Triple Threat Mysteries Collection

Chapter 14

Dressed in black linen pants and a white silk shirt with a polka-dotted white and teal scarf, a gift from Aunt Mat several months back, I swung into the main dining room, Adwin not far behind. I wasn"t surprised to find the other gals wearing shirts and pants as well, in different shades of gray and brown, but I did raise a curious brow at the array of polka-dotted scarves. I"d not even have worn mine had it not been draped on the same hanger as my shirt, kind of like a prompt or Post-It note. This was becoming way too coincidental.

“Nice scarf. A gift from Aunt Mat?” I asked Rey flatly.

“Yeah. I forgot I had it. In fact, I"m pretty sure I forgot to bring it along.” She glanced down, bemused. “Because I forgot I even had it.”

The Sayers presented puckered brows while Linda, May-Lee, and I eyeballed each other"s neckwear.

“Soup"s on,” Adwin announced as Hubert limped in with a large white ceramic tureen and set it in the middle of the table. This time there were no bizarre dinner service motifs. A thick beige linen tablecloth and eggplant-colored napkins, and tall cream-colored candles adorned the table. It was all quite staid, which made me wonder what Mathilda Moone had in store for the evening (the others might lower their guards, but mine was on red alert).

“What the hell is this?” Rey asked, looking into the tureen.

“I believe it"s a pepper pot,” Percival replied cheerfully.

She peered closer. “What"s in it? I see mushrooms and veggies, but there"s lumpy meat-like stuff in here.”

“That would be tripe, dearie,” Prunella said with a smile as wry as her brother"s. “Dumplings and tripe.”

“Lovely,” Rey murmured, wrinkling her nose. She leaned toward Linda and quietly asked, “What the frig is tripe?”

“The lining of a bovine stomach.”

My cousin"s face took on a corpse-like hue.

Prunella inhaled deeply and said, “It smells absolutely divine.”

Hubert nodded and, as if on cue, began to serve.

Talk was limited as we dove into the pepper pot. Alright, maybe we didn"t exactly dive; we sniffed, tested gingerly, sniffed again, and then dove in. It was tasty … for bovine stomach lining.

then“I won the bet,” Percival said after emptying his bowl. “I said soup.”

“You did,” Prunella nodded, “but this wasn"t mushroom soup per se. It merely had edible agaric in it.”

No one won the bet that evening. The pepper pot was followed by chicken schnitzels, spaetzle (Austrian noodle thingies) and creamed mushrooms. Dessert was a dense, spice-laden pumpkin pie – and a very good one judging from the way Adwin"s lips curled upward between mouthfuls.

Later, after dinner and a few treks upstairs, we adjourned to the Drink & Death Room, as Linda called the drawing room. We were sipping mint tea and avoiding eye contact, ensconced in those little Zen zones we"d become quite familiar with in the last twenty-four hours, when ghost-like booing started to flow softly around us like milkweed filaments propelled by a westerly wind.

“How Abbott and Costello,” Linda commented.

“That explains why Jensen didn"t show up for dinner,” Percival said with a roll of his eyes, jerking a thumb upward. “He"s hovering near a vent, doing a Casper impression.”

“It"s kinda lame,” Rey sniffed, pouring more tea into her cup.

“Why don"t we sneak up on him and give him a scare?” Linda suggested, standing. “I don"t want him thinking he can get away with this all night.”

“If the lot of us "sneak up on him", we"d hardly catch him unawares,” Prunella pointed out dully.

Rey threw back her tea. “Let"s give it a try. If it doesn"t work, it doesn"t work. We"ll get back at him with our original plan.”

“Never mind the fact there have to be hidden rooms and walkways in an old place like this,” Linda added with a nod.

“Let"s split up,” I proposed. “Rey and Linda can take the west wing. Adwin, you and I will take the east. Prunella and Percival could –”

High-pitched staccato laughter echoed throughout the dwelling.

Linda snorted. “Geez, now we"ve got freaking Fred Flintstone"s Uncle Giggles running amok.”

Percival looked blank, but Adwin and I laughed.

“Okay guys, let"s do as my cousin suggested and take different parts of the house,” Rey said, stepping past.

I grabbed her forearm. “Let"s not make too much noise. We want to surprise him.”

not“How"re we going to see anything? We can"t exactly go turning on lights if we"re aiming for the element of surprise,” Adwin pointed out.

“Let me get those flashlights we put back in the pantry earlier.” Percival strolled from the room; a man with a target.

