Ghosts Beneath Us: A Third Spookie Town Murder Mystery (Spookie Town Murder Mysteries Book 3) (16 page)

 Abigail asked her about Tina and the doomed cruise while the three waited for Kate to return. Grief glimmered in the old lady’s eyes as she talked about her missing friend and there was desperation in her voice when she spoke of Clementine. “What’s going on in this town with the old people anyway?” she inquired petulantly. “They’re being haunted, tormented or they’re disappearing like chocolate eggs at Easter. Someone or something is doing this. We have to stop it!” She glared at Frank and Abigail and slammed her small fist on the table. The salt and pepper shakers jumped.

“We’re trying,” Frank assured her.

“You got any leads?” Myrtle demanded.

“Not exactly. But I do have a couple of possibilities I’m looking into.”

“Just be sure to keep me updated if you find out anything for sure.” The fierceness in her eyes was finally the old Myrtle again. “Right now we need to find Clementine, right?”

“Right,” Frank said.

Kate’s footsteps were heard coming downstairs and she stumbled into the kitchen. Shaking her head, the expression in her eyes were one of growing alarm. “Mom’s not up there and her bed hasn’t been slept in. As befuddled as she’s become, she still religiously makes her bed every day.” She collapsed into a chair. “We should start looking around outside, huh?”

“We should.” Abigail scooted her chair closer to Kate’s and touched her shoulder lightly. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her.”

“Hi Myrtle,” Kate murmured, her eyes barely flicking across the old woman.

“Hi there, Kate. Like Abby said, don’t you worry. We’re going to find your mother. These two,” she cocked her head at her and Frank, “have a real knack for finding missing persons, criminals and murderers. I have faith in them and you should too.”

“Criminals and murderers?” Kate repeated, eying Myrtle as if she’d uttered something bizarre.

“I’m not saying your mother’s been murdered or nothing. She’s just up and disappeared like Tina. But Frank and Abigail here will get to the bottom of it, you’ll see. They’re the best.”

“Where’s the basement?” Frank interrupted, and Kate pointed to a door on the opposite wall. He walked over, opened it, and descended into the darkness.

Kate’s anxious eyes fell on Abigail. “I knew I should have spent the night, after what you’d told me, that is. But I worked overtime at the shop, was exhausted, and called her really late. She seemed fine. Even clear headed for once. So I thought it was all right. I thought me moving in this morning would be soon enough. My car out there in the driveway is packed with my clothes and things. Now I feel terrible. If anything has happened to her….” Her voice had become frantic. “
Where is she?
”

Abigail thought of Tina and the cruise ship and didn’t want to give the woman false hope. “We’re going to search high and low for her. We’ll try to find her.” That is if she was anywhere to be found.

Frank returned from the basement. “No one’s down there. It’s a normal a basement as I ever saw. Your mother liked things in order.”

“That she did,” Kate agreed, a faint smile on her lips. “Or she used to. Lately, the disease has changed her. Some days she’s herself and some days she’s not.”  

“Unlike the other old people’s houses nothing has been disturbed down there,” he reported to Abigail. “Or anywhere else apparently. This isn’t like the others. It’s different. Now we have to figure out why.

“Let’s look outside before we call the police, though.”

“Good idea,” Abigail concurred.

“After you all poke around out there in the pea soup,” Myrtle came out with, “you think we could get some kind of lunch or something? I’m starving.”

“I’ll fix you something after we get done wadding through the pea soup,” Kate bantered back at her with a restrained smile.

“Nah, don’t bother, child. I know this house well. Your mom and I go way back. I know where she keeps the sandwich stuff so if it’s okay with you I’ll just make me a sandwich while you all are gone.”

“It’s okay. You’re welcome to whatever you find.”

The three exited the house, leaving Myrtle to forage in the refrigerator, and searched in different directions, shouting out Clementine’s name as they went. The smoky haze clung to the ground, trees and bushes and made it difficult to see ten feet ahead or around them, so they kept in constant touch with each other with their cell phones.

