1 Death Pays the Rose Rent (14 page)

“How do you know?”

“Her perfume. It’s very distinctive.”

Praxythea seemed to materialize from the shadows. No clickety-clack here, just the soft rustle of her white silk dress as she glided toward us in Italian leather sandals.

“Good morning, Sylvia. Good morning, Tori. I understand the police chief wants to talk to me.”

Garnet appeared in the doorway. “Praxythea. I was just going to ask someone to get you.”

“I know,” she said with a smile.

“Hi again, Tori,” he said. “You can come in, too, if you want.”

That was all the encouragement I needed. I followed Praxythea into the room, which gave me time to see that her back was bare to the waist, revealing flawless skin. She turned slowly before sitting on the couch, giving Garnet the opportunity to admire the view. I heard him catch his breath. She smiled and arched her back, just a little, just enough to allow her large, erect nipples to show through the soft, white material of her dress. She crossed her legs and dangled a dainty foot enticingly in front of him.

Garnet stared.

In comparison I felt like a chubby twelve-year-old in my jeans, sneakers, and silly Oz T-shirt. All that was lacking was a pimple on my chin.

Questioning Praxythea was an exercise in futility. She was charming, beautiful, and gracious and imparted no useful information whatsoever. She had

neither seen nor heard a thing and hadn’t even had a hint from her friends in “the other world” that anything was amiss.

I noticed that she, too, had a few marks on her hands. “How did you get scratched?” I asked her. “I didn’t see you at the crime scene last night.”

“How observant. I went there early this morning. I thought perhaps I might pick up some vibrations that would tell me what had happened. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive any visions. May I go now?”

Garnet stood up and ushered her to the door. “You’ll be around if I have any other questions?”

She touched his cheek with the finger that wore the enormous diamond and emerald ring. “I’ll be here whenever you want me.”

I’ll bet, I thought.

At the door she turned to face me. “Bellodgia,” she said cryptically.

“Huh?”

“You were wondering what kind of perfume I wear. It’s called Bellodgia.”

I had been wondering, but how did she know?

I stayed where I was until Garnet returned to his chair.

“I’m concerned about LaVonna’s sudden disappearance,” I told him. “I looked in her room a little while ago, and while I’m not familiar with her wardrobe, nothing looked disturbed. And she didn’t take her purse with her.”

Two parallel frown lines developed between his blue eyes. “I’ll check it out. Thanks. But I wish you’d cut out the amateur detecting. This is murder we’re dealing with, not a parlor game.”

“Then why did you let me sit in on the interview with Praxythea?”

He smiled, but his eyes were serious. “Maybe I was just trying to keep you out of trouble. As long as I can see you, I know you’re all right.”

“That’s very nice of you, Garnet. But I can’t spend all day being baby-sat. I’ve got things to do. See you later.”

As I left, I noticed that the crystal vase on the Jacobean table now held only two roses.

CHAPTER 13 

Some supersleuth I was turning out to be. So far this morning, my investigation had achieved the following results: (1) I’d learned that—maybe—Richard’s research project dealt with Thomas Edison; (2) discovered no one there had seen or heard anything unusual—ever; (3) managed to seriously antagonize both of the Thorne sisters; (4) made Twanya cry; (5) learned the name of Praxythea’s perfume; (6) found out Garnet was concerned about my safety. I decided to withdraw gracefully, before someone planted a boot on the well-filled seat of my jeans.

What next? Maybe while I was on a roll, I could go downtown and endear myself to others by accusing Father Burkholder and Judge Parker of murder. What the heck, why not include the doctor and the mayor? What I did decide to do was return to the library and see if I could learn something about Thomas Edison that your average eighth-grader didn’t already know.

I thought I’d borrow Alice-Ann’s VW, but as I left the castle, I spotted Twanya pulling out of the parking lot in an old green Oldsmobile. I flagged her down and asked for a ride. For a moment I thought she was going to say no, but she finally leaned across the seat and unlocked the passenger-side door.

As I got in, I suddenly wondered how LaVonna had left the castle last night. Did she have a car?

“Sorta,” Twanya said in answer to my question. “She has her husband’s old pickup, you know. Started keeping it here after he died.”

“Where would she keep it?”

“In the carriage house.”

“Would you mind …?”

She jerked the wheel and made a U-turn on two wheels. Behind the castle, she slammed on the brakes in front of an elegant building with six wide double doors.

“I’ll just be a minute.”

“Second one from the left.”

I swung the door open and saw a black 1965 Ford pickup. Twanya was right behind me. “That’s hers.”

“Are you sure?”

