The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (6 page)

Seymour leaped out of his chair. “Are you crazy?! I didn’t murder anybody!”

I gritted my teeth. Sunlight was streaming in through Miss Todd’s tall dining room windows. Ciders had opened them wide to air out the room, and a hot breeze was now making the sheer curtains billow violently. As far as I could see from my seat in the corner, an even larger amount of hot air was being produced by the humans in the room.

Seymour wagged his finger in the chief’s face. “And another thing. I demand you return my uniform!” (Under Ciders’s orders, Bull had already dragged Seymour into the kitchen and forcibly removed his shirt and shorts.) “That uniform is property of the Postmaster General of the U. S. of A.! And in case you need a refresher course in civics, the federal government supersedes your puny jurisdiction!”

“Sit down!”

For a few tense moments, Seymour refused to heed Ciders’s command. I didn’t think that was such a good idea. For one thing, Ciders was bigger than Seymour. Not that Seymour was a little guy. He was actually on the beefy side with heavy arms and a moderate belly (per his ice cream addiction) on top of sinewy chicken legs and bony knees (from his hikes carrying mail every day). At the moment, however, with Seymour’s postal uniform impounded as evidence, he was dressed in nothing but his undershirt, a pair of Superman boxers, white tube socks, and black sneakers. Ciders, on the other hand, was packing a service weapon with (presumably) live ammo.

“I said,
sit down
!” the chief barked again. “Or I’ll have you hauled off and booked right now!”

Ciders’s voice was so loud it actually rattled the substantial collection of crystal displayed in Miss Todd’s colossal china cabinet. I knew this because my chair was located right next to the mahogany showpiece.

Decibel level aside, I was seriously upset with Ciders’s treatment of Seymour. Not only was it brutish, I didn’t find it at all helpful to the investigation. I was also eager to question Seymour myself, but I knew Ciders well by now. If I made any trouble, he’d banish me from the house. The only reason I was allowed to watch this interrogation at all was to “finger” Seymour for the chief: Ciders told me that if he ran into trouble getting Seymour to “talk,” he intended to use my “witness statement” to pressure the mailman into “confessing.”

Of course, I had no intention of incriminating my friend. So I simply sat quietly in the corner, attempting to melt into the flocked and flowered Victorian wallpaper. (The entire dining room set appeared to be Victorian era. I was no antiques expert, but the heavy, carved, painstakingly polished pieces looked quite expensive to me. Miss Todd was certainly leaving behind a small fortune in this grand house and its contents.)

“You’ve got to believe me, Ciders,” Seymour went on. “I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t even know Miss Todd was dead until Deputy Dawg over here snatched me up and tossed me into his Batmobile.”

“Deputy Dawg. Real funny, Tarnish.” But Bull wasn’t laughing. He was glaring. Then he was crossing his overly muscled arms and flexing his bowling-ball biceps, which I suspected contained more brain cells than his actual brain pan.

“Look, we know you did it,” Ciders stated.

“Yeah, Tarnish,” Bull added after a substantial lag. “So why don’t you just ’fess up and make it easy on yourself?”

“ ’Fess up?” Seymour repeated. “Interesting interrogation technique, Bull. Where’d you learn it? The Disney Channel?”

The hulking deputy stared daggers at Seymour, obviously straining—and failing—to produce a retort. With an exhale of disgust, Seymour shifted his gaze to Quindicott’s chief of police.

“I’d like to lawyer up now.”

Ciders blinked, surprised. “Who’s your lawyer?”

“I don’t have one.”

Ciders’s jaw worked. “I liked it better when you were threatening to report me to the Postmaster General.”

I silently groaned. “Are you listening to this, Jack?”

“I’m not panicking,” I told the ghost. “I’m just frustrated with the chief. His ‘interrogation’ is going nowhere.”

Seymour tried to rise again, but Bull McCoy stepped up and pushed him back into the chair. “Didn’t you hear the chief? Sit!”