The lighting in a rectangular music room was as dim as it was everywhere else in that wing of the house. A lone bulb in a shade-less lamp was 40W at best. Different sized cloths in various shades of beige and taupe, ranging from silky-soft to scratchy-coarse, had covered two classic pianos, an Erard harp, a long wooden trunk, and one tall cabinet in which clarinets rested. They now lay on a smooth maple hardwood floor that would have gleamed had it been waxed. Textured wallpaper, a dusty rose and pale peach-puff combination, did little to brighten the place. Dusting appeared to be regular, but it didn"t look as if music lovers hadn"t frequented the room in years.

Adwin gazed at a John Brinsmead Art Case Upright while running fingers lovingly over a 1880s French Pfeiffer Cottage Upright, its wrinkled cover lying at its pedals like a shorn shroud. His expression was similar to the one he sported when putting finishing touches on a five-layer hazelnut butter torte. Music had been the pastry chef"s first love, but an incident with a flaky if not skittish piano maestro and the lid of a grand piano terminated a successful music career before it started. Fortunately, those long graceful fingers hadn"t been too damaged and they went on to create other magnum opuses: delectable ones.

I could imagine May-Lee regarding both pianos with appraising eyes, calculating their worth if they were to find their ways into her shop. Or perhaps she"d simply admire the workmanship and marvel at the history.

I could see the Moones going for the pianos and the harp, but clarinets? Pleased to demonstrate how far his know-how extended, my beau-s***h-music-expert pointed out one was an A-flat clarinet and the other a bass clarinet (his Australian cousin Henry played the former in a military band). Given Aunt Mat"s taste for the odd and different, I could imagine her tooting on the former, but not the latter, a heavy version with a floor stand.

“What"s up?”

I brushed dust from the jersey cardigan I"d slipped on before the exploration began. It was getting progressively colder out and it seemed as if the chilly external air were seeping in through windows and cracks. Earlier, the Weather Channel had posted a winter storm watch, which had already gripped Georgia, where highways were experiencing icy white-out conditions, freezing fog, and multiple pile-ups. It would impact at least six states over the next few hours. Airports had already started to delay and cancel flights. From the feel of it, the ice storm was approaching rapidly. Closing a case, I asked, “Do people toot?”

Adwin laughed. “Only if they"re taxis.”

“Ha, ha.” I walked over to see what he"d found in a strongbox. “Anything of note?”

He held up a small pile of printed songs. “It"s hard to hide body parts among compositions.”

“What a funny boy you are … not.”

“Are you ready to move to the next room?”

“I"m ready to call it a night.”

He draped an arm around my shoulders and we strolled to the door. “Where"s that investigative reporter instinct?”

“I"m a weather gal,” I replied with a droll smile. “I only need to look out a window to get my story.”

Adwin laughed as we stepped into the shadowed hallway – only to freeze as a sound that fell between a shriek and a screech pierced the air.

“You"ve got to wonder if there are amplifiers hidden beyond these walls.” He peered into the darkness. “What do you think – was that part of the show?”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. “I doubt it.” I grabbed Adwin"s hand and we raced forward, making it across the house in seconds, only to stop at a flight of shadowy stairs, unsure which direction to take.

Adwin gestured upward. “That way.”

I pointed down the hallway. “That way.”

“Is anyone down there?” Percival"s voice boomed from above.

We hastened up the stairs, stopping before the writer, who stood at the base of a narrow winding staircase that led to the tower where Prunella claimed Reginald kept additional “oddments”. He held a pewter candelabrum in which five fat white candles burned. The golden light made his angular face glow eerily, giving him the appearance of a specter visiting from an otherworld.

Adwin glanced around. “Where is everyone?”

“I have no idea, but I heard a scream. I thought it came from up there,” he motioned, “but the door is locked and there doesn"t appear to be anyone beyond it. I was heading down to find someone to help me open it. Now that you"re here, the three of us should easily be able to break it down.”

Adwin smiled wearily. “It"s another joke … probably.”

“The scream sounded like one of Pruney"s,” Percival claimed, his expression bordering on pained.

Pruney? Oh boy. The more time spent in their company, the weirder the brother-sister duo was becoming. “Maybe she and the girls decided to turn tables and scare Jensen, and/ or us,” I said with a wink.

Percival looked from me to Adwin and back again. The knots in his brow softened. “I wouldn"t put it past your cousin to think up something silly like that.”

Adwin had to agree. “Let them have their fun –”

Another shriek-screech erupted. We scurried up the steps, bumping into walls and jostling one another like the Ghostbusters pursuing the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man.

Percival rammed the candelabrum into Adwin"s chest, nearly knocking him over.

