The Misadventures of the Laundry Hag: All Washed Up: (Book 3 in the Misadventures of the Laundry Hag series) (21 page)

A large canine head poked around the shower curtain at one point, but Neil shooed him off.

“I called for you,” I murmured, sleepily.

“I know.”

Silence reigned for a time. Neil climbed from the tub, then plucked me out too. I sat like a useless throw pillow as he patted me dry and tucked me under about a thousand blankets.

“I want to take you to the hospital.” He stated it as a fact.

The only thing that would make this night any worse. Well, maybe a side trip to Walmart. “I’ll be fine. There are lumps, so I can’t have a concussion.”

He stared at me, still sopping wet, with his jaw clenched tight. I knew he weighed the possible internal injuries I might have suffered against my distress in hospitals.

“You’re dripping on Leo’s new carpet.”

He said something very unflattering about Leo or the carpet, maybe both, but then dried himself.

I sighed. “If it’ll make you feel better, you can bring me to the hospital. But I swear I’m fine.”

“Was it the woman from the road?” he rasped.

I nodded once. “She thought I was Gillian Grant.”

Neil pulled on a pair of sweats I didn’t recognize. They must have been from Leo’s bag, but I’d never seen him wear sweatpants. “I’m calling the Sheriff right now.”

He was out the door before I had a chance to respond.

Atlas remained and picked his big head up off the floor as though to make sure I was really there.

“Did you go get Daddy for me, boy?”

His tail thumped on the rug.

“What a good boy.”

I was snug as a bug in a rug, finally warm after what felt like an eternity of cold. My suitcase was still wedged in the corner, full of warm clothes. Either Neil would decide to take me to the hospital, or the sheriff would show up to interview me. Both options required my being dressed, but my things were so far away.

“Fetch,” I said to Atlas.

He set his huge head down on his equally massive paws and groaned.

“Worthless mutt.” With a sigh of my own, I got up and prepared myself for whatever came next.

Chapter Twenty Two

In the end, we compromised. Neil decided it was more efficient to have me checked out by a local doctor who made house calls than to drive me a half an hour to the closest community hospital and I didn’t fight him on it. The doctor looked like a scraggly mountain man type and had a gruff bedside manner to boot. He checked my pulse, looked in my eyes, ears and mouth with a flashlight, then palpated my abdomen, handed me a prescription for Vicodin and stated I would live.

“That’s it?” I asked, surprised.

His scraggly brows drew down. “No concussion, no internal injuries, nothing broken. What more do you want at 3 a.m.?”

“Not a damned thing.” I thanked him. He grunted that he’d bill us and strode out of the room without further comment.

“Nice guy. Feel better now?” I asked my husband.

“It’s all relative. Are you up to talking to the Sheriff?”

“Yes. Help me up.”

I leaned on him all the way to the kitchen. Sylvia sat next to Sam Ruiz, who looked none the worse for wear, despite the early hour. Leo hovered in the background, clearly at a loss as to what he should be doing. This wasn’t a cocktails and canapés sort of shindig.

Neil helped me sit and then took up his position at my back, one solid hand resting on my shoulder. I took a deep breath and ran through the events of the day and night. It took a long time. Leo made me a cup of tea, which I held but didn’t drink. I had to get it all out.

“I checked out the barn, but there was no sign of the woman,” Neil added after I’d finished my statement.

Ruiz nodded and stared down at Leo’s sketch. “I have a deputy watching the barn in case she returns. You’re sure this is her?”

“Positive.” I bit my lip. “I think she’s mentally ill. When she talked it was as though she heard voices. Schizophrenic maybe. And she thought I was Gillian Grant.”

Sam’s expression didn’t change, but I sensed interest from him on that.

“Is there a group home or anything around here?” Sylvia asked. “Maybe she escaped?”

Sam shook his head. “Not to my knowledge. I’ll get in touch with Miss Grant and see if she knows who the woman is.”

“There’s more. I think she killed Gillian’s mother, Aileene.”

Ruiz blinked and gestured for me to go on.

