Cloudy with a Chance of Ghosts (Destiny Bay Cozy Mysteries Book 4) Page 10

  Somehow, my invisibility had abandoned me. I turned crimson. It was so unexpected and I wasn’t prepared to be challenged like this.

  “I...I…just…”

  She was reaching for a walkie talkie that she carried in a fanny pack. If she got hold of a guard, I knew I was done for. They would find the recorder and everything, grab it and then toss me out on my ear.

  But just how much was I prepared to do to prevent that from happening? Was I going to try to beat her up? Not likely. Run? No. So….what?

  “Hello, hello,” she was yelling into her receiver.

  I was still trying to get her to cooperate. “No, Debbie, please listen to me. Let me explain.”

  “I don’t need to listen to lies. Hello!”

  I reached out and grabbed the thing from her hand, turned and threw it as hard as I could. It went right over the wall and down toward the beach below. I watched it fly, amazed that I’d actually done that. And when I turned back, Debbie looked just as amazed.

  “What are you doing?” she screeched. “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe just a little.” I pushed my hair back. “But I need you to listen to me.”

  “You destroyed my property!”

  “I’ll buy you a new one. Honest. Will you just listen to me?”

  “No!”

  But she wasn’t running away, and something in the way she was looking at me now told me I might have a chance of getting through to her.

  “Please, Debbie. I think it’s important. I want you to know.”

  She threw her hands up but she was listening. “What? What should I know?”

  “That Jagger… .”

  “Jagger! That bum!”

  “No, I don’t think….”

  “Isn’t he the prime suspect? My father won’t give up on him but I say cut him loose. If the police think he did it, that’s good enough for me. We’ve got the officers here right now, asking questions. Even the staff has seen things, heard things, and they’re ready to talk. From what I’ve seen, Jagger is going down.”

  That put a horrible, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was going to have to talk to Roy. But what could I possibly say? And what if he knew incriminating evidence against Jagger? How was I going to counter that?

  I had to try to help him, for Jill if for no other reason. She was my best friend and I was going to do what I had to do to preserve her peace of mind. If Roy and the others came in with stark evidence that proved to be against him…well, I would cross that bridge when we got there. In the meantime, I had to stick up for Jagger.

  Anyway, I was just here to get the recorder. What did that have to do with whether Jagger was guilty or not? Unless there was something I didn’t know about, the recorder was packed full of truth about Carlton—at least, that was what Keri had thought when she put it on there. And that truth contained something so bad, people seemed ready to kill for it. Or to keep it suppressed. Or whatever.

  Maybe that was the key. If we produced the recorder and let the chips fall where they wanted to, maybe the truth about everything would rise to the surface and we could all go home and take it easy and go on with our lives.

  Maybe. But I didn’t really have a lot of confidence in that. Still… I felt at least some degree of power and control was in my hands. I had the recorder. I wouldn’t want anyone who hated Carlton to have it. And I wouldn’t want anyone who wanted to use if to blackmail him again to have it. To tell the truth, I wasn’t even sure I wanted the police to have it. Not yet. It could probably ruin too many lives.

  “Debbie, please listen. Jagger sent me here to look for something. It may be important.”

  She looked at me sharply. “What is it?”

  I took a deep breath. She was actually going to listen.

  “He says Keri had a microcassette recorder with all her research on it. The information for the article she was writing about your father.”

  I definitely had her attention now. She grabbed my arm. “Are you serious? Where is it?”

  Now I had to improvise. I sure wasn’t going to tell her it was in my pocket. Still, I thought she should know that Jagger had Carleton’s interests at heart.

  “He said he saw her stick it into a bush around here somewhere, but he couldn’t remember exactly where. He sent me to look for it.”

  “Why? Does he want to take over where she left off? Does he really think he can make more with a stupid yellow-journalism article than…?”

  “No! No. That’s not what he wants at all.”

