The Realm of the Shadows (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 2) (2 page)

He’d been gathering steam as he talked, which was just what I wanted.

“Then let’s get serious about putting a stop to it,” I said, leaning toward him. “Let’s detonate the invisible elf, or exorcize the demon, or dig up the ancient Indian burial ground and sow it with salt, or do whatever we need to do, okay? Let’s git ’er done!”

He heaved himself back into his seat, giving himself time by taking off his cap and running a hand over his head again, this time without the bandanna. “Yeah. Sure. You’re right. Let’s go. But you do one of those things where the names are changed to protect the innocent,” he demanded, wagging a finger at Ed.

“Of course,” Edson Darby-Deaver said calmly. He pushed a button on his digital recorder and recited our names, the name of the house, the date and (glancing at his wristwatch) the exact time of day. Then he turned back to Charlie and said, “Now. Let’s start with the apparition in the barn. It happened this morning, is that correct?”

“I was looking for Tripp. I needed to mark –“

“Tripp?”

“My son. Charles Anson Kermit , III. Tripp. Got it?” Ruffled by the interruption, Charlie resettled and began again. “I needed to mark off the centerline between the old stables, and I needed him to be my spotter. He wasn’t outside with the other guys, so I walked into the barn.” He stopped a moment and his eyes searched the distance as his face drew down and began to lose expression. “I walked into the barn. There was nobody there.”

“What time was this?”

“Eh?”

I frowned at Ed. I’m no professional, but even I know better than to interrupt somebody who has that look on his face. Charlie was reliving the moment, and breaking his narrative would jar him out of remembrance. Any little odd details he could tell us would be useful. Ed didn’t seem to notice.

“Exactly what time of day was this?” he repeated.

“Oh. I don’t know. Maybe eight, eight-fifteen.”

“Daylight.”

“Hell yes, daylight! It’s light before seven, this time of year. Do you want to know what happened, or are
you
going to tell
me
?”

“Sorry. It’s best to nail down all the details while everything is fresh in a witness’s mind.”

I risked interrupting. “Maybe we can get all the details after Charlie describes what happened in his own way.”

“Good idea,” Ed said. “Thank you, Taylor. Please continue, Charlie.”

“Much obliged,” Charlie said largely. “Where was I? Looking for Tripp. Didn’t find him. Went into the barn. It was daylight,” he said, glaring at Ed. “Daylight streaming in the windows, but the windows aren’t that big and they haven’t been cleaned since the last horse died, or whenever the family got around to it, and the light coming through them was sort of dirty, too. I remember the squares of light on the old brick floor as I walked toward the back end of the barn. Where the stairs to the hayloft are. I got to the bottom of the stairs and called up, because Tripp wasn’t anywhere else, and he’s a youngster yet, he’s fascinated by old buildings, and he’s been looking all around it since we started working, going up into the loft and nosing around the old stalls – he found a horseshoe and brought it home – there are some initials carved under the window frame up in the loft – “H.B.” – and he was asking around who that could’ve been, because the family’s name was Cadbury, originally. This last generation, it’s Huntington. No ‘B.’ I called up, and nobody answered, and it was then, while I was looking up the stairs, that I saw it whip on by up there.”

His eyes were glazed and I held my breath, willing Ed to shut up and not break the spell, because Charlie, as he sat in the dining room of the house, was looking with his mind’s eye up into the loft and seeing “it” just as he’d seen it a few hours ago.

He blinked a few times. I looked at Ed and Ed looked at me. Charlie’s breathing was getting louder.

“I started up the stairs,” Charlie said, his voice going low and his eyes watching for “it.” “I got to the top and looked around the hayloft. It’s empty now, you know. Swept out, hot and dry, but the floor’s sound. It’s safe. No rot. The winch is still there, the one they used to lower the hay, but there’s no rope. There’s an old poster on the wall. Tripp told me about it, but that was the first time I bothered to look at it. Poster of a horse – beautiful, white horse – a Lippizaner, up on its hind legs looking like the god of all horses. Back eighty years ago, a company came through with a lot of them, and they did a show. I was looking at the poster . . . that beautiful white horse . . . .”

I wanted to reach for him and put my hand over his, because his eyes had glazed over, and he wasn’t blinking anymore.

“I was looking at the poster, so I didn’t see it. I just saw – white, you know – a whitish thing coming at me, and I
felt
it,” he said with horror. “I felt it sweep over me and touch me.
Oh, God
!” He stopped, his flesh drawn up in goosebumps and his eyes staring down a tunnel. Tears dropped over the rims of his eyes and stood on his cheeks, clinging there until he dashed them away with the heels of his hands. “I got out of there. I must have run. I can get down a staircase on the railings, just skimming the steps, and I headed for the stairs and I was
down
, and I never stopped until I was out of the barn and standing in the sunshine with everybody looking at me like I was on fire.”

