Dead and Buried Read online

  When I looked over at him, Rancourt was studying me again. It was unsettling.

  “That’s very observant, Mrs. Brewer,” he said. “That’s pretty much what we believe happened, though we’re keeping it quiet for now, all right?”

  “I won’t say a word. But when was she killed?”

  “Between three and seven o’clock yesterday afternoon and evening,” he said. “The cold weather and partial burial makes pinning down a time more complicated.”

  “She could have been killed half an hour before I stopped at the headstone,” Emily said.

  “The timing is plausible,” Rancourt said.

  “I still think a man killed her,” Emily said.

  Rancourt grunted as he stood and then jiggled his legs a little, probably to get his circulation going. “How about a strong woman, Mrs. MacKenzie? Or a woman and a man together? Patti Albert wasn’t big, and the only difficult part of the deal was moving her from the cemetery to your back yard. Anyone could have hit her.”

  He lumbered off for the front door, waddling a tad for the first fifteen feet. I’d noticed the shuffling sway in his walk before, and I speculated that his hips or legs stiffened on sitting down and loosened up once he got moving. How many more years would he be a detective?

  “Ladies, thank you,” he said, standing at the open door. “When are you going to the mansion?”

  “We’re going to the first tour at seven,” I replied.

  “I’d caution you both to be on your guard tonight,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt to be careful. Be aware of your circumstances.”

  “Then it was one of the five society members,” Emily said. “One of them killed Patti.”

  “We don’t want to jump to conclusions,” Rancourt said. “Ladies, again.” He nodded, turned, and walked off down the flagstone path.

  “Conclusions, my foot,” I said. “That’s police gibberish.”

  Emily shut the door, her face drawn with worry.

  “There’s no way he’d tell us to be on guard at the mansion if it wasn’t one of them,” I went on. “He’s not cautioning us about a random tourist. The good news is, you and Laurence aren’t suspects anymore—if you ever were.”

  “Are we still going to the mansion?”

  I grinned. “You bet.”

  “We stick together, right?”

  “Absolutely. And I’ll bring Minette. Her hearing is out of this world.”

  ..

  CHAPTER 9

  Emily and I ate dinner in our own homes, and then, at twenty to seven, she knocked on my front door and we headed out to my Jeep. She told me Laurence had just checked in to his London hotel. They’d talked about his flight and the weather, but she hadn’t mentioned the “body thing,” as she put it. She would tell him, but only when he returned from England, by which time she hoped the killer would be caught.

  At the turnaround on my driveway, I stopped and told her to be careful of my right pocket because Minette was there. At the sound of her name, the fairy clutched the top of my pocket with her diminutive hands, raised her head, and greeted Emily.

  Seeing Minette anew, my friend reverted to the same frozen, numb look she’d worn on first meeting her, but she promptly recovered and said, “Kate tells me you hear very well.”

  “Fairies have magnificent hearing,” she replied.

  I laughed. As puffed-up as such statements sounded, I’d learned that Minette was not prideful. She merely stated what was true. Truth one: her hearing was magnificent. Truth two: she could fly with astounding speed. Truth three: however petite her mouth, she could make herself heard when she wanted to be heard. Truth four: she had more physical strength than any four-inch creature should have. In the latter attribute, she was like an ant, which I’d read was capable of carrying up to forty times its own weight.

  But like my talking-pet comparison, I kept this ant statistic to myself. Truth was, Minette was her own unique being. Fairies were a thing apart. Not pets, not insects, not human beings. I tried to categorize her in order to make sense of her existence, because weeks after finding her in my kitchen, I was still coming to grips with how my world had changed.

  “We’re counting on you to hear things we don’t,” I told Minette. Then I reminded her to stay well hidden and told her to flee if someone spotted her. As Minette had told me, humans didn’t trust their own eyes, so as long as she vanished quickly, it was easy to talk them out of what they thought they saw.

