Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (6 page)

“St. Mary’s was completed in 1427
and is the burial place of Mary Tudor, daughter of King Henry the Eighth. This
area is famous for sightings of two ghosts, the Grey Lady and the Brown Monk.
I’ll cover more about them on my tour.”

Beside the brown stone church a
pathway led into a graveyard where long grass grew over and among the graves.
Tilted headstones dotted the uneven ground, not a place where you could safely
assume you weren’t walking over
someone’s
grave. A small stone building
sat in the midst of them, surrounded by a high iron fence painted black. I
wandered over to take a look at the many plaques attached to it.

“This is the Charnel House,”
Louisa said, “built in the 13th century to store the bones of some of the
graveyard’s inhabitants.”

I read some fascinating
inscriptions, including one about a nine-year-old girl killed by a flash of
lightning as she prayed. So, church might not necessarily be the safest place
to hang out, I decided.

Louisa told more stories and
pointed out that some of the graves had both head and foot markers at either
end of their stone sarcophagi. “I can go on with minutiae for two whole hours,
but you’d probably rather cover a little more ground than this single square
block.”

I skirted the lumps in the ground
that felt like they undoubtedly contained bones and we made our way back to the
paved path. A lone young woman was walking toward us in the shade of the huge
trees. Surrounded by the church, the abbey and high walls, with the path that
disappeared around a curve in the distance, I could easily imagine making that
same journey on a dark, foggy night. A scatter of goose-bumps rose along my
arms.

Chapter
6

The sunshine had dimmed behind
thick clouds and I pulled my blazer a little tighter around me as Louisa led
the way back toward the street. Cars zipped by on the narrow street and the
shouts of school children came from somewhere nearby. The moody feel of the
graveyard dissipated in a flash.

Louisa glanced up at the sky.
“Got your brolly?”

I patted my oversized purse. The
umbrella never got any use in New Mexico but I had a feeling it would come in
handy here.

However, by the time we reached
The Knit and Purl’s front door the wind had shifted and the clouds were
thinning again. Warm light glowed from the shop windows and I could see
Gabrielle inside, flicking at the rows of candles on the shelves with a feather
duster. She smiled at us when we walked in.

“Dolly’s up in the apartment,”
she said. “Go on up if you’d like.”

Louisa knew the way and I
followed along, through a good-sized stockroom lined with shelves and up a
flight of uneven stairs, a reminder of the age of even the most simple
buildings in this town. Ahead of me, she’d come to a landing and before she
could knock at the door a shriek pierced the silence.

Louisa gazed around with
momentary confusion. With no qualms, I barreled ahead of her, grabbed the
doorknob and shoved my way into the apartment. I found myself alone in a parlor
similar in size to the one at Louisa’s house.

“Dolly!” I shouted. “Where are
you?”

She bustled in from a doorway to
my right, her hands fluttering, confusion on her face.

“It’s another one!” she cried.

I stared around the room and
through the open door to the kitchen. “Another what?”

Louisa had followed me inside and
she rushed to her friend. “What is it, pet?”

Dolly’s voice didn’t want to
work.

“Take a deep breath,” I said.

Archie, the husband I’d briefly
met yesterday, appeared from a hallway on the left. His hair was mussed, as if
he’d just woken from a nap. “Dolly, what is it, love?”

Dolly’s eyes scanned our faces,
her mouth working without saying anything.

“Breathe,” I reminded.

She finally focused on me and I
breathed deeply, hoping she would imitate me. She did and finally calmed down
enough to speak.

“The tea. Again. Just like
yesterday.”

I automatically glanced down at
her hands but didn’t see a new injury.

“This time it went cold. My tea
went ice cold in less than two minutes.”

We all stared at her.

“It’s true. I’d just made a fresh
cup. I’ll show you!” She led the little procession into the kitchen. “See? The
kettle is still hot. I had poured a cup.” She pointed to a solid white mug on
the counter. “I felt the, well, the call of nature . . . went to the loo. I was
not gone two minutes. When I came back—well, just feel this.”

Call me suspicious but I held my
hand above the cup for a second before actually touching it. When I did, I had
to agree with Dolly, the liquid was actually ice cold.

I looked around the room, not
exactly sure what I was hoping to see. “And there was no one in the apartment
but you and Archie?”