He stopped. We waited, but he didn’t go on, and he didn’t look at us. He unplugged himself from the memory of it, and withdrew from us as well. Then he looked at Ed defiantly.

“Well? What do you make of that?”

“You didn’t actually see it? I was told something about a long white dress,” he said, shuffling through handwritten notes, frowning.

“I – I thought that’s what you said, Charlie.” I was sure he had mentioned a white figure, or a white dress, but I wasn’t going to argue with him in front of Edson.

“I never said anything about a dress!” he fretted. “I just said a lady.”

“Sorry,” I told Ed. “Guess I was wrong.”

He glared, then turned back to Charlie. “I see. So you didn’t look directly at it? You just saw something out of the corner of your eye and got the impression of a figure in a dress, is that what you’re telling us?”

“Forget the damn dress! I’m telling you that I saw something, and I don’t know what.”

“Taylor, here, told me you saw a woman.”

“It
was
a woman,” he said in surprise, looking back down the tunnel again.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know. But it was. I felt her.”

“You felt her garments brush over you? Is that where the impression of a dress came from?”

“Look, for the last time –“

“Ed, forget the dress!” I said, desperate to keep the men from fighting.

“Then what
did
you see?”

“It wasn’t what I
saw
. It was what I
felt
. I felt
her
. I felt her touch. I felt her – her fingertips. Her breath. She touched me.”

“But,” Ed said, taking his glasses off and staring at Charlie short-sightedly, “if you didn’t look directly at it, how do you know it was a woman?”

Charlie leveled his pale eyes at Edson. “When you take a drink of water, how do you know it’s wet? It just
is
,” he said. “It was a woman. I know the feel of a woman.”

Ed frowned, then tried another tack. “If you could feel her, can you describe what kind of a woman she was? Old, young, angry, frightened?”

Charlie was silent until I thought he wasn’t going to answer, then he said, “Sad. She wanted to touch me. To touch somebody – anybody. She was lonely.”

And that was all we could get out of him. Ed picked at him for a while, but Charlie was spent, and he folded up inside himself and became morose.

“Charlie, can I get you some water?” I said at last. “Iced tea? Beer?”

“Beer,” he said.

“Sure thing.”

“And then,” Edson said, “I think we should go take a look at the hayloft.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m gonna sit here and have my beer. Then I’m going home. You two can go up there if you want to.” His voice was small, exhausted.

“Of course, Charlie,” I said. I’d had no idea how deeply the incident had affected him, and was beginning to feel guilty for taking it so lightly. He had acted differently when he’d first told me about it, but of course, at the time his men had been standing around and he wasn’t going to show emotion in front of them.

I got a beer out of the refrigerator and brought it to Charlie, along with a nice, frosty glass from the freezer.

He took the can, popped it open and drank straight from it, ignoring the glass.

We walked out the back door and started across the lawn to the barn with the sun beating down on our heads. I looked across the clear turquoise water of the swimming pool and beyond to where the river lay glittering in the sun. It would’ve been so good to just cut loose and do a cannonball into the pool with all my clothes on, instead of going ghost hunting in the barn.

Ed was focused on his mission like a hunting dog, and it probably never crossed his mind to look around and enjoy the view.

We reached the barn and hesitated before the open carriage doors. A quick breeze rattled the treetops without touching us, like life breathing around the barn but unable to penetrate. It made me not want to go inside. Or maybe Charlie’s story had just spooked me.

“After you,” Ed said. “Ladies first.”

“That’s only when you’re headed for the lifeboats,” I grumbled, but I went ahead and stepped in. It was darker inside, but no cooler.

We walked down the empty space between the old stalls which still lined both sides of the barn. Charlie had chalked out lines over the bricks, but no actual work had been done. That space should’ve been divided by a long row of cabinets with good, durable work surfaces. The construction was going to involve a lot of hammering, sawing and swearing, and it needed to be done before we moved the shelter animals in.

Ed set his satchel down on the floor. When I turned to look at him, he was gazing around, absorbing vibrations or something. He pulled out a small, boxy instrument, flipped a switch, and then began moving it around, looking at a read-out on the front of it.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“EMF detector.” He stopped and gave me a patronizing smile. “Think of it as a ghost finder.”

“Huh. The carpenters think of it as a stud finder.”

He stared at me and I stared at him. Then I held up a hand. “Okay, okay, you’ve got your little tools of the trade, but don’t talk down to me. I’ll take you seriously if you do the same for me.”

“Agreed. Sorry. I didn’t think you were a skeptic.”

“I am a reasonable person,” I told him, feeling a little superior. “I don’t jump to the conclusion that a place is haunted just because a breeze went under the siding and made a spooky noise.”

