The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed (15 page)

She took a seat, looked at me, and said, “Well, let's hear your little theory.”

Suddenly I was frightened. Ms. Bond had been studying Cornelius Fletcher for years. If my idea was right, why hadn't she figured it out on her own? I had to be wrong.

I don't know what I was afraid of; it wasn't as if Ms. Bond would hit me if I was wrong, or anything like that. I just didn't want to feel her scorn. I had a sense that she was good at scorn, could crank out the kind that made you want to shrink down and hide behind a rock.

I explained my theory.

Ms. Bond closed her eyes for a moment. A look of profound sorrow crossed her face.

“Oh, my dear girl,” she said. “I was so hoping that you would be wrong.”

“Why in the world would you want her to be wrong?” asked Chris.

“Because then I could have let the three of you live,” replied Ms. Bond. Reaching into her purse, she pulled out a small gun. Pointing it directly at my head, she said, “As it turns out, I can't let any of you leave this room alive.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Off the Wall

“Carla!” gasped Phoebe, clutching at her heart. “Carla, what are you doing?”

“Protecting my investment.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, think, Phoebe,” she snapped. “I've been trying to buy this house from you for over ten years now. Didn't you ever wonder why I've been so interested in it?”

“Because you know where the picture is,” I said softly.

Ms. Bond turned to me. “That's right, Nine. But then, you have a habit of being right when you'd be better off being wrong. You see, I can't afford to let that picture come to light just yet. It's my retirement fund, dear—the total investment of my life's work.”

“What do you mean?” Chris asked.

“Figure it out for yourself,” snapped Ms. Bond. She took a little breath, then added, “This isn't the end of some book, where the villain kindly explains all his motives so you can know what's going on. So just think about it, while I figure out what I'm going to do with the three of you. As the witch said in
The Wizard of Oz
, ‘These things must be done delicately.' I have to make sure no one can trace any of this back to me.”

“Carla,” said Phoebe, “let the girls go.”

“The girls, my dear, are the problem.
Your
death is easy enough to explain; you'll probably be gone from a heart attack by the time I'm finished with these two anyway. What I need is something to explain
their
deaths.” She paused, then said, “I think a break-in is the ticket.”

I was annoyed. The last guy who tried to kill Chris and me wanted to make it look like a suicide. Now Ms. Bond was going to blame some nonexistent burglar. I wanted to tell her to grow up and take responsibility for her own actions. But I didn't say that. Instead, I asked, “Is this place really worth the risk of killing us?”

“Shut up,” she explained.

Since Ms. Bond wasn't going to help, I had to figure things out on my own. It wasn't hard. Given what my dad had told me about Cornelius Fletcher's Lost Masterpiece, combined with what I had figured out on my own, I could guess what Phoebe's house was worth. If Carla could buy it at a regular price—probably under a hundred thousand—the difference would be almost pure profit. Which meant my big mouth was about to cost Carla a few
million
dollars.

I could see why she was upset with me. Under the circumstances I would have been unhappy, too.

The difference is, I wouldn't have been willing to kill someone to keep it from happening.

But in a world where people are getting killed for the sake of their wallets, I suppose it shouldn't have been surprising that someone was willing to bump me off for a few million.

If I sound calm now, believe me, I was sweating bullets at the time. Nice cliché; if I could have sweated a gun to go with them, I would have been all set.

When Ms. Bond spoke again, her voice was as cold as February; her words carried that coldness into my blood.

“Maybe I don't need to worry about delicacy,” she said. “Perhaps crude will do just fine under the circumstances. On your faces, girls—and hands behind your backs.”

My heart was pounding. I looked at Chris. Her eyes were wide—and hopeless. I knew what she was feeling. It looked as though this time we had finally gotten in over our heads.

“On your faces!” repeated Ms. Bond.

I thought about resisting. No point—the woman would only blow me away that much sooner. Or maybe there
was
a point. Maybe by resisting, I could give Chris a chance to escape. On the other hand, maybe something else would happen. Maybe Byron would realize he had forgotten something and come walking through the front door. Maybe my father would decide he was lonely and come over for a chat.

