The Realm of the Shadows (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 2) (17 page)

The St. Augustine lighthouse is reputed to be one of the most haunted places in America. I’ve visited the lighthouse many times, and climbed the 219 steps to enjoy the view, but the creepiest place to me is the basement of the lighthouse-keeper’s house.

Naturally, Ed has spent a lot of time there, pretty much getting nowhere with the ghosts. The hauntings are supposed to stem from the deaths by drowning of three little girls in 1873. A lighthouse keeper fell to his death from the tower in 1853, but most ghost-hunters are more intrigued by the little girls, particularly the two who were sisters. My guess was that Teddy was basing the show on them, and that Edson might go over the edge when he caught Teddy wandering around calling their names. While never coming up with any evidence that they did, in fact, haunt the place, Ed was strangely protective of them. If he went off on Teddy, he’d be useless to me. All the way to St. Augustine in my car, with Michael in the passenger seat, I lectured Ed, talking over my shoulder and sending stern looks into the back seat via the rear-view mirror. We were there to investigate a murder, I told him, not a haunting, and we certainly weren’t there to expose a phony whose show had already been cancelled. Michael just sat there beside me, enjoying the view and quietly smiling.

It was close to midnight when we arrived and parked, and we had to stumble over dark ground up to the lighthouse-keeper’s house, where Teddy and his crew had commandeered the place for the night and turned off as many lights as possible. The crew was looking listless, and I figured their minds were more on their resumes than on the defunct show.

The approach to the lighthouse was through a lush setting of old-growth trees and native plants, but Teddy had had the landscaping lights turned off. Normally, they lit the undersides of huge leaves, lining the dark greens with a cheerful lime color under a dome of indigo night, and surrounding the path with an enchanted garden. Tonight, we had to resort to our smart-phone flashlight apps to keep from walking straight into trees.

“Hey,” a disembodied voice said as we got close, “turn those lights off.”

A depressed crew member shambled over to run us off. When he recognized Ed he told him hello and didn’t bother us anymore. His heart hadn’t been in it anyway.

Nobody else seemed to be around. Even the lights in the tower’s spiral stairway were off, and with clouds drifting over the slice of moon, it was like groping your way through the underworld. Far above us, the arms of the tower’s light swept majestically around, too high to illuminate the ground.

The back stairways of the keeper’s house are painted white and show up clearly in the dark. It’s a curious and lovely dwelling, built to house two families, and is split from front to back by a double hallway with identical rooms on either side. There are two exterior stairways to the second floor bedrooms, and they stand against the back of the house symmetrically, like zig-zags of gingerbread icing. Altogether, the Victorian-style redbrick house is charming: small, efficient, and cozy. Cooking was done outside in identical little brick buildings on either side of the house.

The yard between the lighthouse and the keeper’s house was strangely empty, and the few men roaming in the gloaming were as deflated as the guy who’d tried to stop us.

“What’s going on?” Ed asked a passing crewmember. “Where’s Teddy?”

“That you Ed? They’re filming in the bedrooms upstairs. But don’t tell them I told you so.”

“Thanks.” Ed turned to Michael and me. “Well, do we take the bull by the horns, or lurk around in the basement until they come down so we can jump out and say boo?”

“Neither,” I said. “Let’s just approach quietly and see what they’re doing. I wonder if they got somebody to replace Seth?” I added, mostly to myself as we walked up to the house.

“No,” Ed said, because of course, he knew. “Personally, I always thought Teddy felt threatened by Seth. You know – younger, better looking, more psychically gifted – I figured one of these days Teddy would find a way to edge him out of the show.” He stopped as he realized what he’d said. “Not
that
way, of course. I’m no fan, but Teddy’s not evil. Just, you know, inept.”

“We know,” Michael said.

I made no comment.

We were climbing the stairs by that time. As we gathered on the landing, Ed lowered his voice and said, “I don’t know how they’re going to make it scary in there now. The central dividing wall upstairs has been removed, and they’ve set up an exhibit of some kind. It doesn’t look like it did when there were bedrooms up here.”

About that time, we heard Teddy’s voice crooning inside, and we quietly opened the door and stepped in.

A large display partition kept us from seeing what was going on in the room, but when we peeked around it, we saw Teddy, bathed in light and holding a large rag doll.

“Eliza, can you hear me?” he was calling. “We’re here to help you move on, Eliza. Do you want to come and play with us a while?”

That did it.

