The Realm of the Shadows (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 2) (13 page)

“Honey, I don’t know why the buyer backed out, but I can sure make a guess,” Rocky said.

I was all settled in with a cup of coffee in my hand and my feet up on the desk. “You’re the real estate expert,” I said. “Give it your best shot.”

“Lance Skinner.”

I took a moment to connect the dots, but they just weren’t connecting. “Lance Skinner doesn’t want me to sell my house? Come on, Rocky. Do you seriously think he cares about real estate deals where the sale price has less than six zeroes?”

“I don’t mean he wants to buy your place, Taylor. I mean the fact that he’s scouted around the area and is probably about to announce a big deal is scaring your buyer off. They’re an older couple, looking for a quiet place to retire where the husband can work on his antique cars. Your property was perfect, with a nice little house and the old shelter building right there for his workshop. But they don’t want some big golf course and resort hotel going in just down the road from them. It would change the whole character of Tropical Breeze.”

When we’d talked about it at the diner a few days before, Rocky had been excited about Skinner and his mega developments. Now that she’d had time to think about it, it seemed she’d changed her mind.

“Is there a possibility that if the rumors about Skinner come to nothing, they’d still be interested?”

“We-ell, maybe. I tried to get their agent to tell me if they’d found another place they liked better, and she hedged a lot, but I got the feeling that wasn’t it. So maybe they’ll still be in the market.”

“But I need to get my equity out of the place
now
,” I fretted. “I needed this deal to go through.”

Rocky sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. All we can do is get back in there and find another buyer. I’m gonna do my best, Taylor.”

“I know.”

“Well, thanks for being so understanding. I’d like to pull out my little pearl-handled pistol and
make
them buy your place, but there’s some silly law that says I can’t.”

I chuckled. What else could I do? Anyway, by the time we hung up, we were at peace with one another again, and that was good. I hate conflict, especially with people I like. I put my feet back on the floor, leaned my elbows on the desk and rubbed my forehead. Time to do laundry. It was going to be nice having something easy to deal with for a change.

I’m not a big fan of housekeeping, but I have to admit, there is something soothing about repetitive, unchallenging tasks. Sweeping a broom around, stroke by stroke, gathering up all the dust and sand and making a neat little pile of it is gratifying on some deep level. Dishwashing is the same way. I’d never give up my dishwasher, but when I have to do dishes by hand, I don’t actually mind so much. And, of course, there’s laundry. Even if you don’t have to take it down to the stream and pound it on a rock, there’s some work involved. But there’s something hypnotic about the hum of the machines, and a feeling of accomplishment in piling up fresh-smelling, warm towels and putting them neatly away.

Laundry at the shelter is pretty constant. Blankets, cleaning towels, washable plush beds, you name it – you fold up a clean load to put away and here comes somebody with a push-basket full of dirty towels. Volunteers come in every day of the week to help out, and still we barely keep up with it. We run our machines pretty hard at the shelter, and I constantly bless the heart of the donor who gave them to us.

I got the three washing machines going and started sorting another basket of dirty laundry. My thoughts began to drift as the noise of the machines shut out any other noises from the shelter. A few stray thoughts came together in a new way while I stood there, and I paused with a dirty towel in my hands. Then I slowly put the towel back into the basket and leaned against a washer, absorbing the vibrations of the spin cycle.

Pull the thread. Pull toward yourself. The puzzle will unravel. A thread will come into your hand.
Hmmm. I thought I suddenly understood what she had meant about pulling the thread
toward myself
. It was about me after all. The tangle of knots led back to me . . . .

When the savage buzzer went off in my ear, I nearly screamed. The end-of-load signals on the machines are set as loud as they can go, and the washer was done. Within another half-minute, the next machine buzzed, and then the next.

“Okay, okay,” I told the washers. After that I stopped daydreaming and got the laundry done.

I woke up Saturday morning secure in the knowledge that Teddy Force and his gang of believers had moved on to the next carnival of souls and we could get back to normal. For once Charlie and his crew seemed to be making progress, and I began to think about paying Edson off and thanking him for at least helping us deal with the TV people, even if he hadn’t solved the other mysteries.

