The Realm of the Shadows (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 2) (10 page)

“In the barn?”

“That’s what it said. They found her hanging from the window in the loft, where we found the initials carved into the wood frame.”

We both stopped and stared at one another. Then Ed reached over and turned the tap off. In the silence, we both had the same thought at the same time.

“The initials.”

“They don’t work,” I said. “The initials are H.B. Hers were E.O.”

“You’re not looking at this the right way,” he said.

But another thought had hit me, and I interrupted him. “Charlie! What are we going to do about Charlie? Do we tell him?”

Ed thought about it, rubbing his hand across his chin a few times. When he didn’t respond, I said, “Just how serious is it, when somebody, you know, falls in love with a ghost?”

“It can be very serious. It can become an obsession. It can even lead to possession. The experience he had when she touched him, it moved him very deeply. You saw that too, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“And then he became protective, wanting to stay near her overnight.”

“What can we expect to happen when we tell him who she was? Knowing somebody’s name – it makes them seem more real.”

“She’s already real to him. That’s the problem. I have an idea. Let’s tell him her name is, oh, maybe Sarah, and see how he reacts.”

“Why?”

He shivered. “If she really did touch him, if he really caught some of her essence as she brushed against him, he should have some kind of impression. He should know if the name is wrong.”

“I don’t think that follows. If you went out and told Teddy that her name was Bridey McGuiggan, he’d believe it. Why wouldn’t he?”

“I think you’ve pointed up the difference yourself. Teddy will believe anything. Charlie is, well, normal. And I think, possibly, he’s something a little more than normal.”

“You mean you think he’s psychic or something?”

He answered cautiously. “Or something. Anyway, follow my lead and we’ll see what happens. All right?”

“All right. But you have to let me get him back to work. Don’t get him freaked out again, like he was when he told you about his experience in the loft.”

“I’m a professional. Trust me.”

We found Charlie in the old block of servants’ cabins. He and his crew were getting some work done at last. Much as I hated to, I interrupted him, signaling that we wanted to talk to him outside.

“We have some information for you,” Ed said.

Charlie didn’t seem to want to know, which surprised me. He gazed up at the second-floor window of the barn for a moment, then lowered his head. I wondered if he was afraid we were about to take a little of the magic out of his world by giving him a mundane explanation for his experience. He’d reached the point of wanting it to be real, and I wasn’t sure it was wise to confirm that it was.

“The name Sarah,” Ed said. “Does it mean anything to you?”

Charlie’s face hadn’t changed. “No. Sarah who?”

“What about Bridey? Or Bridget?”

“Look, I’ve got to get back to work. Do you have information or don’t you?”

“What about Ellen?” he said, keeping his voice neutral.

The change in Charlie was instantaneous. He didn’t answer. He stared. Then his pale grey eyes lost focus, not seeking the barn, but taking in the space before him, as if she were always in the air around him, just out of reach, where she could melt against him in sorrow. He was always trying to reach her, and sometimes he could catch her essence, sometimes he’d catch at nothing. The name Ellen had placed her before him, set her on her feet reaching out her arms, and as he gazed at her with her name ringing in his head, tears formed in his eyes and his lips parted as if to speak to her.

Ed sagged a little and lowered his head.

“Ellen,” Charlie whispered.

I looked away and blinked to keep the tears from forming in my own eyes.

“What do you know about her?” Ed asked him. “About Ellen.”

Charlie didn’t even look our way. He blinked, and instinctively I knew that the vision had faded. He took a deep breath and turned away from us, never looking back, walking back to where his men were working inside the servants’ cabins, one of which had probably been Ellen’s room.

“We’ve lost him,” Ed said quietly.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

He shook his head. Then he took a deep breath and said, “I’m taking the cemetery tonight. I suppose we won’t be able to keep Charlie out of the barn.”

“We’ve got bigger problems than that. Teddy and his crew are filming tonight, and they’ve found out about what’s been happening in the barn. What are we going to do?”

Ed kept shaking his head, shrugged, then started walking back to his car. “I’ll be back after dark,” he said. “I need to make some phone calls, get some advice. When I get back we’ll have another talk, and try to figure out how to handle things.”

“I’ll be here,” I told him. Then I looked around at Teddy’s gang. “We’ll all be here.”

Looking toward the river, I saw a pathetic figure in baggy overalls, hunkered down by the seawall, looking for all the world as if he were on his knees, praying over the water. The sun shone down on his head, adding to the picture of quiet reverence. I started walking toward him, and when I got close I saw that it was Pluto. Pluto Farnham, but he had introduced himself to me as Perry. It was Seth who had told me to call him Pluto. Maybe, like Walter “Wizard” Sheets, he didn’t like his on-screen nickname.

“Perry,” I called.