  Although, now that she’d mentioned it, I began to wonder. “Listen, I’m just trying to explain what I’m doing here. Believe me, Jagger is a real fan of your father and what he’s doing with the Carlton Group. He just wants to find and manage that information before it falls into the wrong hands.”

  “Yes.” She grabbed my arm even more tightly, her eyes bright with earnest energy. “Yes, that’s what we need to do. Get that information before…” Her voice trailed off and she was thinking fast. Then the approach of another police cruiser on the upper road distracted her.

  I looked hard as it rolled up to the castle. Was that Roy’s car? I wasn’t sure. It was too far away to know for certain.

  “Listen. You stay here and keep looking for that recorder,” she told me. “I’m going to get my father. He’ll want to be in on this.”

  And without another word, she turned on her heel and began to jog up toward the castle.

  But I was done. The only place I wanted to be was out of there. So I started weaving my way through the trees, heading toward what I hoped was the place where I’d come in. I got lost in no time. I couldn’t tell which way I was going. I couldn’t see the castle any longer, but I could sense which way was toward the ocean. The trees covered me like a canopy, hiding everything else and I felt like I was going around in circles.

  I was getting a little anxious by now. What if I couldn’t find my way out? And I wasn’t being as careful as I’d been at first. I just wanted to get out of there. So I made a mistake.

  I started to run, and because I was running, I didn’t consider where I was stepping as much as I should have. And the next thing I knew, the pile of leaves I thought I was running through turned out to be a way to disguise a pit someone had dug into the ground. One step and I was falling.

  The fall knocked me silly. It took a few minutes to realize what had happened. The pit was deep. I tried to climb out, but every foothold crumbled, every handhold ended up in a handful of useless dirt. I had fallen into a carefully prepared trap.

  It didn’t frighten me at first. I hadn’t been really hurt—just a scraped knee and a bruised hip--and I thought it was mostly a pointless nuisance. And then I began to realize I couldn’t get out and panic began to lick at my emotions. You could die in a place like this and it could take weeks to find you.

  “Oh dear.” Julia was bending over the edge, looking down. Her pretty eyes were full of sympathy. “How did you do this? You fell into the trap. Now what are you going to do?”

  I stared up at her. For just a second, I’d thought I was rescued. This nice little girl could run up and find someone to help me get out. But then I realized it wasn’t going to be like that. Julia was a ghost. There was very little chance that she was going to do anything that was going to help me.

  “Julia,” I said hopefully. “Do you think you can get someone to come out here?”

  Sadly, she shook her head. “Sorry, Mele,” she said. “No one ever listens to me. Except you. And now you’re probably going to die.” She brightened. “Maybe you could come stay here with me when you become a ghost. Oh, do! We could have all sorts of fun together, you and I.”

  I was beginning to feel a little hysterical.

  “Julia, can’t you give a message to anyone at the house?”

  She shook her head again and sighed. “Sorry. I just can’t.” And she began to fade away.

  “Julia!”

  She was gone. She wasn’t even going to try. And here I
was, stuck in a hole in the ground and no way to climb out. A bubble of panic rose in my throat. I really was in a trap.

  Even worse—there was someone who had made the trap and he was perfectly happy to have me caught in it.

  “Hello down there,” said a gruff male voice.

  I looked up. The sun was slanting in through the trees and blinding me for a moment, but then I saw who it was. George Marker, the man of trash can fame.

  “Oh, George,” I said in relief. “Thank God you found me. Help me get out.”

  “Help you get out?” He looked shocked at the suggestion. “Why would I do that when I worked so hard to get you in?”

  I frowned, not understanding. It didn’t make sense. “No, George, listen to me. I came over here to search for clues regarding the Keri Shorter murder. Jagger sent me and …”

  “Jagger,” he said, disgust in his tone. “That poser. Carlton thinks his art is superior.” He said the word in a snotty tone that made clear that he didn’t agree. “He told me so. Jagger has him fooled just like he fools the ladies.”

