Top O' the Mournin' (18 page)

“We did okay. We toured the distillery, ate lunch, bought souvenirs, and arrived back here fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Really?” She sounded disappointed. “You didn’t run into any problems?”

I retrieved her bag and headed back to the door. “None.”

“Well.” She smiled stiffly. “Isn’t that nice.”

“We’ve run into a few problems at the castle though. Wailing in the halls at night. Cold spots in the rooms. Bloody footprints on the floor. And lest I forget, two people have died!”

She looked taken aback. “Tour members?”

“Castle staff! A maid and a custodian. And they looked like they’d been frightened to death! This is all your fault!”

“
My
fault? Why is it my fault?”

“Because you booked us into this place knowing full well it’s haunted!”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“I believe in them now!”

“The tour company made the decision to stay here, Emily. And they based their decision on economics,
not
on some old wives’ tale about the castle being haunted. Look at this place! It’s a five-star hotel. Where else can y’all find accommodations like this for the money we’re paying? In another hotel at our rate you’d be looking at single beds, bare walls, and a communal bathroom down the hall. You think the guests would settle for that?”

“I think they’d settle for staying in a place where people aren’t turning up dead every day!”

“Ready or not,” yelled Jackie over the roar of the whirlpool, “here I come.”

I wheeled around toward the bathroom to see a leg kick out from behind the door in the style of a Vegas showgirl. In the next instant the door opened wide to reveal Jackie striking a sexy pose in sheer black babydolls with pink ribbon trim and a matching G-string panty. “Boop-oop-adoop!” She hoisted up her leg, flung out her arm, and snapped back her head. “Okay. What’s next?”

Oh, this was nice. Alone in the bathroom for five minutes and she turns into Betty Boop.

Ashley hobbled up beside me for a better look. She stared at Jackie. She stared at me. A knowing smile curled her lips. “Looks like y’all have plans for the evening. I better go. I wouldn’t want to keep you girls from anything.”

Jackie looked our way. “Oops! I didn’t realize we had company.”

“You don’t. I was just leaving.” Ashley nodded toward the tour bag in my hand. “Loop that around my neck, would you?”

“I can carry it down to your room for you.”

“No!”

Uh-oh. I was getting a bad feeling about this. “Jackie’s being here isn’t what you think,” I explained as I maneuvered the handles over her head. “We’re having a”—I forced the words out—“a pajama party.”

“Is that what y’all call it up North?”

“Too bad about your injury!” Jackie bellowed over the noise echoing behind her. She thrust her foot out and gave it a little wiggle. “That’s one of the advantages of having enormous feet. You don’t fall on your face and make a fool of yourself so often!”

Wow. I had to hand it to Jack. He was really getting the hang of this female thing.

Ashley fixed Jackie with a withering look. To me she said, “Does her husband know about y’all?” Then with her canvas tote hanging like a feed bag around her neck, she hobbled briskly out the door.

“Cretin,” Jackie mouthed after her. “And did you notice? She didn’t even thank me for hauling her butt all the way back from those stairs today. The ingrate.”

I closed the door to the hall, an uncomfortable feeling churning in my stomach. I’d explained well enough, hadn’t I? Ashley didn’t think Jackie and I were…that the two of us were about to—

“If the whirlpool’s available, do you mind if I hop in?” Jackie asked. “Seems a shame to let it all go to waste.”

I waved her on with a listless gesture. “Go ahead. Someone might as well enjoy it.”

“Oh, good. You want to join me?”

“NO!”

“What? Girls don’t do that at pajama parties?”

“No! They don’t. They…they have scavenger hunts. They make crank phone calls. They do inventive things with toothpaste and feathers.”

“Sounds boring.”

“They paint each others’ toenails.”

“Ooh. That’s a little better. Maybe we can do that when I come out.” She gave me a little finger wave and disappeared, thankfully, into the bathroom. I stumbled across the floor, collapsed into a chair, and practiced some mindless staring again.

