Ding Dong Dead (13 page)

Gretchen focused on reaching out to the apparition.

If you exist, let me feel your presence
.

She listened.

Nothing.

She had conveyed doubt with her thoughts. No ifs.

Gretchen waited.

Nothing.

She strained to hear sound. Was there a chill in the air? She’d heard about cold spots.

Silence.

Then a sound.

A noise, like a mouse. An old house like this could have nests of them. Rats, even. Gretchen hated insects and rodents, and Arizona had especially nasty ones, poisonous things with stingers and teeth. And pack rats.

The sound again, coming from over by the wall near the armoire.

She shined her beam of light directly into the mirror. Her reflection was distorted. She looked pale, as Nina had said. Ready to flee. At least nothing stood behind her. Wouldn’t that be frightening? To look in the mirror and see something not quite human behind her?

She opened the armoire doors and peered inside, finding nothing but emptiness and a faint smell of cedar.

“There you are,” Nina said from right behind her. Gretchen gave in to her fears and let out a scream.

“Shhh,” her aunt scolded. “You’ll frighten the spirit.”

Her mother stood next to Nina.

“You scared me almost to death!” Gretchen’s heart pounded at full throttle.

“We came to find you.” Nina was admiring the armoire. “Antique and in perfect condition. Some of the really old ones had secret compartments built into them.”

“To hide an illicit lover?” Gretchen’s petrified imagination was going strong tonight.

“Exactly. Let’s check it out.”

“I was over by the door when I heard a sound from this direction,” Gretchen said. “It must have been a mouse running along the wall behind the armoire.”

“I’ll take a look,” Caroline said.

Gretchen stepped inside the armoire and tapped the back wall of the enormous walk-in wardrobe. Her curiosity over the possibility of a secret place was stronger than her fear. Besides, she wasn’t alone anymore. She tapped the back panel again. “It sounds hollow, doesn’t it?”

“Do it one more time.” Nina came closer and put her ear against the panel. Gretchen tapped with her knuckles again, staring at her aunt, waiting for her opinion. Nina’s eyes grew wide and she nodded.

“No sign of rodent droppings back there,” Caroline said, coming around. “I’ll call an exterminator tomorrow to be on the safe side.”

“Come inside,” Nina called out. “Gretchen’s found a real honest-to-goodness secret room.”

“How does the door open up?” Gretchen ran her hand over the wood, feeling for a latch or release.

“How would I know?” Nina answered. “I’ve never been inside one before. But hurry. Maybe it leads into the secret world of Narnia.”

Gretchen couldn’t help chuckling. “Why am I not surprised that you believe in fantasy worlds?” she said.

Her fingers felt something, a patch of felt, followed by the cold touch of metal. She felt it give and heard the lock release. The secret door moved ever so slightly, allowing her to get her fingers between it and the wall of the armoire.

“Ready for another universe, Nina?”

The secret door swung open. Gretchen backed up, trying to remember where she’d left her flashlight. She bumped into Nina, who moved sideways and swung her own flashlight beam into the gaping cavern of darkness they had uncovered. Her light flicked along the top of the armoire compartment then swept lower along the rich wood panel. Nina worked the light downward until it lit up something near the floor.

Gretchen felt the room spin.

Nina gasped and dropped the flashlight. Her aunt screamed.

Caroline grabbed at Gretchen’s arm, trying to pull her out of the armoire.

She felt paralyzed, too shocked to move, riveted in place.

The skeletal remains of a human being were crumpled on the floor of the secret compartment.

Gretchen turned and ran with her mother and her aunt, but not before she’d seen the rest.

On the wardrobe’s floor, beside the fleshless bones, lay a small cloth body.

The doll’s head was nowhere in sight.

Neither was the skeleton’s.

He gazes curiously up the street, not that he can see the house from where he stands. He’d have to walk two blocks, then over one more if he wants to stand right in front of it.

