Little Ghost Lost (Destiny Bay Cozy Mysteries Book 5) (15 page)

I nodded.
 

“Do you know which one was Mandy’s?”

I gaped at her. “Bebe, she was a little girl with a bedroom over 90 years ago. Others have had those rooms since. And she’s been a ghost. Ghosts don’t necessarily have bedrooms.”

“Hmmph,” she grumped and started to wander off through the house.
 

“Let’s stick together,” I warned, but she just kept moving.
 

“Where’s she going?” Jill asked me a little nervously.
 

“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to follow her.”

We did, walking faster and faster. We couldn’t find her. We went in and out of the main floor rooms and she was nowhere to be seen.
 

“Bebe?” I called, beginning to panic. “Bebe? Where are you?”

“Up here,” she called down.
 

She was upstairs. My shoulders sagged in relief. I looked at Jill. “How did she get up there so fast?”

We followed her up. Bebe was going through all the bedrooms looking like a mother checking out her sweet baby’s dorm before her first day at college. She was looking very brave but what exactly was she doing? I ached for her, but still…

Jill was ticked at her.

“Don’t you see? You were doing just what all those dopey girls in the horror flicks do—follow the murderer down into the basement while the wind howls and the doors slam and all manner of horrible things are screaming, ‘Don’t go!’”

A little overwrought, but embarrassingly true. She was right. Still, Bebe balked.

“I didn’t follow a murderer and there is no wind or door slamming. Curb your imagination, Jill. I’m not an idiot.”

I grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “We know that. Calm down. But don’t go off on your own. You’ve got to remember there are forces at work here that can be pretty scary. So let’s stick together.”

We wandered around, then went on up to the third floor. More bedrooms and a small parlor, lined with bookcases and flooded with sunshine.
 

“Do you feel the presence of some other force here?” I asked Bebe while Jill was interested in a huge set of closets a few doors down.
 

Bebe nodded. “Oh yeah. I can tell it’s haunted.”

I took a deep breath. “Does that mean you think you have your ability to see ghosts back to what it used to be?” I asked her.
 

She looked at me. “I think so. Whether or not it stays, who knows?”

“How about these ghosts? Have you seen anything?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. But I expect to. I have some things to say to them.”

Oh boy. Didn’t she remember what it had been like in the middle of the night when they’d attacked our house? I looked around, getting nervous again. Why were they laying low? Maybe Dante was here. If he was, he hadn’t shown himself either.
 

“You know when we were looking through the papers in the file?” she said, turning back to look into my face, her own so earnest. “Did you read the article about how there were rumors that this house had a bunch of secret passageways?”

That startled me. “No, I didn’t see it. Has anyone ever found any?”

She shrugged. “The article was from the sixties. You would think someone would have found something by now, wouldn’t you?”

That might be a good question to put to Mandy—are there secret passageways? And how do you find them? But asking a question of a ghost was always a touchy thing. You never did know what they knew and what they wanted you to know.
 

Jill called me to come and see something she’d found and I went into a small bedroom at the back of the house—maybe a maid’s room or a storage center.
 

“Look. Isn’t this what they used to call a dumb waiter?” she said, displaying the opening. It had a basket on a heavy cord.
 

“Here. I’m going to see if it still works.”

She put a plastic flower that she found on the floor into the basket and closed the door, then began to pull on the lever that was supposed to start the movement toward the bottom floor.
 

“Come on, let’s go down and see if it arrived,” she said, starting off.
 

“Wait. Where’s Bebe?”

Where
was
Bebe? We both did a quick survey of the entire third floor. No Bebe.

“Bebe,” I called, expecting her to answer from the next floor down. “Bebe!”

Nothing.

Chapter Twelve

At this point I was more annoyed at Bebe than frightened. I was pretty sure she was wandering around downstairs somewhere and we would see her in just a moment or two. Jill and I went down to check on the dumbwaiter, but the basket hadn’t arrived in the kitchen where the opening was.
 

