Ghouls Gone Wild (27 page)

“Sure, Gil,” I said, then leaned over to Gopher and whispered, “Get us to the nearest burger joint you can find.”

About twenty minutes later we were seated at a no-frills Wimpy restaurant awaiting our lunch order. Gilley was twirling his Pepsi with a straw while he wore one big frown. “This place sucks,” he grumbled.

Like Gopher, I was quickly losing patience with him. “You said you were hungry. And I know you like hamburgers, so what’s the problem?”

“I’m not talking about here,” he replied moodily, tapping the tabletop. “I’m talking about Scotland. It sucks. And I want to go home.”

I laid a hand on his arm. “Scotland doesn’t suck, Gil. After all, this is where your ancestors came from, so there has to be something good here.”

Gilley’s mouth worked its way into an award-winning pout. “My ancestors
left
here, remember?”

“Maybe they just wanted to explore America.”

“Or, maybe this place
sucked
and they wanted to go someplace
better
.”

I leaned back in my chair with a heavy sigh and looked up at the ceiling. I hated it when Gil got into one of his moods. And knowing him as I did, I knew that there wasn’t much that could pull him out of it.

Except . . .

Maybe . . .

. . . a project.

I leaned forward again just as our waitress brought the tray with our food. “Say, Gil,” I began nonchalantly.

“Here we go,” he growled, clearly not in the mood for further chitchat.

Gopher looked at him before taking the plate the waitress was handing him. “Here we go what?”

“M. J. never starts a sentence with ‘Say, Gil,’ unless she’s about to put me to work.”

I smiled tightly, debating whether to give my partner a slap upside the head or just propose my project. I wisely decided on pitching my idea. “I need some intel,” I said.

Gil picked up a fry and began to nibble on it, doing his best to look bored. I waited him out and he finally paused chewing the fry long enough to say, “Intel?”

I took a bite of burger, which was incredibly greasy, but in a good way, and waited to swallow before answering. “Heath and I encountered Rigella’s sister Isla. I think she’s the one the mob spared, well, after raping her and leaving her for dead, that is. Anyway, Katherine said that Rigella’s little sister had died in childbirth, which fits with what Heath and I discovered when we met her, because she kept looking for her baby.”

Gilley was working his way through the fries, one by one, listening to what I had to say but not appearing especially interested, so I kept going. “Anyway, Isla said that she named the baby Royshin.”

“Roy who?” Gopher asked.

“Royshin.”

“Weird name for a kid,” Gil grumbled.

“It’s probably Celtic or something,” I said with an impatient wave. “The point is that Katherine said the only person who could call up the witch early would be someone who was within the bloodline. That makes me think that this Royshin lived. And if he lived, then I need to trace his line up through the past couple hundred years to find out who might have called up Rigella’s spirit.”

“How the hell am I supposed to find some dude from the seventeenth century named Roysomething? I mean, you don’t even have a last name for me to run with, do you?” Gilley complained.

Normally, Gil would have been all over that challenge, but nothing about the last few days had been normal. Still, an idea occurred to me. “Oh, but I think we might,” I said. “That castle on Joseph’s property is where I believe Isla lived out her final days. She hasn’t left it since the day she died, because she’s still looking for her baby. That makes me think that whoever took her in had power and money, especially since they kept her son safe from the angry villagers who killed the rest of her family.

“I know I might be taking a leap here, but if we can trace the family of that castle back—we might actually find Royshin within the family tree, or at least perhaps on the servants’ roll call. At the very worst they might have made him a stableboy or a farmhand or something.”

Gilley scowled and took an angry bite out of his burger. He chewed without saying anything, glowering at me. I merely smiled winningly back at him.

Finally after several heavy sighs and a long pull of his Pepsi he mumbled, “Fine.”

“You’ll do it?”

“Do I really have a choice?”

“Of course,” I snapped, finally out of patience. “You can sit in your hotel room
hoping
it doesn’t catch fire while we try to bust this case,
or
you can help us get the job done that much sooner by doing your part!”