He looked up and shied back a little. Then he quickly started digging in his black canvas
Realm of the Shadows
bag, which was sitting on the ground beside him, embarrassed that I’d caught him in a private moment. Many religious people manage to combine their beliefs with the paranormal, and I wondered if he carried a Bible. He struggled to his feet, chubby and clumsy. My heart turned over. The guy was such a sad sack!

“How are you doing?” I asked him. “Look, maybe this isn’t such a great place for you to be right now. Why don’t you come away, take a walk with me?”

I took his arm and steered him along the seawall, away from the house, where the river turned to marshland and egrets were posing elegantly on one of the polka-dot islands just offshore.

His face was red and I could see perspiration around his neck. He grunted a little and protested incoherently that he was all right, he’d be fine, don’t fuss, but when I got him away from the spot where Seth had gone into the water, he seemed relieved. I could see that he wasn’t used to people being nice to him. In the time I’d been around the crew of
Realm of the Shadows
, I’d never seen anybody treat him like a friend. Only Walter had behaved toward him with common decency, and even he hadn’t been really chummy.

“So, you’re going to do more shooting tonight?” I said, groping for something to say.

He animated, slightly, and then got a little shamefaced. “You know about the barn.”

“Yes, I know. Just what is it that
you
know?”

“Aha! You just want to pick my brain, is that it?” He said it without rancor, as if he’d been wondering why I was being so nice to him. Poor kid. “Well, we all read the newspaper, so we knew right away we were on the wrong track. And then some of the workmen who are remodeling those cabins told us about what’s been going on in the barn. And the thing about the blueprints. Strange. Never heard of a ghost moving blueprints, but it makes sense, doesn’t it, if the spirit doesn’t want changes in her place here on Earth?”

I studied him as he talked, trying to gauge if he was a true believer, and began to think that he was.

“So what’s the plan for tonight?”

He stopped and looked at me. “We’re shooting in the barn. In the loft. Where your foreman saw the figure of a woman.”

“I see.”

“Are you going to try to stop us?”

I shrugged. “My landlord gave you the go-ahead. I can hardly stop you. I don’t know how my foreman is going to take it, though. He doesn’t want you people messing around in the barn.”

“I can understand that. Please assure him that we won’t damage any of the work he and his men have done. That’s not our mission. We’re only there to help the soul that’s trapped in there.”

Okay, I though, that’s settled. He does believe.

“Perry, I’ve been thinking about the incident at the seawall last night. Was that – how do I say this? – was it . . . .”

“A set-up? Staged for the show?”

I shrugged, then nodded.

“If it was, I wasn’t in on it,” he told me.

“Have you ever suspected that that kind of thing goes on?”

I’d hit a nerve and I could see it, though he didn’t say anything. I patted his arm. “That’s okay. I don’t know what goes on with the rest of the crew, but I believe in you.”

“Thank you,” he said emotionally. “Thank you for that, Miss, er, Verone.”

“Please call me Taylor.”

“Thanks, Taylor. It’s just that so many people don’t get it. Even some of the people I work with. Even some who should know better. If they would only trust, in the end I know they’d find proof. But we won’t get anywhere if we’re faking.”

Then he stopped suddenly, as if he’d said too much. Before I could try to get any more out of him, we were distracted by shouting from behind us and turned to see about eight men running in the same direction, toward the seawall.

“Oh, God, not again,” I said, and Perry and I both began to run.

We were almost at the seawall when I realized what was going on. Porter was in the house, as the rappers put it, and he was taking over. As Perry and I came running, Porter thundered gaily along the bottom of the seawall toward us, flipping snot in all directions, snorting like a freight train. One of the crewmen made a dive for him and the two did a double roll on the grass. The crewman then splayed himself out flat on his back, defeated, and Porter ran happily on, veering to the west, straight into the men who were trying to catch him. Disconcerted, the men screeched to a halt and let him run right through them, then pivoted and continued the chase in the other direction.

Teddy Force had selected the one dog in the shelter that was guaranteed to give Orphans of the Storm a bad name. Any “spot” he did with Porter was going to convince people that we were running an insane asylum for dogs. I hadn’t realized Teddy was going to the shelter immediately, or I would never have let him go without me.

In a moment of heart-stopping horror, I saw Porter pick something up from the ground and start shaking it all around like he was trying to kill it, and it looked a lot like a snake. The men chasing him must have all seen it at the same time I did, because they reared back sharply.

Getting a better look at the thing, I hollered, “It’s only a rope!” I passed a few guys and had just caught up with the dog when two of Charlie’s men came at him from the other direction and we all managed to get hands on him, his rope and his slobbery face at the same time.

Porter loved it. Best game ever.

I wound up flat on my belly, nose to nose with the frothing, panting dog, and after giving me a huge smile, he licked my whole face from bottom to top. I didn’t know whether to strangle him or just laugh.