Tiny lines appeared for a second in her smooth forehead. “Sure. Look at how the bumpers and trim is all painted black. Her church doesn’t let people have shiny stuff on their cars, you know.”

We got back into the car and drove to town. Since no one at the castle had heard the phone ring, and since LaVonna hadn’t driven away in her truck, it was reasonable to assume someone had come to fetch her. That might explain why she had rushed out without her purse.

Twanya pulled into a metered parking spot on the square, in front of the library. Before I could thank

her for the ride, she spoke. “I didn’t kill him, you know. I loved him.”

I realized then that she was the only person in Lickin Creek who was genuinely grieving for Richard.

“I know that, Twanya …and I’m sorry.”

She smiled wanly and drove away.

I spun around when someone called, “Yoo-hoo, Tori. Come to see me?” Maggie was standing on the library steps, waving at me. “Come on in and have a cup of coffee. I haven’t had a patron all morning.”

It was heaven to be sitting in the peaceful library staff room, even if the coffee did taste as if it had been made a week ago. Instant does have its advantages—never very good—but never really bad, either.

“I’ve brought back that biography you sent out to Sylvia. She said she’d already read it.”

Maggie sniffed. “If she’d come down out of that highfalutin castle of hers and pick out her own books, she wouldn’t have that problem.”

I pulled the book out of my purse and dropped it. “Whoops, sorry.” It lay open on the floor. When I bent over to pick it up, I noticed that a paragraph had been highlighted with a yellow marker.

“Must be the sexy part,” I joked as I scanned the paragraph.

Maggie giggled, but I wasn’t laughing anymore. In fact, I was having trouble believing what I was reading. “Listen, Maggie, according to this book, Thomas Edison spent his later years building a machine to receive messages from the dead—he believed that people’s bodies contained entities that lived forever—and could be contacted. It sounds like old Tom went loony-toony in his old age.”

“I disagree, Tori,” Maggie said with a small frown. “At one time the idea of an electric light or a phonograph or a talking moving picture would have seemed crazy—but he discovered them all.”

I reread the paragraph, then flipped through the other pages. Nothing else was highlighted. Entities. Hadn’t I heard that word just recently …somewhere?

Of course. At the seance. When Sylvia was so upset about not contacting a ghost. She’d used the word then—at the time it had sounded odd, not a term often used to refer to ghosts.

I recalled the black box with the glowing red light on top, which had been in the corner and then wasn’t. I’d thought it was a tape recorder. Now a crazy idea was coming to me. Really crazy. Maybe Edison had invented a machine to talk to the dead. Maybe Richard had found it in the same house where he’d found the antique Edison phonograph. Maybe I was going nuts.

“Maggie, you librarians know everything. Can you help me get more information about this idea of Edison’s?”

She rubbed her hands together, and her eyes brightened. “Love to! Some “real librarian” work, at last. I’ll get on the phone and see what I can find for you. It may take a while. How about if I call you later today?”

I asked if Lickin Creek had a newspaper. It did, a weekly. Did the library have it on microfilm? Fat

chance. But Maggie gave me directions to get to the office of the Lickin Creek Chronicle.

Outside, I saw Mrs. Seligman heading south, leaving a thin white trail of doughnut mix behind her. I caught up to her and relieved her of one of the heavy, leaking paper sacks. She arched her back and uttered an agonized groan.

“Damn that Sylvia,” she complained. “As if I didn’t have enough to do supervising the doughnut frying at three different locations, now she says she’s not feeling well, and I’ve got to take over the Rose Rent rehearsal tomorrow. I don’t know how I’m going to get everything done. She should have canceled the whole thing when Richard was found dead. It’s absolutely tasteless to go ahead with a celebration under these circumstances. And to listen to our chief of police, you’d think I was personally responsible for losing that prisoner!”

“What prisoner?”

“One of the men from the county jail that they let out to cook doughnuts. We had beds set up for them at the synagogue, but Rabbi Weil lost count or something, and on Wednesday morning we noticed one was missing.”

“Richard was murdered Tuesday night! Maybe he came across the guy trying to escape and was killed by him.”

“Impossible! Vernel Burkholtz wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s a local boy. Known him all my life.”

“Why was he in jail?”

“Assault and battery. He caught someone screwing around with his 1956 Jaguar.”

She caught the look on my face. “I know what you’re thinking, but beating up a punk you caught wrecking your car is a lot different from murdering somebody. Here’s the Presbyterian church. If anybody else runs out of mix today, they’ll just have to fetch it themselves.”

