High Intensity (32 page)

"Because the webs were from a spray can. Like the kind kids use at Halloween. They had been placed there on purpose."

"How do you know that?" Todd asked.

"We know that because when I went back to examine them the next day, they were conveniently gone. I believe it was you, Todd, who ordered that passageway cleaned."

Everyone stared at Todd.

Todd looked around nervously. "Yes, but only because you both looked so bedraggled when you came back into the house that day. I was embarrassed it was so dirty. Surely you don't think I did such a thing?"

Tyber didn't answer the question. "When we got through those phony webs, we traveled down an inside circular stairway to another passage. Hambone, our cat,"—Tyber nodded at the kitty sitting by the table near Blooey, and Hambone sat up straighter, proud of his role in the story—"alerted us to the fact that he had been trapped in the passage after following someone else in. When we went back to get him, we noticed two things. There was another passage under that staircase, and the word '
Nan
' had been newly written in what appeared to be blood on the wall."

"Way coool!" Cody shouted. "Yeah!"

"Mills, you should've taken an earlier ferry out so we wouldn't have missed all that fun and gore."

Mills kicked Gregor under the table. "Any ideas who left the bloody trail?"

"There was someone that day who had ready access to blood."

"My gawd, this is getting rather nice and scary!" Auntie downed her bourbon in two swallows.

"Who had access to the blood, Tyber?" Todd asked, although he already seemed to know the answer.

"You. The chicken you prepared that night was free-range, and when I asked you if you had to clean the birds yourself, you confirmed it."

Everyone stared at him again.

He sighed. "Why would I sabotage my own inn?"

"Ah, but it's not all your inn, a fact we didn't know until later. But I'll get back to that. We had pretty much discovered that the passageway led to a trapdoor under the house, leading right to our veranda and easy outside access. Now, who would want outside access? I thought. If it's someone in the house, why not just do the mischief from the inside?"

"It was someone outside!" Cody piped up.

"That's right, Cody. Someone outside." He took a sip of Blooey's squash soup, grimaced, and laid down his spoon. "I'll get back to that later." Zanita wasn't sure if he meant the clue or the soup.

Todd got up to serve the second course, although his step was not as chipper. When he sat back down, Tyber went on.

"Then there was that curious Polariod photograph of Zanita which suddenly sprouted a set of eyes."

Cody gasped. "Awwwww-some!"

"I think we should blame Mills for our missing all this, Spike," Gregor stated baldly.

"What?" She turned to him, astonished. "I wasn't even here!"

He shrugged. "It's still all your fault. Right, Spike?"

Cody screwed up his eyes and gave her a beady look. "Yeah, Mills. You shoulda run away here sooner."

"Run away? He thinks I was running away?" She ground her toe into Gregor's boot under the table. He grunted.

Tyber ignored the interruption. "That photo was altered by someone with a lot of skill. At first I thought this solution too pat until I remembered something Einstein once said…" At the groan from his right, he paused.

"… but I won't go into that. There is only one person here who has such a skill that I am aware of. It also happens to be the same person who pointed out the picture to us in the first place, drawing our attention to it so we would be sure to see it. And it was the same person who made sure it disappeared later so no one could examine it more closely." He stared at Mark. "You also have a rare 'skill' with Kirlian photography."

Calendula moaned. "Mark! You didn't!" His guilty silence said it all. "Don't you realize what you've done? You've compromised all our work!"

"I'm sorry, Calendula. I was just trying to help Todd. I didn't mean to hurt you."

"Help me?" Todd was confused. "How, Mark?"

"I thought if there was a chance the inn was haunted and we verified it for you, it would help your business. You know how some people love to stay at haunted inns. I'm sorry, Todd. I realized afterwards that I shouldn't have done it."

"That's it!" Hubble shouted down the table. "The experiment has been falsified! It's over!"

"Not quite. For you see, Hubble, Todd wasn't the only one to stir the pot, so to speak."

"What are you talking about, Evans?"

"Yes," Zanita whispered, "what are you talking about?" She paused. "This all seems so familiar…"

"It was you, Hubble, who slid the picture off the breakfront in the dining room that night Zanita was watching."

"Ridiculous!"

"Are you sure about this, Tyber?" Zanita mouthed to him.

"I'm guessing here; let's hope I'm right, baby," he whispered to her. "Not that ridiculous. You were perfectly placed at the table to do it with just a bit of fishing line. It was you who told me that most people see what they want to see because they want to believe. That's why it's so easy for charlatans to get away with so much. I think you counted on that fact. Once the picture fell, you quickly removed the line in the ensuing surprise and deftly pocketed it."

"Why would I do such a thing?" he sputtered. "I'm a skeptical observer! I want to debunk this place, not add to its ghostly legend!"

"Exactly. You have a new book coming out next year—I checked with your publisher. I think you needed one more debunking tale to add to your arsenal of remembered frauds, so you decided to create one yourself. When were you planning on discovering the fishing line… ? When you later came back and examined the area? Maybe it's in your pocket right now?"

Hubble reddened. Obviously, Tyber had guessed correctly. Hubble stood, throwing his cloth napkin down. "I will not hear any more! As far as I am concerned, this case is over, proven a hoax due to our friend Mark here. Good night, everyone." He stormed out, and Zanita had the uncomfortable feeling it was not the last they would see of him.

"Should we let him go, Captain?" Blooey was half out of his seat, ready to charge.

"Yes. He's finished. In more ways than one. I intend to report him to the psi-cogs. His investigative techniques will be called into question. Besides, he's going to just hate himself for missing this finale. It would make quite a book."

"Well done, Doc." Zanita smiled and winked up at him.

