What a Ghoul Wants (5 page)

“I say,” he said, “but you lot look a bit worse for wear.”

I attempted to smooth out my hair and collect myself. “Who’re you?” Heath asked brazenly,
and by the look of his sleepy face I knew he’d nodded off too.

“Who am I? Well, young man, I am Inspector Lumley,” the lanky fellow with dark brown
hair, pale skin, and a long thin nose said. For emphasis he pulled out a small leather
case from his coat pocket to flip it open and reveal his identification. “Is the manager
of the hotel, Arthur Crunn, about?”

“Inspector?” I repeated. “I thought a constable was coming to meet us.”

“Yes, well, he was, but he was waylaid by the dead body floating in the moat, you
see. Called me immediately to come have a look.”

My jaw dropped. “Dead body?”

“Yes,” the inspector said, wrinkling up his nose. “Terrible sight that. And the reason
I stand before you now. So, allow me to repeat myself: Is the hotel manager, Arthur
Crunn, about?”

Inspector Lumley had more of an English accent than Welsh. His enunciation was most
crisp and clear, and I wondered if he’d moved here from someplace closer to London.
“No,” Heath told him. “When we came down here, nobody was around.”

The inspector pivoted on his heel to turn his attention to the front desk and took
three purposeful strides to it in order to peer around it and see for himself.

“Was the person in the moat a woman?” I asked, afraid that the battered woman I’d
seen outside my room had come to a bad end after all.

“No,” the inspector said, raising his hand to shine his light into the small hallway
behind the front desk. He then turned his attention to me, his brown eyes shining
with intelligence. I had a feeling not much got by him. “Why do you ask if it was
a woman?”

I took a small step back, uncomfortable under the inspector’s intense gaze. “We called
the police about a woman in distress.”

“Woman in distress?” Lumley repeated, his eyes squinting as they assessed me head
to toe. “I wasn’t told of any woman in distress. I heard only that there was some
sort of disturbance here at Kidwellah.”

Heath wrapped his arm across my shoulders. “We’re guests here at the hotel,” he said.
“About an hour and a half ago my girlfriend woke up to the sound of someone crying
in the hallway outside our door. When she opened the door, she found a woman huddled
there who appeared to have been beaten, and she also seemed too afraid to accept M. J.’s
offer of help. When M. J. woke me to let me know what she’d seen, we did a quick search
for the woman but couldn’t find her. We then came down here to find some assistance,
saw that the front desk was unmanned, and called the police.”

It didn’t faze me that Heath had left out the part about some paranormal creature
almost beating our door down; I would’ve left that part out too. And I couldn’t be
sure, but I suspected that Inspector Lumley had stopped listening to Heath’s explanation
halfway through the story. The moment he mentioned the battered woman, the inspector
seemed to frown and look elsewhere. “I shall have to have a talk with my secretary,”
he muttered distractedly. “She should know better than to discharge a constable for
calls of that sort from here. Still, I suppose that sending Niles over to take the
report did lead us to the body in the moat. . . .”

Heath and I exchanged looks of confusion. What the heck did he mean by that? “Sir,”
I said, catching the inspector’s attention again. “I can assure you that our call
to your station was very serious. The woman I saw in the hallway outside my door had
been beaten, and she was so distraught and obviously traumatized that I still fear
for her safety.”

Lumley’s expression was almost bored. “Yes, well, I can’t very well do anything for
that poor woman
now
, can I?” he said.

“
Excuse
me?” I said. Was he serious?

Lumley pulled out his cell and began to tap the screen with his thumb. “Ma’am,” he
said to me. “The woman you saw is deceased.”

I gasped. Next to me I heard Heath gasp too. “You found her body too?” he said.

Lumley placed the phone to his ear. “No,” he said, a slight smirk tugging the ends
of his mustache up. “But if you travel across the moat and out to the graveyard on
the highest hill next to the keep, you’ll find her headstone.”

I turned to Heath and mouthed, “What the hell does that mean?”

We couldn’t ask Lumley, because he was already talking into the phone. From the sound
of it, he was trying to reach the hotel manager, Arthur Crunn, and had gotten his
voice mail. “Arthur, it’s Inspector Lumley. You must call me back immediately. We’ve
found a body in your moat, and I must speak with you at once.”

