Cooking Up Trouble (18 page)

Paavo and Reginald Vane
found Running Spirit’s body several yards from the toolshed site. He was dead.

“What could have caused this?” Angie asked as the frightened, horrified group huddled close together, watching Paavo and Vane.

“It was dynamite.” Moira had to shout to be heard over the storm. “Finley put it in that shed. He’d planned to use it to widen a stream that flowed near the garden.”

“Why would the man be hiding in a toolshed?” Bethel asked. “He was supposed to be looking for his wife!”

“He smoked, but didn’t want anyone to know it,” Moira said. “So he came out here to hide.”

“But you knew he smoked,” Angie said.

“Yes. I suppose Patsy and I were the only ones he’d told.”

“Well, they always say smoking’s a killer,” Martin said.

No one was in the mood for his quips, though, and all fell silent.

Paavo asked for tarps or other waterproof materials to be put over the whole scene without disturbing anything more than absolutely necessary. He watched as the others followed his orders, then he took Angie’s arm and led her up to their room, wishing he could lead her much farther away from the morgue that Hill Haven Inn had become.

“I find it hard to believe he was a smoker,” Angie said quietly. Paavo sat on the bed, his back against the headboard. Angie lay down at his side, her head resting on his chest. He gently stroked her hair, every so often letting a strand of it twist around his fingers. She sat up. “I can’t believe he’s gone, Paavo. It’s like a horrible dream. A trick of some sort. Why is all this happening? God, but I wish we could leave here.”

He drew her close again. “We will. Soon. It won’t rain forever, and we’ll be off this damn hill and able to turn all this over to the sheriff.”

She lay her head on his chest once more, listening to his strong, steady heartbeat. “Not forever. Just for forty days and forty nights. We’d better start loading the animals two by two.”

“It’s been a long four days,” Paavo said. “Five days for you.”

Ironically, she’d invited him to what she thought was her world, and they’d ended up in his. These murders only served to remind him of how different their worlds were.

“This might have been an accident. Don’t you think, Paavo?”

“It might have been.” He couldn’t hide his skepticism.

“How could anyone have lit the dynamite without Running Spirit seeing them? And everyone was with us inside the inn.”

“There are a number of ways. A simple kind of timing device to use, since Running Spirit was in there smoking
and wouldn’t have noticed the smell, would be to light a cigarette and wrap the fuse around the bottom of it. When it burns down, the fuse will light, and whoever put the cigarette there in the first place could be long gone.”

Angie wrapped her arms tighter around Paavo. “I don’t want to believe anyone here would do anything so cruel.”

Brushing her hair back from her face, he felt the silky strands slide through his fingers. “Believe it. We’re staying with a murderer.”

Paavo wandered away from the investors and Angie as they huddled in the drawing room, trying to make sense out of Running Spirit’s death and trying to convince themselves that it had nothing to do with Finley’s murder, Patsy’s disappearance, or Miss Greer’s supposedly natural death. Paavo didn’t want to hear their speculations or excuses. What they were saying was meaningless. One of them had just killed another person, and that fact wasn’t being even remotely acknowledged. Not out loud, at least.

Moira wasn’t with them, and she was the one Paavo was most interested in talking to right now.

He found her alone in the library, her eyes red from crying. He crossed to a wing chair at her side and sat. “Do you feel like talking?” he asked.

She blinked, then wiped her eyes with a Kleenex. “I suppose you want to ask all kinds of police procedural questions now. Right, Inspector?”

“No. Those questions seem to be going on in the other room. But the answers there are completely false.”

She smiled. “Yes. I couldn’t take any more of it myself.”

“You knew Greg Jeffers better than any of them, I suppose.”

She shut her eyes a moment. “Better than you or any
of them have ever imagined.” With her dark-eyed gaze on him, in her slow, otherworldly way of speaking, she said, “He was Danny’s father.”

Paavo stared at her, thinking back on her story of how Finley had introduced Jeffers to the rich woman he married. Finley, she once had said, liked to play with people the way a cat did a mouse. Did he play so cruelly with his own sister?

“So Danny is your son?” Paavo asked.

“Danny told me that you had met. I’m sure you figured out that he was mine long before tonight.”

“Did Jeffers know about the boy?”

“No. And I didn’t want him to know. That was why Danny stayed with Quint.”

“Finley didn’t know who the father was either?”

“Oh, he knew. He hated Greg for it.”

“Yet he invited him here.”

She folded her hands. “That was only because he hated me more.”

“I can’t believe that.” Paavo once had a sister. He couldn’t imagine ever hating her.

