The Realm of the Shadows (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 2) (15 page)

Wednesday morning was a brilliant, sparkling day, and the drive north on A1A would’ve been exhilarating with anybody but Edson Darby-Deaver at the wheel, and in anything but a 1991 green Geo Metro convertible with the top up. Given Ed’s personality, I was surprised he owned a convertible in the first place. He wasn’t the “wind in your hair” kind of guy. And given the – I’ll put it kindly –
vintage
air about the car, I suspected that once the top was down it would take a team of mechanics to get it back up again.

We trudged along the road at 10 mph under the speed limit (it’s a Florida thing; happens a lot), and still managed to get to Santorini in good time. We parked in Frieda’s driveway, and while Ed marched up to her front door in the grip of a fanatic’s tunnel vision, I looked longingly at the walkover to the beach, then followed along behind him.

Dolores seemed even more repressed than the first time I’d seen her, and I wondered if Frieda had taken it out on her that we hadn’t instantly appeared when she wanted to see us again.

This time, the wheelchair was pushed up to a long dining room table, and stacked in front of it were old albums of all colors and sizes. One in particular was lying open in front of Frieda. Page after page of black-and-white photographs had been arranged on the fragile black leaves, and as we entered, Frieda busied herself turning pages as if she hadn’t noticed us.

She glanced at her wristwatch, then looked up at us. My watch said 9:56, and I wondered whether she’d make us wait the extra 4 minutes, but she didn’t.

“Ah, there you are,” she said, looking very pleased with herself. “Sit down.” She was looking at me and gesturing at the chair next to her wheelchair, and I went and sat.

“Good morning, Miss Frieda,” Ed said formally.

She turned her head and looked at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. “Good morning,” she said dismissively. Then she turned her attention to the album again.

The nearest chair Ed could find was at the head of the table, adjacent to Frieda, where he was looking at the album from the side, and had no view at all of the other albums straggling down the length of the table.

“My mother put this memory book together,” she said chattily. “I was never much for this kind of thing myself. Most of the girls my age had them – full of dance cards, invitations to parties, pictures of their friends dressed up as Greek muses and other such nonsense. I couldn’t bother myself. I should have been born male. I was far more interested in the family business than my brother ever was. Winston,” she said, fixing me with a direct, stabbing stare before looking back to the book again. “Died young. Only twenty-four. Mother was distraught; family name, you know. And of course Father wanted him to carry on the business, not that he could have.” She sniffed loudly. “I could have carried on with it, but nobody thought of that. Sent me to college, then made sure I never used my degree – only I showed them. I had more business sense than Winston ever had. After the Grand Tour, he was only interested in raising Cain with the boys from his club, sketching revolting subjects – nudes – railroad yards – race horses – things you’d never hang on the wall, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was drinking himself to death. They threw him out of Yale, you know.”

She was paging through the book, looking at the pictures but not telling us anything about them, and talking in generalities that meant nothing to us.

“Miss Frieda,” I said at last. “Did you have something in particular you wanted to show us?”

She looked at me with a gremlin smile, her eyes challenging. Someone had applied make-up to her face, but her skin had been over-powdered, and her cheeks were unnaturally pink.

“I thought you were interested in the old days,” she cooed, “when I was a girl, and went to parties at Cadbury House.”

“We are.”

“Well, see here? My mother kept them. All the invitations. Pictures from the fancy dress balls. See? Here I am as Little Bo Peep.”

I looked down at the page and saw a gilt-edged, formally printed invitation. “A Children’s Masquerade,” it said in highly stylized letters. Below were details of the day, date and location: the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine. Next to it was a professional studio portrait of a little girl in a wedding-cake dress, beribboned, bonneted and holding a shepherd’s crook with a large satin bow tied to it. Next to her was a live sheep, looking dazed.

She turned the page. “My mother. I look nothing like her,” she added, before turning the page before I could get a good look at the small woman in the enormous hat.

“Yes, it’s all here,” she said. “I thought you said you were interested in these things.”

“We are,” I said, but in fact, I was quickly losing interest. She seemed to be enjoying some secret joke she was having on us. I knew that it would be absolute disaster to bring up the maid’s suicide directly. I looked at Ed for help, but he was staring hard at the sideways album, trying to gather something from it.

Frustrated ,I looked away across the other end of the table through a window with a distracting view of the ocean. The woman was insufferable, I thought, or maybe she’s just lonely. We were the only people who’d shown any interest in her dead milieu in decades, and maybe she was just desperate for company. But she didn’t look desperate. She was acting like she’d pulled a fast one on us.