Lumley hung up the phone and placed it back inside his pocket. He seemed to catch
our expressions, because he said, “Don’t tell me you’ve come all the way to Kidwellah
without hearing of the ghosts in residence? I thought that was why all you Americans
come here.”

Heath and I both shook our heads. “We know very few specifics about who haunts this
castle,” I said without offering up any details about our TV show or our psychic abilities.

Lumley checked his watch and sighed. “Well, I’ve no time to explain the late Lady
Catherine’s appearance outside your room tonight, miss, but suffice it to say that
there is nothing anyone can do to help her now. And if you’ll excuse me, I must get
back outside. If you happen to see Mr. Crunn, please send him immediately to the north
side of the moat, all right?”

I nodded numbly and watched as the inspector strode away.

Heath and I stood there for a few beats trying to make sense of it all. At last he
said, “I think we need to find Gopher. He should know more about this late Lady Catherine.”

“Good plan,” I said, truly shocked that I, of all people, hadn’t figured out that
the woman in the hallway was a ghost in the first place. Then again, I was operating
on very little sleep and a major case of jet lag. “Do you know which room Gopher’s
in?” I asked Heath.

My sweetheart frowned. “No.” Pulling out his cell phone again, he tried in vain to
get it to turn on before asking me, “You don’t happen to know Gopher’s number by heart,
do you?”

I shook my head. Heath looked around before he seemed to think of something and then
he moved to the other side of the clerk’s desk and opened up the logbook—apparently
the hotel staff still did things the old-fashioned way, without computers.

“Should you be looking through that?” I asked nervously.

“Probably not, but it’s the only way we’ll know what room Gopher’s in. Ah, here it
is, room two-oh-two.” Heath then picked up the phone receiver and dialed the number.
I could hear the ring from the receiver Heath held to his ear, and then Gopher’s raspy
voice barked, “Yeah?”

“It’s Heath. We’ve got a situation. You need to meet us in the lobby right now.”

It took a little convincing to get our producer to cooperate, but finally he promised
to meet us in the front hall in ten minutes. I thought we had a ten percent chance
of seeing him, as I was sure Gopher would likely fall back asleep.

Heath made his way again over to the set of throne chairs, but I forced myself to
stand. If I sat down, I knew I’d be out like a light.

About the time I was going to urge Heath to call Gopher again, a disheveled elderly
man, probably in his mid-seventies, appeared at the top of the stairs wearing a blue
silk robe, striped pajamas, and leather slippers. Gripping the railing, he made his
way steadily down the steps and when at last he took his eyes off the stairs and spotted
us, he appeared truly surprised that the front hall had two people in it, and he swiped
a shaky hand through his unkempt hair. “Terribly sorry,” he said when he arrived at
the landing, and looked around as if expecting to see someone else in attendance.
“Have you been waiting here long?”

“A little while,” I said, thinking he must believe we were waiting for the desk clerk.
“I’m M. J. Holliday and this is Heath Whitefeather. We’re guests at the hotel too.”

The elder man’s brow rose. “Too? Oh, no, miss, you misunderstand. I’m Arthur Crunn,
the hotel manager. I’m afraid I assumed you had just arrived and were looking for
my clerk, Mr. Brown.”

“No, sir,” I said. “Mr. Brown checked us in several hours ago. We’re the ones who
called the police.”

Mr. Crunn’s eyes bulged a little and he appeared quite rattled. “Yes, I received a
most distressing message from Inspector Lumley.”

“He’s outside, waiting for you, sir,” I said.

Crunn ran another shaky hand through his hair and pulled at his robe. He appeared
to be in no hurry to go out and meet the inspector. “Are you all right, sir?” Heath
asked gently.

The older gentleman nodded but put two fingers to his lips. It was a moment before
he could speak. “The inspector said something about a drowning in the moat. . . .”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” I said. “He told us that his constable discovered the body and
called in the inspector. Lumley told us that if we saw you to tell you to go out to
meet him on the north side of the moat, where they discovered the poor man.”

Crunn’s face had now become quite pale and I was afraid he might faint. Moving subtly
to his side, I placed my arm under his to steady him and said, “Would you like us
to go with you to meet the inspector?”