I continued south for two more blocks, turned right, and found the Lickin Creek Chronicle, exactly where Maggie had said it would be. From the tarnished brass plaque on the front door, I learned that the narrow, brick building had been built in 1846. The waiting room stretched the entire width of the building, about twelve feet I guessed, and was furnished with a red vinyl couch with chrome arms and two matching chairs. An imitation-maple coffee table held an overflowing ashtray and a pink plastic vase full of dusty, plastic daisies.

From another room, somewhere, I heard Katharine Hepburn’s raspy, clipped voice call out, “Come in, come in, whoever you are.”

I followed the voice through the half-open door in the rear wall of the waiting room. Sitting at a rolltop oak desk was a woman of about fifty, with short, steel gray hair, and little half-glasses perched just below the crook of her nose. A cigarette dangled from a corner of her mouth.

“I’m P.J. Mullins, publisher, editor, reporter, photographer, advertising sales, circulation manager, and janitor of the Lickin Creek Chronicle. Nice to meet you, Tori Miracle. I’ve been trying to find time to read your book so I can call you for an interview. What’s that white stuff all over your shirt?”

I explained about the doughnut mix as I tried, ineffectually, to brush it off.

“Forget it. Nobody’s going to care. I’m assuming you dropped by to ask some questions about Richard MacKinstrie. Right?”

The grapevine never failed.

“Do you have your back issues on microfilm?”

She waved her right arm in an encompassing gesture. “See those shelves? I’ve got bound volumes going back to when my grandfather established this paper in 1899. The indexing is all up here.” She tapped her forehead. “Ask and ye shall receive.”

“I hate to take up your time.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I groaned inwardly. This was not going to be as easy as I had hoped. “First, there was a man who died sometime this year. Richard handled his estate sale—he was some kind of relative of Thomas Edison.”

She leaped to her feet. I saw that she affected Hepburn’s style of dress as well as her accent—pleated men’s-style slacks, and a white cotton shirt, with a bandanna at the neck. She smashed out her cigarette butt, increasing the noxious effluvium rising from her overflowing ashtray, hauled down a book, and dropped it on a large table in the center of the room. With computerlike precision, she flipped through the pages and slammed her forefinger down on a photograph of a golf ball.

“Sorry about the quality of the picture. He was bald and kind of pale—no contrast there at all.”

She wheeled a chair up to the table for me and returned to her work. I sat down and read the obituary of Marlin Kirkpatrick, Jr., Thomas Edison’s second or third cousin by marriage on his mother’s side. According to the article, one of Marlin’s “most memorable memories” was of when he was just ten years old back in 1920, and his famous second or third cousin visited the family in Lickin Creek for several weeks. Burial was to be at …As he was the last of his immediate family, his estate would be sold at auction on March 15.

I looked through the next several issues of the paper and finally found the estate sale listed. It must have been a large sale because the auctioneer’s list, in tiny print, covered half a page. I read it carefully, but there was no Edison phonograph listed—or anything else with Edison’s name on it.

“Excuse me, P.J. Could I look at your 1920 volumes—I don’t know what month.”

“If it’s that Edison visit you’re interested in, it was in November. I’ll get it for you.” She was amazing!

Famous Inventor Visits LC November 3, 1920. Citizens of Lickin Creek are honored to have the well-known inventor Thomas Alva Edison in town this week. Mr. Edison is visiting the home of relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Marlin Kirkpatrick of Elm Street. Mr. Edison granted this reporter a brief interview while on a tour of the Lickin Creek Historical Society building. He stated his visit was a combination of business and pleasure.

Thomas Edison 111

November 10, 1920. World-renowned inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who is visiting relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Marlin Kirkpatrick of Elm Street, has taken to bed with a serious illness. According to Dr. Jonas Burger, Mr. Edison is suffering from a severe form of brain fever. The citizens of Lickin Creek wish Mr. Edison a speedy recovery.

“I wonder what brain fever was?” I mused aloud. “Could have been anything: meningitis, encephalitis, earache, sinus infection. In those days, though, it was often a euphemism for a nervous breakdown.” “He must have been in his seventies.” “Seventy-three. He died in 1931.” I recalled the highlighted passage in the Edison biography; Edison had spent his later years building a machine to contact the dead. What if …no, it was impossible …but, what if he had brought it to Lickin Creek to test it? What if … he was looking for a genuinely haunted place to try it out, and his cousin had told him about the Underground Railway tragedy in the Historical Society building? What if … he had experimented with the machine there and, disappointed that it didn’t work, had fallen into a depression—the “brain fever” mentioned in the article?

What if … he
had experimented with the
machine, and it had worked, and he’d developed the “brain fever” from fright, not depression?

The one what-if I was pretty sure of was that Edi-