Okay, I told myself, things weren’t
that
bad. My love life was on permanent hold and I had to spend the evening entertaining Gypsy Rose Lee, but at least I was coping. I mean, despite the stress, I didn’t have hives galloping all over my body.

I pondered that for a millisecond before racing to the dresser to check out my face. I squinted into the mirror. Uh-oh. Little red welts were creeping up my throat. And there was a huge one on my jaw. Okay. Things were really bad.

The lights suddenly dimmed, then flickered, then went out completely, pitching the room into total darkness.

And now they were worse.

CLINK! CRASH!
Tinkle.
PLOP! Glug glug.

“Jack? Are you all right?”

Silence.

Uh-oh. “Hang on! I’m coming!” I felt my way through the darkness like a blind person, arms waving like antennae, toes testing the floor before each step. I located the bathroom door and curled my hand around the knob, giving it a turn. It wouldn’t budge. I listened intently for a moment. The silence was eerie. I banged on the door. “Jack? Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, now that you’ve killed the whirlpool. Are you going to turn on the light or not?”

“I can’t. Must be a power outage. Everything is dark out here too. Why can’t I get the door open?”

“Because it’s locked.”

I rested my forehead against the door and waited a beat. “Here’s a thought. Why don’t you unlock the door and come out of there?”

“Because I’m in my bare feet, there’s glass all over the floor, and I can’t see my hand in front of me! You have any other bright suggestions?”

“Are you close to any towels?”

“Just a minute.” A pause. Shuffling. SPLAT!
Plink.
CRASH! “Damn. Okay. I found a couple of towels.”

“Keep them folded, set them on the floor, then step onto them and glide your way to the door. Pretend you’re ice-skating.” I hope she’d found bath towels. Given the size of her feet, hand towels would never cut it.

“You’re sure it’s all right to use these towels on the floor? If I dirty them, what’ll I use to dry off when I finally get to use the whirlpool?”

Back when she’d been a guy, she used to grab our white Royal Velvet towels with the ribbon-and-lace embroidery to dry off the car. Megadoses of estrogen and progesterone had worked wonders with her brain matter. “We can request more towels at the front desk. Just unlock the door and get out of there.”

“Okay.” After a half-minute’s wait that was accompanied by muffled epithets and sounds of broken glass scraping the floor tiles, I heard the lock click and the knob rattle. The door creaked open. “Emily?” she asked tentatively.

“Right here.” I inched my hand into the blackness, connected with her arm, and yanked her into the bedroom.

“Wow.” Her voice was a whisper. “It’s really dark in here. Isn’t this fun? How long do you think the power outage will last?”

“Don’t know. Let’s see if I can find out.” This was eerie. Even the outdoor floodlights were out. I inched my way to the sitting area, located my shoulder bag on the chair where I’d left it, and fingered every object inside until I found my flashlight. I turned on the beam, walked to the bedside phone, and hit the button on the phone pad for the front desk. It rang, and rang, and rang. “No one’s answering.”

“Listen. The music’s stopped. I bet they had to shut down the entertainment. Those cloggers could trample each other to death in the dark. That’s probably where the desk clerk is. In the dining room, directing traffic with a big flashlight.”

I hung up. “Maybe you’re right.” I flashed the light on her. “EH!” Not only was she right, she was buck naked. “Where are your clothes?”

“In the bathroom. What’s the problem? You used to see me naked all the time.”

“Your hardware was different back then. I’m not used to the new stuff yet.”

“You better cough up a robe for me then, because I’m not going back into that bathroom until the lights come back on.”

“You outweigh me by ninety pounds, Jack! I own nothing that’ll fit you.”

“I love that little teal wrap you’re wearing. That might fit. It’s loose enough.”

I sighed with defeat. What the heck. My evening was ruined anyway. I shrugged out of my wrap and set it on the bed for her. “Here it is. Knock yourself out.” I pulled a pair of Joe Boxer pajama bottoms and a cotton top out of the dresser drawer, and yanked them on. “How’s it fit?” I asked as I aimed the narrow beam back at her.