“He’d laid down for his nap after
lunch,” she said, glancing toward him for confirmation. He nodded.

The electric kettle, indeed,
still emitted a tendril of steam when I poured some of the water into the sink.
The tea in the mug had not come from this source, not recently. Puzzling.

“I felt a rush of cold air come
through the parlor as I left the toilet,” she was telling Louisa. “But this
place can be drafty. I didn’t think anything of it.”

Louisa nodded knowingly. “The
spirits are often associated with cold drafts.”

Archie clearly would rather get
back to his nap. He seemed torn between comforting his wife and getting out of
the roomful of women. Eventually he just patted her shoulder and edged his way
out of the room.

Louisa speculated about the rash
of unexplained incidents, while Dolly insisted she’d only been startled, that
she hadn’t sustained another injury. I walked around the kitchen looking for
real clues as to what might have happened. I have to admit, nothing seemed out
of place.

Dolly had regained her composure
and now she squared her thin shoulders. “Well. This is becoming ridiculous. I
have a shop to run. I’d best get back to it.”

We trooped down the stairs single
file and I wandered over to the display of herbs and essential oils while
Louisa completed the mission that had brought us here, paying for her yarn
order. Gabrielle had finished dusting the candles and was now rearranging the
display.

“Everything all right up there?”
she asked, obviously not so worried about her employer that she felt the
necessity of interrupting her work.

I gave a quick explanation of
what had happened.

“Did Mr. Jones see it too, then?”

“Only after the fact, like we
did. Mainly, we just interrupted his nap.”

She nodded, a soft smile on her face.

“Ready to move onward, Charlie?”
Louisa stood near the door, and it appeared that Dolly was once more in full
control behind the register.

I said quick goodbyes to the two
women and joined Louisa on the sidewalk.

“I want to pop over to Marks and
Spencer for a couple of grocery items,” she said. “Thought maybe we’d just do a
light dinner at home tonight.”

That sounded appealing. My jeans
weren’t going to take kindly to a lot more of those fish-and-chips meals.

“What’s the story with Archie
Jones?” I asked as we walked along. “He seems young to be retired, home napping
in the middle of the day.”

“Ah. It’s a little bit of a sore
point with Dolly. He used to be a manager at the sugar factory. Got laid off
more than a year ago and hasn’t found anything else. They lived on the
outskirts of town, nice modern house. Had to rent it out and move to the empty
apartment above the shop.”

“That probably didn’t set too
well with him, either.”

“Not at all well. First, he
wanted Dolly to sell the shop. Fumed over how much she’d spent to set it up in
the first place. But she did that with her own money, something she came into
when her father died. Dolly just put her foot down, said she was at least
bringing in some money and if Archie couldn’t go out and get himself another
job then he’d best start helping out around the shop.”

I could imagine
that
conversation hitting the fan.

“So, I suppose that’s what he
does now. Unpacks cartons of inventory, washes the windows, that sort of
thing.”

I pictured the soft-spoken man
with his slumped shoulders. I could more easily see him washing windows than in
a management role with a big company.

As if she’d read my mind, Louisa
continued. “You’d hardly have recognized Archie two years ago. Top of the
world, suit and tie every day, business lunches at the best restaurants and
trips all over the country. Kind of sad, really, how his self esteem was so
closely tied to that job. The longer he’s away from it the more stooped he
becomes. Lucky for them, really, that they had Dolly’s shop.”

She pointed at an entry on our
right. “Here we are.”

I followed her around the food
market section of the store, eyeing the bakery items that would be new to my
palate, thinking this would be a good place to stop by on my own, pick up a few
things to take home. She chose fresh lettuce and tomatoes, along with some
veggies.

“I should have thought of this
Saturday,” she remarked. “Market day on the square, and things would have been
bargain priced. Plus, you would have had a taste of a tradition that’s been going
here for a thousand years.”

I expressed regret but she
assured me we could catch it on Wednesday. Her purchases filled a plastic
shopping bag, which I offered to carry since she still had the yarn.

“I’d intended to show you one
more local landmark, The Nutshell Pub, which is known as the smallest pub in
Britain, but perhaps we should take these things home first. You might be up
for a little rest, yourself?”

