Wilma Tenderfoot: The Case of the Fatal Phantom (22 page)

“Pickle!” cried Wilma as the shock of nearly being murdered by a ghost for the second time that week wore off and she remembered what had just happened. She rushed to her hound’s side.

“It’s all right, Wilma,” said Theodore, taking a quick look at him. “He’s still breathing, just stunned. Stay with him. There’s something I need to do.”

The great and serious detective leaped to his feet and striding toward the long black curtain at the shack’s one window, pulled it dramatically to one side. There behind the drapes was a kind of projector. “As I suspected!” he declared. Then, turning, he grabbed hold of the Phantom’s hood. “And if I just pull this off,” he added, yanking it backward, “the true identity of the ghost will be revealed!”

“False Dr. Irascimus Flatelly!” gasped Wilma as she stared wide-eyed at the man before her. “That means YOU just tried to kill me …”

“Also known as Oscar Crackett!” yelled the real Irascimus Flatelly, who was standing behind Inspector Lemone as the rest of the Blackhearts and their servants piled in behind him. Barbu, Tully, and Janty hovered on the porch, determined not to miss anything either.

“Curse you, Mr. Goodman!” yelled Oscar, spitting with defiance. “If it weren’t for you and your infernal apprentice, I’d be away with the treasure by now!”

“I can’t believe it,” said Wilma, staring at Oscar Crackett. “You were pretending to be Dr. Flatelly
AND the Fatal Phantom. But how can that be? The Phantom attacked you at the mine. You can’t be in one place twice.”

“You are right, Wilma,” said Theodore, reaching for his pipe. “But I’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s go back to the beginning first.”

“Oh good,” said Lemone, finding a chair, hooking Oscar’s cuffs over the back of it, and sitting. “The explanation bit. At last.”

“This case began when a body was discovered in an excavation pit at the back of Blackheart Hoo,” began Theodore, tucking a thumb into his waistcoat pocket. “Apparently frightened to death.”

“It was planted there,” interjected the real Irascimus. “That mummy came from my offices. It was the over-a-century-old body of a farm worker, according to my research—a man called Taver Cester. He was petrified of spiders. When I dug his body up while doing some basic swamp research, I found it preserved and wrapped about with a massive spiderweb. My guess is that he stumbled into a black reaper’s web. They’re enormous but perfectly harmless. He panicked and died, scared to death.”

“That would explain the build-up of adrenaline that Penbert found,” Wilma interjected helpfully, looking up from tending Pickle.

“Exactly so, Wilma.” Theodore nodded. “I thought it must have been something like that. What you stumbled across when I sent you to fetch a new Brackle Bush was Oscar digging an excavation hole to
bury
the planted mummy, not dig it up. I suspect he wanted the body to be found by someone else. Your intervention simply made him speed up his plans. Oscar had learned of the legend of a hidden treasure and saw an opportunity to investigate and steal it for himself, but he needed access to the Blackheart estate. He did so by getting close to and then masquerading as Dr. Flatelly, planting a false body and making it seem that it was Bludsten Blackheart …”

“With the tooth and the ring?” asked Lord Blackheart.

“Yes.” Mr. Goodman nodded again. “He must have knocked out the appropriate tooth and taken the ring from the real Flatelly’s office.”

“Quite so. I had borrowed some Blackheart artifacts, including the ring, from the island
museum—I believe they’d been sold to the collection over the decades to raise funds for the Hoo’s upkeep …” The doctor trailed off tactfully.

“And the body gave weight to the legend of the treasure, which finally won Oscar the access he needed. But he also needed something more dastardly,” Theodore continued, “something that would stop every man and woman in the household from trying to find the treasure too. And that was when he introduced the story of the curse.”

“So…so that wasn’t true either?” asked Wilma. “No ghosts. AND no curse.”

“Well, really!” Lady Blackheart exclaimed.

“No, Wilma, I’m afraid not,” Mr. Goodman said, looking rueful. “As you know, I was always certain there was no Phantom. But it was your diary find that enabled me to question the curse story and the supposed Dr. Flatelly, so in many ways you were on the right track nonetheless.”

Wilma blushed with pride. Besides, even though it meant she had been wrong all along, it was a relief to discover that Mr. Goodman hadn’t been. The idea that the great detective wouldn’t always be right had felt most unsettling!

“Because if Bludsten wanted the treasure to remain hidden,” Theodore continued, “why did the diary appear to have the makings of a classic treasure hunt enclosed within it? Why so many clues? Besides, without it, we never would have found the treasure in time to stop Oscar getting away—so, well done again, Wilma.”

