A Wild Fright in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 7) (36 page)

“I’ll be fine. We all will. We’re only going to take a look.” Doc squeezed my hand and then pulled me over the threshold after him. Freesia brought up the rear.

“Are you sure your pal used the term
death bell?
” Cooper asked, locking the door behind us.

The two cuckooing clocks were louder inside the apartment. I cringed. How could the others not hear the commotion?

“Positive,” I said over the racket. I stopped in front of the wall covered with wooden, Black Forest style clocks with unique macabre death scenes carved onto their fronts—some with animals of prey like bears and wolves, others had unrecognizable or distorted beasts hefting frightening weapons. There were several empty spaces on the wall where clocks used to hang. It looked like the same number were missing as the last time I had been in here, back on that day I’d heard the cuckooing coming from the mirror.

Cooper stood in the doorway to the bedroom, his arms crossed, his blue-jean clad legs in that wide-legged cop stance he did so well. “Did Prudence say why she called the cuckooing sound a death bell?”

Freesia moved up next to me. “Who’s Prudence?”

“An old friend of Violet’s.” Doc walked over to the living room window that looked out at a stand of pines. They were the same trees in which I’d seen something on the way up the walk. He peeked through a slit in the white gauzy curtains, a deep V forming at the bridge of his nose.

I thought back to that conversation. “When I told Prudence about coming in this place and seeing the moving cuckoo clock in the mirror, all she said was that it was interesting I could actually hear the toll of the death bell. Then she commented that I was getting stronger.”

“Does your friend Prudence know about Cornelius and the séance we did?” Freesia asked.

“No.” I hadn’t gotten around to telling Prudence about my battle with the ax-wielding juggernaut that night, or that I’d actually gotten sliced by his blade in the process of trying to escape from him. I didn’t want to give her more to scoff about when it came to my skills and lineage compared to hers.

Doc turned away from the window, his forehead still sporting that deep V. “You ready?”

I shook my head, but headed toward the bedroom door anyway. Cooper stepped aside to let me pass. Ms. Wolff’s bedroom also had a wall covered with creepy Black Forest clocks. A smattering of them were missing, same as the dining room. Whoever had broken in and stolen the clocks seemed to have done so with purpose rather than grabbing willy-nilly.

The commotion from the two cuckooing clocks was starting to make my head feel like it was going cuckoo, too. I skirted the bed, stopping on the other side in front of the tall mirror attached to the dresser. What would it mean if one of the clocks fell silent suddenly? I grimaced at my own reflection. Hell, I didn’t even know for sure what it meant for them to be going off.

In the mirror, I could see Doc and Cooper standing in front of the clock-covered wall. Freesia’s head poked around the door jamb, her usual smile missing as she stared back at me with worried eyes. Her paranormal experience prior to the séance we’d had included a Ouija board, a trip to a fortune teller, and a haunted house tour or two. We’d knocked her socks off that night with my mirror trip.

“Well?” Cooper asked. “Which ones are cuckooing?”

I glanced over my shoulder to double check that the ones I could see cuckooing in the mirror were actually attached to the wall in the real world.

“The one to the left of Doc and the one directly above your head.” I watched in the mirror as Cooper took down the one over his head. In the reflection, it continued to cuckoo as he inspected it. I looked over my shoulder, making sure the actual clock he held remained silent. Yep, no movement.

Back in the mirror the little birdie kept popping out the window in spite of his hand being in the way. It was the oddest thing to watch, like looking at a pebble under rippling water.

A phone rang, loud and trilling.

That wasn’t one of Doc’s or my cell phone rings, and Cooper wasn’t pulling out his phone, so it must be Freesia’s.

After the fifth ring, I turned to where she now filled the doorway. “Are you going to answer that?”

She glanced to her right and left. “Are you talking to me?”

“Isn’t that your phone ringing?”

Cooper frowned up from the clock. “What are you talking about, Parker?”

The trilling continued. “The phone that’s ringing.”

Doc’s head cocked to the side. “You hear a phone?”

“You don’t?”

He shook his head.

Oh, hell.

“So now you hear two clocks cuckooing and a phone?” Cooper asked, hanging the clock he’d been inspecting back on the wall. It continued to cuckoo in the mirror.