  I drove on, heading for Essex Street and the Fairfield Mansion, rain clouds nearly blotting out the sliver of moon, mist peppering the windshield. It was a fine night for a haunted tour. Not that I really cared for such things. I loved reading mildly scary thrillers, but I’d never gone in for haunted houses and hotels. The Fairfield was well known in Maine for its hauntings, and to me that meant lots of false, foolish stories and people willing to deceive others for their own purposes. People made money off supposedly haunted places. Simple fact.

  “You’re very quiet,” Emily said.

  “Do you think any of the historical society employees really believe the mansion is haunted?” I asked.

  “Zane does. I think Brodie and Olivia do too, at least a little. I’m pretty sure Charlotte and Jonathan don’t because they’ve stayed alone in the mansion, working late at night. Zane and Olivia won’t do that. You know the woo-woo stories Zane was telling you? He believes them. Even in the daytime, he won’t go up to the third floor by himself. He says he can feel the malice.”

  “That’s ridiculous. People are malicious, not places. Places are neutral.”

  “Tell that to Zane.”

  “What do you know about the Fairfield murders?”

  “No more than what Zane told you since I was slated to do the cemetery tours.”

  “Speaking of the cemetery, I’ve been wondering if the killer buried Patti there because he had to hide her. Say he killed her just before a tour started. He wanted to move her, but couldn’t until the night’s tours were over.”

  “Why move her, Kate? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “I know. It’s not logical.” I turned left on Essex, drove six blocks north, and found that every parking space near the mansion had been taken. Now that people had heard the news of Patti’s murder, the Fairfield’s ghoulish attraction had grown. Emily told me to swing around the back of the home and park near the service entrance. She’d let Olivia know my Jeep was there so it wouldn’t be towed.

  Still thinking about our logic puzzle, I shut off the engine. “It could be the killer moved her because the name on the headstone narrowed the cast of suspects. Judging by everyone’s reaction to what Brodie said about where Patti’s body was buried, everyone knew her maiden name was Dawson.”

  “Except for me, that is. Olivia said Patti did everyone’s genealogy for them, going back several generations, and unlike a lot of people, Patti talked about her family history. Names were important to her.”

  I shrugged. “I still don’t see the logic in her being buried and then moved. But the answer is there, Emily. Staring us in the face.”

  The service entrance was locked, so we entered by the front door, and I reminded Minette again to stay well hidden. My job was to observe and keep people from jostling me on my right side. Frankly, I was a little worried about how I’d manage that, especially after I saw the large crowd gathered in the mansion’s foyer and adjacent living room. There were at least forty people, more than double the usual number, Emily said.

  As we moved closer to the living room, Zane saw us, raised his chin in greeting, and zigzagged his way over, occasionally disappearing behind the taller tour customers. “What would the fire marshal say about this?” he asked with a grin.

  “They need to put a cap on the number,” Emily said. “How will you fit all these people into the various rooms?”

  “Jonathan decided we would split into two groups, me leading one and him leading the other, fifteen minutes behind me.”

  “Where are the others?
” Emily said, glancing about.

  “Charlotte and Brodie are upstairs—they’ll be down in a sec—and Olivia is in the office. Notebook ready, Emily?”

  Her face fell. “I didn’t bring one.”

  He winked and nudged her with his elbow. “Just kidding.”

  “Mind if we join your group?” I asked. “You seem to know your Fairfield history.”

  Zane brightened. “Sure you can. And I’m not the historian.” He brought his hand to his chest. “Maybe one day, but Patti had more knowledge of this place than anyone.”

  “Did she ever work on the Fairfield family’s genealogy?” I asked.

  “She could recite three generations from memory, including aunts and uncles.”

  At the sound of clinking glass, I looked behind me and saw Jonathan gently dinging a wineglass with a spoon. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention?” As he spoke, the crowd fell silent and turned attentively to him. Dressed in the same Ichabod garb I’d seen him in earlier in the day—black pants and tie, black suit jacket, gray shirt—a huge grin filled his narrow face. He was proud as a peacock, overjoyed by the turnout.

