The Legend of Sleepy Harlow (18 page)

“What did Jacklyn tell you?”

“That she doesn’t believe any of this ghost hooey. Except for the video of Sleepy. That, she says, is as real as real can get.” In my head, I went over the scene we’d just watched. All told, it couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, so it wasn’t hard to recall it frame by frame.

“Whoever was there with Noreen, there’s no sign of him on the video,” I said. Of course, Hank already knew this, so there was no use waiting for him to respond. “I’d bet anything that whoever it was, he was dressed like Sleepy. Noreen was going to get more footage of Sleepy! Isn’t that what it sounded like to you? She said she was going to say something about feeling cold, then the person was supposed to walk in. That’s the only thing it could mean. Makes me wonder about that video she shot last year. It must have been phony, too.”

“Could that be something our murderer didn’t want anyone to find out about? That the ghost they claim they caught was nothing but a fake?”

I couldn’t help myself—for a second, I pictured Chandra roaming the island, ready to defend Sleepy’s ghostly reputation in any way she could. I didn’t dare mention the fantasy to Hank; he already had one of my friends under suspicion, and I didn’t want his brain latching on to any of the others.

“The ghost isn’t the only thing that’s a fake,” I told Hank. “If just about everybody in EGG thought that plasmometer was the be-all and end-all of ghost hunting, that means that Noreen was a fake, too. She lied to them about everything. The power of the plasmometer, and that video they shot last year, the one that made EGG famous. If one of them found out she faked it all . . . Well, I’ll tell you what, Hank, except for Jacklyn, these paranormal investigators take their jobs very seriously. If they found out Noreen wasn’t a believer and that she’d lied to them all, it just might be a motive for murder.”

Hank let go a long, low whistle at the same time that I mumbled, “Hell hath no fury like a ghost getter scorned.”

*   *   *

The EGG-head I really wanted to talk to was Liam, the group’s equipment tech, who should have been able to tell me more about the Turner Plasmometer. But when I got home from the police station, he was nowhere around. In fact, the house was empty except for Ben.

Or was it Eddie?

The cameraman—whichever cameraman it was—was sitting out on the front porch steps.

“Not filming today?” I asked.

He’d just finished a cigarette, and one look from me and he knew better than to flick the butt into my flower beds. He stubbed it out and set it on the toe of his sneaker. “Dimitri said we needed another break. Everybody pretty much scattered. I heard a few of them were going to head downtown to party.”

“You’re not a partier?”

“Thought I’d catch up on my reading.”

With his long, stringy, dark hair and a beard that looked as if it could use a good mowing, he didn’t exactly strike me as the reading type. But then, I am often surprised by readers and the books they enjoy.

“Anything interesting?” I asked him.

His hand shot to the thick book on the steps next to him. “Technical stuff. Once this show is up and going and I have a few bucks in my pocket, I’m hoping to finish my MFA in film at UCLA.”

Like I said, people are full of surprises.

But then, there are people who say I am, too.

I plunked down on the step next to . . . er . . . Ben.

“So you’re a guy with a great imagination. You must be, or you wouldn’t be getting your graduate degree in film. So what do you think of it all?”

“You mean Noreen’s murder?” He lit another cigarette but, thank goodness, he had the good sense to exhale in the other direction. “If the cops ever figure out what happened, I’m gonna turn it into a screenplay.”

I hoped I looked impressed. “Not just that. What about the whole paranormal investigation show? Jacklyn told me she fakes her way through it.”

“Jacklyn.” When he snorted, a stream of smoke shot out his nose. “Not my favorite subject.”

“I thought Noreen was the one nobody liked.”

“True.” He tapped ash into the flowers, and I found myself hoping that cigarette ash contained magical properties that could keep cats away. “It’s not everybody who doesn’t like talking about Jacklyn. That would be just me.”

A brief picture flashed through my mind: gorgeous, musky Jacklyn and this scarecrow of a camera guy. “You and Jacklyn . . . ?”

“Yup.” He tipped back his head and it didn’t take an ounce of imagination to know he was picturing what I’d just been picturing. Only in Technicolor and with surround sound. “She’s something, huh? Way better in bed than Noreen ever was.”

I nearly choked. “You’re telling me that you and Noreen . . . ?”

“Come off it! Just because you live on an island in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean you’re some prude. Not a cute chick like you!” He gave me a smile. “Yeah, Noreen and I, we’d hook up once in a while.”