Moira took a deep breath. “It goes back a long time. Finley, you see, isn’t my real brother. He’s a stepbrother. My mother married his father when I was ten years old. Finley was twenty-one at the time, and already out of the house, on his own. I was a very shy little girl, and he was nice to me—the only one who had ever paid any attention to me since my mother left my father. But that’s another story.”

Paavo nodded, encouraging her to go on.

Moira continued. “My mother’s second marriage was even shorter than her first. After four years, she divorced Kendall. A year later, her own drunk driving killed her. No one knew where to find my father, and I would have
been made a ward of the court except that Finley heard about it. When my one-time stepfather didn’t want Veronica’s brat, as he called me, Finley brought me to live with him.”

“He was then about twenty-five or twenty-six?”

“Yes. That was the problem, you see. I was a fifteen-year-old kid, and I developed a king-size adolescent crush on him. He was a
man
, after all, not just a boy like I saw in school, and he had protected me from foster homes and juvenile care centers. He, though, fell in love.”

Paavo drew in his breath. He could imagine that Moira had been a strange child, not the type that’s popular in high school. He could see her turning to Finley in her awkward loneliness.

“But you didn’t actually love him in return,” he said.

“No. As I grew older, I began to meet people I could relate to. People who didn’t find me weird, but interesting. Not ugly, but mystical. I found friends.”

Paavo understood. The growing-up process that teens go through, the maturity that causes them to want to leave home and go off on their own, caused Moira to want to leave Finley.

She hung her head. “We fought all the time. He said he wanted to marry me, and I called him a lecherous old man who took advantage of a young, innocent girl. In time, I even convinced myself it was true. I ran away.”

“Where did you go?”

“San Francisco. I’d learned a lot about food and nutrition and its effect on the spirit from Finley. He’d been interested in that sort of thing as long as I’d known him. Even before it became fashionable. So I moved to the Haight-Ashbury, where I could disappear among all the other runaways and lost souls.”

Something about her tone made Paavo say, “That was where you met Greg Jeffers.”

She nodded. “He was like no one I’d ever known before. Charming, fun, and the handsomest man I’d ever seen. He was living with an older, well-known lawyer, a woman. He’d take me to her place while she went to work.”

“Nice guy,” Paavo said. It seemed Jeffers had made a career of living off rich women.

“I know.” Moira rubbed her forehead. “I should have known better. I guess I did, deep down. But I ignored everything except Greg, and how much I loved him. Then one day the woman walked in and found the two of us together. He refused to see me after that. Later, I found out I was pregnant. I never told him.”

“How did you support yourself?”

She gave him a grim smile. “I read tarot, rune stones, crystals, I-Ching. I’d have read tea leaves if it meant a buck. I took all the beautiful, spiritual things that Finley had taught me and used them in the cheapest way. I felt like hell for it.”

“Why didn’t you leave?” Paavo asked.

“Where would I go? It was a horrible life, though. Horrible. I learned that there is much to fear in this world. When Finley found us—Danny and me—he said as long as there was no other man in my life, I was free to go with him. If I hadn’t, I would have been lost. Do you know what I mean, Paavo?”

He knew, and understood even better why she reminded him so much of Sybil. “Yes.”

“I knew it,” she whispered.

She didn’t have to say that she never came to love Finley. In fact, Paavo suspected that if anything she resented him for the hold he had over her. “Did you keep your promise to him?”

“I had to. I’m a weak woman, Paavo. I knew what it was like to live on the streets, and I was afraid to go back to them. As Danny grew older, though, I thought more and more about leaving Finley. I’m sure he realized it, because one day Finley found my father working as a gardener in a small town in Sonoma County. Quint is my father.”

“Quint.” Angie had been right. “Go on.”

“Finley had a dream for our future,” Moira said, “one that also became my father’s and Danny’s, that we would run an inn together.”

“And so you stayed?”

“Yes. I couldn’t disappoint my father or my son. Then one day I looked in the mirror and saw that the strong young girl I once was had disappeared long ago, and in her place was a weak, frightened, loveless old woman. An apt partner for Finley. I learned to resent him as much as he did me.”

“There’s no reason to continue feeling that way,” Paavo said.

“No, not now that Finley’s gone. I guess this makes me your prime suspect. Doesn’t it, Inspector?”

Angie watched Paavo
, Martin, and Reginald Vane as they set out to check, once again, on the mud slide that blocked the road. The storm had eased a little as the afternoon wore on, and they hoped they could soon begin the long, tedious process of digging themselves out. Since Jeffers’s death, everyone was more frightened than ever and even more anxious to get off this promontory.

