Ghouls Gone Wild (32 page)

Heath and I exchanged a meaningful glance, just as the door to the back room opened up and the very girl we were discussing stood there looking sweaty and uncomfortable. “I need your help again, Mum.”

“I’ll be right there, dear,” Sarah promised. “Did you want to purchase those, Miss Holliday?” she asked me, indicating the toys for Wendell still clutched in my arms.

“Um . . . ,” I said, caught off guard by Rose’s appearance. “Sure.”

I followed behind Sarah as Rose gave Heath and me a disapproving look and disappeared into the back again. While Sarah was ringing me up, I mentioned casually, “We saw Rose at Cameron’s funeral. I’m so sorry for her loss.”

For the first time since we’d come into the shop, Sarah’s genteel demeanor changed. “Oh, that cad,” she said with a flip of her hand. “Our Heavenly Father might not approve of what I’m about to say, but I’m not sorry he’s gone.”

“Why not?” Heath asked, again sneaking a pointed look at me.

Sarah placed the toys in a bag. “He was a horrible match for my Rose,” she said. “Horrible. He chased after her, you know, seduced her right under me nose. I didn’t come to find out about it until the poor thing was already with child. And even though my sister had already left the sorry sot, it still caused terrible problems between us.”

“Have you mended fences with your sister?” I asked, hoping that Sarah wouldn’t feel I was overly nosy.

She handed me the package and nodded. “Aye,” she said. “And she’s revealed a lot that’s helped me make sense of what my poor Rose has been through.”

“You mean Cameron’s death?” Heath said.

Sarah shook her head and leaned forward. Speaking low, she said, “No, that Camey was having
another
affair. He was cheating with a girl on the other side of town. And it was no wonder to me then why he wouldn’t marry my daughter, given her condition, the lying oaf. He wanted his cake and to eat it too.”

I held a hand to my mouth, shocked by all that Sarah was revealing to us. If she knew why we were interested, she’d never tell us so much. “Did your daughter know about the other woman?”

Sarah was about to answer when Rose stuck her head back out of the door again. “Mum!” she snapped. “Are you comin’?”

Sarah’s cheeks tinted and she looked rather guilty as she bade us a good-bye. “Sorry to cut our chat short,” she said, bustling over to her daughter in the doorway. “Give that pug of yours a right big hug, if you would?”

“I’ll do that, Sarah. Thank you.”

She smiled broadly. “He was one of my favorite rescues,” she said. “Such a good pup. I just know he’ll make a wonderful addition to your own family.”

I knew it too. “Thank you again, Sarah,” I said, waving my good-bye.

When we got out to the street, I told Heath, “Let’s get back to the hotel and call an immediate meeting!”

Heath was already sending text messages. “I’m on it,” he said. And we were off.

 

 

 

We made it back to the hotel and hurried to the bar. Gilley, Meg, and Gopher were already there, but John and Kim were still missing. “They’re on their way,” Gopher explained with a hint of irritation. “They were in line buying tickets or something.”

Heath frowned. “Sounds like they’re enjoying their vacation.”

“I know, right?” Gopher replied. “I swear, if we didn’t need every member of this crew right now, I’d fire their asses.”

“Fire whose asses?” Kim said as she and John joined us.

Gopher was caught off guard. “Uh, the waitstaff,” he said. “They take forever to get your drinks.”

Kim smiled and set down a pink flyer she’d carried in. The color caught my eye, so I read the large caption.
Take a tour of Scotland’s most haunted locations!

I squinted at the paper. “Is this Fergus’s tour?”

Kim smiled and smoothed her hand over the paper. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s the talk of the town ever since rumors of the witch being back cropped up. John and I wanted to take the full tour last night to check it out for research—you know, to maybe see if there was anything on the tour that might help you guys out. Fergus only took us to the first part of his tour when we first came here to scout out locations. Anyway, we thought we’d pick his brain along the way and maybe get something that could assist us with the bust.”

“But the tour was canceled due to the weather, so we caught a movie instead,” John said.

I nodded and caught Heath staring at me impatiently. He wanted to discuss Rose and our theory. I got straight to the point. “We know who called up the witch,” I said.

