How to Survive a Killer Seance (31 page)

A moan.

Coming from a short distance away.

Maybe she really was hurt. After all, I’d almost broken my kneecap.

I entered the next room on tiptoe and immediately recognized where I was—the infamous Daisy Room. Unlike the inner rooms of the mansion, this one allowed moonlight to stream through the muted yellow stained-glass windows, giving the room a shadowy glow. Suddenly I remembered—Sarah Winchester had been trapped in here for hours during the 1906 earthquake.

I glanced around, certain I’d heard a moan coming from here. I spotted one of the daisy-themed windows—it was broken, shattered to pieces. Most of the shards and bits of colored glass lay on the other side of the window but a few had fallen inside.

Had Stephanie crashed into the window trying to escape?

I scanned the dimly lit room, searching for her. I expected to find her huddled in a corner, nursing some kind of wound, maybe bleeding. Or unconscious.

Instead, I caught movement in the corner of my eye.

Before I could react, Stephanie lunged at me from behind the door to the room. Something in her hand glinted in the moonlight. She raised her fist, giving me only a split second to see that it was wrapped with her scarf.

In it, she held a knife-long razor-sharp piece of broken glass.

I threw up my hands defensively just as Stephanie brought down the jagged shard.

I screamed as the shard plunged deep into my hand. Blood spurted from my palm. The pain made me woozy and the room began to spin. I pressed my fingers to the gash, hoping to staunch the flow of blood and keep myself from passing out.

But the room continued to spin. My legs crumpled, and I fell to the floor, hitting my hip and elbow hard as I landed.

I looked up as Stephanie loomed over me in the semidarkness, her eyes wild, the dagger of glass held high again. Leaning on my sore elbow, I kicked at her stilettos with all the adrenaline-fused strength I had—not to mention a good strong pair of Mary Janes.

Her legs buckled as she lost her balance and she fell to the floor like an inexperienced ice skater. She landed on her butt, and I thought I heard a crack—either the floor, the glass shard, or her tailbone. She let out a string of curses that I doubt sailors or Kathy Griffin would even know.

As soon as she’d caught her breath, she rolled over and pushed herself up, shaking with anger. “I’m gonna kill you!” she screamed, then lunged again, the dagger still intact and in her scarf-wrapped hand.

The scarf was soaked in blood.

“You’ve cut your hand,” I yelled at her, hoping to distract her. I also hoped to attract the attention of anyone nearby, but I knew that in a twisted mansion like this, it might take hours to find us. And that would no doubt be too late—for me.

She glanced at her hand, her eyes wild with both fear and rage. Then she turned that rage toward me, lunging again with the shard. I rolled to the side and found myself trapped in a corner of the room. Glancing around for any kind of weapon to defend myself, I saw nothing—nothing but a pipe that started halfway up the corner to the ceiling, and out of the room.

One of Sarah Winchester’s listening tubes.

“Stephanie! Listen! Do you hear him?” I shouted the words up into the tube, praying someone would hear me. At the same time, I wanted to distract Stephanie, who seemed to believe in all this spiritualism stuff.

She stopped in midair. Listening.

“I don’t hear anything,” she said tentatively.

“A voice. I can’t make it out . . .”

Stephanie continued to listen. Now that she was temporarily distracted, I wanted to get her talking.

“Stephanie, what did Jonathan do to you?” I continued to speak loudly, hoping my words reached the tube. Mia had said that the servants could hear Sarah calling from this room after she became trapped, but they couldn’t get to her because of the damage the earthquake had caused.

“
Jonathan
didn’t do anything,” she said, nearly spitting out his name. Her face contorted as she spoke.

Good. She was talking. And loudly too.

“But he must have done something to you. He used women as if they were his personal toys. Did he seduce you? Promise to leave his wife? What?”

“He didn’t do anything!” She screamed the words, then turn the right side of her face toward me. “Look. At. Me!”

I could barely see her in the moonlight coming from the broken window.

“What? I don’t understand. . . .”

And then I did.

I saw it.

The large red splotch on her face no longer covered with makeup. Wiped away with sweat and tears. The birthmark that disfigured an otherwise attractive woman.

“Do you really think Jonathan would have anything to do with someone like me?” She was screeching now. Hopefully loud enough to be heard through the listening tube.

“But you know how superficial he is. And you’re vice president at a company that’s about to go viral. Isn’t that enough?”

“Not after what he did to me.”

“What did he do, Stephanie?”

“He laughed at me,” she said, giving a little laugh herself. “He didn’t just turn me down when I suggested we . . . get together. He laughed. Of course I knew all about his affairs and what he was like. But to him I wasn’t a woman. He only wanted them young, blond, and sexy.”

“But why kill Levi? Why not Jonathan?”

“Killing Jonathan would have been too easy. He wouldn’t have suffered enough. I had to destroy everything that meant anything to him.”

“So you killed Levi—and Zachary—and then framed Jonathan. Why?”

“I’ve been planning this for two years, ever since Zachary created the 4-D Projection. I found out Zach wanted more money from Jon, and Jon refused to pay him. Not only that, he fired Zach. When Jon came up with this séance idea—which personally gave me the creeps—I went to Zach and told him I had a plan.”

“Your plan was to get Zachary to help you disrupt the séance and expose Jonathan for what he was. But then you killed Levi. Why?”

“I had to find out if he knew what Zach and I had done.”

“And?”

“And, yes, he’d figured it all out, after putting all the pieces together.”

“So you . . .”

“Killed him? Isn’t it obvious? I had to or he’d have told Jonathan and ruined everything.”