“But what about his crazed rantings about death…a curse…?” Wilma persisted.

“My guess now is that they are part of the story too. But I imagine Dr. Flatelly might be able to answer that better than me.”

The doctor nodded. “I advertised and took on an assistant specifically to help me with my research into the ancient legend of the Blackheart treasure. I had discovered stories about a great golden claw that had been commissioned by Bludsten Blackheart and buried somewhere on the estate. But the treasure wasn’t buried because Bludsten was mean or crazy. By all accounts, he was a bit of a practical joker with a fondness for adventure—hence his finding of the mine in the first place.”

“The jokes I found in the mine.” Wilma nodded.
“But if it was for fun, then why was the treasure not found?” she pondered.

“Because the night before the hunt, a terrible fire swept through the Hoo,” explained Dr. Flatelly. “A young boy was killed—a lad who had been taken in as an orphan by the Blackhearts. He was helping Bludsten to lay clues and had been sent to the beer cellar to do so, but the fire took hold and the boy was trapped. The fumes killed him. If he hadn’t been in the beer cellar, he would have lived. Bludsten was heartbroken and never forgave himself, so the treasure hunt was called off, and he went slowly crazy with grief, as you saw in his diary. Then he disappeared. Where to? No one knows to this day. That was one of the main reasons I wanted to research the story.”

“But the treasure remained?” asked Tarquin eagerly.

“When he disappeared, the treasure was still buried. And with the passing of time, it was forgotten. There were rumors of it, of course, but it became the stuff of legend.”

Wilma shook her head in disbelief as she stroked Pickle’s ears. “Yet the haunting and the spooks seemed so real! How did Oscar do it?”

“Yes, how?” chimed in several of the others.

“I’m a genius, that’s how,” the crook retorted.

“I have Penbert’s results here.” Theodore reached for a piece of paper in his waistcoat pocket. “As I suspected, the blood used for the ghostly threats was, in fact, ketchup, a bottle of which I saw in Dr. Flatelly’s shack.”

“And the ghost at the séance, Goodman?” said Lemone, still puzzled.

“Tricks of the mind,” replied Theodore with a shake of his head. “You saw what you already believed. You weren’t looking with the eyes of a detective. You were speculating—always dangerous! And the séance was skillfully done. Tripwires knocked people and things over, recordings of strange noises were played, stink bombs were set off, and a pump plate sent Pickle spinning through the air. All of this created the illusion of ghastly chaos. If you look in Miss Daise’s suitcase there, I imagine you’ll find most of this equipment inside.”

Fenomina promptly sat on her case so that no one could do so.

“The ghostly head, however, was a more complicated trick of the light,” continued the great detective, walking over to the strange contraption behind the drawn curtain. “This is an aphengoscopic lantern. It projects the image of anything you place before it and magnifies it. Watch.”

Theodore picked at something on his sleeve and dropped it into the lantern’s beam. Suddenly a giant spider appeared in the air above them. Everyone gasped.

“Hey, that’s mine—I usually use it for looking at my slides in greater detail,” the real Dr. Flatelly explained indignantly.

“It was this, along with a handheld loudspeaker, that allowed Oscar, disguised as the Fatal Phantom, to appear and speak seemingly in midair. My suspicions of the man calling himself Dr. Flatelly started when we first went to visit him in his makeshift office. There were two sets of plates and two mugs, both of which were still warm, yet there were no departing footprints outside. So where
was the other person—hidden? Hiding? My suspicions were aroused, but it wasn’t proof enough. Then Wilma saw a set of seemingly ghostly footprints leading up to the south side of the Hoo. They stopped at the wall and on either side of them were two round indentations in the snow. You will recall at the séance that there was a sharp blast of cold air that made the curtains billow out. The reason for this was that someone—and I soon realized it must have been the pretend doctor—had climbed up a ladder, opened the window, climbed in, and pulled the ladder up behind him so that he could help create the illusion of a haunting.”

“So the footprints weren’t spooky, but they were a useful clue, Mr. Goodman,” Wilma said, jumping up. “I got that right at least, didn’t I?”

“That you did, Wilma,” the great detective acknowledged cheerfully. “But I was still left wondering WHY the famed archaeologist would be doing all this. His long-standing reputation belied such behavior, and I knew he was comfortably well-off because of all the award-winning papers he has published. It was at the mine soon
after that when I finally got the answer. The so-called Dr. Flatelly took
off
his reading glasses to examine the drawings on the wall. Nobody who really wore glasses would have done that.”

