mac said from behind me.

“He’s not in the kitchen, or downstairs, or anywhere else he should be,” René said. “I haven’t seen him since breakfast cleanup.”

“Oh, no,” Mac said. He grabbed my arm and pulled me out into the hall. “I heard a snowmobile a few minutes ago. I thought it was Kirk and his snowblower, but now I’m worried Emmett may have run away.”

I started to ask why Emmett would run away, but Mac held up his hand.

“Kirk told me about his investigation.” Mac leaned forward and dropped his voice. “He thinks Emmett is our cell phone smuggler. I need to go find Kirk and we might have to go after Emmett.”

“I’ll keep working on the other situation here.” I didn’t have time to tell him about finding the key and the money in the box before he strode off into the back hall.

As I walked back to the dining room, I wondered again where Vi had gone. If she’d been here, she probably would have tried to tag along on the snowmobiles to keep an eye on her number-one suspect, Kirk. I could hardly wait to tell her she’d been tracking an undercover cop.

Seth was chatting with Lucille and already halfway through his lunch when I entered the dining room. Mom and Dad sat with them. I saw that Wally now manned the buffet table and René had left the dining room. I served up a small bowl of soup and sat with my group.

Lucille complimented Mom on her tarot reading. Mom blushed and waved her comments away.

“Has anyone seen Vi?” I asked.

They shook their heads. “Not recently,” Mom said. “She was in the lounge when I started the tarot readings, but she left toward the beginning and I haven’t seen her since. Is something wrong?”

“No, I just . . . wondered.”

“It’s not like her to miss lunch,” Lucille said. “I hope she isn’t feeling unwell.”

“She’s not in her room—we were just up there,” Seth said.

“Oh?” Mom said, and turned toward me.

I squeezed Mom’s hand. “I’ll look for her after lunch.”

Mom nodded and went back to her meal, but her brows remained furrowed and she only pushed her food around her plate.

“Lucille, didn’t you have a yarn-bombing project for Seth?” I asked to deflect attention elsewhere.

“Yes, I do.” Lucille turned to Seth. “Maybe we can do that after lunch?”

Seth nodded and continued slurping his soup.

I finished my soup and excused myself. I felt Mom watching me leave the dining room. I didn’t want to get the rest of them worried, but I felt edgy and unsettled; something was wrong.

Vi could easily get lost in her pendulum daze for hours. I assumed she was still up in the turret room interrogating her swinging crystal. Or maybe she had finally caught Duchess and was trying to pry some information out of the cat. Either way, I decided to go back to the last place I had seen her.

38

I was out of breath when I reached the top of the steps. I swung the door open and was disappointed to see the empty room. I stepped inside. Everything was essentially as we had left it—the shoes still littered the floor, the open curtains allowed a patch of sunlight to creep into the room. Duchess lay on her side, spread out in the sunshine. She sat up when I moved toward her. Those gold eyes held mine, and she began to purr.

“Have you seen Vi?” I asked the cat. I didn’t expect an answer but had to talk to someone.

The bathroom was also just as we had left it, and also no Vi.

I left the cat in her patch of sun and went back downstairs. I stopped at our room, but it was also unoccupied. Where could she be?

Then it came to me—maybe she had gone out to see the dogs. She sometimes liked to sit with Tuffy and Baxter when she was thinking. She said they helped her concentrate. I took the stairs two at a time and headed to the back hallway.

I grabbed Seth’s coat, which was by the back door. His coat was way better than mine for this kind of weather. My sister remembered winter here in Michigan, but she must have embellished it in her mind. She’d sent something that could probably keep a person warm at the North Pole—before global warming. I walked to the cottage, thinking about where I would look if Vi weren’t there.

I also had a decision to make now. Vi would not win our bet, focused as she was on the undercover cop. But she’d still want to open the detective agency together. I had begun to see it take shape. Maybe it would be the answer to my jobless situation. It felt like I’d be taking over a classroom full of preschoolers, but if Vi was going to do this anyway, I might as well get involved if only to keep her out of trouble. And, I had started to warm to the idea. Working to focus my “gift” over the last couple of months had honed my ability to locate things. At the very least I could be a psychic lost and found. I just hoped I could find Vi, and soon.

Baxter and Tuffy greeted me enthusiastically at the door and bounded out to meet me. Tuffy stopped in mid jump when he realized I wasn’t Seth. Before I had a chance to snap a leash on him, Baxter ran through the snow flinging the fluffy stuff over his head. Tuffy stayed much closer to me, did his business and returned to the doorway, where he sat shivering.

I clapped my hands and called to Baxter. I saw him dive into a snowbank, tail wagging.

“Come on, boy! Let’s have a treat!”

At the word “treat,” he pulled his head out of the snow and whirled in my direction. He had something in his mouth. He ran at me, full force, and I braced myself for impact. I didn’t want him racing through the cottage covered in snow, plus I had to get whatever he had found away from him. I just hoped it wasn’t anything dead.

Rather than run into me, he stopped just in front of the door and dropped his prize at my feet. I bent to pick it up, my brain not willing to believe what my eyes were telling me and not wanting to make the connections it was making.

Vi’s bright pink and purple striped mitten sat on the ground. Vi adored these mittens; they were the first pair she had managed to make that fit humans and not some alien life form and she had been wildly proud of them. She’d made others over the years that were much better than this pair, but she always returned to these. She’d used yarn that had belonged to my grandmother and said they reminded her of her mother’s love of bright colors and winter walks.

I knew I wouldn’t find Vi in the cottage. Alarm bells sounded in my brain. I had to find her, and fast. The snow fell in big heavy flakes and the temperature had been dropping throughout the afternoon. I had worried about Mac and Kirk venturing out in this new storm and now Vi was out in it as well.

Thinking about Vi’s love of these mittens had my brain spinning in other directions. Sometimes the things we work so hard to make or to preserve take on a life of their own. Protecting the past can become a mission, or an obsession. I wondered what a person would do to protect his or her heritage, even from one’s own family. I thought about the list we had found in the box.

I gave the dogs their promised treat and shut them back in the cottage. I followed Baxter’s paw prints to the place where he had found the mitten, dreading what I might find. But there was nothing. Just a trampled snowdrift.

I pulled the hood up against the wind and realized Seth had stuffed his ridiculous fur-lined deerstalker hat in the hood. I put it on and rethought my position on the hat. It was soft and warm and my ears thanked me. I put Vi’s glove on my left hand and stuffed my other hand in the coat pocket. I felt Seth’s penknife and a pack of gum.

I surveyed the landscape, looking for footprints, but the snow and the wind had smoothed everything except the area Baxter had just stepped on. Some slight depressions headed into the woods. Clutching the knife in my pocket, I followed the only lead I had.

I was fairly certain they were footprints and as I got to the edge of the trees, the prints became more clear. There was more than one set. They walked into the woods where the land sloped down and away from the castle. The shed where Clarissa’s body was stored sat at the top of the slope and the prints curved around behind it. I knew I was now lost to view from the hotel.

I called Vi’s name every few steps but there was no response. Finally, I heard a weak “help” off to my left. I turned and followed the sound. I spotted the mate to the mitten in another snowdrift, but this one moved when I approached.