He clutched it, barely avoiding a singed neck, a curse seen but not heard.

Prunella"s anxious brother rattled a heavy, clunky lock that would have nicely graced a medieval castle. It wouldn"t give so he banged on the heavy wooden door and shouted his sister"s name several times before Adwin kneed him in the butt. The action was very unlike my beau, but then so was the, “Will you get a frigging grip, dude? She"s not answering the frigging door!”

The lock was sturdy and secure. I was about to request suggestions as to how to open it with no hairpins or sharp implements in reach when something movie-time popped into my head. I reached upward and felt along the doorsill. Nothing. So much for ingenious flashes. Not completely discouraged, I moved onward.

Percival gestured. “Help me break it down.”

Adwin scanned the door that had to be as solid as a fortress gate. The look he gave the middle-aged gent suggested he thought the man two screws short of demented.

“Do you have a better idea?” His question held enough chill to form ice crystals on Adwin"s thin upper lip.

“I do.” I held up a brass key I"d found secured to the underside of a staircase banister.

Ignoring Percival"s outstretched hand, I unlocked the door. Despite its thickness and size, the door swung inward as easily and lightly as if it were a feather fan.

Adwin slipped in first, lighting the way for several feet. “Wow.”

The round room was filled with artifacts and curiosities and Prunella"s “oddments”. “Wow” didn"t begin to describe it. Numerous showcase pieces, made primarily of bone and horn, were so simple and crude they could only have been homemade. But made in whose home? The mad scientist, Dr. Moreau"s?

A tiny control, cleverly camouflaged to blend into roughhewn bricks alongside the door, proved to be a light switch. A soft glow, pale as moonlight, swathed the room.

“Maybe we should have stuck with candlelight,” Adwin said with a tight smile, positioning the candelabrum in the gauntlet of a 16th-century knight. “Hang onto that, willya Lancie?”

“What a hodgepodge,” Percival muttered.

“You"ve never been in here?” I asked. I"d come to believe brother and sister did everything together. So how had Prunella known what was in here? An educated guess? Or a personal invitation?

“Never had the, mmm, privilege.”

“How ugly is this guy?” Adwin"s face was an inch from a wrought-iron griffin. The winged monster stood as tall as he.

“Not half as hideous as this one,” Percival said, eyeing a terra cotta cherub corbel near a high and narrow arched window. “Keeee-rist. The thing looks possessed!”

I"d have argued that a bronze fountain top I"d nearly crashed into beat theirs by a mile or two; a crazed-looking eagle with pointed wings that nearly touched the ceiling clasped a misshapen world in sharp, oversize talons.

Thunk. Swish. Cheep-chirp-chitter. Strange subdued sounds emanated from the area of a carved Gothic gargoyle gracing the wall across from the window.

We exchanged glances that wavered between baffled and frightened.

“Is this where we poke our guardian against evil in the eye and he steers us to a secret room?” Adwin stepped forward and pressed one eye and then the other. Nothing happened.

“Try the ears,” Percival suggested.

Nothing happened.

“Go for the Donald Trump backcombed coif,” I offered.

Adwin looked at me with a furrowed brow, then ran fingers across the gargoyle"s head. Something caught his interest. A jiggle here, a joggle there, and ta-da, a three-by-five-foot portion of the wall slid sideways, sounding like a dull spade scraping pebbled earth.

“Keee-rist.”

“Cool.” Adwin peered inside. An impossibly narrow flight of stairs lead downward into blackness. “Grab a candle, plum dumpling, and place it in that holder-type thing on the windowsill.”

“… Got it, my little banana flan.”

Percival groaned and waited for me to lead the way.

“Anyone here?” Percival shouted.

Bumping into Adwin, who"d stopped in the middle of the narrow corridor, I rubbed my ear, hoping the damage from the strident question was temporary, and elbowed Percival not so lightly in the ribcage.

“Hey!”

“Hey yourself,” I muttered, turning back to the tight ash-colored passageway. Forty feet ahead, it forked. “We could split up,” I suggested.

“It would be better to stay together until we find the others,” Percival advised. “If this is all a stupid game, fine; if not, why play into some fruitcake"s hand?”

Adwin and I glanced at each other and nodded, and the three of us marched solemnly to the left.

The bricked walls and rough flooring weren"t dirty or overly dusty, which suggested the hidden passage had been in use throughout the years. Or maybe dust and dirt didn"t collect in walled-off places. What did I know? It did smell moldy, though, and I fought an urge to sneeze.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” I asked.

