Top O' the Mournin' (21 page)

“I’m not calling him back, Ethel.”

“If she wants to talk to her kid, let her talk to her kid,” griped Gladys.

“Anything to shut her up,” said Ira.

Ethel shot him a hostile look. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re causing disharmony in the environment!” he shouted at her.

“Are you going to let him talk to me like that?” Ethel screamed at Ernie.

Drawn back to the commotion beyond Ira, I watched in stunned silence as my polite, well-behaved fellow Iowans knotted themselves into a gridlocked clump of bobbing heads, writhing limbs, and flying elbows. Yup. They really knew how to queue up at the buffet table. I heard grunts and heavy breathing, a cry of “Get off my foot!” then watched a fistful of what looked like Cheerios geyser haphazardly into the air. “Cut that out!” someone shouted. “You’re wasting it!”

“Stop!” cried the server, waving his dustpan and broom at them. “There’s other food besides cereal for you to be eating!”

“Not on your life!” I heard Bernice wail from somewhere within the center of the throng. “Everything else has botulism!”

I rose calmly from my seat. “Would you excuse me?” I skirted around tables cluttered with abandoned plates heaped with full Irish breakfasts. I shook my head as I headed toward the melee. Good going, Emily. Did I know how to avoid causing a panic or what?

When I left the dining room sometime later, Etienne was at the front desk handing something to the female clerk I’d spoken to yesterday—the one with the name of a deep-sea monster and the body of a football tackle. I admired him from afar for a moment. His style. His elegance. His really nice trousers and Italian knit sweater. I crept up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist. “Top o’ the morning.”

He stroked my hands with his fingertips and turned around, placing a kiss on the tip of my nose. “Good morning, darling.”

I wrinkled my nose at him. “Is that the best you can do?” This didn’t bode well. I hoped he wasn’t still miffed about the change of plans last night.

“My best is for private consumption only. Hold still. You’ve something in your hair.” He spent a half-minute plucking things from the crown of my head, then offered them up for my inspection.

“Cereal,” I confirmed, peeking at the smattering of toasty brown crumbs in his palm. “There was a run on cornflakes at breakfast. I probably have Cheerios on me too,” I said, patting down my cowl-neck sweater, “but I don’t know where they are.”

“I won’t ask how you ended up wearing your food instead of eating it. You Americans do have peculiar ways about you.” He deposited the crumbs in the nearest ashtray, then caught the desk clerk’s attention. “Nessa, could I trouble you to hand me the note I just asked you to place in Miss Andrew’s box?”

A note? Uh-oh. Notes were bad news.

With freshly penned note in hand, he motioned me to accompany him into the lobby. We sat down on a velvet settee nestled in an alcove guarded by two sentinels wearing highly polished suits of armor. “I guess that’s for me, huh?” I said, staring at the paper in his hand.

“Something’s come up, I’m afraid, darling.” His tone was apologetic as he unfolded the note for me. I read his words aloud.

My face fell with disappointment, but it was kinda hard for me to rage and whine when he’d made me sound like Mother Teresa. However, a warning bell clanged in my brain, alerting me to the possibility of trouble ahead. Would it be like this after we were married? Would his job always come first? Was he such a workaholic that we’d be forced to lead separate lives even when we were together? I’d already chalked up one failed marriage. I didn’t want to risk another. That clinched it. We needed to have a long talk about our relationship, only I couldn’t let on about it. Men enjoyed relationship talks about as much as they enjoyed a visit to the proctologist.

I let out my version of the long-suffering sigh. “So when are they going to let you enjoy your holiday? You
are
on holiday. Remember?”

“I shouldn’t have rung them up to have them look into the O’Quigleys. It was too vivid a reminder that I was already over here and available to do their footwork for them. But you’ll be happy to know, they have complaints about this castle on file, so, amazingly enough, the wheels of progress are turning. They’re checking out your O’Quigley angle and might even be asking assistance from Interpol.”

Terrific. The wheels of progress take off like gangbusters for once and I have to bring them to a grinding halt. “About the O’Quigleys.” I winced. “There’s a good chance…I’ve sent you on a wild-goose chase.”

“I’m sorry?” His eyes probed my face, as if he’d misheard.

“Ethel Minch came clean at breakfast. She wasn’t born with webbed toes. She had them sewn together. Deliberately. Her feet are deformed, but not in the way I thought they were. So unless all her relatives have had their toes sewn together, which is highly improbable, the O’Quigleys are a dead end. Our ghost is a web-footed being with another last name.”

“Are you sure Mrs. Minch was telling the truth about her condition?”

“She sounded pretty convincing. She was using words like
metatarsus
and
orthotics.”

“I suppose
metatarsus
isn’t a word one throws around casually.” Sparks leaped behind his eyes as he considered his next step. “I could phone the department and tell them not to waste their time on the O’Quigley link, but I don’t think I’ll do that. Who knows? Maybe they’ll turn something up. Unfortunately, if they don’t, we’ll probably find ourselves back at square one.”

“No! Not at square one. I made a discovery last night. Did you hear the cries in the hall around three in the morning?”

Etienne shook his head. “I followed your example and bought earplugs when I was in town yesterday. I have to confess, I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Well, I heard it, and I’m convinced you’re right. Whatever is happening is originating from the dungeon. All the chambers down there are closed off by doors that are rusted shut and cocooned with cobwebs. All except one particular chamber that was sporting a new door with shiny hinges and a set of wet footprints that I’m positive belong to—Are you ready for this?—Michael Malooley.”

“The bus driver? You think he could actually
find
his way into the dungeon?”