“Check your gorilla, Ciders,” Seymour snapped. “I didn’t do
anything
wrong, so I don’t have to take any brutality from Barney Fife on steroids over here.”

“He isn’t hurting you, Tarnish.”

“Says who? In my opinion, being in Bull’s presence is cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Stop ducking my questions,” Ciders said. “We’ve already determined you were in this house earlier today. You’re Miss Todd’s mailman, and the mail was delivered, which means you were probably the last person to see Miss Todd alive.”

“I was here, but I didn’t see Timothea. Not today,” Seymour insisted.

Ciders bent down until his broad nose was an inch from Seymour’s. “Did the old lady piss you off, Tarnish? Did she complain about lousy mail delivery, maybe?”

Seymour shook his head. “Miss Todd was a nice person. She never complained about anything—”

“Did the struggle begin in the foyer? Why did you drag Miss Todd into the living room? So no one could see you while you strangled her to death?”

Seymour’s eyes bulged. “You’re crazy, Chief. I didn’t do a thing to Miss Todd. You’ve got to believe me!”

“Explain the bloodstain on your uniform then,” Ciders barked.

“I told you already,” Seymour said. “I told you
ten
times. That’s not a bloodstain!”

Ciders folded his arms. “It’s clear to me the initial altercation broke out in the foyer.”

“What?” I asked Jack. “You don’t think the altercation began in the foyer?”

“I don’t understand. You saw the mess. The mail was everywhere and that little antique table was knocked over.”

“Yeah, it’s blustery today—” I closed my eyes. “Oh, God. The wind.”

“I retied my ponytail.”

“Right.”

“But why wouldn’t Miss Todd have latched her doors properly? Unless . . . maybe the killer was leaving in a hurry and didn’t close the doors all the way—”

Just then I heard a door close, a car door. I rose up, hoping to catch a glimpse of Eddie and the medical examiner, but it was just two more of Ciders’s regulars. With a sigh of disappointment, I sat back down.

“Okay, Tarnish. Let’s change the subject,” Ciders declared. “Tell us what you were doing last Tuesday night.”

Seymour blinked. “Huh? What night?”

“Last Tuesday,” Ciders said. “On most weeknights, your ice cream truck’s parked down at Quindicott Pond. But for some reason, you weren’t there last Tuesday.”

“Wow,” I whispered to Jack. “Guess I haven’t been giving Chief Ciders enough credit for his powers of observation.”

Jack laughed; his cool aura fluctuated colder for a moment.
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion so quick, doll.

Gaping, Seymour looked impressed, too. “How do you even
know
that?” he asked the chief.

Ciders shrugged. “My two granddaughters wanted ice cream cones. You weren’t there. It ticked me off.”

“Let me guess why you were ticked,” Seymour said.

“You had to drive all the way up to Cold Stone Creamery on the main highway. Well, boo-hoo.”

I rolled my eyes. So much for Ciders’s powers of observation.

“Where were you, Tarnish?” Ciders barked.

“I took the night off, okay? So what?”

Ciders glanced at Bull. “You tell him.”

Seymour smirked. “Tell me what?”

“Funny thing happened that very night. We got a call from Miss Todd. She wanted us to investigate strange noises.” Bull put air quotes around the words
strange noises
.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Seymour said, imitating the air quotes.

“It
means
the old lady probably heard someone trying to break into her house,” Bull replied. “That’s what it”—(air quotes again)—“means!”

Ciders rubbed his jowly jawline. “My men did a routine investigation. They didn’t come up with anything, but it seems pretty clear that someone was harassing Miss Todd. She reported ‘strange noises’ again a number of nights after that first report. Since her doors and windows never showed any attempt at forced entry, I figured it was just pranksters—local teenage crap. But seeing what you did to Miss Todd, I’m thinking there was a pattern here.”

“What
pattern
?” Seymour threw up his hands. “And how the heck did you find a way to shoehorn me into it?”