Gilley lowered his lids at me and smacked his lips. “Well, when you put it like
that
,” he muttered.

Gopher and Heath snickered and pretended to be really interested in their food, and that was the end of the discussion for a while.

 

When we got back to the hotel, Heath went immediately to his room to take his pain pill and a nap. I was pretty exhausted myself, so I handed the camera over to Gopher to look at the footage we’d gotten from the castle, asked Kim and John to keep watch over Gil, and hunted down Meg and Wendell.

Meg was only too happy to hand Wendell over to me for some prime puppy love and a few z’s. Half an hour later, I was fast asleep.

 

“M. J.,” someone called to me softly. “M. J., can you hear me?”

I sat up and looked around. I was in my hotel room with Wendell cuddled up next to me; however, sitting in the corner was none other than Samuel Whitefeather.

“Hey!” I said, a little startled and still sleepy. “How’d you get in here?”

Samuel chuckled and I found myself smiling. “I climbed in through the window,” he joked. For the record we were two floors up.

“Ah,” I said. “Right. You’re dead. You can go anywhere.”

“One of the perks,” he quipped. “That and you can get into any show or concert for free.”

“No joke?”

“No joke.”

I nodded. “Good to know.” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and blinked a few times. “So what brings you by, Mr. Whitefeather?”

“I’m worried,” he said. “And please, call me Sam.”

“ ’Kay, Sam. What worries you? The fact that your grandson had his arm broken by a spook-wielding broom, who then tried to kill me, or the three-alarm fire that nearly took my partner’s life?”

Sam chuckled again. “Well, all of that, plus what I saw happen this afternoon.”

I cocked my head, thinking back through the events of the day. “Which part exactly?”

“I think you missed something,” Sam said. I opened my mouth to reply, but he stopped me by saying, “Don’t get me wrong, M. J.—you and Heath make a great team—but there was a clue in that castle that I think you passed by.”

“What clue?”

“There was a room that you never got to. Do you remember?”

I blinked a couple of times, trying to recall, and I had a hazy memory of a room at the top of the stairs that had a door that was still intact, and closed tight. “I remember,” I said.

Sam smiled and folded his hands together in his lap. “Excellent,” he said. “What you’re really looking for is in there. And you can’t delay going back to find it. You must go later on tonight, or it could be removed and you’ll never put it all together.”

I didn’t know what to say other than, “Can’t you just tell me and save me the trip?”

“No,” he said. “It’s for you to discover. But I promise it’ll be worth it. Oh, and Gilley won’t find Royshin. But he might find Katherine. You’ll tell him to look for her now, won’t you?”

“Um . . . sure,” I said, not really understanding what he meant.

“Wonderful. I have to leave now, but before I go, can I give you a bit of advice from an old man who loves his grandson?”

Uh-oh
.

“Sure,” I said with a gulp.

“Go easy on Heath. He likes you, and not just as friends. I don’t want to see him get his heart broken again.”

I felt my cheeks heat. “Sure, Sam. I can do that. And I’m trying to figure all this out, I promise. The last thing in the world I’d want to do is hurt him.”

“I know, M. J. I know.”

And with that, Samuel Whitefeather dissolved into a mist just as I heard three bangs on my door. Then Wendell barked, and I woke up with a start.

 

 

 

Still trying to sort out the dream from the reality, I pulled off the blanket I was lying under and stumbled to the door. When I opened it, I found Gilley standing there looking quite peeved.

“Hey, Gil,” I said, doing my best to sound upbeat and positive.

“I’ve been at it for
hours
,” he yelled. “Hours and hours!”

I rubbed my face and shook my head, trying to get my brain to work. “What time is it?”

“Six.”

“Okay, so you’ve been at it a few hours, and I’m guessing you came up with nothing?”

“Not. One. Thing,” he growled, pushing his way into the room to pick up Wendell and go straight to the chair where Sam had been just a moment earlier. “I’m telling you this Royshin dude doesn’t exist!”