His cherry pipe tobacco, the first bowl of the day, catches the flame from the matchstick. Smoke swirls upward on this gray morning, the first overcast sky in weeks.
Let it rain for a change, really come down in buckets.
He likes when the earth can’t take the load and water runs in streams, flooding streets. Weather reporters in Phoenix have a mundane job. The same old, same old. Pollen counts aren’t interesting for long. But rain, that’s something to start a conversation.

Traffic—cars and pedestrians—hurries along. Already, early this morning, he has waved to some, called out to others, listened patiently while neighbors griped about this and that, pollution, smog, neighborhood pets, you name it.

All the while his thoughts bubble like a shaken can of soda, ready to explode. Especially now, with what he’s just heard.

“Mr. B.,” she says, calling him back from wherever his mind has wandered. “Want one?” Cramming Dunkin’ Donuts into her piehole. Offering friendship. He waves it away without transferring his eyes from up the street. Nice try, but no thanks.

He hears a growl from inside a bag on her shoulder. Ratlike thing with beady eyes stares out at him. Growls again. They exchange glares. The dog looks away first.

She’s finished with the tale, but he has questions. “Skeleton in the closet, you say? Imagine that.” Everybody has ’em, only this isn’t what she means. These are real bones. He wonders what they look like. “Anybody get a picture?”

A vigorous shake from her, whole body a big negative. “No,” she says. “My friend? You know the one who dresses to match her dog? She had a camera, but she didn’t pull herself together in time after the shock. It isn’t every day you find a skeleton.”

“Too bad. Convenient that she had a camera with her, though.”

“They were trying to get photographs of a ghost.” She has crumbs on her lower lip. Brushes them away. “Instead they found a dead body. The place is haunted, you know?”

“I can see why.”

What’s her name again? Starts with an
A
. After a month. August? April? That’s it.
“You sure have the details, April.” She’s been spewing them at him, along with donut crumbs, one after another, like she knows what she’s talking about. Wasn’t even there. If he hadn’t volunteered the use of his building for their event, he’d miss out on all this action. Living right upstairs helps, too, makes him feel part of things.

“They found a headless doll body in the closet, too, with the headless skeleton.”

“How old do you think the bones are? Did anyone say?” The house has been vacant for what? A decade? Two? What a perfect place to stash a body. In a house nobody wants.

April chews a chunk of donut.

“Could be only a few months, I think,” she says, like she knows her corpse decomposition facts.

April bounces away from the street corner and disappears inside the banquet hall. Pretty soon more of them will show up. He’s still exchanging greetings when the shakes start. Like ground tremors along a fault line, his body begins to tremble and all the self-will in the world can’t control it.

A group of women in the cast walk toward him, crossing the street against the light, oblivious to traffic. A car honks and they step it up. One of them looks directly at him, right into his eyes.

He’s almost sick on the sidewalk.

When will she stop tormenting him?

Every last one of them looks exactly like her.

Gretchen’s hiking boots dug into the red rocks of Camelback Mountain. She’d learned the hard way that early morning climbs were less dangerous than those made later in the day. As an expert climber, she wasn’t worried about proper dress and ways to prevent dehydration. It was the creatures of the desert that bothered her the most. One too many encounters with rattlesnakes and poisonous bugs and she’d rapidly adapted to this exotic land.

The colder the temperature, the better. Not only did she have the popular mountain all to herself, without the influx of tourists and sightseers, but the rattlers were paralyzed by the cool air. Later in the day when the temperature rose, they would be lying on the rocks, sunning themselves. That is, if the sun managed to come out today.

The snakes could appear deceptively immobile, but if warm enough to respond, they could strike like a bolt of lightning.

She shuddered at the thought of thick-skinned, deadly reptiles as she reached the summit and greeted the day. Clouds hovered over her head, giving her the impression she could reach out and touch them. She wore a lightweight waterproof jacket just in case the angrier clouds in the distance reached her before she descended.