“When we visited the Grey’s house today, Veronica Grey told us that Aileene Grant was upset when her parents sold this place to them. The woman talked about Aileene, said she’d betrayed her. There was rat poison in the barn, the same kind that possibly killed Aileene Grant. It’s my theory that Aileene knew this woman was holed up here, maybe even befriended her. The Grants were eager to unload the place. I think they knew who the woman was and wanted to get their daughter away from her.”

Sam scowled. “But where did she come from? She couldn’t just appear out of thin air. Someone had to supply her with all the things in that barn. We need to know who she is.”

“Her name is Mary Grant. She’s my wee sister.”

The unfamiliar voice came from the doorway, where Mr. Grant lurked. He hung his head and his shoulders slumped forward, the picture of defeat.

Sam Ruiz rose. “You have something to confess, Mr. Grant? I’ll take you down to the station—”

But Mr. Grant looked to me. “Forgive me, lassie. I dinna know she was here or I would have told ye.”

“Your sister?” I asked.

“Half-sister, almost thirty years younger. My Ma and Dad died shortly after I immigrated and I brought wee Mary over, raised her along with my own daughter. Aileene was more like her sister than her niece. But Mary was wrong headed. I knew this, and yet I prayed to God to make her all right. But no matter how much I prayed she grew worse and worse. We sold the property to pay for her care.”

In spite of my ordeal, my heart went out to Mr. Grant and I sent up a quick prayer of my own that no one I loved suffered from mental illness.

“It was hard on all of us, but hardest of all on Aileene. They’d grown up together, were like sisters. She couldn’t accept that Mary would be better off without her family. She would sign her out without my knowledge and bring her back here. She insisted Mary just needed to be somewhere familiar. It wasna until Mr. Grey told me about the rumors of a ghost that I knew what she was about and could put a stop to it. Aileene was well-intentioned but Mary was beyond reason. I moved Mary to a new residence and told the staff at the home not to allow her visitors beyond my wife and myself and under no circumstances was she to be let out on day passes.”

My mouth fell open. “So as far as Mary knew, Aileene just stopped showing up, stopped caring enough to visit her? Of course she felt betrayed, who wouldn’t under those circumstances?”

Regardless of what else he was, Mr. Grant was a proud man. His eyes flashed as he raised his chin. “I did what I thought was right for my daughter. She deserved to have a life beyond caring for an aunt who would require constant watching for the rest of her days.”

Sheriff Ruiz nodded. “Did you suspect Mary of Aileene’s murder?”

“Not until well after it happened. Here I thought she was safely contained but come to find out she’d escaped and had been living at the barn again.”

“But why didn’t you tell anyone?” Sylvia asked. “She killed your daughter.”

“I will no defend my actions.” Mr. Grant looked down. “There was no help for Aileene by then and what good would it do to drag my whole family through a trial? What could a judge or jury do to punish Mary more than she already had been by her illness? I had Mary moved again to a more secure facility and we stopped visiting her altogether. I prayed for her soul every day but wouldn’t see her. That should have been the end of it.”

 “Except she came back,” Neil said. By his tone I knew he wasn’t nearly as moved by the tragic story as I was, probably because he’d had to pluck me out of the river.

Mr. Grant nodded, his shoulders slumped. “Yes. I called the facility today. It seems Gillian has been visiting Mary without my knowledge. And last week, Mary escaped again.”

“Do you have any idea where she’d be?” Sam Ruiz asked at the same time Neil said, “Tell us where else she might hide.”

“There’s a series of tunnels beneath the carriage house. One goes into town, beneath the library, another to the cellar of the Grey estate. They were built for smuggling back in the nineteenth century, but are not structurally sound. There have been several cave-ins over the years. She might hide there if she can’t go back to the barn.”

“Show us.” Neil and Sam said in unison.

We all trudged down to the dilapidated carriage house. Mr. Grant bent low over what appeared to be a trap door and flipped it up. Neil held me back as though afraid I’d throw myself into it. He needn’t have worried. The tunnel was dark, dirty and possibly held a murderess. I was good right where I was—in his arms.