“What a great dog!” a man cried, running up from the sidelines now that the action was over. It could only be Teddy.

The other men who were holding Porter down were grinning and nodding. “What is this thing?” one of them asked.

“An English Bulldog,” I told him.

“Oh, man, I gotta get me one of these!”

I gently banged my forehead on the ground a few times.

I caught up with Perry.

Porter had been safely containerized in a dog crate and would rest up a while before his moment of glory in front of the cameras. Teddy was welcome to try to hold the spotlight with Porter heaving and grinning and generally upstaging him in all directions.

I had seen Perry pick up the object Porter had been playing with and stash it in his pocket, and that brought up a whole other thing I’d been meaning to talk to Teddy’s people about.

“Man, I love that dog,” Teddy said over my right shoulder. “Porterhouse? Like the steak? Great name. Is he, like, adoptable?”

“It’s Porter,” I told him, just as I caught Perry’s arm from behind and spun him around. I gave him a look, and said, “Whatcha got there, Perry?”

“Oh, this?” he said. “Just some webbing. We’re trying to keep things neat for you, so I thought I’d pick it up.”

I held out my hand. Reluctantly, he handed over a heavy black strap, an inch wide and maybe eighteen inches long, with metal spring clips on each end.

As I turned around and showed it to Teddy, glaring at him, while Perry driveled on nervously behind me.

“We use them to hang lights, or secure things together. I strap them around my satchel when I’ve got it overloaded. They’re kind of all-purpose.” Perry’s voice drifted off into a garble of nonsense.

“This could have been dangerous,” I told Teddy. “If Porter had whipped one of these clips into his own face, he could have blinded himself. I’ve been finding your crew’s trash all over the yard.”

“Oh, that’s bad. I gotta talk to them about that. HEY GUYS!” he shouted over my head, making my ears ring. “We can’t leave stuff like this around!”

“Yeah, you go talk to them,” I said, shoving the strap into my cargo pocket. Perry had slunk off and was down by the seawall retrieving his canvas bag. I’d wanted to soften the edges of what I’d said; he seemed so downtrodden, I felt sorry for the guy.

“Listen, Teddy, I gotta go,” I said, edging away, but Teddy didn’t get himself a reality show by letting people give him the brush-off.

“Listen, I wanted to give you the program for tonight’s shoot,” he said, turning me and guiding me back to the seawall. By then, Perry was trudging along toward the barn, looking like somebody had kicked him.

Teddy sat down on the sun-warmed coquina and patted a space beside him. “Pull up a rock.”

I sat. “Okay, what?”

“We’ve gotten the story about the haunting in the barn, and I just wanted to give you a head’s up. This one is going to get ugly.”

“Ugly? How?”

“This is no normal infestation,” he said darkly. “It’s more a case of animal possession.”

I resented his talking about Ellen that way, not that I really knew much about Ellen, but the one who should know (Charlie) seemed to care about her, and she’d only been seventeen when she died. “What kind of animal?”

“A dog, of course. It isn’t a woman we’re after over there. It’s a dog, or more precisely, the spirit of the dog that is now bound to the spirit of an evil woman.”

Convinced he had absolutely no clue as to the real story, and strangely interested in whatever hooey he’d come up with now, I encouraged him. “What woman?”

“Our Betsy.”

“You mean Betsy-in-the-water? That Betsy?”

He laughed shortly, bitterly. “Yeah, that one. She’s been toying with us. She almost made fools of us. She’s clever, that one. And never forget, she used a ghostly dog to lure a man to his death.”

“Now you’re blaming Elizabeth Cadbury for Seth’s drowning?”

“Who else?”

I flared up. “How about your stupid show? If you hadn’t been out here fooling around in front of the cameras, that young man would still be alive.”

I meant it as viciously as it came out, but he only smiled, one of those tragic, misunderstood-hero smiles. Then he nodded.

“I’m used to that kind of reaction,” he said. “I never let it discourage me.” He stood up, brushing coquina crumbles from the seat of his pants. “It gives me strength, really. It makes me determined to go on. So many misunderstand, but I never lose sight of my mission.”

Holding that vision before him, he walked on, on into the bloody sunset, strong in the glory of righteousness. Then he spoiled the effect by turning around jauntily and saying, “Listen, we’re going to do the Porterhouse spot now, and I want you in it, so come on.”

“It’s
Porter
,” I said. “The dog’s name is – oh, never mind.”

“Don’t worry,” he said confidingly as we went across the lawn. “I’ve called for back-up. An expert from the shelter is on her way. Oh, there she is now!”

A couple of cars had pulled up, one of them Michael’s, saints be praised, and as I saw him getting out of his car I was so relieved just by the sight of him I wanted to run to him. Teddy had a hold on my arm, though, and as all the things I wanted to tell Michael streamed through my mind, Teddy prepared to introduce me to my own employee and house-sitter.