I started planning our exit. We’d been listening to her and looking at useless pictures of long-dead debutantes for almost an hour. I don’t know what made me reach for the album farthest away from me, but when I did, I saw another one under it, and that one had been opened to a particular page and then flattened.

In hard-to-read silver embossing I saw, “A Wedding is Announced and will take place on Saturday, June 13, 1936.”

I drew the album closer and studied the invitation. I sensed without looking that there was a quickening in the dried-up woman beside me.

It heralded a wedding between Hunter Wellesley Barrett and Eugenie Alicia Castle.

“Who’s this?” I asked, being careful not to seem too interested.

“Oh, them? I told you about him. Don’t you remember?”

I played stupid. “I’m sorry. You told us so many interesting things. Which particular fellow is this?” I almost batted my eyes.

She was amused. She knew exactly what I was doing, and loved it. “Chipper. From the party the Cadburys gave when they opened their house.”

“Ah, yes! Chipper Barrett, the divine dancer. And this –“ I put my finger on the invitation and looked down at it “—Eugenie – would be the drippy blond from the Castle family.”

She only smiled. I was an apt pupil, apparently. Ed was out of the equation, and I carefully avoided looking at him.

Events began clicking through my mind, but before I could have too much time to think about it, she interrupted, seemingly throwing anything off the top of her head to distract me.

“Is it true,” she said, “that that fool from New York is putting up an extravaganza of some kind on the beach down in Tropical Breeze?”

I struggled to switch gears. “Which fool?”

“The developer. Lance Skinner.”

“Oh! You know, you may be right. I’ve been hearing rumors. You probably know more about it than I would. After all, you’re a real estate developer yourself.”

She brayed with laughter, and actually reached out to touch my arm with a cold, dry hand. “Clever girl. Yes, you’re sitting on top of one of my achievements in real estate. I built Santorini as my own enclave, when land on the beach was cheap on Anastasia Island. But it was far from my most impressive project. Still, it’s nice to be remembered.”

“Oh?” I took a wild guess. “Then Lance Skinner has been in touch with you? How exciting.”

She tried to maintain her cold reserve, but she just couldn’t help herself. “He called a few weeks ago. Purely for the sake of form; I knew his father. I’m sure he’s made his deal by now, but he didn’t get any inside information from me. I’ve been out of the game for a long time now. Still, I like to keep my ear to the ground.”

I nodded and gave her an admiring smile, while wondering how much of that had been puffery.

Suddenly, Ed made a move, and I could’ve picked up one of the memory books and brought it down on the top of his head.

“Well,” he said crisply, “we must thank you, Miss Frieda. You’ve been most helpful. I hope you’ll send for us again soon. We enjoy these little chats.”

Frieda looked up at him, then looked back at me and gently shook her head, amused. “As you enjoy them, I certainly shall. Good bye.”

I maintained my calm manner until we were outside and Dolores had closed the door. Then I turned to Ed and began to whack at his arm with the flat of my hand, saying, “You . . . id . . . iot!”

“What?” he said, holding up the briefcase to defend himself.

“She wasn’t through. She was going to tell us something else about Lance Skinner.”

“No she wasn’t,” he said. “We don’t care about Lance Skinner. All we were interested in was the memory books, and we were done with them.”

“No we weren’t!” I said, giving him one final smack. “What do you think she meant about keeping her ear to the ground?”

He shrugged. “Bragging. She wants us to think of her as relevant.”

“She had something on her mind. I could see it. And you made us get up and leave!”

“Sorry,” he said, as he unlocked the green tin can with a key. “Next time I’ll let you take the lead. Frankly, I was getting bored, and I thought you were too.”

“I was – until I hit on the clue we were there to find. And next time may be too late.”

I was still angry with Ed when we got back to Cadbury House. Dragging down the road at 40 mph in a 55 mph zone will do that to me. What I saw when we got to the end of the dirt road leading to Cadbury House made me even angrier.

I bolted from the car and yelled, “What are
you
doing here?”

Hypnotically green eyes gazed back at me with maddening calmness. “You should have known that I would have to come.”

“Oh?” Ed said, advancing with menace. “And why’s that?”

“Seth is here,” he said quietly as we got to within an arm’s length of him.

I clutched my brow like a Shakespearean actor; it was appropriate to the moment. “Take me now, Lord,” I murmured, “this planet is getting too weird for me.”

“Really?” Ed said to Teddy. No sarcasm, no irony. Actual, serious interest. I bailed out of the circus ring and went into the house, locking the door behind me.

“Teddy’s sitting in on the séance tonight,” Ed said after he’d rattled the door handle, found it locked, located his key and let himself in.

“That’ll be fun,” I said, listless.