It was the sheriff who climbed down into the tunnel and found her body. The four of us stood back as the emergency personnel swarmed over the carriage house and retrieved the earthly remains of Mary Grant and what was left from the box of rat poison she’d consumed. I held her brother’s hand as he watched her body be removed from the ground.

“It’s what she would have wanted,” he murmured. I was pretty sure he spoke to himself as much as to me. “To die here. This was the only true home she’d ever known.”

“She said she was the estate’s guardian. Do you know what she meant?”

Mr. Grant gave me a hollow smile. “Aye, the guardian is the last person to be buried in a graveyard, the one appointed to watch over the dead. She believed she’d killed Gillian as she’d done Aileene. She meant to die, to watch over them so they could never leave her again.”

It was dawn when the officials were through, though the sheriff requested that Leo put any further renovations on hold until his people processed the scene.

“No problem,” Leo said. “I’m ready to get the hell out of dodge. If the dragon lady wants to finish the renovations, she can do it herself.”

 “What about the bean nighe?” Sylvia asked.

I sagged onto the stone bench where I’d first felt the ghost’s presence and thought about my mother, about Sylvia’s aunt, about Aileene Grant. Ghosts cling when they have something to cling to, someone who will remember them. “Did anyone think to ask her to leave?”

Three faces stared at me with matching expressions of utter blankness.

I tried to explain. “The bean nighe is just doing her job, grisly as it is. But maybe she doesn’t want to stick around where she isn’t wanted. Or maybe, now that Mary is dead, her job is finished.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Neil said at last.

I cleared my throat. “Hey, bean nighe. If you’re listening, it’s time for you to move on.”

The warm breeze lifted my hair away from my face like a gentle caress. It could have been the ghost bidding us farewell. Or it could have been a scientifically explained weather phenomenon like air currents and the jet stream. I was too tired to care. I smiled up at my husband.

“It finally feels like spring. Let’s go home.”

****

“Mom!” Kenny and Josh flung themselves at me, heedless of my bruised ribs. “You’re all black and blue.”

“What, you don’t like it?” I struck a ridiculous pose. “And here I thought it was my color.”

They giggled happily and for that one second, everything was right with the world. Then Atlas charged inside, sopping wet, and shook all over the three of us.

I grimaced and shooed him to the back door. “Out, foul beastie. Guys, grab some dog towels and dry him off.”

Marty, who’d been camped out in front of the television, stood up. His white t-shirt was stained with what appeared to be pizza sauce. “Hey, laundry hag. Helluva shiner. What’s the other guy look like?”

“You, get your sorry ass in the shower, then go home and help Penny with May or you’ll find out.”

Marty rolled his eyes. “I told you, she kicked me out.”

“Sprout, she just had a baby. She’s hormonal and upset and needs some help. Now man up and get the hell out of my house.”

“Are you on the rag or something?”

I didn’t say anything, just shoved him down the hall toward the bathroom.

Marty cast a disappointed glance at Neil, who humped our bags inside. “I thought this trip was supposed to mellow her out, not make her bitchier.”

“She’s plenty mellow with me.” Neil sent me a lascivious wink and I shivered. “It must be you.”

“Yeah yeah, it’s all my fault. Broken record, table for one. Oh, by the way, Neil’s mom called and she did not sound happy.”

“She never does.” I shoved him into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.

“Home sweet home,” Neil murmured.

There was nothing sweet about it. I wrinkled up my nose. The place was a total pit, worse than I’d even imagined. Soda cans, beer bottles, socks, underwear, pizza boxes, lotto scratchers and muscle car magazines were strewn everywhere. From the smell of it, no one had taken the garbage out since we’d left. “Fricking Marty, I swear he hasn’t changed since high school. Cripes, I’m gonna need a hazmat suit to clean this up.”

My head started to spin as I considered the daunting amount of work ahead of me—finagle with the auto insurance company, figure out what the hell was going on with Penny and her ex, snuggle with May, make cookies or something to cover the stench of the house—