“You’re sitting here without a solid alibi for why you weren’t working your ice cream truck last Tuesday.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake. I
have
an alibi! The brakes on my truck were on the fritz! Cost nearly a grand to get them fixed, too. Call Patrick Scotch at Scotch Brothers Motors if you don’t believe me. It was Paddy who did the scalping.”

Ciders shook his head. “Miss Todd made a number of noise complaints, all of them at night. I think it might prove interesting to match the dates of those calls against the receipts from your ice cream truck.”

“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” Seymour replied. “Prying into my private life like jackbooted fascists!”

In a disturbing coincidence of timing, the
clomp-clomp-clomp
of heavy boots sounded in the foyer. Eddie Franzetti entered the dining room a moment later, wearing his perfectly pressed blue uniform.

Eddie was more compact than Bull. He had a runner’s physique with leaner muscles and a smaller stature, but his expression was light-years sharper. Under his flat-topped cop’s hat, he had a thick head of black hair, like all the Franzettis. His complexion always appeared lightly tanned, even in the winter. And when he walked in the room his big, long-lashed, cow-brown eyes (the ones that made all the girls swoon in high school, including the girl he married) surveyed the room in a microsecond. The first thing he did was nod to me. I silently waved back.

Ciders appeared to notice Franzetti’s arrival and the fact that I was still in the room at the same time. His face darkened when he glanced at me. Then he directed his words to his deputy chief.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Eddie shrugged. “You told me to find the medical examiner. The man was out of cell phone range, so I had to track him down. It didn’t take me two guesses to figure out where to find Dr. Rubino.”

“At Mullet Point,” Ciders said.

Eddie nodded. “He’s going for your fishing championship title, for sure.”

Ciders waved that comment aside. “So where’s the good doctor now?”

“In the living room with the victim. He’s already begun his examination,” Eddie said.

The chief pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed the sweat off his neck. “Do you have an evidence bag, Franzetti?”

Eddie put his hands on his hips. “Sure, Chief, in my car.”

“Get it. Seymour’s clothes are on the kitchen table and there’s blood all over them. I want you to bag them up for the state forensics team.”

Eddie ducked out to his car, came back in, and crossed to the kitchen. He glanced at me again on the way. I nodded again but continued to keep my mouth shut. My mind, however, was still working.

“Jack,” I whispered to the ghost, “do you really think Ciders can pin this on Seymour?”

“There’s got to be something we can do.”

Eddie emerged from the kitchen a few seconds later, holding up Seymour’s shirt. The red stain was impossible to miss.

“Hey, Chief, we got a problem.”

Ciders scowled at Eddie when he saw the uniform. “I thought I told you to bag that up!”

“But, Chief, I don’t see why. There’s no blood.”

Ciders’s bushy eyebrows leaped north. “What?”

“There’s a big red stain, all right, but it isn’t blood—”

“I tried to tell you, Ciders!” Seymour said triumphantly.

Bull pointed a finger. “Shut up, mailman!”

Ciders stepped up to Eddie. “Since when did you become a forensics expert?”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “I don’t have to be a forensics expert to recognize my own family’s pizza sauce!”

CHAPTER 5

Do you realize what you’ve done? . . . You, with your sloppy mass of misinformation, your atrocious taste, and your idiotic guesswork?!

—“It’s So Peaceful in the Country,” William Brandon,
Black Mask
magazine, November 1943

 

 

 

CHIEF CIDERS SNATCHED the shirt from Eddie’s hand and put the cloth to his nose. With a grunt he turned to glare at Bull McCoy.

“I thought you said these clothes were covered in blood!”

“It . . . It looked like blood to me—” Bull said.

“It reeks of garlic and oregano, you knucklehead!”

“Sheesh, Uncle Wade! You didn’t expect me to actually
sniff
it, did you?”

Seymour stepped forward. “Can I have my clothes back now?”