Little Ghost Lost (Destiny Bay Cozy Mysteries Book 5) (12 page)

“So you decided to come here.”

“No. But Jill suggested it. And I thought it might do.”

“Thanks a lot Jill,” I muttered. But Celinda didn’t pay any attention and Bebe seemed distracted.
 

“We do have an extra bedroom,” she said, frowning. She glanced at me and we both thought about Mandy and her little dog. “But it’s…it’s kind of full of things.” Her face cleared. “But not to worry. I can take her….uh, the things into my room. That will take care of that, won’t it?” She looked at me for affirmation.
 

I shrugged, feeling helpless. I was more convinced every minute that this was a horrible idea. But we seemed to have stepped onto a juggernaut and I wasn’t sure how we could get off again without getting pretty banged up.

 
We talked for a bit longer, then squared away the bedroom situation. It was getting late and we were going to bed, but I went out into the back yard to have one more try at connecting with Aunty Jane. I walked up and down the flowerbeds and called softly, but she didn’t respond.
 

I was on my way back to the back door when I happened to glance over and notice that the drapes to the spare bedroom had an opening large enough for me to see into one side of the room. Celinda was busy stowing something under the bed and I was just in time to see it happen.
 

I shrank back into the shadows, my heart thumping in my chest. What was she hiding? If it was a gun….!

I watched for a few more minutes, but she didn’t do anything else suspicious. She was unpacking her bag and putting things on hangers. I calmed down. Now would a person who planned to commit a couple of murders be doing something like that? It didn’t seem likely.
 

I went on into the house, taking deep breaths and trying to convince myself there was nothing to fear. But I still wanted to know what she’d been hiding under the bed.
 

As I came into the hallway, she came out of the spare bedroom.
 

“The bathroom?” she asked, waving a toothbrush at me.
 

I pointed it out to her and waited until she’d closed the door, then headed quickly into the spare room. I knew I didn’t have much time. I dropped down to look under the bed. Sure enough, she’d stashed a large carryall there. I pulled it out and opened it. Inside there were a few large pieces of antique silver, a money belt, a stack of papers and a notebook. No gun. No weapon of any kind. I let my breath out and began to feel almost giddy with relief.
 

Then I noticed the name, embossed in gold, on the front cover of the notebook. Thomas Hatchett, it said. It belonged to poor, newly murdered Tom. Why would Celinda have it?

I heard the bathroom door open and I jumped up, realizing it was already too late to make a clean get-away. I looked at the notebook still in my hand. I didn’t have time to put it away. In fact, I barely had time to kick the carryall back where she’d put it and jam the notebook into the seat of my jeans before Celinda appeared in the doorway.
 

Outrage flared in her eyes. “What are you doing in here?” she demanded.
 

“Who, me?” I blinked at her, trying for an innocent look but failing badly. “I…I just wanted to make sure you had everything you need.” Then a stroke of genius came to me. “And I needed to get the blouse I’m planning to wear tomorrow out of this closet,” I said, reaching in and grabbing the first thing on a hanger I made contact with. I pulled out a huge purple jersey shirt that must have belonged to some linebacker out of Bebe’s past.
 

“That?” Celinda said suspiciously.

“Uh…yeah. It’s dress-down day at work.” I waved it around, knowing it would never fit me. My smile was as phony as hers was stilted.

“Well, have a good night. I guess.”

She still didn’t believe me. Let’s face it—who could? But I was making my way out of the room, stepping backwards toward the door. I couldn’t turn. I had something square and rigid in the back seat of my pants and she would surely wonder what it was if I let her get a glimpse of it.
 

“So, let me know if you need anything,” I babbled as I turned the corner and closed the door, all without once turning my back her way.
 

I breathed another sigh of relief as I made a break for it and slipped into my own bedroom, dropping the shirt on the floor and pulling the notebook out and slamming it into my desk drawer. All done without Celinda realizing I had the thing. I was proud of that.
 

But I left the room again, just as my cell phone buzzed. It was Jill.
 