“Of course you know Angie Kelly,” he said, being formal. “After Porter got away from us a little while ago, I called Orphans and asked if they could send somebody over to help out. Angie, here, graciously said she’d come herself.”

“Gee, what a relief,” I said, giving Angie the eyeball-riveting she deserved.

“Hey, Taylor,” she said, insouciant as ever. “Happy to help out, Teddy,” she crooned, bathing herself in the glow of his eyes.

“Now,” Teddy said, getting businesslike, “I think it would be best if you’d take the leash, Angie, so Porter doesn’t get away from Taylor, and then Taylor and I can say a few words about the shelter. Now don’t be shy, Taylor. I’ll handle most of it. You just stand there and look pretty, okay? Might want to let Jazz get you into the make-up chair for
just
a minute,” he added, looking all around my face. Then he veered off, shouting for Jazz, while the camera-and-sound crew started setting up in a pretty spot on the lawn, talking about the Golden Hour and the reflected light on the water.

“Get up here; the guys are in a hurry,” Jazz said. She wanted me to hike myself onto a tall chair so she could do make-up. She took her glasses off, got in my face, and studied me short-sightedly.

“That bad, huh?” I said. She had an industrial-strength make-up case sitting on a table beside the company van. We were outside, on the other side of the house where all the cars were parked, and she came at me with her brushes and war paint the way a plumber goes after a clogged drain – grim and determined.

“Don’t talk,” she said.

Okay, I didn’t talk. But just looking at her face, I could see straight into her mind; Jazz was pissed. I speculated silently, just to amuse myself while she worked. Maybe she was mad because she had to make me pretty, and
she
was the pretty one. Maybe she was pissed at Teddy for making a fuss over Angie while Angie made a fuss over him. Whatever it was, it wasn’t mourning. The way she’d been pawing Seth before the fatal shoot, I would have expected her to be sad, not mad.

While she dipped a tiny brush into several colors and mixed lipstick on the base of her thumb, I said, “I’ve wanted to tell you how sorry I am about Seth. I could see that the two of you were close.”

She snapped around and glared, making a creamy pink streak down the side of her hand.

“There was nothing like that between me and Seth. We were professionals, working on the same project, that’s all.”

“I see. Well, still, I want to offer my condolences. He was a special young man.”

“Shut your mouth.”

I stared, but then realized that she had the brush ready to paint my lips and wanted them together.

“Now open,” she said, filling in the color. She put her glasses back on and looked up at the sky. “We’re losing the light. Get down. You’re done.”

She put her glasses back on and stalked off, taking her cosmetics case with her.

I stuck my hands in my pockets, then realized my cargo pocket had something in it. I groped, then had a moment of shuddering horror – something cold, slimy and snake-like was coiled in my pocket. Then I remembered.

“Porter,” I said out loud.”Thanks a lot, little buddy. Ee-yuck!”

“Come on, Miss Verone,” a crewman called, popping around a corner. “We’re losing the light.”

“So I’ve been told.” I ditched the strap in one of the old cabins behind the house just because I was walking past them at the moment, checked my face in an old mirror on the cabin wall, just to be sure Jazz hadn’t made me look like a hooker after a hard night on the streets (she’d actually done a very good job), then went to the other side of the house and down to the seawall, where a gaggle of men, Angie, and the recharged Porter were waiting.

Actually, it all went pretty well. While Teddy and I addressed ourselves to the camera, Angie knelt beside us holding Porter’s leash. Porter seemed to know what the camera was all about, and hammed it up without any kind of lunacy for just long enough, then at the end of our chat about how pet adoption works, he popped up at Angie and gave her a big wet kiss while she let out a musical trill of laughter.

Perfect.

“Man, he’s perfect,” Teddy said, echoing my thoughts. “He’s a natural.”

I, apparently, wasn’t a natural and got no praise, but I was happy to let Porter get the attention. Of course, Teddy looked great. And Porter looked like a roly-poly ball full of fun, which was the whole point. All in all, I thought the thing went well, and quickly forgot about it. I did find out what Jazz had been upset about, though.

After the shoot, Teddy went to the still-kneeling Angie and lifted her by the fingertips, almost to within kissing distance, mesmerizing her with the misty greens. Angie was bedazzled. I had to quickly catch hold of Porter’s leash as it slipped out of her hand. I managed to pull him to my side and out of the way before she could trip over him.

Actually, I kind of enjoyed it. Let her have some fun, I figured; the guy would be on to the next ghost before he could really cause any heartache. But about the time Teddy was asking her about a decent restaurant where he could take her for dinner, I caught a sharp movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see Jazz stomping away across the lawn.