Of course, things are never that easy. Nothing had been explained as far as the lady in the loft or the vandal in the graveyard, but I just wanted to be done with it.

“Do you think there’s a chance the stuff we’ve been experiencing had something to do with Teddy’s crew?” I asked in a hopeful way at breakfast. Myrtle was taking her tea and toast on the veranda that morning. Discipline was slipping fast, I realized, but if discipline was going to keep her always at my side, attentive and interfering, then let it slip.

Michael pursed his lips. “Boy, wouldn’t that be nice,” he said, but I could see he was doubtful. “Then it would be over.”

“We thought from the beginning that it was just prowlers, or pranks. Maybe it was all a set-up to give Teddy a chance to come to Cadbury House and do a show. After all, I’m still convinced that Seth’s drowning was the result of a set-up that went wrong.”

Before Michael could say anything, we heard a knocking at the French doors, and looked up to see Charlie, grinning like a maniac.

I let him in.

“They’re gone again,” he yelled, waving a roll of blueprints.

“What is?”

“The blueprints.”

“Then what’s that?” I asked, nodding toward the roll of long papers in his hand.

“I made a copy! I made
lots
of copies, and I hid them where nobody but me and Tripp can find them. But the ones we’ve been working from were taken from my truck last night. Gone. Poof.” He started laughing, and I didn’t like the look in his eye. “Who cares? I have back up,” he cried, waving the roll triumphantly. “Take all you want – help yourself – I’ve got all
kinds
of copies. Damn it, I was ready for him. Take
that
, whoever you are!”

He left, after fixing me with a maniacal look.

Michael was still at the breakfast bar, and I turned to stare at him.

“The man is being driven insane by all of this,” Michael said.

“I guess Edson is still on the job after all.”

Once I had a chance to think about it, I went out to find Tripp. He was in the cattery, supervising the cutting of an interior pass-through. Taking him outside, I asked him about the blueprints.

“Where was your dad’s truck when they were stolen? At your house in town?”

“No. Here. We spent the night in the barn. After what happened the night before, we felt we had to. Listen, is Mr. Darby-Deaver making any progress?”

“Not that I know of. Did anything happen in the barn last night to upset Charlie?”

His gaze drifted away. Then he said, “I don’t know. He was in the loft. He won’t let me come up there anymore. He seemed okay when he came down this morning, but when he took a look in the truck, he went off again.”

I hesitated, letting this all sink in. Then I made a sudden decision, and patted Tripp’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry. I’m going over to the cemetery to talk to Ed right now.”

I’d hoped that would reassure Tripp, but it didn’t seem to. He told me half-heartedly that he appreciated it, and went back to work.

Ed was asleep in his folding chair at the cemetery, which wasn’t reassuring. He told me that he was such a light sleeper, if somebody had been sneaking around, he would’ve awakened. “Like I did the other night,” he reminded me. I wasn’t going to argue, and I guess I had to be grateful he was so dedicated he’d be willing to sit around in a cemetery night after night. You can’t exactly find guys like that in the want ads. Still, it made me see more clearly how helpless we really were against this thing, with Ed as our first line of defense.

And, as I’d been afraid would happen for days, Michael and I had a huge fight, and not about Ed. It was something not nearly so simple and easy to deal with.

“So what are you up to today?” I asked Michael when I got back into the house.

“Golf. My buddies and I lucked into a cancellation; you
never
get tee time on that course on a Saturday morning.”

“
Again
?”

He looked at me like a startled child. Myrtle glared at me like whatever she is. I glared at both of them.

“How can you play golf when my whole world is in chaos? Charlie’s losing his mind – Ed’s been asleep on the job in the cemetery – and you’re going
golfing
?”

He’d recovered himself and assumed an infuriating dignity. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said quietly, with a tiny tilt of the head toward Myrtle. “I’m not going to keep my friends waiting and make them play ahead without me just because you’ve chosen this moment to pitch a fit.”