“Everything okay?” she asked.
 

“Why?” I whispered as I walked out into the living room. “Are you feeling guilty that you sent a possible murderer to spend the night with us?”

There was a moment of silence. “You know what,” she said at last, very softly. “I kind of am. I mean, it seemed like the perfect solution, but once she was gone I started thinking and I realized it might not be the best thing to do. I mean, what do we really know about Celinda?”

“Too late. She’s here for the duration. We’ll just have to lock our doors and hope for the best.”

“Oh Mele! I’m coming over to help you!”

“Jill, Jill, I’m teasing you. She’s fine. I mean, even if she is the murderer, she has no reason to want us dead. We haven’t done anything to her. We aren’t threats to her in any way.” I felt a twinge as I thought of the notebook I now had in my possession. But I pushed that away. “So rest easy.” I winced, thinking of how hard it was going to be for any of us to fall asleep tonight.
 

“You’ll call me right away if anything happens?”

“Sure.”

“Do you want me to call Roy or anything?”

I hesitated, then decided against it. I was pretty sure that from Celinda’s point of view, the cops were as much to be avoided as anyone. Well, maybe not as much as the real murderer who might be after her. If it wasn’t her. Which I was almost 90 percent sure it couldn’t be. Wasn’t I?

I was so tired by the time we actually went to bed, I fell asleep right away. I was jerked awake at about 3 in the morning when the world went crazy. At first, I thought it was the cats howling. Then I was sure it was a storm trying to rip the roof off the house. I ran out into the living room and Bebe was doing the same. We stared at each other as the walls seemed to shake and the air was filled with screeches and howls.
 

“What is it?” Bebe cried, grabbing me by the arm. “What’s happening?”

By then I was awake enough to be pretty sure I knew.
 

“The ghosts,” I told her, trying to breathe around my shock and fear and gasping with the effort. “The Pennington ghosts.”

She stared at me wildly, grabbing harder. “What do they want?”

I shook my head, but it was no use pretending. I knew what they wanted. “They want Mandy back,” I told her.
 

Her eyes widened and she shook her head. “No! No, they can’t have her!” She ran back into her bedroom. I knew she was going to try to protect Mandy, even though she couldn’t see her.
 

The noise was horrifying. I kept trying to think straight. What should we do? Where was Aunty Jane!

There was a crash, as though a tree had fallen on the house, and then a weird, piercing scream that chilled my blood. I ran into Bebe’s room to see if they were alright. Bebe was sitting on the bed, holding Mandy and something about the way she was holding her told me she was seeing an awful lot, if not the entirety of the little girl now. Mandy was crying and Bebe was soothing her gently.

A chorus of screams ripped the air apart, making me sink down and join the joint hug, terrified. This was awful. Almost as bad as what had happened to me in the Pennington kitchen the day before. I didn’t know how much longer I could stand this. Where could we go? What could we do to stop this? That helpless feeling was the worst.
 

And then all the rumble and smashing noise stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
 

We sat for a moment and waited, holding our breath. Nothing. It was as though it had never happened.
 

“Oh! Celinda,” I remembered, jumping up and running to the spare bedroom. I threw open the door. Celinda was gone, and on the bed was a note. “Had to go—Thanks! C.”

I did a quick look under the bed. She’d taken the carryall with her. Turning on a dime I ran outside and headed for the barn. Her car was still there. Someone must have come for her.
 

I walked slowly back toward the house and suddenly, a young man stood in front of me.
 

“Dante!”

He shimmered eerily in the moonlight as some ghosts do, handsome as ever. My heart soared with pleasure to see him again. I’d been wondering if I ever would.

“Did you see what just happened here?” I asked him, still quivering from the horror.
 

He nodded. “I made them stop,” he said softly. “But they will be back. They won’t quit until they get the little one back again.”

“Oh no, Dante. Don’t tell me that. She can’t go back there. They treated her badly and….”

“She has to go back. She has unfinished business. Some things just have to be.”