  “Because the crowd is so large,” he said, “we’ll be forming two roughly equal tour groups this evening. Zane Parsons—where are you, Zane?”

  Zane raised his hand.

  “Ah. Zane will be leading the first group. The second group, led by me, will leave fifteen minutes after the first. Coffee and light snacks are on the buffet in the living room, so those of you in the second group needn’t feel as though you’re getting second best.”

  His comment drew a smattering of appreciative laughter.

  Zane raised his hand again and kept it up. “I need about eighteen more guests, right over here, please. Leaving from platform 2 in one minute.”

  The lure of the buffet was sufficient to keep Zane’s group down to just under half the crowd, and moments later we were heading for the grand staircase and the second floor, the “second most haunted part of the mansion,” Zane told us all.

  Although the staircase was well lit—insurance and permits requiring it to be so, I supposed—the second-floor hallway was lit solely by small-wattage sconces. All the more to scare us with. We stopped at the first bedroom to the left of the staircase, a dismal room whose sole sources of lights were a table lamp by a green-silk-covered bed and a marginally brighter lamp atop an old chest of drawers. Somehow the eighteen or so of us wormed our way inside, the majority of us huddling at one end of the bed.

  Zane cleared his throat, rubbed his expansive nose, and held his hands waist high, looking like a conductor about to wield his baton. “This, ladies and gentlemen, was Letty Baldwin’s room. Letty, twenty-one years old, was Thomas and Flora’s maid. Those of you who know your Fairfield history know that she was the first victim to die at Fairfield’s hand. More on that when we go to the third floor. Her spirit is seen more than any other in the mansion.”

  “Is this the original furniture?” a man asked.

  “Most of it,” Zane answered. “The walls have been painted since her time, and the lamps are more recent, but the bed, table, and bureau belonged to Letty. Or rather, to the Fairfield family. Letty was a mere maid.”

  Given the opportunity, Charlotte would have taken bleach and white paint to all of it. I recalled Olivia’s comment about paint destroying the historic value of the mansion and realized that in her reluctance to clean things up, history wasn’t what she was preserving. It was the nightmare nature of the place, and fresh paint would have put a big dent in that.

  “This is the best photo we have of Letty,” Zane said, pointing at an old photograph in a too-ornate frame. “She’s wearing a maid’s uniform and standing to the right of Flora Fairfield. It was a warm summer day, and you can see a pitcher of lemonade on the patio table, most likely made from scratch by Letty herself. The Fairfields were wealthy enough to buy scads of fresh lemons at a time when not everyone could. Seated on the grass near Letty are George and Maryanna Fairfield, the couple’s two young children.”

  From the back of our small group, a woman asked, “Is this room haunted?”

  Zane smiled. “Yes, it is. Letty has been seen in this bedroom and in the hall. Unlike some ghosts, she’s not playful or happy. Witnesses report seeing her cry or hearing moaning sounds in the bedroom, as though she’s lost or in pain—or possibly mourning her own untimely death.”

  As Zane turned, gesturing at the bureau, a heavy thud sounded from the third floor.

  Several people jumped and every eye turned to the ceiling.

  “There’s not supposed to be anyone up there,” Zane said.

  Nervous laughter rippled around the room.

  “You might want to take a look at the photo on the wall, in case you recognize this woman later,” he added with a strained chuckle.

  Zane was keeping things light for the tour, but he’d jumped as much as anyone at the noise. And when he moved past me for the door, I saw a shadow of fear cross his face.

  CHAPTER 10

  Emily and I lingered in Letty’s room as Zane and the tour crowd moved down the hall on their way to the next haunted spot on the second floor, and when they disappeared from view, I tugged at her coat sleeve. “Let’s investigate that noise.”

  She gaped at me.

  “You’re allowed to go up there,” I said, tugging again. “Come on.”

  “It’s dark up there,” she murmured.