“You tell me.” She twirled in place like a music-box dancer. It was too short, too tight, and entirely the wrong color, but at least she wasn’t naked anymore.

“Perfect,” I said, cursing under my breath when my little Maglite suddenly dimmed. I slapped it against my palm and rotated the head, narrowing and widening the beam.

“Looks like your batteries are getting low. Do you have matches here someplace?”

“By the ashtray on the desk.” I heard commotion in the hall as I panned the light left and right over the fireplace. Excited voices. High-pitched laughter.

“I told you they must have ended the entertainment,” said Jackie from the direction of the desk. “Party’s over. Everyone’s headed back to their rooms.”

My beam was holding steady, but as I focused on the gilt-framed painting of the aristocratic lord with his horse, hounds, and frolicking children, I slatted my eyes in astonishment, noticing something I hadn’t seen before.
“Uff da,”
I said in an undertone. I hurried closer for a better look and squinted up at the painting, but it was too high on the wall for a close-up inspection. “Jack, come over here. And bring a straightback chair. You need to drag this painting off the wall for me.”

A hesitation, then, “Oh, I get it. This is part of the pajama party festivities. You take a painting off the wall and hang it in another place and see if anyone notices.” She lumbered through the darkness with the requested chair and set it down on the outer hearth. “Girls really get off on some pretty stupid stuff. I think getting bombed at the frat house sounds like a lot more fun.”

She stepped onto the chair and braced a hand on either side of the painting, hefting it slightly. “Whoa. This baby’s heavy.” She wiggled it up, down, left and right. “It’s hung up on something.” She wrenched it back and forth several times before she was finally able to free it from its wall hooks and hand it down to me. She was right about the painting being heavy. It had to weigh a good fifty pounds. I leaned it against the stonework and steadied the beam of my Maglite on the youthful figures in the foreground.

“Okay. What do you notice that’s different about this painting?” I asked in my best Sherlock Holmes imitation.

Jackie hopped down from the chair and gave the picture the once-over. “It’s dusty.”

“Besides that. Look at the three children. Do you see anything unusual about them?”

“They’re not fighting with each other. That’s pretty unusual for kids of that age.”

“Their feet, Jack. What’s odd about their feet?”

She hunkered down, studying the composition intently. “Oh, wow. Their toes look like they’re all stuck together. I’ve heard of that condition. There’s a name for it, but I can’t remember what it is.”

“What would you say if I told you Ethel Minch has the same condition?”

“I’d say she probably saved a lot of money not having to buy beach thongs every year. Which reminds me. Do you happen to know what room she’s in? I bet ole Ernie could tell me where I could order classy shoes in extra-large sizes. Most catalogs only advertise up to size eleven.”

She wasn’t getting the point. “Don’t you think it’s a little coincidental that Ethel Minch has the same foot condition as the family in the portrait?”

She hoisted herself to her feet and pursed her lips in thought. “No.”

“But
think
about it! You heard the conversation at dinner. Ethel’s maternal side of the family has roots in Ireland. The condition is hereditary. The people in this portrait could very well be part of the O’Quigley clan.”

Jackie shrugged. “So what if they are?”

“That would prove Ethel and her family have some connection to the castle.”

“So?”

“So that might lead us to the person who left the bloody footprints.”

Jackie grew very still. “The what?”

“The bloody footprints they found under the maid’s body. The imprint showed it was someone with webbed feet. Probably not Ethel, but it could be someone related to her.”

“A maid died? When did a maid die?”

“Yesterday. In Nana’s room. The custodian died today in Nana’s closet, but they didn’t find any footprints under his body. He still looked like he’d been frightened to death though.”

Her voice rose two octaves. “Excuse me?”

“Did I forget to mention that the castle might be haunted?”

“I’LL SAY YOU FORGOT TO MENTION IT! Bloody footprints? Dead bodies?” She locked her hand around my arm and steered me to the nearest chair. “Okay, Emily. Talk.”

