How to be Death (41 page)

“Looks like a wheelchair ramp,” I said.

“Just wait,” Runt said, eager to show us more as she climbed up on the ramp, her nails clicking against the stone as she walked around, sniffing for something.

“Found the trigger!” she called, lifting a paw and setting it down precisely on a small, round depression smack-dab in the middle of the stone plane. There was a click, and then a secret doorway opened up in the stone wall behind Freezay’s back, making us both jump in surprise.

“What the—” I said as Freezay stalked past me, flashlight aloft, its LED light illuminating the confines of a tiny hidden room.

The space was only about four feet by six feet—not much bigger than a walk-in closet—but every inch of wall space was covered with the well-ordered spines of a miniature library. Freezay ran the flashlight over the books, stopping occasionally when a title caught his attention.

“
The
Vollkommene Geomantia
…
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft
…
The Malleus Maleficarum
…” Freezay read out loud, the low vibrato of his voice eerie in the confines of the odd little room.

“Someone’s interested in the dark side of the occult,” I said, each title I saw reconfirming my hypothesis. Whoever curated this library had dark tastes, indeed.

“What’s that?” Runt said as she jumped down off the stone ramp and trotted past me into the room, coming to a stop in front of something shiny and metallic lying on the floor.

Freezay crouched down beside the pup, lifting the shiny object up into the air by its long golden chain.

“That’s the locket we found in the hidden compartment with the book!” I said, taking it from Freezay so I could look inside of it just to be certain. “Yep, same picture and everything.”

I started to hand the locket back to him, but he waved me away.

“You hold on to it for now—we need to get back to the other end of that tunnel,” he said, and without further explanation, he strode out of the tiny library, taking his flashlight with him so that Runt and I were left in darkness.

“Hurry up!” Freezay yelled, the distance between us increasing until he was only a flickering pinprick of light jogging down the length of the tunnel.

Not wanting to find myself in inky blackness all over again, I felt compelled to run. Runt, who was physically much faster than me, stuck close to my heels. She should’ve passed my
lumbering gait easily, but instead, she was staying nearby, acting as my protector. As the end of the tunnel came into view, there was a blinding flash of light—the kind of flash no flashlight, especially a little LED one, could boast—and I blinked at the sudden brightness.

A moment later we were out of the tunnel—the mysterious adobe wall that had blocked our progression earlier was turned sideways, so we could climb through it.

“Oh my God,” I said as I realized where we were.

“It’s our room,” Runt said, stating the obvious.

We’d climbed through a secret doorway only to find ourselves standing in the space that used to be the fireplace of our bedroom at Casa de la Luna. In front of us, Coy’s headless body lay at our feet, a grizzly reminder of why we’d begun this wild-goose chase in the first place.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Freezay said from where he was perched on the end of my bed. “The bodyguard outside has no idea we’re even in here.”

Without another word, he pulled a long, serrated carving knife from behind his back, its bloody, metallic body glistening in the lamplight.

“Welcome to the last piece of the puzzle,” he said.

And then he grinned manically up at us.

“I don’t give good head,” I said, “if you’re thinking of using that thing on either of us.”

It took Freezay a moment to understand what I was saying, but when he realized my meaning—and how freaky it looked, him sitting in the middle of a grisly murder scene, holding up the murder weapon—he instantly dropped the knife down onto the bed.

“That’s a terrible double entendre,” he said, raising an eyebrow in my direction. “I expected something much cleverer from the likes of you.”

“It was pretty clever, considering the fact I was worried you were gonna behead me,” I replied, eyeing the bloody knife where it lay nestled in the sheets.

“Touché,” he said. “And I had no intention of frightening you, ladies. You were just so slow getting down the tunnel. I got tired and had to sit down.”

“Where did you find it?” I asked, ignoring the slowpoke comment.

Freezay stood up, leaving the knife on the bed as he joined us, careful to avoid the pool of dried blood on the floor.

“Well, after Runt discovered the hidden room, I had an epiphany,” he said, motioning us to move away from the fireplace.

I followed Runt over to the bathroom, both of us crowding inside the doorway.

“It wasn’t a blind passage after all, but another trick. I ran back down here and discovered that the mechanism which reveals the hidden library also opens part of this entrance, too,” he continued—then he paused unexpectedly and added: “Let’s reset the doorway so no one joins us unexpectedly. There are just too many curious people involved in this case.”

“How do you do that?” Runt asked.

“Easy,” Freezay said. “You see that stand there—”

He pointed to an antique bronze fireplace tool stand sitting slightly askew on the hearth. As we watched, Freezay grasped the top of the stand—tongs, brush, and poker swinging—and pulled it toward the hearth until we heard a soft
click
.

“There we go,” Freezay said, the mechanism inside the wall beginning to whirr. To my amazement, the adobe wall swung toward us as the fireplace silently descended back into its spot on top of the hearth, effectively sealing the entrance to the secret passageway.

“That’s insane,” I said, marveling at the ingenuity of the Castle’s architect.

“Insane, yes,” Freezay agreed. “Now where was I?”

“You had an epiphany,” Runt said.