“You have got to be kidding me!” Ed shouted.

The videographer reacted instinctively and swung the focus onto Ed, while Jazz and Pluto covered Teddy with their own, much smaller cameras. Wizard, in his role of oddball scientist, was standing just inside the circle of light, looking abstracted.

“Ah,” Teddy said smugly. “The Unbeliever. We may as well cut. If Eliza wanted to come to me, she’s scampered away by now.”

“Do NOT make her sound like a furry little thing that chews on the woodwork! She was a
girl
– a real, living, breathing girl.”

Needless to say, the cameras were still rolling.

“And you brought your lawyer,” Teddy cooed, smiling at Michael, who bowed slightly. “Thinking about slapping us with some paperwork? You have no rights here, Edson. We have permission to film here.”

“You may have permission,” Ed said grandly, “but you have no right!”

The crew was loving it, capturing every nuance of the two paranormal prima donnas.

“And you too, Taylor,” Teddy said. “Welcome, welcome. We were just about to move to the basement, where I expect to see some real action. Care to join us?”

“That depends,” I said. “Are you planning to do a normal episode to wrap up your series, or is somebody else going to die?”

Even Teddy was shocked, and he stood there holding his stupid rag doll with his mouth open.

When he got his breath back, he said, “How
dare
you . . . !”

“Because Seth
was
murdered, and I know how. Want to hear about it?”

All the entities in the room, the living and the theoretical dead, became unnaturally still.

“Please,” I said, gesturing to rows of folding chairs set before a video display. “Let’s get comfortable, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Even the videographer wasn’t grinning now, though he had never stopped filming.

I was happy to see that Teddy was getting furious enough to lose control.

“You will
not
ruin this shoot,” he yelled. He threw the ragdoll down on the floor like a spoiled child. “I’ve faced too much adversity this week already, and I will not be defeated! We are moving to the basement,” he said to his crew and co-stars, and he led them past us, deliberately bumping into Ed as he went by. The poor ragdoll lay on the floor grinning idiotically at the ceiling.

We followed them doggedly.

We went single-file down the stairs, with me at the back of the line. As the three in my gang came to the entrance to the ground floor, Teddy, who was at the head of the line, stopped and pushed back past a few people.

“They do not come in!” he commanded. Then he turned and went down the hall.

Perhaps because the show had already been cancelled and filming was almost over, the crew didn’t seem to care what Teddy said. And, as Michael suggested later, it might have been because the crew had an instinct to mix the dangerous chemicals and see if they’d explode. Whatever the reason, nobody stopped us, and we followed them right in.

As I was about to enter the house, I noticed something in the darkened yard and turned to look.

Two green eyes glowed in the night, coming right at me.

It was the cat. Bastet, in her animal form. I had left her at Cadbury House, but I didn’t even wonder how she had gotten here. I stood aside and she preceded me into the house, threading her way between moving feet to make her way along. At the top of the spiral stairs to the basement, I was stunned to see Ed pick her up and carry her down the iron-grille steps as if she belonged to him. When I got to the bottom, Ed’s arms were empty and the cat was nowhere to be seen.

Teddy, noticing that we’d followed them down, gave us a murderous glare, but decided to ignore us.

“Now,” he said, giving directions to his crew, “We’re going to set up by the cisterns. The brick arches make a great background, and the passageway they’re in will make for a tight, claustrophobic feel. Just what we want. Jazz and I will be moving slowly down the passage with our sensors; Pluto, you’ll be bringing up the rear, using the thermal camera or – whatcha got there? – okay, the proximity MEL meter, but make sure the alarm doesn’t go off at the wrong time, all right, guy? Wizard, hang back. We’ll need you for the post-encounter analysis, but for now, you’re just an observer. Everybody got that? Let’s go.”

He turned to the camera and went pro, but I could see that our presence was throwing him off.

He began his psychic babble. Ed was rigid, paying close attention, but my mind was occupied with other things.

I really didn’t like the basement of the keeper’s house. It was spooky. Normally I like interior brick walls, but these rooms felt like crypts, maybe because of all the arches and crossbeams, and the unexplained nooks and crannies along the walls, where anything could be hiding. The cisterns were the worst – two concrete and brick chambers for retaining water, now dry, difficult to access, and shaped like prison cells.

Standing in the anteroom, I could see the red bricks lit up in the cramped passageway, which was filled with bodies, and with Teddy’s strangely flattened voice. Suddenly, I heard Teddy scream.