Or maybe nothing would happen, and I would have to do it myself. If so, I decided to wait as long as I could; I didn't want to get myself blown away mere seconds before rescue arrived.

“All right, here's the picture,” Ms. Bond said. At first I thought she meant the Lost Masterpiece. Then I realized she was talking to herself, outlining her plan. “Burglar breaks in, finds girls in living room, kills them so they can't identify him. Old woman hears commotion, too much for her weak heart, bang—she's gone, too. Probably better get Phoebe back into her bed before I finish her off.”

“Carla!” said Phoebe desperately.

“You're not going to turn me away, Phoebe. I've been waiting decades for this, and I'll not be stopped now.”

She walked over and stood behind me. Suddenly I felt cold metal against the back of my neck. “Now how would a burglar do this?” she muttered to herself. “From close up—or farther back?”

“My God, Carla, listen to yourself,” pleaded Phoebe. “This isn't you. You're a woman of culture. Stop before it's too late.”

“It's been too late for over sixty years.”

If things had gone on much longer, I probably would have died of fright before Ms. Bond had a chance to shoot me. But suddenly a new voice spoke.

“Put down the gun, little sister.”

“Jimmy!” I cried in astonishment. “What are you doing here?”

“Quiet!” snapped Ms. Bond. “Both of you. Jimmy, get out of here. Now!”

“I can't do that,” said Jimmy, stepping forward. “I can't let you hurt Cornelius's daughter.”

“He killed our father!” Ms. Bond screamed. “What do you care anyway, you traitor?”

“Our father killed himself,” Jimmy said. “And that should have been the end of it. But it wasn't, was it? Oh, no, it wasn't anywhere near the end.”

Chris inched a little closer to me. “What the heck is going on here?” she whispered.

“I don't have the slightest idea,” I hissed back.

Ms. Bond was facing Jimmy now, pointing the gun at the crazy old man I used to feed, the coot who had come to our rescue.

He had no real weapon to fend her off, only a weathered two-by-four that he carried between his gnarled hands. He was so old and frail, I didn't know if that would do him—or us—any good.

“Jimmy, I swear I'll shoot you, too,” Ms. Bond said. Her voice was trembling, but she raised her gun and pointed it directly at his chest.

I gathered myself. I could feel Chris doing the same thing. We might be able to rush Ms. Bond while she was concentrating on Jimmy. But we hesitated. If we attacked, she might just fire wildly. She could hit any one of us before we managed to get the gun out of her hands.

“Jimmy, you can leave here alive,” continued Ms. Bond. Her voice was low, pleading. “I don't need to kill you. Even if you did tell what happened here, no one would believe it. You can't hurt me. So turn around and go. Go, damn you!”

“I can't. This is my home. I have to protect it.”

“What do you mean?” asked Ms. Bond. She was almost shrieking. “This isn't your home.”

“Yes, it is,” whispered Phoebe. “He lives in the basement when it gets too cold or wet outside. He's been there off and on for years.”

Boing!
That explained the singing. Cross off the three-ghost theory; it was two ghosts and a nut.

“Couldn't you even give him a decent room?” Ms. Bond screamed, swinging the gun toward Phoebe.

“I offered,” said Phoebe. “I offered, but …” Her voice trailed off, and she clutched at her chest.

“Ms. Bond,” I said desperately, “she has to have her medicine. Let me get her medicine.”

“Shut up!”

“Carla …” gasped Phoebe. Her voice sounded raspy and strangled. She began to tip forward.

Jimmy lunged at his sister. She fired the pistol. Jimmy fell, clutching his arm.

“Cornelius!” he cried. “
Cornelius, for the love of God, help me!
”

I shivered. They were the same words, the same cry, the same
voice
I had heard the night “Early Harvest” drew me in and told me its entire story. It was as if Jimmy's younger self were calling across time.

Cornelius Fletcher heard it, too. Not the daughter he had lost, but the man he had saved. Not his failure calling, but his success. This he could do. Suddenly the air of the room was filled with a great cry of rage as the ghost of Cornelius Fletcher appeared inside his home for the first time since his death. His angry spirit turned in a slow circle, taking in the scene. When he saw Phoebe, bent forward in her chair, clutching her heart, his mad eyes began to blaze.