I don’t remember what I yelled after him as he was leaving, and I don’t want to. To pick an argument with the man I loved at precisely the moment I needed him the most was stupid. Turning and seeing the look on Myrtle’s face didn’t help matters, and on top of all that, I found myself under a crushing load of guilt when he came back that night and said he’d quit his foursome. He wouldn’t be playing golf at all anymore, at least not for the foreseeable future.

“Did you have a fight with them, too?” I asked, not too nicely, not ready to admit that I was the one who had picked our fight in the first place.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said coldly. “As you’re so quick to point out, you’ve got enough worries of your own.”

I couldn’t believe at the time that Michael was being so foolish as to quit golfing with his friends just to play the martyr with me. He’d been playing with those guys for years – as long as I could remember – and some of them were important men around town (or at least big fish in a small pond). Bud Kady was the City Planning Commissioner, and Wesley Carter was the Mayor. Michael was on the City Council, and he was going to have to face both of them at every meeting from now on. Benny Wheaton was a retired banker, but he was out having eye surgery. I didn’t think to ask who the man was who’d made up the foursome. Actually, I didn’t care.

Exasperated, I turned away and got busy with my own plans. I had decided that it was time I crashed the party in the barn. I was spending the night in the loft with Charlie. He might be able to order his son to stay out of the loft, but he couldn’t do that with me.

So I didn’t have a good talk with Michael for several days. If I had, the mysteries surrounding Cadbury House would have been unraveled sooner.

Edson and I walked across the lawn to the barn together at dusk. When we started across the yard, I looked over the river to see the sunset’s colors echoed in the eastern sky with a diffused coral and a calm turquoise. By the time we’d reached the barn, the turquoise was fading to purple and the coral was just a bloody smudge. Soon there would be just an indigo sky and, for me, the dusty darkness of the barn.

Before he went on to the cemetery, I wanted Ed to come into the barn with me. I had a feeling I’d need reinforcements. I had called Tripp’s cell phone to warn him we were coming, but apparently he hadn’t found the words to tell his father, because when we entered, Charlie’s head came up in surprise and he stared. Then he walked to the center of the barn and stood like prizefighter, ready to bar the way.

We wrangled. It got heated. Charlie swore and Tripp remained tensely silent, looking from me to his father and back again, wanting to agree with us, but needing to stand with his dad.

“We’re not sure this is even necessary anymore,” I said at last, tired of arguing. “The whole idea in the first place was to keep the film crew out of the barn. Well, they’re gone, so what’s the point?”

“No point at all,” Charlie said with his chin up. “You can leave any time.”

Tripp spoke up at last. “The damage to the work we’re doing in here happened
after
the TV people left. And the thing in the loft – that happened before they ever came here. I don’t know what we’re protecting, but Dad’s got a feeling, and he thinks it’s important to . . . guard. To guard the place. To guard the barn.”

“He’s right,” Ed said. “Teddy and the gang brought things to a boil, but things were simmering before that. I still say my place is in the cemetery,” he said without irony, “and that’s where I’m going.”

I looked around, challenging them all. “And I’m staying right here, or rather, I’m going up to the loft. If you’d care to come with me,” I added, engaging Charlie’s beady eye and not backing down, “come on up.”

After a moment of boiling silence, Tripp said. “She’s right, Dad.”

Charlie broke eye contact, and I knew I’d won, so I didn’t say anything more. I just waited, and Charlie finally said, “If that’s your idea of a good time, come on up. We can swap ghost stories, but my money says you’ll be asleep on the floor by midnight, and you won’t be back tomorrow night.”

Tomorrow night.
And tomorrow and tomorrow and . . . I had this sudden vision of a little apartment up there – twin bed, TV, kitchenette – where Charlie would spend the rest of his life sleeping in the loft with his cold companion, but I shook it off. This had to end, and for Charlie’s sake we had to figure out if we were dealing with a real ghost or just a very sophisticated prank.

In the end, we split up into two groups: Edson and Tripp went to the cemetery, and Charlie and I climbed the wooden stairs to the loft. Charlie carried up the folding chair that Tripp had been using downstairs, and I told Ed how to find another beach chair in the house for Tripp to use in the cemetery. He couldn’t very well stretch out on the ground there without feeling the presence of those who lay beneath.