Angie, Chelsea, and Bethel made a pact to stay together. Bethel had what she called a “touch of arthritis” in her hips and knees and couldn’t walk very far. Chelsea was too heavy to move fast, and Angie, although she could walk far and fairly fast, remembered her difficulty climbing over the headland rocks on the beach with Paavo and didn’t want to do anything to slow down the others.

Moira didn’t want to be with anyone, preferring instead to lie down in her room. As much as Angie and the others thought it was foolish for her to be alone, it was clear that no one was willing to argue with her.

Seated in the drawing room, Bethel asked Chelsea to tell her about Elvis. Angie did her best to ignore them by trying to figure out, if it were up to her, how she’d redecorate the inn to make it more inviting. She loved redecorating. At the moment, the inn reminded her of something out of
Wuthering Heights
.

To begin with, the library was much too dark. A gloomy library wouldn’t attract anyone. She’d love to play around with the window coverings and furniture.

“Why don’t we go into the library?” she asked.

Engrossed in their discussion of Elvis, neither woman bothered to answer.

“We need to find a new angle,” Bethel said. “Something that hasn’t been done before.”

“But what?” Chelsea asked, then sighed wearily.

Angie couldn’t believe them. “You can always play ‘Love Me Tender’ backward. Call it a way to conjure spirits. Or at least to cause a primal scream or two from the audience.”

“That’s an idea,” Chelsea said.

Bethel didn’t move or say a word. She was either giving it serious thought or she’d been struck catatonic by how ludicrous it was.

“I’m going to the library,” Angie said. “Anyone care to join me?”

“‘RedneT eM evoL’,” Bethel said thoughtfully. “I believe it can lead to a higher spiritual consciousness. Don’t you, Chelsea?”

Rolling her eyes, Angie left.

In the library, she pulled back the heavy drapes. They needed to be tied or hooked back off the windows. Even better would be to take the drapes down and replace them with light, lacy curtains or simple wooden blinds in white or cream.

She slid small wooden chairs beside the windows, then lifted the drapes over the back of each so she could get a sense of the room with more light in it. If it ever stopped raining, she’d open the windows and let the place air out. She hated the constant damp, decaying, musty smell in the air.

On each side of the fireplace stood a high-backed, peacock-blue armchair, and beside the chairs stood bookcases, so that the chairs were wedged between a hot fireplace and dusty books. Not a comfortable spot to sit. As a result, no one ever used them.

She pulled one of the chairs out from its wall and decided to place it in front of the fireplace, first facing the mantel. No, it would look better, friendlier, if the chairs faced each other. She went to the other chair and tried to pull it out into the middle of the room as well, but it wouldn’t move. Tugging harder, she watched an electric cord fly loose as the chair suddenly pulled free of the wall.

The wire ran upward from beneath the chair to the top of the wainscoting midway up the wall, then disappeared behind the bookshelves, probably into an electrical outlet.

She got down on her hands and knees and peered under the chair to see what the cord had been connected to. A little black box was taped to the bottom of the seat. She yanked it off.

It looked like a miniature projector, with a tiny lens. She plugged the cord into it, but couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. The entire device must have been operated from some remote location. But what was it? And why was it there?

Only one person in this inn seemed to have any idea about electronics. Reginald Vane.

So much had already happened around here that had made her suspicious of everything and everyone. The
thought that it had all been orchestrated by a mad scientist made a lot of sense.

Who else could it be but Reginald? On the other hand, she had been warmed by his obvious interest in Chelsea. The two seemed somehow peculiarly right for each other. Or would be, if only Chelsea forgot her macabre love for a dead man. Could Reginald be a murderer? And if so, could his interest in Chelsea put her life in danger?

Angie had to find out. She needed to show this to Paavo, to tell him all about her finding.

She put the projector back under the chair and slid the peacock-blue chairs back against the wall. No sense alerting whoever had put it there that they’d been found out. What could the projector possibly be for, though? Could it be used to make ghostly holograms on demand? Just like at Disneyland’s haunted house? Chelsea said she saw a ghost the night of their séance, and Reginald Vane said he believed her.

Angie went into the hall to check on Bethel and Chelsea in the drawing room, since they’d agreed to keep an eye on each other. They were there, still planning Bethel’s return. They were fine since, after all, the house was empty.

Empty.

The perfect time for checking out Reginald Vane’s room—the sole room up on the third floor. Angie had never even been up there yet. If Vane was behind this, if he used electronic devices in some strange way, his room would be the perfect hiding place for them.

She really ought not go searching, though. She ought to wait for Paavo. To tell him about it.

Of course once he returned Vane would return, too. They couldn’t very well search Vane’s room with him looking over their shoulders.

She’d have to do it on her own. Paavo wouldn’t like it, but then he wasn’t here, was he? If she didn’t find anything, she wouldn’t have to tell him she’d even looked. And if she did, he wouldn’t mind that she’d looked. Case closed.