“Trust me. He’s smarter than he looks. I thought he was in cahoots with Ethel, but maybe he’s running the operation by himself. You’ve seen him. I don’t mean to stereotype, but have you ever seen a more shady, unfriendly character? He’s the culprit. I know he is. If we could coax his shoes off him, I bet we’d find he has webbed toes. Could you flash your badge and commandeer his shoes and socks so we could check?”

Etienne laughed softly and lifted my hand to his lips. “You’ve become a footprint expert, have you, darling? Might I inquire how you decided these particular footprints belong to Malooley?”

“It wasn’t the footprints exactly. It was the smell. It’s pretty hard to disguise a stench like that.” He feathered kisses across my fingertips with a gentleness that lifted the down on my arm from my wrist to my shoulder.
Unh.
Okay, maybe a long talk wasn’t as necessary as I thought. So he was a workaholic. I could live with that.

“As an aside, darling, would you care to tell me how you got into the dungeon to smell him?”

This could be a little sticky. I didn’t know if what I’d done would be considered breaking and entering, but I needed to play it safe. “It took a little ingenuity, the details of which I’m not willing to share at this time.”

“You picked the lock.” He shook his head and tried to suppress a smile. “If I’d known you were so adept at breaking and entering, I’d have asked you to do it myself.”

“You would? You wouldn’t have scolded me for setting out to perform an illegal act?”

“Emily, darling, I might be an officer of the law, but I’ve learned that laws can sometimes be bent without being broken. Even I can turn a blind eye every so often.” His gaze shifted from my eyes to a spot above my right ear. “Though it’s increasingly hard to turn a blind eye when your hair is full of foreign matter. Hold still.”

“More cornflakes?” I asked as he caught something between his fingers and coaxed it down the length of my hair. I eyed the BB-sized piece of grit in his palm. “Nope. Grape-Nut.”

Etienne studied the morsel with appreciation. “Cheerios. Cornflakes. Grape-Nuts. They have an excellent assortment of breakfast cereals available here.”

Good thing. They were going to need them.

From the parking lot we heard the loud blare of a car horn. Etienne rose from his chair. “That’s probably my cab.”

“Your cab?” I popped up beside him. “But…but…I haven’t finished telling you what else I found out.”

He grasped my hand and pulled me along with him as he strode to the door. “Is it life or death, or will it hold until evening?” The horn blared again. He gave me one of those anguished looks that punctual people always give anything that is threatening to make them late.

“It’s not life or death. It’s about a painting in my room.”

“Your room. Perfect. Tonight then. You won’t have to tell me; you can show me.” He bent close to my ear, his breath warm against my lobe. “I hope this doesn’t interfere with your showing me the other intimate details in your room that crave my attention.” He kissed my mouth and bolted out the door, leaving my hand elevated in farewell and the rest of me in need of a cold shower. But remembering my dilemma with the dungeon door, I ran outside after him.

“If you happen to pass a hardware store, would you pick up a flashlight and a skeleton key?” He waved to me as he stepped inside the cab. I watched the vehicle squeal out of the parking lot, not knowing whether he’d heard me or not. Oh, well, I guess it would be a surprise.

As I made my way back across the lobby, I noticed Ashley standing at the front desk, jabbing an angry finger into the air in the vicinity of Nessa’s nose. I wondered what the desk clerk had done, or not done, to warrant Ashley’s wrath, but figured it didn’t have to be much to set Ashley off. She was so fond of reaming people out, I was amazed she could hold on to a job that required her to be nice for extended periods of time. All that phony Southern charm was such a crock. Funny no one had exposed her for what she really was. Knights might have lived and died by the sword, cowboys might have lived and died by the gun, but tour guides lived and died by the all-important standard evaluation form. Strange that it hadn’t proven Ashley’s downfall already.
Hmm.
Maybe Golden Irish Vacations used a new form that excluded the really profound questions, like:
Was your guide informative? Was she courteous? Was she careful to avoid poking your eye out when she jabbed her finger in your face?
That had to be it. The company had sanitized the forms to be more politically correct. They didn’t dare give guests a chance to say Ashley was hostile, two-faced, and crabby because the truth would hurt her feelings and she might decide to sue the hell out of them, which could plunge the company into bankruptcy.
Geesch.
I hated political correctness.

As I rounded the corner of the front desk on my way to my room, Ashley stopped rebuking Nessa long enough to call out to me, “Did y’all enjoy your evening with your…friend last night, sugar? You’ll have to tell me what you did to amuse yourselves, especially dressed like you were. Loved the see-through babydolls.”

Nessa took advantage of the interruption to escape to the grid of mail slots behind her and busy herself with extraneous pieces of paper. But she wasn’t so busy that she failed to toss me a grateful look over her shoulder. I smiled inwardly. I’d consider that my good deed for the day.

“We had a lovely evening,” I fired back at Ashley. “It was especially exciting after the power went out.”

“I’m sure it was.” Ashley faked a honeyed smile. “Lots of heavy breathing was there?”

“Lots of…bubbly.”

“Champagne? Y’all were able to order champagne? I tried to order champagne, and they told me they didn’t have any.”

“Maybe it’s your accent. I bet they couldn’t understand you. You should try again.”

She squinted at me like a clueless Neanderthal before trying to gain the advantage. “Not to rain on your parade, Emily, but if you can’t control your people any better than you did this morning, I might have to write you up. And you really don’t want that to happen. It could ruin your career as a tour escort.”

She…I…
Uff da!
“My people wouldn’t be
out
of control if someone could explain why two people died in the last two days. When they think they might be next in line, they panic!”

“Nonetheless, I don’t expect them to start food fights. If there are cleanup costs, you’re footin’ the bill.”