I nodded, kneading my hands together. “Am I going crazy?” I asked Doc.

“I think it’s this apartment. I’m beginning to suspect …” he trailed off, sending a quick frown in Freesia’s direction. “Can you tell where the ringing is coming from?” he asked me.

I closed my eyes, letting my ears take over. I followed the sound around the bed, careful to swing wide enough. Doc’s warm palm clasped my elbow, guiding me through the doorway to where the trilling sound was a bit louder. I turned and took several steps into the living room until Doc tugged me to a stop.

“It’s the antique phone,” he said.

I opened my eyes, finding myself in the corner where Harvey and I had found Ms. Wolff’s wrinkled up body and severed head under the rocking chair. There was a Victorian style phone sitting on the end table next to the chair. It was the same phone that had been there the day Harvey and I had found Ms. Wolff. The very phone that Cooper had told me was not connected to a phone jack. We had figured it was for decoration. Turned out we’d been wrong, because it certainly sounded like it was ringing now. The trouble was, I was the only one hearing it. Had the cuckooing in this place finally broken my brain?

I pointed down at the phone. “None of you can hear this thing ringing?”

“No, Parker. Just like none of us can hear the clocks. But I’ll humor you.” Cooper nudged me back a step. He took a handkerchief from his jacket and grasped the receiver, lifting it to his ear.

The ringing stopped.

“Hello?”

I held my breath, holding Cooper’s steely gaze.

“Is someone there?” he asked, his focus shifting behind me to Doc. “This is Detective Cooper from the Deadwood Police Department. If someone is there, you’d better start talking.”

After a few more seconds, he placed the receiver back on the base. “Nobody,” he told Doc. “Not even the sound of breathing.” He looked down at me. “Are you sure you heard this phone ringing?”

“Positive,” I told him.

“How can you be so sure it’s not just in your head?”

“Because it stopped when you picked it up, and now it’s ringing again.” It had started seconds after he’d hung up.

I held out my hand. “Give me your handkerchief.” I took it by the corner. “It’s not used, is it?”

“Don’t confuse me for Detective Hawke.”

I wrapped it around the receiver and slowly picked it up, holding it to my ear. My hand trembled visibly.

It was only a phone, I reminded myself. It wasn’t going to reach out and bite my head off, unlike the rigid-faced detective watching me with squinty eyes.

“Say ‘hello,’ Parker,” he ordered.

I held my hand out to shut him up. I was building up to it, damn it.

“Hello?” I asked, my voice husky with uncertainty. “Is anybody there?”

“OPEN THE DOOR!” someone yelled in my ear.

I screeched and dropped the receiver back onto the cradle, hanging it up in the process.

“What did you hear?” Cooper asked.

“Someone yelling at me to open the door.”

He tugged the handkerchief from my clenched fist. He wrapped it around the receiver and held it up to his ear again, listening with wrinkled brow. Then he shook his head and handed the receiver to Doc. “I don’t hear anything, not even a dial tone. You try.”

Doc took the receiver and listened. “Hello?” he waited, watching me without expression. “If someone is there who would like me to relay a message, I can open the channel for you.”

He reminded me of the paranormal investigators I’d seen on television shows, only less bossy than some who demanded the ghosts talk back.

After several seconds of silence from the rest of us, he shook his head at Cooper and hung up the receiver. “Nothing.”

The phone rang again almost immediately. I gasped, staring at it like it was a snake that had arched up and started hissing.

“Is it ringing again?” Doc asked.

I nodded, reaching for the receiver.

Cooper shoved the handkerchief in my hand before I made contact. “No prints, damn it. I don’t need Detective Hawke knowing we were here.”

Sheesh. He was going a little over the top if you asked me. Like Hawke stopped by every other day and dusted for new prints.

I wrapped the soft cotton around the phone and lifted it slowly to my ear, my eyes locked onto Doc.

“Hello?” I whispered into the mouthpiece.

“OPEN THE DOOR!”

A boom reverberated out from the bedroom.

I started in surprise but held onto the phone this time.

Doc looked over my shoulder toward the entrance to the bedroom, his brows wrinkling.

I covered the mouthpiece. “Did you hear it, too?”