“Oh, yes! My epiphany,” he said, plopping back down on my bed and making the knife bounce. “I ran back here and found the adobe wall askew and your bedroom half-exposed. To my surprise, I discovered
another
hidden compartment built into the brickwork of the fireplace.”

The place is littered with the damn things,
I thought.

“At that same moment my flashlight decided to stop working, so I stuck my arm and head inside the new compartment, but that only triggered another mechanism and I was lucky enough to get my head and arm out—minus my hat, but plus the knife—before the fireplace finished its ascension into the ceiling.”

I felt bad. I hadn’t even realized Freezay was missing his trusty bowler hat.

“How did you know that’s where the knife would be?” Runt asked, thoroughly engaged by the bizarreness of Freezay’s story.

He scratched his head, his eyes shooting back and forth inside their sockets.

“I could lie to you, but what’s the point?” Freezay said, running his hands through the shock of blond hair on top of his head so that pieces of dirt and soot littered the floor. “I had a hunch the knife was close, but I had no guarantees it was in that compartment until I stuck my hand inside.”

“Why would the murderer just leave it there for anyone to find?” I asked.

“Coy’s murderer did not plan to kill her, so there was no premeditation.”

“Well, the murderer came in here with the knife, so he had to be planning something—” I said, but Freezay shook his head, picking up the knife and testing its weight.

“Oh, this knife isn’t the murder weapon.”

He dropped the knife back down on the bed then pointed to the fireplace.

“That poker is.”

Runt and I both turned to look at the fireplace at the same time, our eyes locking onto the heavy bronze poker sitting benignly between the tongs and brush. It looked nothing like a murder weapon, but I supposed that was the point.

Freezay stalked over to the fireplace and picked up the poker, holding it out so we could see the flecks of dark brown blood still clinging to its end.

“Resembles rust and blends right in with the aged bronze patina, but I assure you that it’s blood.”

“Cool!” Runt said, amazed by what Freezay had discovered.

“It was right there in plain sight the whole time,” Freezay continued, speaking almost to himself. “I guess I was just really thrown by the head in the bag.”

“But that knife is covered in blood,” I said, not understanding. “What was it for?”

“The beheading and the removal of the heart were done to throw everyone off the scent. After the murderer hit Coy on the back of the head—an impulse killing probably perpetrated in a fit of rage—he or she ran back to the kitchen to get the knife. They wanted to make it seem as if this were a ritual killing because they knew Horace was here at the Castle and they hoped
the evidence would muddy the trail, point us in her brother’s direction.”

We were missing something—something about the murderer going back to the kitchen didn’t sit right—and then it hit me, a series of possibilities exploding in my mind.

“What if Zinia and Constance weren’t killed because of the book?” I asked suddenly. “What if they died because they saw something they shouldn’t have seen—”

“Like the murderer going back to the kitchen to get the knife!” Runt finished.

“Exactly,” I said, pleased with our tag team deductive reasoning.

“You’re definitely barking up the right tree,” Freezay said, starting to pace. “But why would any murderer in their right mind try to both poison and shoot their victim?”

“To make sure the poison wasn’t a dud?” Runt asked, but Freezay shook his head.

“Nope.”

When neither of us had another possible answer to Freezay’s question, I said: “We give up. Just tell us.”

He smiled at me and I knew instantly he wasn’t going to give us any more information for free. The jerkoid was going to make us work it out for ourselves.

“We can reasonably assume that Horace wasn’t responsible for his sister’s death,” Freezay went on, approaching the problem from a different angle. “And we can also assume that whoever murdered Coy knew about the secret passageways.”

“Someone who worked here?” Runt asked. “Maybe Constance and Coy fought over the book and Constance killed her.”

“Another possibility,” Freezay agreed. “But that would mean someone else knew about the book—and they killed Constance and Zinia.”

“Yeah, there’s no way Zinia would kill Constance,” I agreed. “They shared a common goal: trying to get Frank out of Purgatory—and if Zinia
had
killed her, then who killed Zinia? The woman didn’t poison herself.”

Freezay nodded, walking over to the window and drawing back the drape so he could look out into the onyx sky.

“Once again that leaves us with another party—and this
party killed Zinia and probably Constance, too. What else do we know about Constance’s death?”

“We know she didn’t give Uriah Drood the book,” Runt chimed in. “He wasn’t lying about that. Otherwise he would have already tried to use it to blackmail you into giving him Naapi’s job, Cal.”

“Agreed,” Freezay said.

“She was never going to give him that book,” I said, enjoying the way we were all working together to find the solution. “She’d only told him about her plan, period, because she knew he’d be here for the Death Dinner and he’d have recognized her.”

“Well, what I don’t understand is why the murderer cut up Constance’s body,” Runt interjected.

“They were furthering the Aztec ritual killing scenario—” I said then stopped as another possibility occurred to me. “That means whoever killed Coy murdered Constance, too!”

But Freezay wasn’t so easily convinced. He pursed his lips together thoughtfully as he considered what I’d said.

“Not necessarily.”

“Why not?” I asked, liking the way the plot was thickening around my new theory and not wanting Freezay to tell me I was wrong.