“But it didn’t last. Who broke it off?”

He shrugged. “Her? Me? I honestly can’t say. I can say that Noreen was demanding. She wanted to be the boss. And it’s one thing, you know, when you’re in front of the camera or you’re leading a ghost hunt. Then somebody’s got to be in charge. I get that. But in real life, it’s not supposed to operate like that. There’s supposed to be give and take.”

“And Noreen wanted to take but not give.”

“You got that right.” Done with that cigarette, he added the butt to the one on his shoe top.

“But Jacklyn was different?”

“More girly, you know?” There was that look again. Dreamy, drunken, besotted. It might not have been true love, but I had no doubt there was a whole lot of true lust going on.

“That’s why Noreen didn’t like her.”

“Noreen didn’t like anyone.”

I thought about the snippet of video I’d seen back at the police station and what Noreen had said to the person off camera about how that person shouldn’t be angry anymore. “Was there anyone Noreen didn’t like more than anyone else lately?” I asked him. “Someone she’d been fighting with?”

Eddie . . . er . . . Ben barked out a laugh. “Who wasn’t she fighting with? Every minute of every day, Noreen found someone, somewhere to get into it with. She didn’t like the way we stood when we shot video. She didn’t agree with the sound tech when she listened to his recordings. She didn’t like the way Dimitri did the intro on one of our spots or the research Rick and David found out about a site we were investigating. I’ll tell you what, I’ve never met a person anywhere who was as miserable as Noreen. And she let the world know it.”

“Who was the latest person?”

He shot me a look. “You mean before she died? If you ask me, it’s a toss-up. Dimitri was steaming mad at her.”

“Because of the magazine article she published that used all his research.”

“You know about that?” I can’t say for sure, but I think he was impressed. “Then you know David went looking for him Wednesday night and Dimitri wasn’t around.”

“David mentioned it.”

“And you know about Thursday morning, too, right?” He rubbed a finger under his nose. “Maybe you don’t know. You weren’t around Thursday morning.”

“I left breakfast for all of you.”

“Yeah, well, obviously Noreen didn’t make it to the table.”

“Obviously.”

“But you know, Dimitri didn’t, either.”

This was news, and I guess the sudden gleam in my eye told Ben . . . er . . . never mind! I guess the gleam in my eye told the cameraman as much. “I bet David didn’t mention it because the way I remember it, he came down late,” he said. “He couldn’t say who was there before him and who wasn’t. But I was the first one down, see. I’m usually an early riser. I never saw hide nor hair of Dimitri that morning.”

“He wasn’t in his room Wednesday night, and he wasn’t back Thursday morning.” I thought back to when I’d run into him at the park. He’d been walking back from the ferry dock with Jacklyn and I’d just assumed he’d gone to meet her. But what if—

“Do you know where he went?” I asked the cameraman.

“Not a clue. I do know he was plenty mad at Noreen on account of that magazine article. What do they call that on the cop shows on TV? Motive? Dimitri, he had plenty of motive.”

And opportunity, it sounded like.

But then, maybe he wasn’t the only one. “And Jacklyn—she didn’t like Noreen, either.”

“Believe me, the feeling was mutual,” the cameraman said. No big news there. “Jacklyn and Noreen were like oil and water. All crazy, all the time.”

“That’s why Noreen tossed Jacklyn out of EGG.”

“And that’s why Noreen started spreading dirt about her and Dimitri.”

“Noreen and Dimitri?” Even my imagination wasn’t good enough to picture that.

Apparently, the cameraman knew it, because a grin split his beard. “It wasn’t true,” he said. “Not a word of it. But Noreen, she knew she could get Jacklyn’s goat. Even after Jacklyn was gone, I heard Noreen would text her with Dimitri this and Dimitri that. You know, like the two of them were an item. I know Jacklyn called once or twice and the two of them went at it over the phone, and I hear they had some pretty epic text fights. Between that and the screaming that went on when Noreen gave Jacklyn the boot . . . Lordy, those girls were at each other twenty-four-seven.”

“And still, Jacklyn says she came here to thank Noreen for giving her the opportunity to take the soap opera job.”

He gave me a sharp look. “You think? The way I heard it, that job out in Hollywood wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and she showed up here to beg for her old job back. And it worked, didn’t it? Jacklyn got her old job back, all right.”