For fifteen minutes, sitting in the pitch black, I told her everything I knew about the star-crossed lovers, the demise of the maid and the custodian, the inexplicable noises and cold spots in the castle, and what I perceived to be Ethel Minch’s connection to it all. When I finished, I fired up my flashlight again to find Jackie’s eyes looking pinched and frightened, her face drawn and sallow. Either I’d really creeped her out, or this was the way she always looked when the makeup came off.

“So that moaning I heard last night wasn’t some old geezer with a six-pack of Viagra? It was a ghost?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Either a ghost, or someone trying to convince us it was a ghost.” I shined my flashlight at the portrait again and regarded it through the dimness, bothered by something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Jackie followed my gaze.

“If those are the O’Quigleys, they certainly looked prosperous enough four hundred years ago,” she observed.

“How can you tell the portrait was painted that long ago?”

“Look at the guy on the horse. I wore a ruff, doublet, and cloak-bag breeches just like that when I had a part in
A New Way to Pay Old Bills.
The long hair parted in the middle. The small, neat beard. It’s all seventeenth century. You have to wonder what happened to change the family fortunes.”

Her words jarred me. Of course! That’s what had been bothering me. I smacked the heel of my palm against my forehead. “Duh! What was I thinking? This family can’t be the O’Quigleys. The Irish were impoverished during the sixteen hundreds. They couldn’t own a horse, much less land or a castle.”

Jackie leaned back in her chair. “So if Ethel Minch is related to these people, but they’re not the O’Quigleys”—she threw me a long questioning look—“who are they?”

There could be only one answer to that question, and the shock of it had me counting sheep at three o’clock that morning.

I’d finally gotten through to the front desk clerk, who informed me that power outages happened all the time at Ballybantry and electricity might not be restored until morning. So having nothing better to do in the dark, we’d stayed up past midnight, reminiscing about our days in New York and scaring each other with ghost stories. Jackie had rehung the portrait over the mantel, but it would need tweaking in the morning because it was hanging at a disturbing slant.

“It looks like it’s about to fall,” I said, tilting my head in the same direction.

“Trust me. It’ll be fine until morning.”

I’d slipped into some walking shoes and ventured into the bathroom to retrieve Jackie’s clothes and my toiletry bag with my anti-itch cream. Using the dull beam of my Maglite for illumination, I picked some larger chunks of glass off the floor and disposed of them, but I could still hear the crunch of shards and slivers and other substances under my feet, so to be safe, we closed the bathroom door and set a chair in front of it to remind ourselves not to go into the bathroom without shoes on our feet. Having experienced numerous power outages in our collective lifetimes, we also remembered to turn off the switches of the bedside lights that had been on when the power went out so we wouldn’t be blinded by them if the power came back on in the middle of the night. We’d thought of everything to ensure ourselves a peaceful night’s rest.

So how come I couldn’t sleep?

I turned over on my side and punched my pillow, knowing exactly what was keeping me awake. The portrait.

If the people in the painting weren’t seventeenth-century Irish, they had to be seventeenth-century British. And if they were British, the reason their picture was hanging in Ballybantry Castle was undoubtedly because they had once lived in the castle. If my hunch was right, the family in the portrait was the same one that had emigrated from England to Ireland and commissioned the castle to be built. The original owners of Ballybantry. And if that were the case, one of the fair-haired children in the picture had been disowned and suffered a grisly death in the dungeon, and after four hundred years, might still be walking the halls of the castle.

And Ethel Minch was related to her.

She wasn’t Irish at all. She was English. But why had she lied? Was she playing a role in the hauntings? And if she was, what was in it for her?

I flopped over onto my other side and hit the illumination bar on my travel alarm: 3:05. I groaned, then, feeling a sudden chill, pulled the bedclothes up to my nose. I knew the furnace was off for the season, but even given that, it seemed inordinately cold in here.

Hrrrrrmmmm.

I lifted my head off the pillow, listening.

Hrrrrrmmmm.

The whirlpool. The power must have come back on again. Great. We’d turned off all the lights, but we hadn’t thought to turn off the power switch on the tub.