Top O' the Mournin' (7 page)

I rushed into the bathroom. Wow. Whirlpool tub. Glassed-in shower. Marble tile. Aromatic candles. Jars of bath salts and bubble bath. Little bottles of shampoo, body lotion, and massage oil. I held up the massage oil. Maybe I could heat it over the candle. Oh, boy. This day might not be a complete loss after all.

I pulled the turtleneck of my sweater down to examine my neck. Okay. It didn’t look too bad. No new welts had formed. If I applied more powder, Etienne might not even notice, especially if he was looking at me by candlelight.

A light tap at my door. Speak of the devil. I threw the door wide and smiled my most seductive smile.

“I’m sorry to bother you, dear,” Nana apologized, “but do you suppose you could come down to our room?”

“Right now?”

“You’re probably expectin’ your young man. I’m sorry. You take your time then and come down when you can. There’s no hurry.”

“Is there a problem with your room?”

“Just a small one. There’s a dead body in it.”

“You didn’t touch her, did you?” I asked as I inched close to the body.

“’Course I touched her, dear. I had to check for a pulse.”

She had curly salt-and-pepper hair, pale, wide eyes that stared fixedly at the ceiling, and thin lips that were drawn apart as if in a silent scream. I placed her at well beyond retirement age.

Tilly hovered near the woman’s feet. “I looked her all over and found no blood. No trauma to the body. My guess is stroke or heart attack. These people can’t expect to eat full Irish breakfasts every day and not suffer the consequences. Fried eggs. Fried potatoes. Sausage. Bacon. Black pudding. Even the Samoans have switched to Special K.”

“How long do you think she’s been here?” I asked. As upsetting as this was, I was thankful the deceased wasn’t a member of our tour group.

Nana sank to her knees for a better look at the body. “There’s fixed lividity. See here. All the blood’s settled at the back a her arms and legs, makin’ ’em that purplish color. Her lips and nails are real pale. Her extremities are blue. Her eyes are startin’ to flatten ’cause a lack of fluid. And her skin’s real cool. My guess is, she’s been here between six and eight hours.”

I regarded Nana in astonishment. How did she know that?

“Very impressive,” said Tilly. “You’ve been overly modest about yourself, Marion. Were you a former medical examiner?”

“Nah. I just watch a lot of them forensic shows on the Discovery Channel on Tuesday nights.”

Considering the scope of my grandmother’s knowledge, it was now apparent that I might have learned more from a constant diet of TV than from four years of higher education at the University of Wisconsin. I guess that said a lot about the quality of cable programming these days.

I heard a rush of footsteps in the hall and a cry of alarm as the front desk clerk burst into the room. “Oh, Jaysuz. This is terrible. She didn’t sign out today, but I was thinking she’d simply forgot. Rita’s getting on in years, you know, and her memory’s failing. Is she going to be all right?”

Liam McEtigan obviously never watched the Discovery Channel on Tuesday nights. I patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Liam, but she’s no longer with us.”

“Are you sure? Her color’s not too good, but she uses off-brand cosmetics, so her color’s never that good.”

I shook my head. Liam’s face crumpled. “This is terrible. Terrible. What am I going to do?”

“You might want to call the coroner,” I suggested.

“No, I mean, we only have one other chambermaid. Yours is the only group booked into the castle for the next few days, but one person can’t be cleaning all the rooms. We were hardly managing with two.”

“Only two maids?” I marveled. “Maybe you need to improve your benefits package.”

“We
have
good benefits. We even include dental. It’s—” He stopped short, looking as if another word would be one too many. Perspiration beaded his upper lip. He wrung his hands in nervous agitation. “I’d best call me da. He owns the local mortuary.”

As he made to flee, Tilly thumped her cane on the floor. “Not so fast, young man! You can’t expect us to sleep here tonight. We’ll be needing other accommodations.”

Liam wheeled around, looking like a deer caught in the headlights. “Of course. I’ll be seeing to it right away.” He sniffed suddenly, as if he were just now remembering to breathe. “I apologize for the smell, ladies. Jaysuz, this is terrible.”

“It’s not so bad,” said Nana. “You should get a whiff a our bus.”

“You’d better make your first phone call to the police,” Tilly instructed. “We don’t know if this woman died from natural causes or from more nefarious means. A thorough investigation must be conducted.”