How did so many species survive in this hostile environment? Squirrels, birds of every kind, coyotes, bobcats, jackrabbits, wild pigs, all seemed comfortable and at home in the desert.

Gretchen sat and breathed in the fresh air, absorbing the quiet.

Then she climbed back down to the halfway point where an enormous boulder overlooked the city.

Matt was already waiting for her with travel mugs.

“Coffee?” He flashed the smile that had charmed her from the very moment she met him. And he wore the Chrome cologne that she loved so much.

She took the cup he offered and sat down on the boulder beside him.

“You look tired,” she said.

“I have to work twenty-four hours a day to keep you out of trouble. Every time I arrive at a crime scene, there you are.”

“Are you blaming me for all your problems?”

“Absolutely. But you’re worth keeping in spite of the extra effort.”

“Thanks.”

They watched the Phoenix morning unfold below them and sipped coffee. Their relationship had reached a new level. They could be in each other’s company without feeling like they had to talk every minute. Gretchen found it comforting.

She also felt a drop of water.

“It’s starting to rain,” Matt observed, but he didn’t move from beside her.

“You’re in the right field of work, Sherlock,” Gretchen said, teasing, “But you still haven’t learned how to dress to climb mountains. Where’s your rain gear?”

Matt wore khaki shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. “Rain gear in Phoenix?” he said. “We rarely need foul-weather gear.”

“Right.” Gretchen raised her face into the soft rain. “Have you found out anything about the skeleton?”

“The victim was a woman, probably about sixty years old. Dental records aren’t going to be helpful since we don’t have a head to work with, which also rules out our ability to forensically reconstruct the victim’s facial features. Identifying the remains is going to be tricky. Our team worked through the night querying missing person databases and lining up forensics experts. The department doesn’t have its own internal resources to handle the complexity of identifying the corpse without requesting additional assistance. What we really need first is a forensic anthropologist to date the remains.”

“Sounds more complicated than I imagined,” Gretchen said.

“The days of pounding the pavement for information are almost over. I spend most of my time at a keyboard. It’s raining harder by the way.”

Gretchen didn’t move. This moment alone with him on the mountain was too precious to give up willingly. “Finding the skeletal remains of a human didn’t really bother me as much as I thought it would. I’ve seen enough cadavers in textbooks, and I took anatomy in college, so I can even identify most of the bones in a human body.”

“The missing head did it, right?”

Gretchen snuggled a little closer on the boulder. “The lack of a head, yes. And the headless doll body disturbed me as much as the actual headless skeleton.”

She shivered. “It has to be Flora Swilling’s body. Did you see the photograph of the girl holding a doll? It’s the same cloth doll body. I’m sure of it.”

“It could be, but we can’t work from intuition like you do. I have to prove it with concrete facts. Flora Swilling married a man named Berringer. The husband died in the sixties of heart failure. I went through old missing person reports and found something interesting: In 1981, almost twenty years after her husband died, Flora Berringer disappeared. She was never heard from again.”

Gretchen jumped up, excited. Nina had been right all along about the identification of their ghost. “You know we’ve found her!”

“We still need to make a proper identification, but for now, yes, I think you stumbled across what’s left of Flora Berringer.”

Gretchen felt as though she’d accomplished something big, something really worthwhile. She’d put together one more piece of a puzzle, as grisly as it was. Now the police would study Flora’s history, search her background, and catch her killer after all these years.

“I want to help,” Gretchen said as they started down the mountain. “I felt a connection to her from the moment I saw that old photograph.”

“Now you sound like your aunt.”

“If what I saw last night is all that remains of that woman, I want to help catch the person responsible.”

“That’s my job.”

“We can solve a cold case together.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that be fun.”

“I knew that’s what you’d say.”

They had reached the trailhead. Matt’s car was the only one in the parking area. They ducked into it just as the sky gave way. Rain beat on the windshield. Matt didn’t make any attempt to start the car.