Gopher, Gilley, Meg, Kim, and John all stared at us with mouths agape and said,
“Who?!”

“Rose Summers.”

No one seemed to recognize the name.
“Who?”
Gilley asked again.

“Sarah Summers’s youngest daughter,” I clarified. “She was Cameron’s girlfriend.”

“How could she have called up the witch?” Kim asked.

“Sarah Summers and Katherine McKay are the witch’s descendants,” Heath explained. “Only someone blood-related could have called up the witch, and Sarah Summers was the seventh daughter of Allister McKay. A few centuries ago the McKays owned a castle where Rigella’s baby sister was taken after she was raped by the mob. She gave birth to a little girl who must have been adopted by the McKays and given their name to hide her from anyone still angry at the witch.”

“It gets even better, Gil,” I said. “Rose’s Celtic name is pronounced Roy-shin, but it’s spelled R-o-i-s-i-n-n.”

“No way!” Gil said, digging into his messenger bag for his notes. “I found that name early on in my research, but I didn’t think that’s how you pronounced it and I thought I was looking for a boy!” He showed me the small chart he’d drawn from the research he’d done that traced everyone back to the year the witch had died. “See?” I said, pointing to her name. “Roisinn is listed here. She married Peter McKay seventeen years after the witch was killed!”

“So the McKays
did
bring her up,” Heath said.

“And if we follow this thread,” I said, moving my hand carefully through the marriages and finally landing on Katherine and Sarah’s line, “we can see that these guys really are related to the witch!”

“Tell him about the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter!” Heath encouraged. “You know the myth about how the seventh offspring of the seventh offspring is supposed to have magical powers?”

By now, Gopher had gotten out his video camera to record our conversation, and I ignored him while I focused on Gil. “Sarah is the seventh daughter of her parents’ children, and Rose is Sarah’s seventh daughter. Rose is the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter!” I said, which won me another surprised look from the group.

“That is
freaky
!” Kim said, leaning over my shoulder to look at the chart. “Oh, hey, Gilley! Your family intermarried with the McKays too!”

Gilley frowned distastefully. “Yes, I know,” he said. “The traitors.”

“And so did the Ericsons,” she added. “See? Right here. Pheona Ericson married Gabriel Gillespie! Then, their daughter Clementine married William Hill! I’ll bet that means you and Fergus are distantly related!”

Again, that tiny, niggling thought at the back of my mind began to creep out of its hiding place, but I became distracted again by what Heath was saying. “We also learned that Cameron was cheating on Rose,” Heath said. “The poor woman is ready to give birth and her boyfriend is sleeping all over town.”

“So she called up the witch to get even with him?” Gopher asked.

I shook my head. “No, she called up the witch to cover up his murder.”

“You really think she murdered Cameron?” John asked.

I nodded. I knew it in my gut. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure of it. You should have seen her at the funeral—she just looked totally guilty, like someone realizing they’ve done a terrible thing, but there’s no way to repair the damage.”

Heath scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Something about her as the murderer doesn’t add up, though, M. J.,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, you saw Rose. She’s nine months pregnant. How did she kill Cameron and get him into the freezer, then pull him into the street so that Gilley’s van could run over him? Plus, how did she know where the brake lines were to cut them? Most girls I know barely know how to check for oil.”

I decided not to take offense at that and focus on the question. Before I could answer, however, Heath added to the debate by saying, “And for that matter, how did she know we were coming? Cameron was killed over a fortnight ago, before Kim and John got here to scout out the location. Did you guys visit with a pregnant lady and discuss our plans to come here?”

Both Kim and John shook their heads.

“How’d you find out about this village anyway?” I wondered.

John said, “All we did was plug
European haunted locations
into Google and came up with some choices. We hit on Fergus’s Web site, came here to check it out, and only stayed one night before we left early the next morning.”

“So Rose couldn’t have known ahead of time that a Gillespie was coming to the village,” Heath concluded. He then offered another fly in the ointment. “Also, if Rose is responsible, why did she also murder Joseph Hill? I mean, the two murders have to be related, don’t they? I think she could probably have strangled him if she caught him by surprise, but there’s no way she alone could have strung him up in that tree.”