“Charlie has flatly refused to participate, Tripp won’t come if Charlie won’t, and it isn’t really safe to conduct a séance with too few people.” He obviously wanted me to ask him why, and I didn’t. I’d seen the movies.

“Whatever you decide,” I said, and I walked out of the house with no particular object in mind other than getting away from Ed for a while.

The psychic from Spud was due at 11 pm.

“Always happy to meet a colleague,” Teddy said, reaching to shake the medium’s hand.

She was gobsmacked, and shook his hand with her mouth dropped open. He was a god to her.

“Taylor Verone,” I said, trying to bring her back to earth and reaching out my own hand.

She held Teddy’s hand as long as she could, then looked at me with blank eyes and limply shook my hand. “Purity LeStrange.”

Without cracking a smile, I said, “What a lovely name.”

“Ah, yes, I’ve heard of you,” Teddy said. “Astonishing work you did in Key West. That devil doll will keep his hands to himself for a while after that!”

She became mystical. “Evil never sleeps for long. Robert is strong-willed. The spirits can often be quite . . . earthy. I’ve gotten used to being groped.”

This was obviously shop talk about a famous case, and I let it go over my head. When Ed began to explain about some artist’s creepy ragdoll, I held up a hand and closed my eyes.

Meanwhile, incensed and manly, Teddy expanded his chest. “No entities will molest you while I’m around.” He stared at her with his dangerous eyes for a very long time, and I feared for her delicate sensibilities. I didn’t want to try to pick her up off the kitchen floor. She was substantial.

Purity LeStrange was short, round, and drifty as to attire. Ultra-feminine, with startled blue eyes, very long blond hair and bangs that came down almost over her eyes, she was pretty in a kewpie-doll way, with small, perfectly bow-shaped lips.

“How shall we handle this?” asked Ed, standing forgotten outside Purity’s and Teddy’s charmed circle.

“I accede to the expert,” Teddy said without looking away from her.

She fluttered appropriately, and I, a womanly woman but feeling downright manly next to Purity, hoisted her bag of tricks and said, “Shall we take a look at the loft?” I was leaving her portable séance table for the men.

All three of them turned to me, aghast.

“Of course not!” Ed said. “You never enter the territory of the spirit until you are ready to begin in earnest.”

“Well, silly me,” I said, setting her carpetbag down again. “You’ll find me on the veranda when you’re ready to begin. In earnest.”

I left them gazing after me, still overwhelmed at my naivete.

Thus, I missed the preparatory conference, and at the time I was glad of it. Starting with Miss Frieda’s gamesmanship and followed much too soon by the girly 40-something who was about to swoon all over a séance table, I was reaching the limit of my tolerance for big personalities.

When they were ready (and earnest), Ed came for me and I put my iced tea glass down on the veranda and followed him to the barn.

They had set up without me. In front of the window was a simple square table with four folding chairs, and on the table a candle was burning feebly. It was the only light in the loft, and gave off a sandalwood fragrance. On the table in front of one of the chairs was a deck of cards – you know,
those
cards – and a few metal trinkets. In reviewing the research Ed had left for me, I had rolled my eyes as I read about tambourines, trumpets, luminous gauze and a little kinky bondage for the medium, but there didn’t seem to be any of that here, and with the wide-open spaces of the empty loft, there was no place to hide them.

When I told them that I had awoken that night in the loft to find Charlie standing inert against the other wall of the barn, they picked up the whole shebang and moved it down there.

“But I believe she hung herself from the window,” I said.

They hesitated and had a long academic discussion. Finally, Teddy turned to me and asked, “Where are those initials carved?”

“Oh,” I said, pointing at the window. “Over there.”

Teddy scrutinized the graffiti, then decided that the table should come back. Purity would’ve conducted the séance from the back of an elephant if he’d told her to, and Ed had lost his position as ringleader. He just didn’t have Teddy’s panache.

Once they were settled in the proper place, we sat around the table, ladies across from one another, Ed to my left, Teddy to my right. Ed had set his digital recorder unobtrusively on the floor between himself and the medium, then tested it a few times to see if it would still pick up her voice.

Then we settled in our places, took one another’s hands and waited.

His voice muted, I heard Teddy murmur to Purity about Seth. “If it would not be too exhausting for you in one sitting.”

“Are the two spirits related? Did they die together?”

“No. One is a simple maid who died in 1936. The other is my friend, from
The Realm of the Shadows
.”

“Ah, yes,” she said mistily. “I was aware of him as soon as I came onto the estate.” Given the news coverage, I was pretty sure she’d been aware of him long before that. “He died in the river, did he not? Yes. He is near. But we will find your young girl first. Seth tells me he will wait. He is interested. It is the investigation you were pursuing when Seth gave his life, is it not?”