I ran back up to the second floor, but it hadn’t landed there either. So where was it?
 

Back down to the kitchen, we leaned in and realized the kitchen wasn’t the end of the line. The opening went on down into what must have been the basement. Not a place I wanted to explore.
 

And anyway, where was Bebe?
 

We called and went through every room. No sign of her. Now I was really panicking. Had she gone outside? I tried the kitchen door, but it was locked. By now my heart was racing. I ran to the front door. It was locked too. What was going on? Was it the ghosts again? Or something even more sinister?

I pulled out my cell phone and tried to call Roy. No service.
 

“Jill, try your phone,” I called back to her. “Hurry!”

“No service,” she responded. “How about you?”

“The same.”

I swung around and faced her. “What can we do?” I said, trembling with fear and anxiety. “Quick! We have to do something!”

Jill was as desperate as I was, and she looked it. “Let’s…let’s try to break a window and get out,” she cried.
 

“Wait.” I held a hand up and looked around the room. “Hey, you ghosts,” I said in a loud voice, “I know you’re here, watching us. I just have to tell you that we plan to bring Mandy back very soon. Bebe just wanted to see what the situation was like here before we brought her back. You know where Bebe is. Please, please let us get to her. We need her in order to bring Mandy back. So please….” My voice broke and I had to grip hard to keep from letting tears come. “Where is she? Give me a sign.”

I turned slowly, looking in every nook and cranny. Nothing. No sign. No anything.

“Thanks a lot,” I said, and I began running down the hallway, pounding on the walls. Bebe had read there were secret passageways. Well, where were they? There had to be a way to access them.
 

“Bebe,” I called. “Are you in there?” I pressed and I pounded, and Jill mimicked me, doing the same thing.
 

I turned into the library and pulled books off shelves, pressing sides of bookcases, searching, searching.
 

“Bebe!” I called. “Can you knock on a wall? Can you show me the way?”

Suddenly I realized that I didn’t see Jill any longer.
 

“Jill!” I called. “Where are you?”

Nothing.
 

I was having a hard time breathing now. I was so angry, so scared. Jill was gone too. What next? I kept running down hallways and pounding on the sides of bookcases, hoping to find that lucky one that would turn into the room and open a doorway into the secret recesses of this evil old house.
 

I tried to use my cell again. No service. No earthly use to it. I threw it down in frustration and went back to pounding walls.
 

Then I got an idea. That dumb waiter—it went down to the basement. Maybe, just maybe…..

I ran back to the kitchen and opened the cabinet door to the dumb waiter, looking down into the dark space below. Just the cold air wafting up gave me the creeps. There was no way I would ever go down there, especially not alone. No way.

I looked down, holding my breath, and someone walked by the opening vista. I held back an involuntary scream. It wasn’t Bebe and it wasn’t Jill. I held my breath. I saw something move. Then someone spoke, but the voice was too soft for me to make out what he said. But it was a he. That I could tell. And it wasn’t a ghost.
 

I didn’t think he’d noticed me up here looking down. I stepped back carefully, out of sight, breathing hard. I was going to have to go down there—down into the basement.
 

No! Everything in me rebelled. I didn’t want to go. Just thinking about going made me feel like I was about to pass out.

I closed my eyes. Spiders like huge tarantulas crawled into my mind. Bugs and snakes and worms and gooey stuff you didn’t want to identify. And all in the dark. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go down there.

But what if Bebe was down there? Maybe Jill? I had to go. I had to do what I could. Some man was down there, and what was he doing to Bebe? Jill? If they were alright, they would have called up to me. They weren’t alright. Someone had to save them. And that someone was going to be me.
 

For just a moment, I thought I was going to throw up. But I got myself together and I took a few deep, cleansing breathes. Then I went as softly as I could toward the door to the basement. The only way this was going to work was if I had a lot of luck. If I could think of any other way, that is what I would do. But I couldn’t. So here I went.
 