At this, Oscar tutted loudly. “And nobody who isn’t an annoying attention-to-detail detective would have noticed!”

Mr. Goodman gave him a stern silencing look and continued. “He was obviously a fake! He went to great lengths to take Bludsten’s diary from Wilma too, and as soon as he had it, the Fatal Phantom appeared and the attempt on our lives was made.”

“But what about that Fatal Phantom?” called out Inspector Lemone. “If the fake doctor was with us, how was he acting the Phantom too?”

“He wasn’t,” declared Theodore. “At that moment I realized that his accomplice was! There was more than one person at the Hoo up to no good.”

More than one person? But is it a human? Or a SPOOK? Turn the page, quick! QUICK!

E
veryone in the room gasped. Oscar went pale and stared at the floor, and Wilma couldn’t stop herself looking from face to face, trying to see someone’s guilt in their eyes. How had she missed this? She couldn’t help feeling a little disheartened that she had gotten it SO wrong.

Seeing her glum face, Mr. Goodman bent down toward her. “And it was Wilma’s keen eyes again,” he reminded her as he continued to address his audience, “that spotted said accomplice trailing us down to the mine. In fact, she saw two separate people on our tail, but the other was merely
Barbu’s spying henchman, so I was less concerned about that.”

“What? No, er maybe, er …” Tully blustered from just outside the shack door.

“Shut up, you idiot.” Barbu’s cane popped up from behind the thug and rapped him on the knee.

“So,” Theodore continued, “I knew the accomplice had to be a real insider—someone with easy access to the house to help with the ghostly scrawls and keep abreast of developments while Oscar was stationed outside; someone who could have planted that ectoplasm, since the fake Dr. Flatelly was sitting next to me, so I knew it wasn’t him. And motive was, as ever, at the forefront of my thoughts. Most of you here needed money: Lady Blackheart with her penchant for pearls, Tarquin with his terrible gambling debts, and Belinda with her lavish dream wedding. Then there were the servants. All of you needed the money the treasure would bring.”

“Well, really!” Lady Blackheart exclaimed.

“Exactly, Mother,” Belinda pitched in. “I think I might faint at the impertinence of the man.”

Tarquin remained sheepishly silent whilst the servants simply huddled closer together nervously.

“Fret not, Miss Blackheart. I am no longer, in fact, accusing any of you,” Theodore went on. “But the presence of Barbu D’Anvers did slow my deducting down in this respect. For one thing, it made finding the treasure of the utmost importance and distracted my attention from getting to the bottom of the hauntings.”

“Yes.” Barbu nodded, twirling his cane smugly. “Yes, it would.”

“More importantly, it was
his
attempts to FINISH OFF LORD AND LADY BLACKHEART that led me to doubt myself.”

“What?” Lord Blackheart roared as Belinda’s eyes widened.

Barbu froze. “That’s an outrageous slander! Anyway, they’re both still alive, so I’ve done nothing wrong. You can’t arrest me. You’ve got no proof!”

“Sadly, no,” Mr. Goodman acknowledged quietly. “But I know I am right. At first, after the attempt on our lives by Oscar and his accomplice
in the mine, I took the murder attempt on Tarquin to be the work of Oscar and his friend—perhaps they were trying to protect the treasure?”

“But it wasn’t,” Oscar interrupted. “You can’t try and pin that on me too!”

“Quiet!” Lemone snapped. “I need to concentrate in these explanation scenes. Especially when I haven’t had a biscuit in hours! Carry on, Goodman.”

“Thank you, Inspector,” the great detective said, inclining his head. “So before I could accuse or arrest the fake doctor and force the name of his accomplice from him, the next trap—the crossbow—was sprung. It seemed to target the fake doctor, and he was genuinely shaken by it. Suddenly, all my theories were thrown into disarray. Why would the fake doctor or his accomplice try to kill Tarquin? Had I gotten the wrong person all along? It wasn’t until we were at Folly Island and I saw Barbu D’Anvers hanging around Belinda that I realized the first murder attempt was not meant for Tarquin but for Lord Blackheart, who had been about to drink his hot cocoa in
that very seat. The second one was intended for Lady Blackheart, when she was next arranging her famed flowers. Instead Miss Daise sprang the mechanism—which only someone as tall as Tully could have set up with the crossbow so high up the wall—by lifting the vase from the table, and Oscar simply got caught out when he stopped to talk to the psychic on his way back from scratching the latest fake-phantom message into the wall.”