  I was beginning to sense a theme here. George didn’t like Jagger. Just like Celinda Moore. Artists seemed to be particularly jealous of each other. Was that what making them compete for prizes led to? Hmm.

  “George, listen. Why don’t you just let me out of this pit and….”

  “No. I can’t. I won’t. I know what you’re doing here. You want to find Keri’s notes for her article. Don’t you? That’s why you were at Marilee’s house last night. You knew she had all Keri’s notes. But you were too late. I got them all. And guess what.” He grinned malevolently over the edge. “I burned every damn one of them.”

  I gasped, almost in shock. What? Had this man been the one who’d bowled us over? Had he held Marilee under the water until she drowned? Had he run out and left a few floating pieces of paper behind?

  “You killed Marilee,” I accused before I could stop myself.

  “Marilee killed Keri Shorter,” he countered. “I saw her do it.”

  “Why would she do that?” I asked breathlessly, not really thinking he would give me an answer.

  But to my surprise, he did.

  “It’s all come out now,” he said. “Marilee has been blackmailing Carlton for months. Then Keri showed up with her journalist arrogance and let everyone know she was working on a story that would reveal all about Carlton’s shady past. Marilee couldn’t have that. Her excuse for extorting big money from Carlton would be dead and gone. So she stopped Keri the only way she knew how—with a rock to the skull.”

  I winced, picturing the scene.

  “And you saw it?”

  “Yes I did. I saw it from a convenient place I go to in one of the towers. I can look over the entire compound and see what’s happening. I saw it, and then I dashed back down to the terrace, thinking to tell what I’d seen. But by the time I got there, I thought better of it. Something told me it would be more advantageous to lay low and see what happened.”

  “You should have said something right away!”

  “Oh sure. But I knew Marilee would be back to her old tricks, trying to ruin Carlton. She’d had it in for him ever since he made her move out. We all thought she was secretly in love with him all those years, but we learned better, didn’t we? Carleton is a wonderful patron of the arts. If she’d had her way, that would have been all over. I had to stop her from sucking him dry.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes. Good old George to the rescue.” He chuckled in a rather nasty way. “So last night I went over there, just to have a talk with her. But she was in the tub, and I thought, wow—fate and destiny. Kismet. Nothing could have been easier than to hold her under the water long enough to take care of that problem.”

  “Wow,” I muttered to myself, in a daze. “What a guy.”

  He looked down. “And now there’s you to take care of. How are we going to do that? Hmm?” He sighed. “I don’t think I ought to get too close. I have a feeling you might fight back. Okay, you stay here. I’m going to go to my house and get a gun. I’ll be right back.”

  He clomped off into the underbrush.

  My heart was racing. Somehow, someway, I had to get out of here before he came back. But how? I tried my cell phone but it was out of juice. Typical! I railed at myself and my sloppy ways. Why couldn’t I even keep a darn cell phone batteried up? I tried climbing again, only to fall back. It was no use. Whatever these walls were made of, they seemed to disintegrate at my touch.

  And then I heard a soft meow. I looked up. There was the Siamese kitty, looking down at me.

  My heart leapt, then fell again as I realized there was nothing the little cat could do to save me. Still, I loved it when she jumped down to join me.

  I gave her a good petting, then began to think fast. This was no ordinary cat. I’d known that from the first. In fact, I suspected her of being a ghost cat. If that was so, who knew what she might be capable of? I might as well take every chance I had available to me. After all, what did I have to lose?

  “Listen,” I said to her. “Can you go find someone in the house?”

  She stared up at me, bright eyed. I could have sworn she understood just what I was saying.

  “His name is Roy McKnight. He’s a police detective, handsome with silver blue eyes. Do you think you can find him?”

  The meow she uttered was completely confident. She could do it.

  “Okay. I’m going to give you this.” I slipped the silver and turquoise bracelet off my wrist and dropped it around her neck. It hung there glistening and making her look supremely elegant. “Now go. See who you can find.”