“Damn, how are we going to find anyone in this mist,” she grumbled to Frank on her cell after they’d been hunting for a while out in the woods. Days before Easter, spring was leisurely slipping into summer, and the days had become warmer. She was sweaty and tired of traipsing around in the woods, tripping over dead branches she couldn’t see, attracting cockleburs, early season bugs and scratching up her exposed skin. Yet she was desperate to be sure Clementine wasn’t lost out there so she pushed herself and kept looking. They all did.

They didn’t find Clementine.

An hour or so later they were in the kitchen and Frank was calling the sheriff’s department. Again. “Oh, Mearl’s going to just love this. Another missing old one. Another unsolved crime. It means he might actually have to do his job.”

“Or we will,” Abigail voiced, meeting Frank’s gaze.

“Or we will,” he whispered back.

Kate sat at the table, looking lost. She didn’t cry but Abigail could see she was on the verge. She kept getting up and going to the windows or pacing the kitchen like a trapped animal.

Myrtle had made a plate of bologna and cheese sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea for them. She urged Kate to eat something and hovered over her as if she were her own child. Abigail thought she was being really sweet. For Myrtle.

“I don’t know if this means anything,” Myrtle mouthed around a sandwich as she sat next to Kate, “but Clementine telephoned me, oh, about twelve-thirty last night–I’d called her from Tina’s earlier, gave her the number, and let her know about Tina’s vanishing–and she was a scared wreck. She was babbling all manner of nonsense. She declared there were scary noises outside her house and men in black, or some such thing, roaming around shouting out her name. She said her husband and children’s ghosts were speaking to her from the basement. She asked me to come over. Of course I couldn’t that late. The forest phantoms were out, the fog was already rolling in and who could see a foot before their own eyes? Ha! I couldn’t.

“Anyway, I told her to stay inside and not–for anything–go out. Those crafty eyeless wraiths would get her for sure. She seemed to listen, said all right and hung up. I called her again around four a.m. or so but got no answer. I scurried over here as soon as the sun came up. Too late, though. I
told
her to stay inside, I did. But I suppose she didn’t listen. Sorry, Kate.” Myrtle dropped her head in shame for a second, then she popped up from her chair and began rummaging through cabinets looking for goodies, as she called them. “I got to have chocolate. It reduces my stress, you know, and right now I have a ton of it.”

“Spooky noises…men in black,” Abigail echoed. “I wonder what Clementine meant by that?”

“If she meant anything at all.” Frank stood up and went to answer the door. Sheriff Mearl and one of his deputies had arrived. It occurred to Frank the sheriff was supposed to be on a retreat of some kind. Either he’d come back early because of the escalating situation, he’d never gone in the first place or Frank had been fibbed to the other day when the dispatcher had said the sheriff wasn’t reachable.

After they conferred with the officers the search began in earnest. The sheriff called in all available deputies and, even with the fog, dispatched them to comb the woods around Clementine’s house and the surrounding neighborhood. They also checked unlocked outbuildings and garages, knocked on doors and asked if the residents had seen or heard anything. Frank, Kate and Abigail, until she had to go pick up the kids, helped.

The day dragged on but by the end of it Clementine was still missing.

And worse, later, Frank called her cell phone with an update, and told her that during the neighborhood search he also discovered Alfred still wasn’t home. He knocked and knocked and, again, Alfred didn’t answer.

“Where could he have gone in this fog and in his bad health?” Abigail had quizzed Frank, cradling her cell phone against her ear as she spoke with him. She was on the road returning with the kids who, exhausted from their weekend, were dozing in the front and back seat. She was glad they weren’t overhearing what her and Frank were discussing. They didn’t need to be bothered with it. It’d only upset them, especially since the ordeal with their missing father the year before, who ended up dead at the hands of a killer, was still too fresh in their minds.

“I don’t know,” Frank had replied. “But, as the other night during the storm when I checked up on him, I can’t see him out stumbling around in the forest when he could barely walk the last time we saw him. So it’s a possibility Alfred, too, is missing and has been since the night of that storm.”

Neither one of them said anything to that. There wasn’t anything really to say.

That’s just great,
Abigail fretted after she’d hung up. She had to watch the road. She was coming into the city limits and the fog, true to form, was thickening around her.
Just great. More missing old people. Now she had more of them to worry over.