Liam shook his head. “Everyone will know what killed Rita. Bad heart. She was living on borrowed time, but she wasn’t one to sit at home to wait for the Grim Reaper. She wanted to keep working until the end. And look at her. That’s exactly what she did.” He blessed himself with a quick sign of the cross. “If you’d be good enough to accompany me, ladies. I’ll see about relocating you.”

As Tilly and Nana hurried toward the door, I remained hovered over the corpse for a long moment. I wasn’t entirely convinced Rita had died from a heart attack. Judging from the look in her eyes, I’d have guessed she’d died of fright.

My arms itched. My throat itched. The roots of my hair itched.
Scratch scratch scratch,
as I unlocked the door to my room.
Scratch scratch scratch,
as I flipped on the light switch.

“This is awful nice a you to put us up for the night,” Nana said as she followed me into the room.

“A poorly run operation,” said Tilly, thumping her walking stick for effect. “Imagine! A castle of this size and they haven’t one room available for emergency occupancy.”

I scratched my arms. My throat. My scalp. Nana was philosophical. “With only two maids to clean this place, I’m surprised they’ve got rooms available at all. Did something bite you, Emily?”

“I think it’s hives.” I rolled up my sleeve to discover a fresh crop of welts on my forearm.

“That’s not good,” said Nana. “Bernice’s husband died from hives. Maybe you need medical attention.”

I rushed into the bathroom for a better look at myself in the mirror. The welts peppered my arms and throat, but they hadn’t reached my face yet.

“Did you eat somethin’ you was allergic to?” Nana asked.

“I’m not allergic to anything.”

“Hives can sometimes be activated by stress,” said Tilly. “Are you feeling stressed by anything?”

I thought about my life over the last twenty-four hours…and scratched some more. “Not that I know of!” I lied. And what was worse, the more I thought about Rita, the more creeped out I was getting that she’d seen something that had literally scared her to death. What if Ashley had told the truth about the castle? What if it really
was
haunted?

“If she’s not stressed out, I think we should tell her,” I heard Tilly say.

When I didn’t hear Nana reply, I poked my head out the bathroom door. “Tell me what?”

Tilly looked at Nana. Nana looked at Tilly, then at me. “It’s about the castle, dear. I don’t mean to alarm you, but…it’s haunted.”

My mouth fell open. “You know? Who told you? Bernice? How did she find out? Was she eavesdropping again? Oh, great. If Bernice knows,
everyone
will know, and they’ll all want to go home. I can’t go home. What am I supposed to do about Etienne? He took time off work to be with me. I think he might be planning to pop the question!”

Nana clapped her hands together. “How nice for you, dear. You want I should e-mail your mother so’s she can reserve the Knights a Columbus hall for the reception? You can never book too early these days.”

“No e-mails! Not yet. Now let’s back up. Who told you about the castle?”

“Tilly told me last night,” said Nana, “but she’s kept it to herself ’cause she didn’t wanna spook anyone. What with the maid dyin’ like that, though, we thought you oughta know what you might be dealin’ with.”

“How did you find out?” I asked Tilly.

“It’s a long story.” She staked out one of the room’s velvet boudoir chairs and sat down. With a waggle of her walking stick, she directed Nana and me to do the same.

“One of my pet courses during my years at Iowa State was a graduate seminar on Irish myth and legend, and one of the most poignant tales my students uncovered was that of a wealthy English lord who accepted an invitation from James I to settle on land the king was disbursing in Ireland. By James’s edict, Irish landowners were expelled from their farms, driven into bogs, and forced to act as slave labor to the new English landowners. This particular English lord had a daughter who some say was the most beautiful female ever to set foot on Irish soil. She was light-eyed, golden-haired, and fair-skinned, and when her father commissioned a castle to be built, the girl fell in love with a handsome Irish laborer who was as dark as the girl was fair. Naturally, their union was forbidden. They didn’t share the same social class or the same faith, but despite their differences, they ran off and were married in a secret ceremony by an Irish monk. No one knew what they had done until it became obvious that the girl was breeding. Her father forced a confession out of her, and they say he was so incensed, he locked her in the dungeon and forbid anyone in the family to speak to her. As far as he was concerned, his daughter was dead to him. When her lover discovered her punishment, he tried to scale the castle wall one night to save her, but his body was found floating in the moat the next morning. When the girl’s father told her of her lover’s fate, she went into premature labor and, after two days of agonizing pain, died in childbirth.