The rain that managed to hold off
more than half the day hit with a vengeance as soon as we walked into the house
so our plan for the little pub got postponed. The downpour settled into a
steady drizzle while Louisa napped. Restless, I wasn’t sleepy and found myself
pacing through the parlor, once again taking stock of the books on the shelves.

I suspected that the collection
had, for the most part, belonged to the previous owner just like the rest of
the furnishings. There were classic novels of the Bronte sisters’ era and
several volumes on gardening, a pastime Louisa had admitted to me that she did
not much indulge in. One of her neighbors loved the hobby so much that he came
over to keep her roses fed and pruned and the scrap of lawn trimmed, and she
was perfectly happy with that.

The one section that no doubt
came to the house with my aunt was a corner shelf filled with books on
astrology, the occult, and histories of ghostly doings in and around the town
of Bury. I pulled one down and flipped through the pages. It was an excellent
reference and I could see why Louisa was now considered such an authority on
her tours—she’d really done her research.

A small booklet slipped from
between two of the guidebooks and fell to the floor. Wrinkled from humidity and
yellowed with age, it clearly was of a different vintage from the other books
nearby. When I bent to pick it up, I saw that it was titled in a foreign
language—something that looked a bit like German but with a whole lot of
diacritical markings. Hmm . . . A crude hand drawing of a hooded figure
decorated the front cover. I flipped through the pages and a single sheet of
folded paper popped out. More of the foreign writing. The rain blasted the
windows with renewed vigor, casting the room in a wavering light.

“Charlie?”

I jumped about a mile and I think
a squeak escaped me. “Louisa! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to snoop—”

She gave me a quizzical look. “I
was about to ask if you’d like some tea. Did you get to nap at all?”

I shook my head and closed the
booklet. “I was looking at some of your books about the haunted sites here in
Bury and I—this—well, it fell off the shelf.”

Don’t get me wrong. I am an
incurable snooper. It’s just that I itch a little when I actually get caught at
it.

Louisa patted my arm on her way
to the kitchen. “Charlie, it’s fine. Help yourself to anything you see. I tend
to keep an eclectic mix.”

I heard her fill the kettle and
take mugs from the cupboard.

“So, then can I ask—what’s this
language?” I stood in the doorway and held up the booklet.

“Oh, that. It’s Romanian.” She
spooned loose tea into a ceramic pot. A dreamy look came over her face.
“Nicolae gave me the book. Right before I had to escape. That single sheet was
the forged document that was supposed to keep me from the firing squad. I could
have fallen in love with that man—dark curly hair, vivid blue eyes . . .” She sighed.
“I really missed him.”

“Romanian. Wait—escape?
Seriously?”

The kettle whistled and she
poured boiling water over the tea leaves and set the lid in place on the
teapot.

“Of course, dear. Well, in those
days one didn’t simply ask the communists to let you go. But there was a pretty
well established underground movement, a few days dodging through the woods. It
wasn’t really cold that time of year. Except on rainy nights. And of course I
always questioned whether that document would have really saved me.”

While she spilled out this
matter-of-fact recount, she brought out a plate and opened a package of cookies
that she’d bought earlier.

“So you escaped from communist
Romania in the dark of night . . . What were you doing there in the first
place?”

“Oh. Well that, of course, was
because I’d gone to Transylvania. My interest in eastern European witchcraft.”
She caught my incredulous stare. “I gave it up after a couple of years.
Fascinating people, but it was sort of a crowded field.”

I think my expression conveyed
the
What??
that was going through my mind. She smiled sweetly and I
couldn’t help it. I burst into giggles. Once I started, she practically
collapsed with laughter herself.

“Oh, I can
so
understand
why my father could not accept your lifestyle.”

“I know—” she gasped. “Silly,
isn’t it? Bill and me, brother and sister. It really never quite worked.”

I sank into one of the chairs at
the kitchen table. Once I caught my breath, I had to ask. “So, what’s the book
about? Can you actually read it?”

“I used to. I’m probably fairly
rusty at it now.” She poured tea into the two mugs and set them on the table.
“It’s a book of spells.”

Ah. I reached for a cookie to
keep myself from cracking up again.

“If you noticed the little wooden
box on the shelf . . . the compartments in it contain the basics that a witch
needs—eye of newt and such.”

“And did you have a wand?” I
asked.

Her brows drew together in the
middle. “Well, no, of course not.”