Jeanne Glidewell - Lexie Starr 03 - Haunted (2 page)

I really didn’t want to hear my daughter say the word “dead” one more time. She had to be mistaken. Walter Sneed was a college kid from here in Rockdale, Missouri. He’d been going door to door last week, looking for part-time work to make a little extra cash to help with college expenses. He’d shoveled snow out of the driveway before, and I knew he was a hard worker, and a good, polite young man.

So we hired him to lie in a makeshift coffin and jump up occasionally to scare young customers as they traipsed through the Alexandria Inn. He wore a vampire costume, complete with fake fanged teeth. He had drops of fake blood all over his shirt, and a part of a wooden stake stitched into his costume to appear as if he’d been stabbed in the heart with it. It was a very realistic-looking, gruesome costume, and I was proud of it.

My boyfriend, Stone Van Patten, had recently purchased the old turn-of-the-century mansion, and restored it as a bed and breakfast. It had been my idea to turn it into a haunted house during the Halloween season, primarily to promote business at the inn and familiarize the town with the establishment. Ours was the only free haunted house in town. I thought it would be a lot of fun, and the young kids in Rockdale would really enjoy it. But this was certainly not what I had in mind, not by a long shot!

I hurried to the parlor, nearly tripping over a hard plastic tombstone in the process. Wendy must have dropped it when she noticed Walter was not moving, or even breathing. Walter was indeed stiff-as-a-board dead. I’d hoped Wendy was just being melodramatic, even though she wasn’t prone to lying, and she was not that great an actress either. At twenty-eight, she was working as a deputy coroner, or assistant to the county coroner in St. Joseph. St. Joseph was just a few miles from our location in Rockdale. Anything we couldn’t find in Rockdale, we could find in St. Joseph.

Wendy was scrutinizing Walter’s body as it lay prostrate in the coffin. Wendy had a tendency to find death fascinating, particularly if foul play was involved. I hadn’t raised her to be so morbid, but then again, I couldn’t force her to become a pediatrician as I would have preferred. She’d told me that although she really loved children, she wasn’t so wild about them when they were ill. She didn’t think there was anything lovable about a child with a nose dripping down into its socks, or a cough that was nearly always directed right at someone’s face. Still, I’d dreamed she would save young lives, not cut up ones that couldn’t be saved.

“What happened to him?” I asked. After all, finding the cause of death was Wendy’s forte, not mine. Surely she could tell by just looking at him what had caused his death.

“Somebody must have killed him.”

“How do you know he was killed, Wendy?”

“Well, actually, I don’t,” she conceded, as disappointment flashed across her face. “But he’s awfully young to just up and die like this, don’t you think? He didn’t seem to be having any pain or discomfort when I last talked to him, which wasn’t all that long ago. I asked him if he wanted to take a break for lunch, and he told me he’d already eaten so would just rest while he waited for the haunted house to open back up for business.”

“Uh-huh. So what happened to him?” I asked again.

“I’m not sure yet. Nothing obvious stands out. There doesn’t seem to be any stabbing or gunshot wounds, and no signs of strangulation,” she said, as she looked for ligature marks around his neck. I was a little taken aback at how excited, almost giddy, Wendy sounded.

“Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet, though, so he hasn’t been dead very long, Mom. This is unbelievable.” Wendy sounded as if she’d just discovered a treasure chest full of gold doubloons, instead of a corpse in the parlor. “Have you got your phone, Mom? We need to call nine-one-one, even though it’s too late for him to be resuscitated.”

I shook my head, as I had left my phone in the kitchen. I could hear Stone’s footsteps coming down the hall and knew he always carried his cell phone in his front pants pocket. He’d no doubt contact the authorities once he was made aware of the situation.

I noticed now Walter’s lips looked pale; his skin had a bluish, waxy appearance. He was a tall, thin guy with strawberry-blond hair and a very light complexion. He suddenly looked older than his twenty years. But then, death can do that to a person.

“What’s going on in here?” I heard behind me.

I turned to see Stone standing in the doorway, a look of apprehension on his face. His almost translucent light blue eyes looked into mine as he ran his fingers lightly through his silver hair. It took him a little while to speak as he observed us leaning over the coffin.

“Is something wrong with Walter?” he asked. “Is he sick?”

I thought carefully for a few seconds. What was the best way to break this to him? He had already had one man, a guest named Horatio Prescott, killed on the premises not awfully long ago. That untimely murder had occurred on the first night the inn was open for business, which wasn’t the best way to celebrate a grand opening. It took a while for the establishment to get over the stigma of being the scene of a violent murder, an extremely rare event in Rockdale. It then took months to begin to build up a clientele. News of another death here at the inn would not sit lightly with Stone, because it would surely cause a stir in this small community.

“He’s dead!” Wendy blurted out. Subtlety was not one of her assets.

“Oh, my God! Not again,” Stone gasped. “Why do people keep dying in the Alexandria Inn? Is the inn cursed? Poor Walter! He’s so young. Was he ill? Wendy, please tell me he was asthmatic and suffered a sudden asthma attack. I’ve known of people younger than Walter who’ve died suddenly of aneurysms.”

“I wish I could tell you it was probably an aneurysm, Stone,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s very likely he had an aneurysm, asthma, or any other chronic illness. But then again, anything is possible. Professional athletes die suddenly on occasion from a wide variety of causes. Walter seemed like the picture of health to me. He was on the college basketball team, and ran cross-country in high school. He told me that just this morning. He also mentioned he was a strict vegetarian.”

“I sure hope some freak ailment killed Walter. Is there any reason to think otherwise? Is there any sign of foul play, Wendy?” Stone asked. He obviously was not interested in the young man’s eating habits. As things stood, avoiding meat had not prolonged his life.