Where were they?

Chapter 7

Frank

Frank aided in the search for the rest of the day until it grew dark. But Abby needed to leave early to pick up the children from their cousin’s house because they had school the next day and the round trip took time.

He was uneasy about Alfred’s absence. He’d been the one to knock on the old vet’s door and after a long time without an answer he’d gone in anyway. A detail he hadn’t told Abby or Sheriff Mearl about because he’d had no right to waltz into another’s person’s house without permission, but he couldn’t help himself. The house was unlocked and, after exploring every room, he found the place empty. There was a half-eaten meal on the table and the television had been on as if the man had only stepped out for a moment. It had been strange.

Alfred rarely went anywhere and never that close to dark. He’d told Frank that himself. His nineteen-seventy-six truck was an unreliable heap parked in the middle of his yard and Alfred tried not to use it unless he had to. He walked or hitch-hiked a ride with a friend most destinations, or had until recently before his health and his legs had begun to fail. A monthly foray into town to bring back supplies was usually the most he used his truck. When Frank visited, the rusted red jalopy was parked in the yard among the other junk, but Alfred was nowhere to be seen. Oh, where was the old coot? Only time would tell. But as with Tina, that answer didn’t satisfy Frank.

As he’d told Abby, now they might be looking for two missing people.

The night fell and the search for both old people went on. As frail as both Clementine and Alfred were, time couldn’t be wasted. But when the following morning dawned the missing were still missing.

Frank dragged himself home when he couldn’t keep his eyes open and his body moving any longer. Abby had called him late the night before for an update on her way home and he’d hated telling her the bad news.

“Should I come back and help?” she’d asked.

“No, we have plenty of people beating the bushes for them. You should stay there with the kids. Get some rest. If Clementine isn’t found, though, you might give Kate a visit tomorrow morning. She’s going to need a friend and you seem to fill the bill lately since she’s still so new in town.”

“I’ll do that. I felt so bad for her today. She’s already lost so much and now this.”

Frank knew she was referring to Kate’s dead family. Having grown up in Spookie, he was well aware of her childhood tragedy.

After he’d spoken to Abby he had rejoined the search party and the night had gone on. Then he’d driven home as the new day had begun.

Outside the cabin the sun was shimmering, predicting a balmy day. The fog, which had persisted for most of the night, was finally evaporating. He was tired and, at the least, needed a nap. He wasn’t as young as he’d once been so all-night activities didn’t come as easily or their aftereffects leave as quickly.

Before he went to bed he put in a second call to his naval friend Charlie but was only allowed to leave another message. He was still attempting to get a hold of the man, but Charlie could be occupied with a case or out on a mission. The intelligence service kept him busy. It was frustrating. He would have liked the man’s input, his help, or both. There was a reason for what was happening and Frank would have liked Charlie’s take on it. The man was good with conspiracy situations, plus he had contacts that might shed some light on the corporation behind it all. Well, he’d just have to wait, be patient. Charlie, if he was available in any capacity, would get back to him when he could. He wasn’t the sort of man to ignore a friend’s request for help.

Frank had always been able to get by without much sleep, so he rested for four hours and then was out again with the others hunting for the lost old lady and absent veteran. One of the sheriff’s deputies, because Frank had asked him to, had also gone out to Alfred’s house. The old man still hadn’t come home.

The search for both of them continued.

In the middle of the third day they found Clementine, or her body. It appeared she’d tumbled into a steep, rock lined ravine and the fall had killed her. It
appeared
, but Frank didn’t believe it for a second.

“Yep, looks like she left her house and went wandering–as a lot of elderly with Alzheimer’s do–got lost in the fog and tripped over something,” Sheriff Mearl pronounced complacently. “No crime here. Just another accident. The fall killed her. It looks like her neck is broken.”

Frank wasn’t as sure. It felt too easy after the others’ misfortunes. Too convenient.

“Are you going to have the ME do an autopsy?” Frank got the sheriff aside and inquired.

“Why? It’s easy to see what happened. No reason to put her daughter through all that. I’m not requesting one. As far as I’m concerned this was an accident. Case closed.”