She went into the kitchen to get the set of spare keys, then snuck up the stairs to Vane’s room. As she’d suspected, the door was locked. Angie unlocked it and walked in. The room was immaculate. If Vane wasn’t an electrical engineer, he should go into the housecleaning business. Angie would hire him in a minute.

This had been Elise’s room, the pathetic, lonely, ever crying Elise. It was small, with a peaked ceiling and two dormer windows. But the view of the ocean was breathtaking. The room looked directly out upon the cliffs from which Elise had jumped.

Suppressing a shudder, Angie began to look around the room.

No electronics were lying about, but that didn’t surprise her. The man could hardly keep such things out in the open. She searched his closet. Nothing.

Judging from the outside of the house, the roofline was quite a bit wider than the room, which meant there could be eaves on either side of it creating attics. Now all she had to do was figure out how to get into them.

In the back of a closet, she found a small, half-size door. She opened it. Two VCRs, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a timer, a small framed mirror, batteries of all sizes, and several flashlights filled the space. No televisions, so just what Vane did with the VCRs was anybody’s guess.

Incredible. How did he get so much paraphernalia in here? she wondered. Were Finley and Moira so oblivious that the man practically set up his own Radio Shack and
they hadn’t even noticed? But as she thought of Finley and Moira, she realized, maybe so.

What did he do with all this stuff? It had to somehow be connected to the mysterious ghost sightings around Hill Haven. He was the one who kept running around warning people of the ghosts, telling them that they ought to leave. Was all this equipment to back up his pronouncements? Obviously he had planned all this before ever coming to the inn, but why? And just what did he do with everything?

She’d get Paavo up here and he’d be able to figure it out. He wasn’t exactly Mr. Fix-it, but men seemed to understand this sort of thing. As if it came with their Y chromosome or something.

She backed out of the attic and quietly shut the door. She had to get out of here; no telling when they’d be back. Wouldn’t Paavo be surprised when she told him!

She was crossing Vane’s room when she glanced at his bureau. What if, just as he brought the equipment before he ever arrived at the inn, he also brought something that explained his actions?

It might be right there, in one of those drawers. How long could it take her to find out? Not long. They wouldn’t be back quite yet. At least she hoped not.

She dashed over to the drawers and began to open them. Socks. T-shirts. Purple bikini shorts. (For Reginald Vane? Unbelievable.) Waffle-textured thermal underwear. (That was more like it.)

She shut the drawer and went on to the next. It was empty. So was the one after that.

But in the bottom drawer of his dresser she found a large padded envelope and inside it some papers and a Bible. Could this be what she was looking for?

She could feel her nerves tense as she carried the envelope to the bed and slid the contents out. Would she
find something here that could cause a man to commit murder?

She picked up the Bible. It was old—old like the diary and letters that belonged to Susannah. The dried leather cover felt as if it might crumble to dust under her fingers.

The pages, almost tissue-thin, had gold leaf on the edges. Carefully turning them, she saw nothing unusual until she reached the back cover. There she found a handwritten paragraph in an ink so faded, and a hand so stylized, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to read it. Following it was a list of names, written in different inks and by different hands. Her glance traveled down the page to the bottom where, in bold, black letters, she saw the words, “Reginald Vane, born 1950.” The Vane family Bible.

But why bring it here?

She wove back through the list of names, reading about Vane after Vane, until she reached the topmost entry. The room was growing dark as evening fell and she turned on the lamp on the nightstand to better see the faint ink. Under the bright light, reading slowly and carefully, she was able to read the words:

Jack and Elise. The Vanes, then, were the childless family that Ezra and Susannah Sempler gave Jack’s son to. Ezra must have told them that the child was an orphan, and they took him and clearly opened their
hearts to him. And now Reginald was here. The last survivor of Jack’s line. Was he coming to proclaim his heritage?

She unfolded the sheets of paper. An article entitled “Ghosts of the Pacific Northwest” from a 1967 copy of
Look
magazine lay before her. In it she found photos of the Sempler house, Jack’s and Susannah’s portraits, and a brief retelling of the love story of Jack and Elise.

As Angie looked at the papers in her hands, she was struck by the sadness of it, the senselessness, and the loss.

Could Elise’s great-grandson be murdering people because of her story? That seemed too horrible to contemplate. But what other explanation could there be for the happenings at Hill Haven?

Quickly she put the material back in the envelope and placed the envelope in the drawer. As soon as Paavo returned, she’d tell him everything. She turned around.

Reginald Vane, his bow tie bobbing in agitation, stood in the doorway watching her.