“But still, you’re wearing a lucky charm. That’s the Egyptian cat goddess, Bastet, isn’t it?”

“Oh, this?” I looked down and touched the green cat pendant I always wore. “It’s just – you know – a souvenir. It belonged to Vesta.”

“Yes,” he said, with one eyebrow lifted. “
You’re
not superstitions. I imagine most people from St. Augustine to Palm Coast went to that sale you had, when her collection of Egyptian trinkets was donated to the resale shop. I know I did.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a small, black carving of a beetle, about an inch and a half long, and displayed it to me in the palm of his hand. “It’s a scarab.” He tossed it a couple of inches into the air, caught it, and returned it to his pocket. “I like to carry it around. I don’t know why. Most people will tell you they’re not superstitious, but we all like to think a little talisman will give us – an extra something. I don’t know what.”

“I suppose so, but as a matter of fact, I wear this to honor Vesta, and because I like it. It’s the same color as my eyes.”

“Uh huh. Let’s leave it at that. Bastet was the protector of an ancient city, wasn’t she?”

Before I could answer, he put the EMF detector up in the air again and did another sweep. “Nothing. Let’s proceed.”

“Yes. Let’s.” I tried to settle down and not get huffy with the little know-it-all.

We walked to the bottom of the stairs, and once again Ed wanted me to lead the way. The stairs were nothing fancy; just a thick, inclined wooden ladder with an attached handrail. At the top, I stopped, and Ed said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I took the last step and walked out to the middle of the naked wooden floor, unconsciously curling my fingers around the cat pendant. When I realized what I was doing, I forced my hand to open and let the pendant drop before Ed could see.

The air was stale, suffocating. I turned to see Edson crouching down by the bottom of the big square window that had been cut in directly over the barn door.

“H.B.” he said. “Interesting.”

Not to me. With nothing else to look at, I wandered over to the poster and admired the magnificent white horse. The sales pitch described “Airs Above the Ground,” and the horse in the picture actually did look airborne.

Suddenly I realized that this was where Charlie had had his brush with the lady, while he was absorbed in looking at the poster. I paused, trying to invite an encounter. I closed my eyes, even trying to imagine the brush of a misty shroud. But I felt nothing. Just hot, stagnant air pressing against my skin. Turning, I saw Ed kneeling on the floor and taking pictures of the graffiti. I sighed. If it was initials he was after, we could wander through the groves around the estate and find a bunch of them, some with hearts around them. This was a waste of time.

“I’ll just take some readings for a baseline,” he said, more to himself than to me, “then blanket the area with photographs. Then we can move on.”

We paused as we heard the sound of Charlie’s pick-up roaring to life and being driven away.

“Move on to what?”

“I’d like to document the cemetery.”

“Oh.”

Nothing else happened while we were in the barn, but the cemetery was a disaster.

It was on a high patch of ground behind the barn, about fifty yards away, and as we got closer I could see the damage before we even climbed the hill. Facing in the direction of the house was a wrought iron gate with “CADBURY” over the arch. There was a hip-high iron fence enclosing the cemetery, and a section of it lay flat on the ground. One of my landlord’s stipulations was that his family’s burial ground should be respected and maintained. I stopped before the gate and stared.

“I was here pulling weeds the day before yesterday,” I said. “Everything was fine.”

Now, three of the tombstones were flat on the ground, and the grave of Vesta’s grandfather, gadfly golden-age archeologist Kingsley Danvers Cadbury, had been excavated down to a depth of roughly three feet. His grand obelisk was solid and straight, but dirt from the grave had been carelessly thrown around its pediment.

Ed quickly entered the cemetery and jumped down into the hole, while I walked around assessing the damage. My friend, Vesta rested close to her parents, David Ramses Cadbury and Elizabeth Hull Cadbury, and her Aunt Vesta Marie, who had only lived to be three. Only Vesta’s tombstone remained standing; all the others were flat, and David’s was broken in two. I was horrified, and stared around mutely. When I finally looked back for Ed, he was nowhere to be seen, though I could hear the shutter-click of his camera. I walked over and looked down to see him squatting in the grave.

“They didn’t reach the casket, of course,” he said without looking up. “Yet. Has anybody been spending the night on the property?”

“No.”

He stirred with energy. “With your permission, I’d like to stake out the cemetery tonight. Let’s see if our grave-robber comes back to finish the job.” He hauled himself out of the hole and dusted his hands and clothes. This was more like it, he seemed to be thinking.

“I suppose the rumors of Egyptian treasure are still going around?” he asked.

“The ones about Kingsley Cadbury smuggling things out of a pharaoh’s tomb? Probably. It’s a stupid idea, but people like to believe things like that.”