“Not as far as I can tell,” she said. “There’s no apparent reason to suspect there was foul play involved, yet I do suspect it, for some reason.”

“Should I try CPR? How long ago did he stop breathing?” Stone asked Wendy. He was still hoping Walter could be saved, could somehow come back from the dead, and the crisis averted.

“I don’t know, but it’s too late for CPR. He’s gone and has been for a while, or I would have already started CPR. We practiced it on dummies in one of my college courses. Feel his skin. His skin is blue, and he’s cold as a fish.”

“Shouldn’t we call nine-one-one?” Stone asked, shock still apparent on his face. Not waiting for a response, he pulled his cell phone out of the pocket of his trousers, and punched in the number. As he dialed, he said to me, “Close down the haunted house. Quickly! Get everyone out of the inn. And don’t let any kids into the parlor. Something like this could traumatize them for life. It’s traumatic enough for me.”

“There are no kids in the house right now, Stone,” I assured him. “We’re closed for lunch. But we’ll put up ‘closed’ signs and tell any waiting guests we’ve had to shut down because of an emergency.”

“Don’t tell them why we had to close down. Just say something important has come up. Be vague if anybody asks. We don’t want the news of Walter’s death to leak out before the next-of-kin are notified,” Stone said.

Wendy and I sprang into action. The Alexandria Haunted House, which had just opened the previous day, was officially closed for business.

Chapter 2

My name is Alexandria Starr, or Lexie for short. I’m a forty-nine-year-old widow, soon to be at the over-the-hill, ripe old age of fifty. My husband, Chester, died when our daughter, Wendy, was seven. I’ve always felt I did a really good job of rearing her as a single mother. After all, she is a college graduate, has not experienced any out-of-wedlock pregnancies, has never been arrested and, to my knowledge, has only experimented with drugs one time. Having a daughter who smoked one marijuana joint at a prom party certainly doesn’t make me a bad mother. And anybody could get two speeding tickets in one week from the same police officer, in the same school zone, with just a stroke of bad luck. All in all, in my unbiased opinion, I have produced a very decent human being, an upstanding citizen, a proud American, and a wonderful daughter. It is probably my biggest accomplishment to date, and one I take great pride in.

I still live part-time in my own home in Shawnee, Kansas, where I had been volunteering as an assistant librarian at a small local library a couple of days each week. It was a nice way to pass my spare time, and it gave me an opportunity to read new books as soon as they arrived at the library. But because of the location of the inn, and because the Alexandria Inn wasn’t needing seasonal help currently, I was putting in fewer and fewer volunteer hours at the library. I felt a little guilty about it, but right now Stone needed me more critically than the library did. I hadn’t even found time to read a book in weeks. I was lucky to get the newspaper read each morning.

I now spend most of my time in Rockdale with Stone, operating the Alexandria Inn, which Stone had named after me. We aren’t married, but we both assume marriage will be the next step in our relationship. Neither of us is quite ready to take that step yet. We are pretty content with the current situation, so why fix something that’s not broken?

Stone is a bit older than me at fifty-seven, and we both carry around a few extra pounds on our shorter than average frames. Before moving to the Midwest, Stone had been a jeweler in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We’d first met when he helped me replace the charms on a beloved charm bracelet Wendy had lost. Technically we’d met over the Internet, but I hesitate to tell anybody that. It sounds so reckless and irresponsible.

When we first met in person during my trip back east the previous year, Stone told me he’d lost his wife of many years to cancer. Stone and I hit it off almost instantly. Shortly afterward, he sold his business there to be closer to me, and found a way to spend his time and make a little income in a small town within an hour of Shawnee.

The expansive historic home he refurbished into the bed and breakfast of today consists of two upper floors of suites, some with shared bathrooms. On the ground floor there’s a large parlor, complete with a grand piano; a dining room with a table that seats twelve people; and an ample kitchen. It also has a huge living room with lots of seating and a television with a fifty-five inch screen. In the rear of the house are three more bedrooms, each with their own bath. A cozy, well-stocked library completes the array of rooms in the inn.

From the outside, the inn still resembles an old-fashioned Victorian mansion, erected in the late 1890s. The palatial home, which was built by a wealthy landowner, had employed a lot of local laborers to complete the structure. It covered half the block, and boasted an immaculate lawn with a fountain, centrally located in the circular driveway, and numerous flowerbeds. Filling the flowerbeds now was a variety of fall foliage, such as chrysanthemums and red salvia plants. Several sugar maples scattered across the lawn had already lost their brilliantly colored autumn leaves.

Like me, Stone was pretty well set financially and didn’t have to make a lot of money to get by. His investments provided him with a sizable monthly income. He also carried the mortgage on the jewelry business he’d sold to one of his employees, so he received monthly mortgage checks and benefited from the interest on the loan.

But he needed something to do to keep him busy. He wasn’t the type of person to enjoy hobbies, although he occasionally spoke of wanting to take up golf, more for the exercise than anything else. Despite his intentions, he still couldn’t tell anybody what a mulligan or a double bogey was. He had yet to beat me in a game of Putt-Putt, and I had a tendency to bounce putts off the cars out in the parking lot.

We held hands now and spoke softly while we waited for the authorities to show up. We were speculating on the circumstances around Walter’s demise when we heard a loud rap on the front door. It was the local police responding to our call. Looking out the window I noticed that numerous emergency vehicles now filled up our driveway, from an ambulance to a pumper truck. The entire Rockdale Police Department, and that of several small surrounding towns, must have responded too, judging by the number of cop cars lined up and down the street.