  She climbed the walls as though she had suction feet and off she went. I had no idea if she was going toward actual, usable people or the deep blue sea. Either way, she was surely a cutie.

  But soon George was back and he’d brought his gun. I started to tremble, just a little bit. I didn’t know if my ploy of sending the kitty off with my bracelet would work but I had to play for time, just in case. How was I going to do that?

  Talk—keep him talking.

  About what?

  Anything.

  “So, George, tell me. If you really saw Marilee kill Keri, I can’t believe you couldn’t have found a way to let the police know without spilling all the beans on Carlton. Why did you let Jagger get the blame?”

  George gave a guttural grunt. “Jagger deserved it. He needed to be brought down a peg or two.”

  “Why was that? Did you know that Carlton was going to award him with the prize?”

  He leaned over the edge and glared at me. “The prize? Who told you that?”

  “I think he deserved it. I’ve seen some of his paintings and I’ve seen some of the rest done by you and others in your group. I really do consider his a cut above. Surely you can see that.”

  His face got red and he looked furious. “You’re crazy. He’s a hack. He thinks that charm can win the day for a wise guy like him. Well, he’s wrong. Karma comes back to bite you in the butt every time. And now it’s his turn. Once he’s locked up, things will get back to normal. Carlton will have time to pay some attention to the rest of us. And maybe he’ll understand just how far I’m willing to go to protect him from these blood-sucking parasites.”

  He lifted the gun and aimed and I made a little shriek and crouched back into a corner, wishing there was some place to hide.

  “Like you,” he added needlessly.

  “George! Don’t do this. You’ll get caught. You’ll end up doing time yourself, and how will that help anything? Think it over, man. This is crazy.”

  “Stand still. I don’t want to waste any bullets.”

  “Stop! Haven’t you seen all the cops that have been arriving? Do you really think not one of them will notice if they hear a gun shot?”

  “Shut up.”

  “And even if you do manage to kill me, what are you going to do with the body? Leave it out for the gardener? I think not. I think you’ll have a lot of trou
ble getting rid of me. You know what they say. It’s always the cover-up that trips up the perpetrator.”

  “Cover-up?” He frowned as though he didn’t understand what the heck I was talking about. So I went on.

  “Sure. You’ll try to bury me, but it will be hard work with this thick clay around here. You won’t get it done by sunup and then what will you do, when everyone can see you?”

  “I said, shut up.”

  “You’ll put me in the trunk of your car and you’ll go driving all over town, trying to find a place to dump me, but there will be problems to every site you pick. You’ll get caught. Believe me. You’re the type who always gets caught.”

  He hesitated, looking stricken. “You know, you’re right. I always do get caught.”

  “You see? Better not try it. If we could just talk for awhile….”

  “But I didn’t get caught for the Marilee thing.” His voice sounded triumphant.

  “Not yet. But…”

  “Shut up.”

  “George, think! We can work this out. Let me come up there and we can….”

  “No!” He aimed right at me and this time he meant business. “You stay right where you are, sister.”

  My heart was beating out of my chest. I closed my eyes and waited to hear the gun go off. Instead, I heard a shuffling sound.

  “Hey,” George cried out. “Hey, get away from me!”

  I opened my eyes and saw him batting at something down near his feet.

  “Get this cat away from me,” he yelled, and then I saw the little Siamese leap out of his grasp and turn, looking as though she was laughing back at him.

  “Oh!” I couldn’t believe it. The cat was fighting for me! But where was the bracelet?

  I didn’t have time to speculate. Roy had arrived on the scene, with a couple of other cops trailing in behind him, and they had George on the ground and in handcuffs in no time at all. I watched, breathing hard, as relief washed over me.

  “Hey.” Roy grinned down at me. “We’re getting a rope ladder. We’ll get you out of there in no time.”

  “No hurry,” I lied, my knees shaking so badly I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to keep standing up. “I can wait. Just don’t go off and leave me here.”