“Did you look at the family that owned the castle?”

Gil’s lids lowered—his look dangerous. “What do you take me for, an amateur?”

“Okay, sorry,” I said, coming back into the room to sit on the bed, remembering what Sam had told me. “But I might have given you the wrong name. I think that instead of looking for a Royshin, you should look for Katherine.”

Gil’s mouth dropped open. “You’re
kidding
me, right?”

I sighed heavily. Gil could be so damn difficult sometimes. “I know I’m asking a lot of you to go back and look some more, buddy, but this is important.”

Gilley sat forward and placed a squirming Wendell on the ground. The pup trotted quickly back to me, obviously scared of the testy guy who’d just entered our suite. “No, M. J., you don’t get it. That’s what I was going to say next. I’ve already found Katherine.”

I shook my head again. “Wait. . . . What?”

“Katherine McKay of the McKays of Queen’s Close. The woman living in Joseph Hill’s guesthouse is a direct descendant of the clan of McKay—the same family that once owned that crumbling castle on Hill’s property.”

Gil pulled out a piece of paper that he’d scribbled his notes on and referred to it as he told me what he’d found. “The McKays have been residents of the village of Queen’s Close for centuries. They were a very prominent family all the way up through the late eighteen hundreds, and they owned most of the property here in the close until they fell on hard times and had to sell off most of what they owned. That’s when the castle fell into ruin, in fact.”

“So the woman we met on Joseph Hill’s property today was once related to the family that owned that castle?”

Gilley nodded. “Quite the coincidence, isn’t it?”

“But, Gilley,” I said quickly, “don’t you see? She’s a direct descendant of Rigella’s—she as much as admitted it to us this morning!” When Gilley cocked his head sideways like a confused puppy, I explained, “Remember? Katherine said Rigella only communicates with her direct descendants, and Katherine told us that Rigella came to her in Katherine’s dreams! She said that the witch showed up the first time in a dream when she was nineteen, and then again recently when she asked Katherine to make the brooms.”

“Okay,” Gil said, still not following.

“Which means that if you can go back and follow her family branch specifically, it might lead us to who else has survived through the ages and would be in mind to call up the witch.”

Gilley looked at his notes and said, “See, that’s where things get really interesting. Katherine is one of seven girls.”

Gil nodded. “But only three sisters are still alive.”

“What? Four of her sisters are dead?”

“Yep. Two were twins who died in infancy, one more was killed in an automobile accident in the late seventies, and the fourth died about two years ago. I found her obit half an hour ago. She had cancer.”

“So where are the other two remaining sisters?”

“One is currently living in New Zealand, and the other you already know.”

“I do?”

“Well, sort of. Vicariously. Through Wendell.”

“Gilley,” I said irritably, rubbing my temple.” “Just tell me.”

“Sarah Summers. She owns the animal shelter where Wendell was living.”

I blinked, totally surprised. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“Then she must be the one,” I said. “She must be the woman Katherine refused to tell us about, and she must have called up the witch.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

But then something struck me as odd, and I had to pause. “But why would Sarah want to kill Cameron?”

Gilley shrugged. “Why don’t you go ask her?”

I leveled a look at him. “Yeah, great idea, Gil. I’ll just walk right up and ask her why she murdered a man, froze his body, defrosted him, laid him in the road then cut your brake lines. I’ll bet she’ll share her whole life’s story once I’ve broken the ice with that one.”

“Beats sitting around here and speculating about it,” Gil said, his own tone a bit testy.

I took a deep breath and pulled in my horns. “Okay,” I relented. “We’ll go talk to her. And see if we can’t get her to cough up something incriminating.”

“Now?”

I looked at my watch. “No. Now we go eat. Then I’ve got to borrow Heath to go back to that castle. So tomorrow we’ll go talk to Sarah.”

Gilley stared at me in shock. “You’re going back to that castle?
Tonight?
”

I got up off the bed, stretching before I answered him. “There’s something I need to check out, and Heath’s grandfather said it was urgent.”