When I started for the door, I was shaking so hard I wasn’t sure if I would make it. Funny thing, though. By the time I’d got the door open and was starting down the long, winding stairway, the shaking stopped. I began breathing normally. In fact, I was cool, calm and collected—almost as though I was moving in some sort of phony reality, something unreal and totally controlled. I took each step slowly, softly, and descended into the gloom.
 

Cold, dank air swept toward me. The smell of old, rotting things filled my nostrils. My foot slipped. Terror shot through me as I lost my balance. But I caught myself, clinging to the iron railing that ran alongside the stairs. And my will was ice cold.
 

I was going to find Bebe and Jill if it was the last thing I ever did. Instinct told me that whoever had grabbed them was intent on doing something very bad, very ugly, and I couldn’t let that happen.
 

I heard a soft, muffled moan, and it wasn’t coming from any ghost. In fact, I could have sworn it was Bebe. I bit my lip hard, holding back the urge to call out to her.
 

My eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness. I thought I saw the bottom now, and over toward the wall, two bound objects stacked together like logs. My heart began to race again. Bodies. But if there was moaning, they were still alive. Relief washed over me and I held onto the railing for a moment, letting my heart settle down.
 

Three or four more steps and I would be at the bottom. The only trouble was, I couldn’t see the whole basement from the stairs. Half of the area was beyond a curved wall. I had no idea how big that area was, or what was in it. But what could I do? I had to go on down.

Two more steps to go. I could see the bodies pretty clearly now. Bebe and Jill were both tied up like mummies in ropes and a gag. But neither of them seemed to be conscious. What had he done to them?

One more step. I knew this was the dangerous one. Taking in a deep breath, I took the leap, stepping to the floor and turning quickly toward the part of the room I hadn’t been able to see.
 

But before I could focus, a hand grabbed my throat, and I was suddenly struggling to breathe at all.
 

“Come in to my parlor, said the spider to the fly,” a rough voice whispered harshly very close to my ear. “Mele Keahi, I finally have you. Now what to do with you? There are so many options.”

I struggled and gasped, trying to breathe and he finally released my neck enough so that I could take some air in. I caught my breath and managed to get a look at him. Middle-aged, dumpy, curly hair. He looked…he looked a lot like pictures of Alexander Pennington. But that was crazy. Alexander had been almost 90 when he died. This man was about forty or fifty. Just the age that Alexander’s son who drowned would have been today. Could this possibly be “Junior”? How could that be?
 

“Who are you?” I managed to grind out.
 

“Never mind,” he said, slamming me hard back against the wall. “Just know that I’m the rightful owner of this place. All the rest of you are trespassers. You know what they used to do to trespassers in the old days, don’t you? Shoot them. That’s what you people deserve.” He shook his head. “I was doing okay until you showed up, little lady. You and your many friends. You ruined everything. Now it’s time for me to ruin a few things for you. It’s only fair, don’t you think?”

He let go of me and stood back, gazing at me as though he wanted me to agree that he had every right to do whatever he wanted to the lot of us. I rubbed my neck where he’d grabbed me and tried to stay calm. I thought as fast as I could, trying to remember a spell or a magic chant Aunty Jane might have taught me in the past, something that might help me now, but somehow, nothing came to mind. What good was magic if you couldn’t remember how to access it?
 

Talking. That was all I had.
 

“It’s not fair at all,” I said. “You can’t hurt people just because you’re mad at them.” I glanced over at Jill and Bebe. “What did you do to my friends?”

He was pacing in front of me now, glaring at me. “Eh, a little chloroform never hurt anybody.”

“Oh.” I drew in a sharp breath. “Did you know what you were doing? Did you give them a dangerous amount?”

“No. Don’t worry. I’ve worked many years in the doctor’s ward at the home. I know what I’m doing.” He pushed his chest out as though he were proud. “There were doctors there who asked to have me help with some of the surgeries. Did you know that? I was the best in my ward at helping the doctors. I learned a lot. So don’t worry about the medications. I’ve got some good stuff with me. I can kill them easily and they’ll never know it.”