  “That’s the whole point of this place, don’t you think? Let’s find out what they’re up to.” I shot a quick look in my pocket to check on Minette. She was sitting with her knees drawn to her chest, and she grinned up at me as I peeked.

  “Did you hear everything?” Emily whispered.

  “Yes, I’m listening,” Minette said solemnly. “Zane was scared after he heard the noise. It was in his voice.”

  Emily grimaced.

  I refused to be deterred. Zane may have been fearful, but that didn’t mean he was right to be afraid. Something told me that Letty and Fairfield’s second murder victim, whatever his name was, weren’t dropping twenty-pound weights on the upstairs floor. Something unsavory was going on. I yanked on Emily’s sleeve a third time and headed for the grand staircase. Thankfully, she followed.

  At the top of the stairs, we paused, listened, and then walked to the first room on our right, the room directly above Letty’s. It too was dimly lit, sparsely furnished, and dreary. I walked inside and checked behind the room’s long drapes to see if there was someone lurking there. It was an unlikely hiding place, but I had to be sure. I was about to leave it at that and exit the room when I realized the big four-poster bed could not be ignored.

  Crouching to my knees, I hesitantly lowered my head and raised the bedskirt, ready to fall back in an instant should someone actually be hiding under the four-poster. With only two small lamps in the room, it was hard to see much of anything, but I reasoned that if one of the employees was hiding there, I’d at least see the blackish outline of a human being. “Raise the skirt on the other side of the bed,” I said.

  Emily grumbled but held it up, letting the room’s faint light shine through from the other side.

  “Nope. Nothing.” I dropped the skirt and stood.

  Back in the hall, as we were about to move to the next room, Minette squeaked. I froze, looked about me, then peered into my pocket.

  “Noise,” she said softly.

  Letting go of my pocket, I glanced at Emily, and the pair of us, riveted to the floor, listened intently. We heard nothing at first, but soon the distinct thump of footsteps sounded from the turreted end of the mansion.

  “It’s one of them,” I said, marching for the library. “Trying to fool everyone.”

  Emily reluctantly joined me, locking her hand on my left arm and whispering, “I don’t like this” all the way down the hall.

  When we reached the open door, I rocketed into the library, hoping to catch the culprit red-handed, but the room was empty—and as dark as the
other rooms. “Remind me to bring a flashlight next time.”

  “How can you joke?”

  “I’m not joking. We need a flashlight.”

  “Kate, Kate.”

  I held open my pocket.

  “Someone is running,” Minette said.

  “I hear it now.” I strode from the library and spun to my left. At the far end of the hall, a dark figure disappeared through a doorway. I set off in pursuit. My theory was that ghosts didn’t run, or if they did, they didn’t thunder like elephants when they did, and whoever was running was making a very human racket.

  I sprinted down the hall, Emily running after me, and came to a screeching halt at the doorway I’d seen the figure enter. It wasn’t a room, I now saw, but the door to a back stairway. Hearing footfalls below me, I knew I wasn’t far behind, so I doubled my effort to reach the culprit. At the bottom of the steps another door swung shut, and I raced through it.

  “Stop!” I cried.

  The figure jerked and swung back to face me. “Kate!”

  “Charlotte? What on earth?”

  “It’s all right. It’s just me.”

  “No, it is not all right.”

  Emily shot through the door and nearly ran into me. “What is going on?”

  Still glaring at Charlotte, I said, “Someone’s been playing games.”

  “Was that you making that noise?” Emily said. “Trying to scare people on the tour?”

  For a brief moment, Charlotte appeared almost confused by the question. Either that or she wasn’t quick on her feet and needed time to formulate an answer that wouldn’t implicate her or the historical society in a minor case of fraud.

  “I can explain,” she said.

  I folded my arms over my chest. How many lies begin with that sentence? “Go ahead.”

  “I dropped some books for effect.”

  “Oh, Charlotte,” Emily scolded.

  “That wasn’t a few books,” I said. “That was a heavy weight.”