“And then you made it look like Jonathan had done it,” I said, as it all fell into place.

Her eyes narrowed in the dim light, but she said nothing. What was she thinking? Or planning next?

“Did Zachary know you killed Levi?”

“No, Zach thought Jon did it, too. He knew about Jon’s affairs and believed me when I told him Jon had killed Levi thinking he was the one who’d exposed him.”

“So you convinced Zachary to make that new message for the séance, and promised him—what? More money? The job of VP when you took over Jonathan’s CEO position after Jonathan was arrested for murder? You stood to gain a lot if your boss was out of the picture.”

A thin smile appeared on her lips. I’d figured it out.

The hand with the glass knife inched upward again.

I was running out of questions to keep her talking.

“So . . . you sent those e-mails, didn’t you? And deleted them, knowing experts would be able to retrieve them. That was clever, because you knew Jonathan wouldn’t see them.” I thought giving her a few compliments would help me stall for time.

The smile remained. So did the shard in her bloody hand.

“You . . . must have arranged for Zachary to enter the building. Then you killed him with Jonathan’s statue. Only, I can’t figure out why you got rid of Zach. He was your ally, so why did you kill him?”

She shrugged. “Zach finally figured out I killed Levi. He came to see me, told me he didn’t want to be involved in murder. He was going to turn me in. I had no choice.”

I had no choice.
There it was.

Stephanie raised the shard higher over her head, now grasping it with both hands. She was moving in for the kill.

I huddled in the corner, trapped, and covered my face with my arm.

Seemingly from the walls, a disembodied voice echoed the name, “Stephaaanniieeee. . . .”

The voice of a dead man: Zachary Samuels.

Even in the semidarkness, I could see Stephanie turn a whiter shade of pale.

“Zach . . .” she whispered, eyes searching the moonlit room.

“Stephanie . . . I’m here . . .” the voice said.

If I hadn’t known about the listening tubes, it would have scared the shit out of me, too. But Stephanie didn’t know—she hadn’t taken the tour—and she literally dropped to the floor, both hands covering her mouth, the unmistakable look of horror on her face.

I didn’t hesitate. While she cowered in fear, repeating the name “Zachary,” I shoved her down flat so she landed on her stomach. She screamed when pieces of broken glass cut her hand.

And then I sat on her.

She stretched back, making short jabs with the dagger she still held, but I raised my foot and brought it down forcefully on her wrist.

She screamed again in pain and the shard tumbled from her bloody grasp.

I unwrapped the soaked scarf from around her hand and tied one end to her damaged hand. I grabbed at the other hand, yanked it behind her back, and roped her hands together. I continued to sit on her as she writhed under me, drooling and shouting profanities, her face twisted in agony. The splotch on her face was clearly evident.

Feeling like Horton the Elephant, I yelled toward the listening tube, “We’re in the Daisy Room! Get Mia to show you. Hurry!”

“On our way,” Brad’s steady voice came through the tube.

His was the first face I saw entering the Daisy Room door fewer than three minutes later. Good timing, as Stephanie was still kicking and screaming and trying to break free. Behind him were Mia, who I was sure led him here, plus Detective Melvin. Mia punched on the lights.

Brad lifted me off Stephanie, who seemed to have finally lost steam. Now that I had backup, she lay there silent, eyes closed, deflated as a morning-after party balloon.

Detective Luke Melvin knelt down and admired my homemade handcuffs, then removed the scarf and cuffed her with the real thing. Backup, in the form of two uniformed officers and two EMTs, arrived moments later. One EMT bandaged Stephanie’s wounds, while the officers read her her rights and placed her under arrest.

The other EMT wrapped my hand in gauze and tape, and checked my knee to see if I’d broken anything. My clothes were a bloody mess.

“You okay?” Brad asked gently.

“Yeah.” I glanced down at my bandaged hand and tried to wiggle my fingers. “I just hope I can play the kazoo again, or at least blow up a balloon again. If not, I may be out of business.” I grinned at my own version of the old joke to show him I was really all right.

Brad glanced around at all the broken glass. “Very funny. By the looks of things, she nearly killed you. How did she break the window?”

I hadn’t thought about it. “I don’t know . . .”

Detective Melvin interrupted. “With her heel,” he said. “See how the crack webbed out from that small hole?” He held up a portion of a pane that he’d retrieved from the other side of the window. “Then she found a big piece to . . .” He left off the rest of the sentence but the meaning was clear.

Brad looked at me in disbelief. “How did you manage to stay alive until we found you?”

“I kept her talking until I spotted the listening tube. You know how some women love to talk. Plus, I knew she was very superstitious, so I tried to scare her a little. Then you guys caught on and really played that up. Which reminds me, how did you bring Zachary back to life like that?”

“Duncan—that kid’s not only a skater and gamer, he’s an electronics wizard too,” Brad said. “He’s got voice-changer software on his computer and he used something called a voice comparator to create Zachary’s voice.”

I’m sure I looked completely baffled. He explained, “Basically, he called Zach’s cell phone and imported his recorded answering message. He used that as a reference for its pitch and timbre. Then he recorded his own voice, saying the word “Stephanie.” Finally he used the comparator to match the pitch and timbre with Zach’s. I thought it sounded pretty close to the answering machine message, especially for doing it on the spot like that.”

“Apparently, Stephanie did too—thank goodness. It scared her nearly to death.”

The EMT looked up at me. “You’re going to need stitches, ma’am,” the cute young EMT said, finishing his ministrations.