“But only because Noreen is dead.”

“Dead and gone.” Ben . . . er . . . Eddie plucked the cigarette butts into one hand and stood and turned toward the house, and in an effort (a subtle one, I hope) to block his path, I got up, too, and climbed one step.

“So Noreen and Jacklyn hated each other.” I stated the obvious. “But there’s no way Jacklyn could have killed her. She wasn’t on the island until after Noreen was dead.”

“Well, it all depends who you hear the story from.”

Electricity zinged through me. “Are you telling me Jacklyn was here on Wednesday?”

“I can’t say. Not for sure. I can tell you that when we were coming back from the winery, we were driving through town, and there’s this bar with the big windows that look out over the park.”

I knew which bar he was talking about.

“And there was a woman sitting there, and a guy across the table from her. And this flare went up in my brain. That’s the way it happens when I’m thinking about story and camera angles and things like that. In that one instant the whole scene flashed in front of my eyes and . . . Well, you won’t get it. People who aren’t involved with film never do.”

“Try me,” I suggested.

He drew in a breath. “The first thing I thought of was that the scene had great atmosphere. A couple talking in a bar. Soft light spilling from overhead. The trees outside and the way the wind blew them around and the way their reflection in the window swayed and made the whole thing look as if had been filmed underwater. And it happened in just a heartbeat. You know, the way these things sometimes do. I remember thinking how perfect it all was, because say what you will about her, but Jacklyn is a gorgeous woman, and I remember thinking it was perfect because she was in the scene.” He shook himself as he must have done that night.

“And then we were already past the bar and I couldn’t get another look and I told myself I was imagining things. The lady in the bar, maybe she just looked like Jacklyn.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “But it could have been her.”

The cameraman laughed. “Now you sound like you just stepped out of the script of one of those cop shows. Yeah, if I was under oath, I’d have to admit that it could have been her. But she says she wasn’t on the island when Noreen was killed, and if that’s what Jacklyn says . . .”

“Not a liar, huh?”

He slid me a look. “I didn’t say that. Let’s just say that I don’t think she’d lie unless she had a real good reason to lie.”

“A really good reason like murder?”

“Hey, I never said that, either. I only know that Noreen being dead and Jacklyn sleeping with Dimitri, it’s all worked in her favor. It’s getting her second billing on the show and plenty of time in front of the camera. But then, that’s the thing about Jacklyn, see? Jacklyn gets what Jacklyn wants, and that girl, she wants to be a star.”

  17  

I
t wasn’t hard to find a photograph of Jacklyn online. Whoever was in charge of the EGG website was on the ball and had already added her to the team. Aside from announcing the first episode of
Ghost Getters
, the site featured pictures and bios of each team member.

Well, except for Fiona.

I printed out the picture and raced off to town, and just a little while after I left the B and B, I was standing in the bar that the cameraman had told me about.

“That’s her, all right.” The bartender was a crusty middle-aged guy named Barry whom I’d met at various and sundry Chamber of Commerce functions. He had a head like a bullet and a crop of silver hair. “Hard to forget a girl that pretty. She sat right over there.” He poked his chin toward the windows that looked out over the park. “She was with some guy who wore sunglasses the whole time. Imagine that! The middle of the night, and the guy was wearing sunglasses. You’d think he was some kind of movie star or something. Had on one of those hats, too. You know, the kind with the brim all the way around. Like Indiana Jones.”

“You didn’t happen to catch his name?”

I knew it was too much to ask, so honestly, I shouldn’t have been disappointed when Barry grunted. “I did hear him say something about the airport, though. Looks like he didn’t come over on one of the ferries. Flew in, and said he was flying out, too, as soon as him and that good-looking babe . . .” He slid another look at Jacklyn’s photo. “Said he was flying out as soon as they were done doing their business. And it’s not like I was eavesdropping or anything. I just happened to be cleaning up the table next to where they were sitting, and I heard what he said, see, and that’s when I told him there aren’t any lights at our airport. No planes in or out at night.”

“What did he think of that?”

Barry grabbed a toothpick from the bar and stuck it between his teeth. “Didn’t seem to much care. Said he’d find someone to take him back to the mainland on a boat if that’s what it took.”

“Did he?”

“I sent him over to Pat Bakersfield. You know the guy.”

I did.