“
Where did that cat come from?
” he shrieked. “Aargh – it went right over my shoulder! A black cat! You saw it too, didn’t you?” He turned desperately from one person to another. “You
did
see it, didn’t you?”

Gazing around at one another, there was a negative murmur, followed by Jazz’s voice saying, “Sorry, Teddy. I didn’t see any cat.”

“
Dammit
!” It was Teddy, and the crash that followed meant that he’d thrown something against the bricks and smashed it.

“Why have you decided to ruin my life?” he cried, looking past Jazz’s shoulder to where I stood in the dark. “What do you want from me?”

“Justice,” I said quietly. The hard brick walls deadened my voice, and Teddy’s face took on a ghastly expression. The harsh lights against the blackness gave the scene the look of a horror movie.

“Listen, woman,” he said, “I didn’t hurt Seth. I
liked
Seth. Will you accept once and for all that it was just an accident? Even the police think it was an accident. Nobody here would’ve hurt him.”

A few people murmured in agreement, but not all of them.

“Then why are you afraid to listen to me?”

He broke then. “Fine. Sure. Whatever you want, lady. I can see you’re not going to let us get anything done until you’ve had your say, so come on in and tell me all about it. And then
get the hell out of here and leave me alone!
You and your stupid haunted barn. I wish I’d never gone to Cadbury House. Since then my whole life has fallen apart. Come on back, Taylor Verone, and tell me how I killed one of my best friends in the world.”

“I will.”

There was a room beyond the tiny passage where they’d been filming. Several chairs had been left there, and Teddy insisted on moving us deeper into the creepy basement, down to a dead end where we felt trapped. He made a show of seating us and asking if we were comfortable. His videographer and sound man came in silently and continued to record, anonymous specters in the shadows. Wizard, instead of seating himself, stayed on his feet with the crew, as if keeping himself on the other side of some dividing line from the cast. It was probably still in the back of Teddy’s mind that demolishing me, and dragging Ed down too, would resurrect his reputation and give him back the only thing he cared about: his show.

“Now,” Teddy said, seating himself with grandeur, “Why don’t you amuse us all and tell us how we killed a perfectly harmless young man for no reason at all?” His manner was artificial to the point of brittleness, and I had the feeling that he was close to a breakdown.

“I’m guessing it all started in New York. Were you filming in New York before you came to St. Augustine?”

“Yes,” Teddy said. “As you very well know, I’m sure. You’ve checked our blog?”

“Actually, no. Didn’t know you had one. But I’m glad my guess was right. It makes things nice and neat. You were in New York. You were all in New York, and naturally your fans keep track of where you’re working. Your schedule showed that you were going to St. Augustine next. And that while you were in the area, you might just be taking a side trip to Cadbury House.”

“So what?” Teddy said, relaxing. “
The Realm of the Shadows
is a high-profile show, and our fans want to know what we’re investigating.”

“And one person who isn’t necessarily a fan found out about it. He didn’t care about you running around after ghosts. But he was intensely interested in Cadbury House. You were doing paranormal research. And doing paranormal research sometimes involves – shall we say – special effects?”

“Our investigations are genuine!” Teddy roared. “We do
not
fake
anything.”

“I’m not saying you do. I’m saying that given the nature of your work, your people naturally know how to create special effects, either from dealing with television in general, or in dealing with recreations of supernatural events. Also, your people are familiar with the legends and history of the sites you visit, and they know how to use technical equipment. You have a researcher: Pluto. He checks everything out ahead of time and tells you all about it. You have Jazz. I suspect she functions more as a personal assistant than anything else, but she makes for eye candy on the show. And you have a mechanic: Wizard. If you need someone to invent a butterfly net for catching spirits, he’s your man. Fair enough?”

He grudgingly agreed.

“And this man in New York would very much like to get his hands on a big chunk of land on the coast of Florida for his next big venture.”

“You’re talking about Lance Skinner,” Teddy said. “I heard the rumors too. Why don’t you just come out and say it?”

“And there sits Cadbury House, old, remote, at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by virgin acreage just begging for bulldozers to come and tear everything down. That’s how they think in New York, don’t they?”

“Money grubbers,” Teddy said loftily. “Philistines. They don’t care about the essence of life, as we investigators do.”