“She must have had help,” Gilley said.

“But what about Jack McLaren?” Gopher asked. “You know,” he said when everyone looked curiously at him. “The maintenance worker who died down in the close. Do you think he was murdered too?”

I thought about that for a minute, wondering about that poor man, caught down there in the throes of a heart attack, dropping his little radio as he stumbled down the close . . . and just like that, all those pieces came together. “Holy freakballs!” I said, slapping the table with my hand, causing several of my colleagues to jump.

With trembling fingers I reached for the pink flyer and held it up as evidence. “It’s been right in front of us all along!” No one in the group seemed to understand what I was talking about, so I took a breath and tried to calm myself to explain my theory to them. “When Heath and I were down in the close for the first time, I remember stumbling over what I thought was a small transistor radio. At the time I believed that Jack had dropped it when he felt his heart attack coming on. Then, later, when we were chasing the van where Gilley was trapped, I remember seeing another small radio lying broken in the street!”

Gilley’s eyes widened as understanding bloomed. “They weren’t radios!” he said. “They were miniature ghost enhancers like the one you found in the castle!”

I nodded vigorously, turning to Heath. “Remember the energy on Briar Road?” Heath’s brow furrowed. “Remember how intense and overwhelming it was?”

“You think it was being enhanced?” he asked.

“I’m sure of it!”

Heath’s eyes darted to the flyer. “Fergus,” he said. “Fergus has been using the gadgets to enhance the energy for his ghost tour!”

I nodded again and pointed to the flyer. “This ghost tour starts at nine p.m.! The same time we felt the effects the other night in the castle!”

“But what about the woods?” Heath asked. “We weren’t there at nine.”

“If Fergus is controlling the devices, he could have a remote control or just flip a switch. He had to have seen us following him into the woods, and flipped one of his gadgets on. My thinking is that there’s another device hidden somewhere near where we saw the first broomstick in those woods.”

“So Fergus called up the witch?” John said, clearly confused.

“No,” I told him. “But somehow he convinced Rose to do it.”

“But what’s in it for him?” Kim asked. “Why kill Jack McLaren and Joseph Hill?”

Heath and I exchanged glances, and I knew, like me, he was remembering that conversation in the car we’d had with Fergus. “I think Jack was simply an unexpected casualty,” I said. “But I know why Fergus would want Hill dead.”

“Why?” Gopher asked.

“He wanted the castle,” I said, knowing it in my gut. “With all the competition of ghost tours in Edinburgh, his business was suffering so to lure tourists in, he needed to purchase that old ruin. And I bet he didn’t want to wait the year or two for Joseph to die, so he took advantage of the witch’s reappearance and Joseph’s depressive state of mind to kill him and make it look like a suicide.”

Gopher eyed me skeptically, so I pointed back to the bottom of the flyer where a small map was drawn. “Look where the tour goes, Gopher! It starts on Briar Road, heads into the close, comes back up here, right next to the woods we got smacked around in, continues on to the giant oak tree where we found Hill, and
ends at the castle
!”

“Holy cow!” Gilley shouted. “Why didn’t we see that before?”

Kim and John looked at each other guiltily and then Kim said, “We overheard someone gossiping about Ericson yesterday,” she said. “One of Joseph Hill’s neighbors was saying that she believed Joseph was driven to suicide by Fergus. She said that Fergus tortured him constantly by vandalizing his home and that Joseph had even called the police on Ericson, but no charges were ever brought.”

To cement my theory, I turned to Kim and John and asked, “When you guys first came here to scout the location, did you tell Fergus anything about our show?”

The couple looked guilty again. “We did,” John admitted. “We even gave him your Web site, M. J.”

I looked at Gilley. He was featured almost as prominently as I was on the Web site, because Gilley had a bit of an ego and he’d designed it, after all.

“So he
knew
a Gillespie was coming to town,” Heath mused. “And our visiting the village was the last ingredient for this perfect storm. I’ll bet he was the one on the video the night of the accident caught sneaking along the side of the van and the one responsible for cutting the brake lines.”