“Pat isn’t fussy when it comes to how he can make a few extra bucks. I knew he’d take the guy back to the mainland if that’s what he wanted. And if he paid enough.”

It’s a no-brainer where I went next.

I found Pat Bakersfield touching up the blue stripes painted on the side of his boat at the private marina near the yacht club.

“I made quite a killing that night!” The sun brushed the western horizon, and when Pat grinned, the light gleamed against his teeth. “Got a call from Barry about the one guy who wanted to get to the mainland, and then I got another fare, too. What are the chances? Two guys who need to go to the mainland fast at the end of October! All told, I made a fast five hundred bucks. Charged each of them one-fifty, and the older guy, the guy with the hat, he gave me a two-hundred-dollar tip when we got to Sandusky.” He leaned in and elbowed me in the ribs. “Five hundred. Cash. Tax-free.”

“The guy Barry sent over, did he say what his name was?”

“I didn’t ask.” Pat dabbed his paintbrush to the stripe that outlined the railing of his sleek yellow and blue cigarette racing boat. “I mean, when a guy’s wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night, seems to me the whole point is that he doesn’t want people to know who he is.”

“And the other guy?”

“Him? Oh, I seen him around. He was at the bar the other night. And that night it rained, he and a bunch of other dumbbells were walking around outside the hotel, like they were looking for something.”

Something like ghosts?

I couldn’t afford to make a mistake, so I tried not to lead Pat on in any way. “Describe him,” I said.

“Good-looking guy. Dark. Young. But there must have been something wrong with him. I thought before we got to Sandusky, he was going to cough up a lung.”

*   *   *

Two days before Halloween, and the day dawned in appropriate fashion. The blue skies over the island were polka-dotted with fat gray clouds, and a chill breeze held the promise of colder days to come. Leaves danced through the air in a rainbow swirl, and when they landed, they raced each other down the road and piled in crispy mounds against rocks and tree trunks and my front steps.

In between making about a dozen phone calls, I’d been busy the night before putting what I hoped were the last touches on Marianne’s manuscript. I should have been tired, but truth be told, I felt energized and, for the first time in nearly a week, encouraged.

I had two viable suspects in Noreen’s murder. Neither of whom was Kate. And even more importantly, I knew how I was going to figure out which of them—Dimitri or Jacklyn—was the murderer.

The first expert who would help me put my plan into action was a young, savvy guy named Aaron, who arrived long before breakfast. I explained to him what I wanted to do, and Aaron, who came highly recommended, told me exactly what it was all going to cost. To my credit, I hyperventilated for only a couple minutes. When I finished catching my breath, we struck a deal that included me paying all the expenses for him and his team, including lodging and meals for the weekend. Aaron made the calls and arranged for technicians to come and go throughout the day, their presence (I hoped) explained away as merely visits from electricians and plumbers, a painter, and a guy who was there to check the foundation on the garage. By the time the ghost getters got to the breakfast table, Aaron was in my private suite taking care of the details, and I was ready with a platter of still-warm sweet rolls.

I set the rolls on the table, where I’d already put out a couple of carafes of coffee, as well as yogurt and fruit, and watched as, one by one, the members of EGG were captivated by the enticing aroma of cinnamon. Their eyes opened a little wider. They sat up a little straighter. David was the first one to reach for the rolls. He took two and passed the serving dish to Liam, who took three. I called into the kitchen to Meg to put another batch of rolls into the oven and made my move.

“Dimitri, I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

He had just taken a bite of his cinnamon roll and he had gooey cream cheese and powdered sugar icing on his lips. “Go ahead,” he said.

Was I a good enough actress to pull this off? I hesitated for what I hoped was an appropriate amount of time. “I feel a little silly,” I admitted. For a woman who is a lot of things, but never silly, this was something of an effort. “I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I don’t believe in ghosts or anything, but something happened here last night, and . . .”

Dimitri might still be working on his first cup of coffee, but I guess ghost hunters have an instinct about these sorts of things. He sat up like a shot, his dark eyes aglow. “Are you saying—?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying, only that I saw something last night, and I can’t explain it. Not rationally, anyway.”

By now, I had everyone’s attention. But then, that’s pretty easy to do when you’ve got ghost getters gathered at your dining room table and you’re suddenly talking about things that go bump in the night.