“But somewhere in your little group,” I said, looking around and engaging each set of eyes in turn, “Lance Skinner found somebody he could bribe. A mole. Not for anything nasty. Just a few pranks. That’s how it started, anyway. And being a good little mole, he (or she?) would want to show the big man what was being done at Cadbury House, so he’d grab the blueprints if he could. If we made any progress, he’d be sure to have it stopped, and if we hung in there too long, the pranks would’ve gotten more serious. Eventually, there probably would’ve been a fire.”

Teddy was staring at me hard. “Seth would’ve never done that. He was incorruptible. He believed in what we were doing.”

“And no doubt he had high hopes of one day stepping up over you and taking over the show, or getting a show of his own. That’s showbiz, baby. No, I don’t think the mole was Seth. Things continued to happen after he died. But I do think that Seth found out what was going on, and put the squeeze on the mole, and so . . . he had to die. He couldn’t just be paid off, because he was too much of a threat. Blackmailers never really give up and go away – not while there’s still honey in the pot. Whose idea was it to trick out the jumpsuits with all this hardware?” I asked suddenly. I reached over to Jazz and flipped a shiny D-ring attached to the front of her shirt, then jiggled one of the lobster claw closures. She moved sharply away from me. “I’ve been watching the DVD’s you gave me. You’re not wearing so much hardware on your jumpsuits in those shows. All these zippers and rings and extra pockets aren’t in the older R.O.T.S. episodes.”

“Rots?” Michael said. “What’s that?”

“The acronym for the name of the show.
Realm of the Shadows.
”

“Huh. I never thought of that.” Michael alone was amused.

“We call it R.T.S.,” Teddy said snippily. “As for the hardware, it was my idea. What of it?”

Jazz spoke up. “He thought it would be useful for attaching equipment and . . . oh, hell. He thought it would make us look hot. Tough. Macho.”

“And who,” I asked. “redesigned the suits?”

“Pluto and I did,” Jazz said coolly. “I liked the idea of a lot of zippers and pockets, and Pluto suggested the rings and extra clips over the zippers, so we’d have more exposed metal to catch the lights. They’d show up better on-camera than just plain zippers. Then I sent drawings to our costumer and she modified them. They make it a pain to get dressed, but they look good.”

I had turned to her. “I noticed something else while I was looking through the old shows, Jazz: your earrings. The ones you’re wearing now. You always wear them for the show, but you took them off just before shooting began that night, right before Seth died.”

She stared at me. “So what?”

“You knew you’d be jumping into the river because the script called for it. You didn’t want to lose them. They’re important to you for some reason.”

“They were my mother’s. She was wearing them when my father proposed. I . . . I wear them for luck. And I guess I have been lucky: I didn’t make the mistake of a lifetime.” She was gazing frigidly at Teddy, who failed to register her meaning.

“Are you implying that we
knew
that Betsy would lure Seth into the river?” he demanded, ignoring Jazz.

“Oh, come off it, Teddy,” Pluto said in a tired voice. “Yes, it was a set-up. We worked it out before the show. Seth was our psychic, and we liked the story of Betsy jumping into the river to save her child. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Teddy glared at him, registering outrage.

“Whose idea was it, originally?” I asked.

“It was Seth’s,” Jazz and Pluto both answered at the same time.

Pluto explained. “It gave him the spotlight, big time, and the show needed a little goosing up; we were losing the drama. So – ‘I’m coming, Betsy!’ – then,
splash
– into the river for all of us, except Teddy and Wizard. I checked the tides and they were high that night, so it was deep enough that we could jump in safely. Seth wasn’t a great swimmer, but he could dogpaddle, and the river isn’t that deep, even at high tide. There were all these people who could help if he got into trouble. It should’ve gone off without a hitch.”

“Did Teddy know about the stunt?” Ed asked.

“Yes,” said Pluto; “No,” said Teddy. They glared at one another, and Pluto shrugged and slumped down staring at his hands.

“Jazz? You get the tie-breaker,” I said. “Did Teddy know?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I wasn’t there when they cooked it up. Seth told me about it later, and I just assumed Teddy would have to know. But we didn’t always tell him about the things we did for the show. We figured it was better he didn’t know ahead of time. He’s not a very good actor,” she said, giving him an uneasy glance. Then she shrugged: what the heck, after tonight he wasn’t the star anymore. “Pluto knew, and the rest of the crew knew. I wasn’t sure if Teddy had been told, so I didn’t mention it to him ahead of time. And Wizard, well, I don’t know if anybody told Wizard.”