Once up in the loft, Charlie went to the double-door window through which the old Cadburys had winched out bales of hay and opened them, letting in starlight. Apparently we were going to do this without artificial light. Then he opened the two zero-gravity folding chairs – the kind you use as a portable recliner when you go to the beach – and got himself comfortable. The he waved a hand grandly at the other chair.

I sat. We covered our legs with the blankets he’d brought and our vigil began in an angry silence and near-absolute darkness.

I gazed across the loft to where I knew the poster of the Lippizan stallion was tacked up and couldn’t make it out, but when I looked the other way, toward the window, I could see a square of muzzy gray against the blackness. Our chairs were back against the wall opposite the poster, with Charlie between me and the window, and after a moment of staring hard, I could just make out his profile, outlined in steely gray. If I blinked my eyes, I lost him again.

I let my head rest against the back of the chair.

I pulled the blanket up as my metabolism dropped from the inactivity and my body grew cold.

I began to blink. By now, the charcoal gray of the window looked brighter, the light coming in was silvery and I could see that it made a faint square patch on the wooden floor. The Lippizan showed up clearly across the room.

I wished Charlie would talk to me. The coolness of the night was coming over me like a creeping fog, and I felt my skin tightening against it, repulsed. I tried to think of happy things – the sudden colors of Munchkinland when Dorothy comes out of her house – hatchling tracks in the sand on the beach at dawn – rainbows over a sunlit shower – but the very tone of the air that smothered me kept pushing me down again and blackening the colors out of the pictures in my mind. Sadness ached in the air, and things lost became the only things that mattered.

The things she had lost! Hope and joy and comfort, contrasted with the emptiness into which she had been born, only to have her one chance snatched away from her. The chance that she had believed in. Had it
ever
been real? It would have been better if she had never believed she had a chance at all.

There was love. She knew it, because its flame had risen up and engulfed her, with a force that could not have been false. And then the golden ship had sailed away, off to find golden isles where the sun was always shining, while the force of her own fate had anchored her to a cold harbor. Here she would lie, cold, dark, swelling up with the tide, then sinking to the bottom as it ran out without her.

I felt what Charlie had known and all that was kind within me welled up and reached for a shadow that only drifted away out of my reach. I could offer nothing. I had nothing she needed.

I awoke with a violent start and came up standing out of my chair, freezing cold, teeth chattering, hands outstretched, fending something off.

“
Charlie?
” I said through clenched teeth. I had lost my sense of direction and didn’t know where to look for him. He wasn’t in his chair; it was a light color, and showed up easily against the dark wall. It sat there, empty.

His answering voice was mutated somehow, almost mechanical, and there was no way to tell what direction it was coming from.

“Don’t be afraid,” his voice said. “She won’t hurt you.”

I don’t know how long I stood there, rigid in the dark, closing myself up because something was
there
and I didn’t want it to come in. I knew that that kind of sadness would swallow me up and I would never be the same. I didn’t even want to attract Charlie’s attention anymore, because Charlie had gone over to whatever lived in the darkness and allowed himself to unite with it.

I forced myself to move. I reached blindly for the arm of my chair. In little, jerky stages, like a stop-action figure in a movie, I repositioned myself inside the arms of the chair, but for a while I could not let my body fill into it and relax.

I didn’t sleep again, but I kept my mind withdrawn from the loft and the sadness, and I never spoke again until the window began to lighten. Then I turned my head with an internal
crack
from my neck, and saw Charlie standing at the far side of the loft, opposite the window, doing nothing, holding nothing, saying nothing. He merely looked back at me and stood in front of the wall, as if occupied somehow in another dimension while his body rested here, as inert as a dead thing.

When morning came, I heard him move and I recoiled again, as if I would look toward him and see him shuffling at me like a zombie, insensate . . . dangerous.

I held my breath and watched him until he looked at me with the eyes of a living man and said, “That’s all for tonight. Let’s go get some coffee.”

“It’s real,” I told Ed when at last I could speak to him and nobody else could hear.

“You saw her?”

“It’s real,” I repeated, and that’s all I ever told him about that night.

Michael moved out the next day.