There was an empty seat between David and Liam, and I dropped into it, the better to look around the table and make sure I had all of EGG’s attention. “I thought I heard something during the night, you see, like footsteps. And I figured it was one of you, and I got up to see what you needed, and . . .” Was the shiver too much? Apparently not, because, done shivering, I saw that all their gazes were glued to me. “There was something . . . someone . . . in the parlor. Not a person. Not a real person. I just saw a sort of . . .” This time, I tried a shrug. “It was a misty sort of—”

“An apparition!” Rick’s eyes lit. David’s hands grasped the table. Dimitri looked very much like one of those marble statues I’d thought of when I’d first seen him. Frozen in time.

Fiona’s cheeks were bright with color, and I swear, both Ben and Eddie would have gotten up right then and there and gone for their cameras if they weren’t afraid they’d miss something I had to say.

Jacklyn? Don’t think I didn’t notice that she simply sat back and gave me a squint-eyed look that made me think she was wondering what I was up to.

I ignored her.

“It walked out of the parlor and up the stairs and”—I wrapped my arms around myself—“when I went to follow it, it just . . . well, if I told anyone else this, I know they’d think I was crazy, but you all . . . you all believe me, don’t you? When I went to follow it, it just disappeared. I don’t believe in ghosts. At least I never have. And now I’m wondering . . . I mean, this is an old house, and after everything you’ve all said about limestone and flowing water and trapped energy . . . what I was wondering is that if you’re not busy tonight and you’re looking for a place to do an investigation . . .”

I didn’t need to finish the sentence. Before I went to get the next batch of cinnamon rolls, they were already talking about where they’d set up cameras and tape recorders for the ghost hunt at Bea & Bees, and everything was moving forward.

Just the way I wanted it to.

*   *   *

I couldn’t invite Chandra to join me because she would have been so darned excited about the very idea of ghosts at the B and B that she wouldn’t sit still. Or keep quiet. Or believe me when I explained that everything that was about to happen was carefully choreographed, completely staged, and totally phony. Chandra, see, is a true believer, and besides, from what I’d been told, she was planning on spending the evening on her last-minute Halloween preparations. In Chandra’s world, there are never too many jack-o’-lanterns, pumpkin-shaped cookies, or treat bags filled to the brim that she—resplendent in her witch garb—would hand out at the big party in the park in two nights.

Luella, too, was not available. According to the weather forecast, these were the last fine days of fall weather, and Luella had been out on the lake all day, fishing for walleye in the deepest waters near the Canadian border. I couldn’t possibly ask her to sacrifice sleep in the name of my spooky scheme.

That left Kate, and since she was the one I most wanted with me that evening, it made as much sense inviting her as it did having Hank join us.

By seven o’clock, when I promised EGG that I would be gone and they’d have the B and B completely to themselves until the wee hours of the morning, the three of us had snuck into my garage via the back door. We joined Aaron and a phalanx of technicians and the equipment they’d tucked away in there during the day when I made sure the ghost getters were so busy planning their attack on my supposedly haunted digs that they couldn’t pay any attention to what was going on outside.

Hank hovered behind Aaron, who was monitoring a bank of screens where feeds showed us each room of my house. “Are you sure this is going to work?” he asked. “Aren’t they going to know we’re watching?”

“No way!” Aaron shook his head. “We’ve got cameras in clocks, cameras in air vents, cameras in light fixtures. From what I saw when I was in there with Bea and pretending to be a painter”—he had loved playing along with the little game, and he gave me a smile—“those paranormal investigators might think they’re hot stuff, but they don’t have a clue or the cash to work with equipment nearly as sophisticated as what I have. It’s surveillance equipment, just like the stuff the feds use. No way they’re ever going to notice equipment that small.”

“You arranged all this? For me?” Kate glanced from the video screens to another table where another technician wearing headphones was listening to—and recording—every word spoken by my resident ghost getters. “It must have cost a fortune.”

She was right, but I waved away her concern. If I couldn’t use my money to help my friends, what was it for?

Another technician, this one a soft-spoken Brit named Terry, hurried by. “We’re set,” he told me. “As soon as you say the word.”

I stepped closer to the screens and watched as, inside, Dimitri gave his crew last-minute instructions.

“I don’t think we want anything to happen too soon,” I told my own crew. “That will look too fake.”

“Like it isn’t fake?” Kate rolled her eyes.

“Like we can’t let them catch on,” I told her.