“I knew,” he said at the edge of the lights. “I wasn’t involved in the stunt, but Seth told me. He was excited about it.”

“Teddy knew too,” Pluto said stubbornly. “He was there when Seth floated the idea.”

“I am not lowering myself into a he-said-he-said. I did not know, and this is getting us nowhere. You’re all over the place. Just how does all this tie up together, anyway?”

“Our mole took advantage of the stunt to get rid of a problem. Seth was dangerous, and so Seth dove into a deathtrap.”

“The woman is crazy,” Teddy said, getting up.

“I’m not accusing you, Teddy. You were never in the water with Seth. And to make the deathtrap work, the killer had to be in the water.”

“What is this deathtrap you’re talking about, anyway?” Teddy said, sitting down again. “There was no deathtrap!”

“There was a mark on the seawall where Seth was told to jump in. A little black piece of masking tape that was removed while Seth was getting CPR. Seth jumped in just where a strong metal ring had been embedded into the bottom of the seawall under water. One end of this,” I said, drawing Porter’s strap out of my cargo pocket, “was attached to the ring at the bottom of the river. And this clip on the other end was attached to a D-ring at the back of Seth’s jumpsuit by the murderer, where Seth could never reach it with his hands. You said he wasn’t a good swimmer, Pluto. He panicked. He couldn’t undo the tricky closures on his jumpsuit fast enough to get it off. The strap held him under water until he drowned, then it was removed and Seth was brought to the surface, dead, in a remote place where no paramedics could get to him quickly and revive him.”

“And only two people jumped into the river with Seth,” Ed said. “Pluto and Jazz.”

“I never touched him!” Jazz cried. “I tried to find him, but I couldn’t – I couldn’t see him under water.”

“I know,” I said. “You didn’t have your glasses on, and you’re nearsighted. When you did my make-up, you had to take them off to see what you were doing close-up. You never wear those glasses for the show, but you need them, or you can’t see three feet in front of your face. He knew you could never have found Seth and saved him.”

“He?” Teddy said, but he was already looking at Pluto.

Pluto stood up, knocking his chair over and putting his back to the brick wall. The lights were aimed straight at him now, making him look like a figure in a theatrical line-up.

“Pluto is the only one who could have done it,” I said. “He was your ‘advance man,’ your researcher, the first one on the scene to scope things out. He’d been at Cadbury House when nobody was there, after my work crew had gone home and before I had moved in. He could take his time and set up pranks, knock over the tombstones and incidentally, set his deathtrap, with no one around to see. After Seth jumped into the river, Pluto was the first one in after him. Next, Jazz dove in, but the chances that she would blunder into them were pretty much nil. Nearsighted as she is, in the dark, under the water, she could never have seen them, and there was no reason for her to try, at least until everybody realized Seth was drowning.”

“He told me not to jump in too close to where Seth went in,” Jazz said slowly. “He said something about us getting injured, landing on top of one another.”

“She’s lying,” Pluto said desperately.

“Shut up, Pluto,” Teddy said. “Go on, Taylor.”

I nodded. “The next day, Pluto waited around until nobody was by the seawall and retrieved the strap. It was about eighteen hours later, and the tide was low. And it was daylight; he could see it lying on the riverbed below him. I remember the sun making kind of a halo on his head, and I thought he’d been praying. But he was after the strap that was just lying there; he’d unclipped it from the bottom of the seawall after he’d killed Seth, and all he had to do was fish it out, get rid of it, and the only evidence left would be the metal ring at the base of the seawall, under water. There are plenty of metal rings in concrete blocks in the river. By itself, it wouldn’t have raised suspicions, even if somebody noticed it, especially after some time had passed and it had corroded. But the one the police diver found today is still shiny and new, and it’s directly below the oyster half-shell embedded in the seawall where you put the mark for Seth. And thanks to Porter, we have the strap you used.”

“How could he fish it out of the water without jumping in?” Teddy asked, academically interested, now that he wasn’t being accused.

“With a prototype that Walter – excuse me, Wizard – had given to him. He gave prototypes of his long-range grabber to all of you, didn’t he?”

Jazz and Teddy nodded. Pluto stood silent in the spotlight, frozen.

“Did it work?” Wizard asked. While Pluto sank against the wall, Wizard was focused on his beloved invention. “That’s a pretty delicate operation. Light refracts under water, and it must’ve been tricky getting your aim right. The current might’ve affected the pole if you had it fully extended – did it take a few tries?”