"Thanks, baby." He winked back.

"You mean there's more to this story? Mar-r-r-r-velous!" Auntie gulped her refreshed bourbon.

"Oh, yes, Auntie, there is much more. You remember the night that Zanita came running down here with the book? I've already shown her that the book was not sent her way by something supernatural, but rather by means of a peephole strategically placed behind the bookcase. I won't go over all the details now of how the effect was created except to say that there is another secret passage behind our bedroom." He faced Zanita. "And now I know exactly who it was, baby."

"Who, Tyber?"

"The same person who led us through all the passageways in the first place and the same person who wrote in blood."

"I didn't do it," Todd insisted.

"I never said you did." Tyber stared down the table at Sasenfras. "The night we went to visit you, you remarked as we were leaving that you had seen us,"—Zanita pinched his arm, warning him to be careful—"ah… seen us. I was sure that view from the balcony was blocked by the tall end of the decorative hammock before it was moved. For those of you who haven't seen the hammock by our room, it's quite a fanciful design. The frame is custom carved and quite high, but I checked it again just to be sure. I was right; it definitely blocks that view. So the only way we could have been seen was from inside the room, or more precisely—the peephole." He turned to the caretaker. "As the old song goes, 'It had to be you.' "

"Ewwww!" Zanita cringed. Sasenfras had been watching them?
Yeck!

"I don't think he could see too much from that angle, baby," Tyber murmured for her alone.

"But still…" She shivered.

Sasenfras grinned but not out of humor. "So you figured that out, boy, did you? Now, why would I want to lead you to the passages? Have you figured that out, too?"

"I think so. You have an accomplice, you see. And a very unlikely one, at that."

Everyone looked at everyone else at the table.

Tyber paused just the right amount of time to build the suspense. His light blue eyes hunted out Calendula. "Mrs. Winifred Sasenfras, I presume?"

Several gasps rang out around the table.

"This one came as quite a surprise to me, and I have my lovely wife to thank for inadvertently helping me figure it out."

"I did?" Zanita cleared her throat and preened. "I mean, of course I did."

"Zanita mentioned in passing that Winnie was said to have a certain
'je ne sais quoi
.' An old fisherman we met on Nantucket, Junior Zaccheus, told us she talked to seals. Now who does this describe? Our Ms. Brite is psychic in certain areas. At one time, she helped the police catch several criminals, but I suspect that work proved to be very disturbing to her ethereal nature. She decided to focus her talent in the investigative arena instead."

"I know this reminds me of something." Zanita blew a gust of air between her lips.

Calendula was quiet for a moment, then looked up. "Very good, Dr. Evans. How did you figure it out?"

"It was a combination of things. Zanita's ghostly visitation required two people to pull it off—one to flash the penlight and one to push the book off the shelf. The Keroac book was the dead giveaway, though. It belonged to you back then. The other perpetrator noticed it and placed it in the empty slot when he moved the books in our room. A sort of secret joke… and a secret clue."

"Why leave a clue?"

"Now, that is an interesting question, and it bothered me. Until I put the final piece together."

"Accomplice… why did he need an accomplice, Captain?" Even though Blooey thought himself on a pirate ship, the Arthur Bloomberg inside was still a very sharp man.

"Good point, Blooey. To answer that, I'll have to reveal what Zanita and I found in that sealed wing and why Sasenfras needed us to find it for him."

"What did you find, Tyber?" Gregor got into the tale.

"We found Merville. Dead as a doornail, if you'll forgive the cliché."

"Grandfather?" Todd was shocked. "But he was lost at sea!"

"No, it was only made to appear that way. They recovered his boat and he was reported missing, but his actual body was never found. That's because it's in this house."

"There's a body in this house? With us?" Mills paled.

"I'll protect you." Gregor tried to put his arm around her; she slapped it off.

"Go, Gregor!" Cody chirped.

"It appeared to be suicide at first. But what really bothered me was, why would Sasenfras want us and not Calendula to discover that body? What was he really after? And why did he then point us to Nantucket?"

"Yeah, what's the deal with that?" Gregor was now totally into the story. He and his son bent forward over the table, both of them black-haired and green-eyed and adorable.

"When we found the body, next to him was a paper with writing on it—in code. It wasn't until I was able to break the code that it all came together."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the faded piece of paper, spreading it out on the table. "As you can see, the numbers threw me a bit because I needed to figure out where any commas came in. For instance, in this first line 52329625 could have been 52,329,62,5, but in the end it turned out to be more simple than that, which is usually the case."

"Eggheads," Zanita mumbled playfully.

Tyber chuckled and wiggled his foot against hers under the table. "The person who wrote this subtracted 3 from the 26 letters of the alphabet, then counted backwards starting at 23 for A toward 1 for W, starting at 26 again at X, ending with 24 for Z."

"That sounds so simple to figure out… not!" Zanita poked at him.

"So when you put it all together, you find out exactly what this is all about, and guess what? It's not dead bodies, ghosts, flying kitchen gadgets, secret passageways, changing photos, ex-hippies, or separately owned wings."

"What is it about, Tyber?" Cody put his chin in his hand, fascinated.

"What it's usually about, Cody. Greed."

Everyone looked nervously around the table, wondering who was going to get nailed next.

"The secret code reads: Savory Buns by Sasenfras. He is the real owner of the recipe, Todd. Not you. Sasenfras was very proud of that recipe. He loved Winnie and the savory buns he had created. Merville took them both. Merville stole the original recipe, recognizing its potential. Even then, buyers were interested in it. But Sasenfras had encrypted his prize recipe in code. When Merville realized this, he turned to Winnie."

"Winnie?"