“It’s not stupid. Archeologists of that era got away with a lot of contraband, even after the Egyptian authorities tried to crack down. When Howard Carter found the door to King Tutankhamen’s tomb, he had to stop work and send for an official from the Egyptian Antiquities Organization before he could legally open it. That took three days.
Three days!
Do you really think Carter resisted the temptation to go in and see what he’d found until the official showed up? There was plenty of time to hide small items – gold statuettes, scarabs, faience figurines like that pendant you’re wearing – where the authorities wouldn’t find them. It’s unlikely that the Cadburys buried anything priceless with Kingsley, but what better way to hide the theft than to let him take it with him to the grave?”

I had grabbed the cat pendant protectively. “It’s a fake, Ed.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But if you could strip the Parthenon of the Elgin Marbles, you could sneak trinkets out of Egypt, especially if you had three days to hide them.”

“Oh, all right. I suppose Kingsley might’ve slipped something into his pocket and smuggled it out, but personally, I don’t believe it.”

“What you believe doesn’t matter. All that matters is what our grave-robber believes. So, are we agreed? I stay here and keep a watch tonight?” He actually sounded excited about it.

“Are you sure you’ll be safe? This guy could be dangerous.”

“Anybody who sneaks around in the middle of the night is not looking for a confrontation. I bet he runs off as soon as he knows I’m here.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

He stood in the middle of the cemetery, looking at the damage. “This isn’t a fortune-hunter, or there wouldn’t be this kind of vandalism. Somebody with a plan and the right kind of tools could have dug down and been into the casket in one night. Whoever this was didn’t dig very deep before giving up. This smacks of bored kids, or a double-dog dare. They probably got exhausted and decided to come back another night to finish the job, or lost their nerve completely and won’t be back at all.”

“We can only hope. First thing tomorrow, I’ll get Charlie to send over some guys to fill the grave in again.”

“Good.”

“But I’ll have to wait until my landlord gets back to see what he wants to do about the tombstones and the fence. Listen, Ed, I don’t like the idea of you being alone out here tonight.”

“I’ll be fine. Graveyards don’t faze me. I’ll bring a crowbar or something, just in case. They won’t be expecting somebody to be here, so I’ll have the advantage.”

“You’ll back off and call the police,” I said sternly. “They won’t be able to dig down to Kingsley’s casket before the cops can get here and arrest them.”

“Oh, all right. If you insist.”

“I insist. Do you want me spend the night here with you?”
Say no, say no, say no!

“No. I’ll be fine. I’ve done this before.”

Of course he had.

The next morning I brought two coffees with me and walked toward the hill, past the house and barn. Halfway up, I turned to gaze around. The wind was coming out of the northeast, which kind of messes up the beach, but back here closer to the river it was refreshing. It was an hour past sunrise and the sky was a classic Florida turquoise blue, arching grandly off to the west where a cloudbank had stalled, flattened, as if it had hit a wall. I turned around and continued my climb. Ed was standing in the cemetery looking down into Kingsley’s grave.

“Morning,” I called, not wanting to startle him. I saluted with one of the cups. “Hot coffee.”

“Hot damn,” he answered, walking toward me. “Thank you.”

We took a moment to have a few sips, then I said, “Anything?”

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“So where do we go from here?”

He considered. “I go home and get some sleep, then get on the computer and do some research on Cadbury House. Then tonight – same thing, I stake out the cemetery again.”

“Why research on the computer? Why not just go to the horse’s mouth?”

“What? The poster in the loft?”

I softly punched his arm. “No, silly. Frieda Strawbridge. She knew the Cadburys, right? Those people had nothing to do but gossip. I bet she knows a lot about Cadbury House, and the whole family. You do know Frieda, don’t you? You live in her development.”

“I know her,” he said reluctantly. “She doesn’t socialize much. And unless you have a certain status, she’s not likely to gossip. She’s a snob, you know.”

“Even snobs love to gossip, and what elderly person doesn’t like to talk about the glory days? She was famous once: photographers followed her around, movie stars wanted to date her, everything she did went into the society pages. Now – nobody remembers her or her bigwig father. She must be lonely. She lives all alone, doesn’t she?”

“Her daughter, Dolores, takes care of her.”

“So Dolores is the gatekeeper? Well, let’s ask her for an audience with Frieda.”

“Dolores doesn’t have any influence over her mother. Nobody does. We’ll have to go to Frieda herself, and that’s not easy. She’s wheelchair-bound now. I haven’t actually seen her in a couple of years.”

“Give it a try anyway. The old girl would probably like a good long talk about the old days, and if we tell her it’s got something to do with the desecration of the Cadbury cemetery, I bet she’ll see us.”

He looked at me. “You want to come too?”

“Why not? I’m the one having problems here. And you said she was pleased when I figured out who killed Vesta. Lay it on thick, tell her I desperately need her help. It’s worth a try, and we might get more inside information than you’d get on the internet.”