“But, Bebe has just fallen in love with her and…” I looked toward the house and then back again and he was gone. I bit my lip. This was going to be hard.

Chapter Ten

“It’s a journal, a register, a record of everything Tom saw out his front window on that street.” I showed the notebook to Bebe and she reached out to touch the name embossed on the cover, then looked inside.

“Oh my gosh! He really was nosy, wasn’t he?”

“Oh yeah. Look, there’s a map at the front and the name of everyone living in each house on the block. Then under each date, there’s a notation about everyone, coming and going.”

Bebe shook her head and stared at me. “What on earth for?”

I shrugged. “He must have been some sort of compulsive personality. Maybe he craved power, but since he couldn’t have that, he just kept records. That somehow satisfied his need to control what everyone was doing.”

She stared at me, then rolled her eyes. “Now you’re making things up,” she said.
 

I admitted it. “Sure. But I’m just trying to give chaos a sense of order.”

“I’ll take the chaos.” She stared at the notations Tom had written in straight, neat columns with dates and times attached. “What are we looking for here?”

“I don’t know. But probably what was going on the night Jerry was killed.”

“Okay.” She turned to the right date. “Here we go. 12:03 am. Jerry arrived, parked and went inside.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Go back a page. Let’s look at who showed up before midnight.”

“Okay. Oh look! It’s you.”

It was me alright, but long before midnight. The notation was for arrival at 3:30 pm. Then he saw me walk over to the Moore house with Celinda at 4:20. I came out again at 4:45, got in my car and drove off.
 
He didn’t mention how he’d been chasing me at the time. And luckily he didn’t see Mandy in the back seat.

I looked further down the page. Richard left at 5:00. Astrid came up to the main house, said something to Celinda, then went back to the cottage again. Celinda drove off for Cambria. And then, nothing for a long time. About 9 pm, Astrid came out and drove away. At eleven, Richard was back.
 

Richard was back?
Whatever for
? Jerry was still on the road from Santa Barbara, Celinda was in Cambria and Astrid had gone off, probably to meet with her surfer boyfriend. What was Richard doing there?
 

The next notation had some clues. Tom had written “packed car and left”. Was that what had happened to the silver bowl and other pieces that were missing?

But if he left at 11:25, he left before Jerry arrived.
 

I scanned down the page. There were no other arrivals. Just Jerry, and then Celinda at 3:10. So did Celinda kill Jerry after all? And was that why she stole the notebook from Tom’s house—after she killed him, too?

“I just don’t believe it,” Bebe said after I showed her the notations and told her my latest theory. “Celinda isn’t a particularly nice person, but she isn’t a murderer.”

“You never know what a person is capable of until they are under stress,” I told her.
 

“How do you know that?” she challenged.
 

“It’s part of the detective creed,” I made up on the spot.
 

“Hah!”

“You can scoff all you like, you’ve got to admit it’s got some truth to it.”

Later when I told Jill, she was just as skeptical.
 

“Here’s a thought,” she offered. “Maybe Richard parked down the road, knowing Tom would be watching, then snuck back, waiting for Jerry to show up, then killed him. How about that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Old eagle-eye Tom would have seen him.”

“The man can’t be awake all the time. He had to sleep.”

I leafed back into the previous pages, scanning the entries. There were a lot of them, too many to understand in the limited time I had. But one thing caught my eye. Tom was watching the Pennington House along with everything else, and he saw something I didn’t expect. A light on inside the house at odd times. In fact, from the notations, he said he called the police twice. They came, but they didn’t find any sign of life. His mark for those times was a red x, nothing more.
 

That was odd. Ghosts didn’t usually turn on lights. But then, I had seen some indications of someone using the house, hadn’t I? I scanned a few more pages, trying to see what Tom had made of it all.
 

And then I found it—just a little note squeezed into a corner of a page. “Is x amp? Or Alexander back again to taunt me?”

Amp? Alexander must be Mr. Pennington who had died a couple of years ago. But who—or what—was amp? Maybe I would find out more once I had the old papers.