“Legend holds that from that time on, the two lovers have roamed the castle in search of each other, their wailing cries echoing through the halls. And when experts have chased down the cries, they’ve found a man’s wet footprints, as if he were dripping from the moat, and a woman’s bloody footprints, as if she were fresh from childbed. The name of the Irishman who dared marry an English lady has been lost to history, but the name of the castle is…Ballybantry.”

I stared at her, spellbound. “Has anyone ever seen the ghosts?”

“A handful of people swear they’ve seen the girl rattling doors in the hall in search of her lover. Others claim she moves chairs close to the window so she can sit and wait for him to appear. And she’s blamed with filching articles of a personal nature from guests’ rooms, items that might provide small comfort to her as she wanders through eternity.”

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!

“EHH!” I leaped out of my chair. I liked scary stories, but I wasn’t so keen about finding myself at ground zero. “Don’t anyone move,” I said bravely, ignoring the goose bumps that were tap-dancing up and down my spine. “I’ll get the door.” I was pretty sure a ghost wouldn’t bother to knock.

“That’s an awful good story,” said Nana. “Maybe they could use this place as the location for the next
Survivor
series. If you’re a contestant in a haunted castle, maybe they’d even let you order takeout ’stead a forcin’ you to eat rodents and bugs.”

I checked the peephole and opened the door. Etienne stood before a baggage trolley crammed with luggage. “If you see your suitcase, point it out. And by the way, I missed you today.” He cupped his hand around my neck and kissed my mouth.
Unh.

“Why are you playing porter?” I asked dizzily. “You’re one of the paying guests. You get to have your luggage delivered to your door.”

“I haven’t mastered the art of how to stand around doing nothing. If there’s activity going on, I need to be in the middle of it. Besides, I assume the guests would like their bags tonight. I feared that being the bastion of inefficiency he is, Michael might not finish unloading the luggage bays until next week.”

Bless his little Swiss heart. “That’s so sweet,” I gushed. Was this guy proving to be a perfect ten or what? He probably even liked animals and small children. He was the catch of the century, and even though I was a little squeamish about this sudden possibility of another marriage, intuition told me that if I didn’t reel him in, some other woman would be only too happy to do the honors.

But what if I was jumping the gun? What if the question he wanted to ask me was more basic, like what side of the bed did I like to sleep on, or was I the type of woman who’d freak out if he left the toilet seat up? Hmm. Maybe I needed to see the whole picture before I got too far ahead of myself. “About the question you’ve been meaning to ask me,” I hedged. “Would now be a good time for you?”

“Now?” He looked around him. “I’d envisioned a slightly more intimate setting than a hotel corridor, darling. Say, something with candlelight, and champagne, and an obscene amount of bare flesh.” He trailed a slow knuckle down my cheek. “What if we synchronize our watches and meet in my room a little later? I’ve seen the room. I have a king-size bed.”

This job was starting to cramp my style. I hesitated. “I have a teensy problem. Rule number eight of my
Escort’s Manual.
I have to be available in my own room in case any of my group needs me.”

He nodded supreme understanding. “Then shall I plan to come down here? Your
Escort’s Manual
doesn’t prohibit guests from visiting you in your own room, does it?”

I sighed. “As it happens, I have a teensy problem with that too.”

Nana poked her head out the door. “I thought I heard Inspector Miceli’s voice. That was real nice a you to help Mr. Malooley with the luggage. Poor man needs all the help he can get. Makes you wonder what line of work he was in before he took up bus drivin’.” She eyed the luggage trolley. “My grip’s right on top there if you wanna haul it down. The big red one.”

“What’s your room number, Mrs. Sippel? I’ll deliver it to your door.”

“You just did. Drag it down and I’ll wheel her in. Be careful though. My laptop’s in it. Tilly! You wanna step out here and find your grip?”

Etienne shot me a quizzical look. I lifted my eyebrows and shoulders in a tandem shrug. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. Nana and Tilly are spending the night with me until another room comes available.”