“Hear what?” Cooper glanced toward the bedroom.

“I think I felt it more than heard it,” Doc answered. At Cooper’s glare, he explained, “Something hit the dresser mirror.”

I swallowed my heart back down into my chest, making room for my tongue to come back to the forefront. “Who is this?”

Something growled on the other end of the line, sending a rash of goosebumps down my spine.

The boom echoed out from the bedroom again. I pinched my lips together, holding in a cry of alarm. Covering the mouthpiece again, I lowered the phone and told them, “I think someone or something is trying to come through the mirror.”

Freesia let out a squawk and raced over next to me, staring with wide eyes at the doorway where she’d been a second ago. “Who is it?”

“I’m more afraid of what it is than who it is.”

“What are you talking about, Parker?” Cooper walked over and stood with his shoulders framed in the doorway.

Doc turned me toward him, his gaze drilling into mine. “You’re a medium. Focus on what you want to achieve.”

What did I want to happen here besides the spooky craziness in this damned apartment to stop?

“There’s nothing in the mirror,” Cooper said from the doorway. I could hear the skepticism in his tone.

I sighed. “I want Cooper to hear what I do—the cuckooing, the mirror booms, the voice on the line.”

“Okay,” Doc said. “Now make it happen, medium.”

Make it happen. I closed my eyes for a moment and pictured a candle flame flickering in a dark room. As the flame danced in my mind’s eye, a calm settled over me. My trembling stopped. My fear receded into the darkness, away from the light, replaced by an ironclad resolve.

I raised the receiver back to my ear. “You want me to open the door?”

“Yes!” It sounded more like a snarl than an actual word.

“Not until you tell me why you want through.”

“I can smell you,
Scharfrichter.
”

Great. Whatever it was knew my job description. Now we could focus on the
why
part of this call instead of
who
. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

Booming again.

I opened my eyes, focusing on the wall in front of me. The dancing flame still flickered in my thoughts.

“There it is again,” Doc told Cooper, who’d returned to our huddle around the phone.

“What happens if I let you through?” I asked the caller.

The laughter that came through the line had a sharp, menacing edge to it. “All the better to eat you with.”

I recognized the line from the Brothers Grimm. Was it role playing? “Who are you supposed to be? The big bad wolf?”

“My teeth are sharper.”

Was this the other bone cruncher? The one I’d been warned about after executing its hunting partner? That sucker’s teeth had been long, sharp, and wicked as hell. But I’d killed it just the same.

“Shall we see how your teeth stand up when I swing my war hammer at them?” Was whatever waited on the other side of the mirror the reason I would need that weapon soon?

“She has a war hammer?” Cooper asked Doc, sounding surprised.

“Open the door now!” The caller snarled again. The mirror rattled from the boom but held.

I looked at Cooper, but he didn’t react. Damn it, how could I make him hear what I was hearing?

“Not until you tell me who executed the timekeeper.”

Silence came through the line. In that moment of nothingness, I thought of Prudence and an idea hit me.

After a few more seconds, the caller spoke, “The
Scharfrichter
.”

I reached out and grabbed onto Cooper’s forearm, holding tight when he tried to pull away. “What about me?” I asked into the mouthpiece.

“
You
slew the timekeeper.”

“You’re mistaken. The door stays shut.” I hung up the phone.

An ear-clanging crash came from the bedroom.

Freesia screamed.

Cooper yanked free, pulling out his gun with lightning speed.

Doc tucked me behind him, blocking me from anything that might step out through the bedroom doorway. I peeked around his shoulder in time to see Cooper disappear into the room, his handgun pointed up but at the ready.

“Holy fuck!” I heard Cooper say.

“What is it?” Freesia called out.

He rejoined us, holstering his gun. “The mirror shattered. There’s glass everywhere in there.” His gray eyes narrowed on mine. “I mean
everywhere
. What in the hell did you do?”

“Me?”

Cooper frowned toward the bedroom. “Jesus H. Christ, Parker! How am I going to hide this mess from the surveillance crew Hawke sends through here each week?”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Are you sure?” Doc asked under his breath.

No, not entirely. But there was no way I was going to take a single ounce of ownership for it while Cooper was on the warpath. He might put a bullet in me so I could share his pain.