Percival"s voice grew urgent. “I heard something. It was soft, hushed, and seemed to come from there.” He pointed to the left.

Adwin and I turned to each other and shrugged simultaneously. “Left it is.” He grasped the candle holder and took the lead. For an introspective laid-back kind of guy, he was being as valiant as one of the men sporting Reginald"s armor centuries ago might have been.

“Ach-choo!”

“Gesundheit,” my valiant beau murmured as we halted. There was nowhere to proceed; solid wall lay immediately ahead.

GesundheitPercival pressed a monogrammed linen hankie into my hand. After another violent sneeze and the blowing of my itchy nose, I pressed it back into the pocket of his sweater.

“Thanks.” You could hear the wince rather than see it.

I pointed a thumb to the rear. “As Rey would say: about face!” Making a crisp turn, I started to head back when Percival grabbed my forearm.

“Listen.”

We faced the wall. Subtle sounds suggested there was something or someone beyond the barrier. I ran fingers along uneven bricks on the left. Adwin, seeing what I was doing, did the same on the right. Percival inspected the barren floor and low irregular ceiling.

It was nimble-fingered Adwin who discovered a loose brick that – with a push and a pull – resulted in a wall shifting inward. “Just like in the movies,” he said with a triumphant smile.

“Too much so,” Percival said with a sigh. “If Mr. Hyde or the Wolfman pops out of nowhere, I won"t be held responsible for what I may do.”

He wasn"t intending to be funny, but I laughed.

An apricot light glimmered in the nearby distance and we moved toward it. The search for missing persons and goblins was on again as we picked our way down a short slope.

Adwin stopped dead in his tracks, prompting me to bump into him and Percival to stumble into me. “Speaking of horror-movie nasties, what"s this? A lair?”

“Someone"s been here,” Percival said, nodding to one of two antique parlor lamps that provided the gentle lighting. “Hey!”

The opening had slid back in place with a whoosh-thunk. We were in a square room of meadow green with a low beamed ceiling and walls finished with plaster. It resembled a cross between an old-world library and study, and would have made a great Victorian England stage setting. Had this been Reginald"s little getaway? It was certainly reminiscent of the library-study in the main part of the house. Or could this be Aunt Matty"s hideaway?

Adwin blew out the candle and we spent a couple minutes attempting to find a lever or switch that would reopen the wall, gave up, and decided to investigate the intriguing surroundings that suggested we"d walked into another era. We strolled around, entranced by quality furnishings and fine details, tempted to touch things, but knowing better.

“Oh-oh.”

Adwin and I turned to Percival, then to what he was viewing. Oh-oh was an understatement.

Jensen Q. Moone was reclining on an elaborately carved mahogany recamier in a far corner niche, a slender pine stake wedged into his heart through a fine designer shirt and the gold chain and cross he"d sported since arrival draped around the stake. If you looked beyond the blood-covered chest, you might have claimed the barrister was sleeping, so serene was his expression. Hadn"t the man protested or fought? Or had he known his killer? And if he had, why would he have allowed that person to drive a wedge of wood into his body? Maybe the killer had been swift, surprising? Or had Jensen Q. Moone been drugged, his senses dulled so he couldn"t react?

“So much for the crucifix. It didn"t do him much good,” Percival murmured, peering over my shoulder.

“Vampires are the ones to get stakes through the heart, and they don"t wear crosses – at least not in the movies I"ve seen,” Adwin said.

“He was a bloodsucking lawyer, Addy boy. They"re a different, hardier breed.”

I swallowed a chuckle and attempted to appear grave. Okay, maybe “grave” wasn"t the right word, considering.

“My word, what a spot of bad luck,” Adwin said with a West-Country English dialect.

I roared. Adwin tittered. Percival looked at us as if we"d lost it, but seconds later, he was laughing like someone who"d sucked in too much nitrous oxide.

Several tears and gasps for breath later, Adwin was checking out a large handcrafted oak fireplace that hadn"t seen a fire in years, if ever. Percival was investigating a beautiful mahogany bookcase with a lovely brass swan neck he swore was from the Chippendale period, while I was searching a handsome handcrafted nineteenth-century oak armoire with satyrs and other mythological creatures lining triple-paneled doors. Besides the wall that had swung back into place, there had to be an alternative exit somewhere.

I was about to test the rear panels of the armoire when a grinding sound from beyond the unit drew my attention. I glanced across the room to see if my cohorts had heard it. They had and their expressions mirrored mine: wary.

Like a loaded car carrier, slowly and noisily, the heavy armoire slid aside.