At first the older gentleman shook his head, but it wasn’t a very convincing headshake.
“That’s very kind of you,” he said hoarsely, “but I believe I’ll manage.”

Heath put a hand on my back. “I’ll go with him, Em,” he whispered.

But I didn’t want to be left alone. The old castle was suddenly giving me the creeps.
Also, it occurred to me a little belatedly that if the dead man in the moat had drowned,
it was quite possible that he hadn’t been able to cross over. If I could locate his
spirit nearby, I might be able to quietly assist his journey to the other side. “We’ll
all go,” I said, looping my arm through Arthur’s. “Come on, Mr. Crunn. We’ll keep
you company. And if it gets to be too much, you just give us the word and we’ll bring
you back inside the castle, all right?”

Crunn gave a pat to my hand. He seemed a kindly elderly man, and I had a soft spot
for kindly elderly men. “Thank you, Miss Holliday. You and Mr. Whitefeather are most
considerate.”

We escorted the hotel manager outside into the damp morning and I realized there was
a fair amount of fog settling in. Although I hadn’t looked at a clock since being
awakened by the inspector, I still estimated that it was somewhere around four thirty
or five o’clock in the morning.

We moved through the mist, making our way nearly soundlessly across the cobblestones.
Crunn led us across the inner courtyard to a small wood door set to the left side
of the main keep that was cleverly obscured by the surrounding ivy and architecture.
If Crunn hadn’t stopped in front of it, I’d never have known it was there. “We can
take this across to the north side of the moat,” he said, fishing around in his robe
for a set of keys, which he used to unlock the door.

Once he had the creaky door open and reached for a light switch on the inside wall,
Heath and I moved through to enter a low-hanging tunnel. I felt goose bumps immediately
line my arms as the cold dampness of the stone walls seeped through my clothing. The
tunnel was very poorly lit by only three dim bulbs and I could see that both Heath
and Crunn had to bend at the waist so as not to bump their heads on the ceiling.

After moving a few feet forward, I could see that the floor was actually a bridge
with a very low stone wall only about two feet high, and below the bridge the slight
gurgling of the moat echoed against the walls. It wasn’t far across, but I was anxious
to get over the bridge and back out into the open. The tunnel seriously gave me the
creeps and I didn’t like it. By the looks of Heath’s face when I turned back to catch
his eye, he didn’t like it one bit either.

Finally we came to another door; this Crunn unlocked from the inside, and we stepped
through it to head up a series of stairs. At the top of the stairs was yet one more
door, which Crunn also unlocked, and we were at last back out into the open. The early-morning
mist obscured most of the surrounding area, but I guessed that we were at the far
end of the castle, very near Lake Byrn y Bach.

From here Crunn led us over a larger bridge that extended over the rest of the moat,
then down a narrow path, which curled to the left to follow the round exterior wall
of the castle and the curve of the moat. At last we spotted an array of lights, which
led us to a small cluster of people at the edge of the moat.

As we approached, I could see several cars parked nearby. One looked to be an ambulance,
and another was a marked police car. Two more were small compact vehicles that I assumed
belonged to the inspector and perhaps to the coroner.

When we were within about ten yards of the lights, the mist swirled and I was able
to pick out the inspector from the other people gathered there. He saw us and waved
impatiently to Arthur, who quickened his step, and we did too.

As we came abreast of the inspector, I kept my focus on Crunn. He was trembling outright
now and he’d gone so pale that I was starting to really worry about the possibility
of him collapsing. I reached out and took his hand to help steady him, and he cast
me a grateful glance before focusing on Lumley. “Jasper,” he said, “is it really true?
Has someone fallen into our moat?”

The inspector waved a hand to an area just behind him, and reflexively I leaned out
around Crunn to take a look.

There on a black tarp looking bloated and blue was the figure of a young man with
bright red hair, pouty lips, and eyes wide open. I put a hand to my mouth and had
to steel myself. The sight was horrible.

There was a gasp to my left and I realized that Mr. Crunn was vigorously shaking his
head back and forth, as if he was willing the sight away. “It can’t be!” he said in
a voice barely audible.