Teddy nodded solemnly.

“Then naturally he is interested.”

I glanced at Ed, but the candle reflecting on his glasses hid his eyes from me.

Purity closed her eyes and began to gently sway. In a few minutes, I realized she was humming, so softly that I couldn’t tell when she had started. The imperceptible humming gradually became a charming little melody, and as it developed, it turned into a song, framed by the sweet, clear voice of a girl.

“How shall we find our way back home,

“Johnny, Bobby, Billy?

“How shall we find our way back home

“After all this time away?”

She repeated the stanza a few times, and then she fell silent and became peaceful.

This was followed by another long wait, and I found myself listening for the wind to stir the trees outside. Whenever I heard it, I was strangely reassured.

Suddenly she said, “Is that you?” She cocked her head childishly and simpered. Then, “Yes, I hear you. Will you find our lady for us? Will you find our girl? The one who died here so long ago. She’s here,” she said playfully. “I feel her. No? Why not?”

She seemed to be listening.

“Yes, it is naughty to cause your own death,” she went on. “But she is not a bad girl. Not really. She is only sad.”

Sad
.

Nobody else at this table knew what it meant, that sadness, but I had felt it before, and I felt it again now, creeping toward me along the floorboards like a rolling fog. When it reached my chair, it came around my feet, my legs, my knees, and began to rise around me, trapping me. Then it began to drain the living warmth from me like the earth surrounding a coffin. My eyes began to prickle and I closed them, still holding the warm hands of the men, not because I’d been told I had to, but because they were warm and strong, holding me down. I couldn’t be taken away to a terrible place while the men held onto me. Purity’s voice had become a low, meaningless hum in my ears.

The little maid crouched beside me on the floor, hunkered low, like a frightened animal, then her arms trailed up along my legs and suddenly fastened around me. I felt a heavy pressure as her face pushed against my belly and moved from side to side, as if drying tears on my shirt. The pressure of her grip grew stronger until it seized my lungs and stopped my breath.

I became rigid, and I felt the hands that held mine tighten into iron bands holding me prisoner.

I let out a sob. I knew, because I had seen, in that album, on the table beside me at Frieda’s house. And now I saw it fresh and new, printed this very year, 1936, and shining in silver embossing, new on my lady’s desk as I waxed the floor around it. I stopped my work and set the mop aside, and with both my hands I lifted the heavy bond of the invitation and I read it over and over.

Mabel hissst at me. I must get back to work; Missus would see me and sack me on the spot, and then where would I go?

I didn’t matter where I would go. I would wait. I would wait where I always waited, in the loft, by the window, looking down, and he would come to me and explain how he had been forced into the arranged marriage, and he would take me away, as he’d always said he would.

And so I waited.

I ran my fingertips over the initials that I had carved. My lover’s initials: “H.B.” Hunter Barrett. He would come. And if he didn’t, I would die.

“Wake up, Taylor.”

I opened my eyes to see the faces of the men above me, and an exhausted Purity lying artfully against the back of her chair, wanly smiling.

“What happened?” I asked groggily.

“Purity was successful!” Teddy said. “Brilliantly successful! We reached the maid at last. She hung herself because she’d been caught stealing the silver plate from the butler’s pantry. The Cadburys made her confess in front of the whole congregation at church, then fired her. The humiliation was too much to bear. The exorcism was beautiful! She will rest peacefully now. You may proceed with your plans for the barn. She’s gone.”

“You fell asleep,” Ed said, disappointed in me. “You missed it. Anyway, we were successful, both in reaching Ellen, and in reaching Seth.”

“He’s comfortably settled in the afterlife, and he was thrilled at Purity’s handling of Ellen. Really, Taylor, I don’t know how you could’ve slept through all that.”

I was still a bit shaky, and in no mood for his blather. “You saw Seth?”

Teddy giggled. “He thought you were adorable, sleeping like a baby and gripping our hands for all you were worth, like a frightened little child. He says the initials carved on the window frame have nothing to do with the maid. That was just a stable boy who was bored. We gave Seth your regards,” he added as an afterthought.

“Uh huh.”

Ed was on the move. “I’ve got to transcribe the recording and put my impressions down while they’re still fresh. Teddy, do you mind helping Purity get her things together?”

He beetled off.

“It’d be a pleasure,” Teddy said warmly.

From the look on Purity’s face, Teddy was going to get lucky tonight, if he wanted to.

From the look on Teddy’s face, he knew it, but he didn’t want to, really.