Ms. Bond's face was white; her whole body shook with astonishment. “Go away!” she screamed. “You're not real. Go away!”

Cornelius didn't move.

She fired her pistol, once, twice, three times.

Cornelius moved toward her, his face more terrible than anything I had ever seen. Ms. Bond spun toward me, then pointed the gun at me. “Go away, or the girl dies!”

Before I had time to faint, a terrible shredding sound ripped through the room. Turning my head, I gasped as I saw a long strip of paper peel away from the wall. Faster than I can write this sentence, the paper flew across the room and wrapped itself around Carla Bond.

I could see bright colors where the paper had been torn from the wall.

I whooped in jubilation. I had been right!

Rip! Rip! Rip!

You could feel the power swirling around Cornelius as he used his ghostly abilities to strip the aging paper from the walls and bind it around Carla.

When he was finally done and silence descended on the room, we found ourselves staring in awe at something more terrible, more wonderful than I had ever imagined.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Over There

An hour later my father stood in the center of Phoebe Watson's parlor, turning and turning as he studied the Lost Masterpiece.

“It's magnificent,” he whispered, his eyes filling with tears. “So terrible, but so beautiful.”

I knew what he meant.

Cornelius Fletcher's last painting was a vast mural, a picture that started in the parlor, then stretched to the hall, and then to the dining room, and on, until it covered every wall on the first floor of the house. It was a painting nearly unbearable in its sense of pain and betrayal and lost love.

Now that painting surrounded a small mob of people. My dad was there, along with Norma Bliss. (It turned out that the two of them had had a date that night, a fact concerning which I was less than amused.) We also had half a dozen cops, a doctor, Jimmy, and Carla Bond. Byron was there, too—the cops had managed to locate the bar where he had gone with his friends. Stephen Bassett was also present, acting as Ms. Bond's lawyer.

The only one missing was Phoebe. She had taken her last breath during the battle between her father and Ms. Bond.

An ambulance had come, and medics carried her away. But it was too late. I knew that for a certainty. Now I only wanted to go home and think. But first we had to answer questions from the police and almost everyone else in the room. That wasn't all that bad—at least we got to hear some answers from Jimmy and Ms. Bond, too.

By the time the session was over, the picture was pretty well filled in.

“The picture was pretty well filled in”—a good phrase to use here, all things considered.

That was one of the first questions
I
had to answer, of course—“How did you know where the picture was?”

“To tell you the truth, it was more hunch than knowledge,” I said. “Mostly it came from the way little things began to fit together. When enough of them connected, everything seemed to make sense.”

“What kinds of little things?” asked my father.

“Actually, you gave me the first clue, even though I didn't realize it at the time.”

He looked blank.

“Stripping wallpaper,” I said, and laughed. “You put the idea in my head that wallpaper covered up what had been on the wall before. Then there was the mural being painted at Seven Rays; it reminded me that artists don't have to paint on canvas, that they can use a whole wall if they want. Then there were the ropes we found in the attic. Too many ropes for a simple hanging.”

“He couldn't have done it without me,” muttered Jimmy, staring at the painting. He was on the sofa. A blanket covered his dirty, ragged clothes, and he was sipping coffee from a cup Norma had brought him. “I hung him every day, so he could work.”

As I looked around the room, I could imagine the scene. Cornelius Fletcher, his legs gone, half mad—or maybe completely crazy—consumed with the passion for creating his final masterpiece. But he couldn't do it on his own. So he had his assistant, Jimmy, the boy he had saved in the war, help him. Jimmy rigged pulleys and ropes and scaffolds all around the house, and came in every day to strap Cornelius into a harness and pull the legless artist into the air, so he could hang there and work.

I looked at the wall in front of me, with its terrible images of battle, images that overwhelmed even “Early Harvest.” I could imagine Cornelius hanging from a harness in front of it, desperately painting, feverish with inspiration.