Page 52 of Crazy Spooky Love

I plan to push the door open slowly, but Donovan Scarborough is faster and rips it back on its hinges the minute I unlock it.

He reminds me of Frankenstein’s monster when he looms up toward us in the doorway, his arms aloft and his eyes wild.

Marina and I are so shocked that we duck underneath his arms and make a run for it, ending up behind him in the hall as he swings around in a blind rage.

Leo is sprawled out on the floor with the creepy twins on their knees beside him, but from the way he’s batting them off and gingerly feeling his nose to see if it’s broken it’s fairly obvious that he’s going to be fine.

All three Scarborough brothers are here too.

Isaac looks mortified, and Lloyd is observing proceedings with an expression of morbid satisfaction.

I don’t care if he’s an old man; if he were flesh and blood right this moment, I think I’d actually swing for him to wipe that smug little smile from his face.

Only Douglas has the gumption to make a useful suggestion.

“Hit him with that!” he shouts, gesturing toward a tall china vase on a side table close tome.

“Not the Wedgwood!” Lloyd yells, finally roused out of his smugness as I reach for it. “I paid a fortune for that!”

“Shame,” I say, as my fingers clasp around the vase’s slender neck. “It’s pretty.”

Donovan Scarborough makes a sudden lunge for me and I instinctively swing my arm back and bring it down with a satisfying crack over his head.

He goes down onto his knees like a comedy cartoon character, clutching his skull in shock.

The vase was pretty dainty really, nowhere near heavy enough to kill him but enough to give him a banging headache and me and Marina time to escape toward the staircase.

Even as we’re doing it I’m thinking how only too-stupid-to-live heroines in bad B movies make for the stairs instead of heading for the front door, but it was the nearest option at short notice and Scarborough was between us and the exit.

Besides, we need to get up there to execute the second prong of my hastily cobbled-together plan.

“Come on,” I say, half-dragging Marina by the hand. “We’ve got a teddy bear to find.”

We make it to the top of the staircase in five seconds flat, running and scrabbling, and when we see Scarborough start crawling up behind us Marina takes one of her shoes off and flings it at him.

“Just so you know, I’m putting new shoes on expenses,” she says as she takes aim.

I don’t argue. So far today she’s used her skyscraper heels to kick Fletch’s hand when he grabbed me under the bed, knock the key from the cellar door, and now hamper Donovan Scarborough’s progress.

The way she’s going she’ll deserve Jimmy Choo’s.

Lloyd must have heard what I said about the teddy bear, because he’s waiting at the top of the stairs and is no longer the sneering, supercilious ghost of a few minutes previously. He reminds me of his great-grandson more than ever: filled with rabid, ugly fury.

If he could push me down the stairs and be done with me, I have no doubt whatsoever that he would.

Isaac and Douglas are here too now, and Donovan is almost at the top of the stairs.

His head is a bleeding mess of little cuts and scrapes from the vase and Marina’s heel, he looks like a boxer at the end of a very long fight.

An onlooker would be forgiven for thinking that he’d been brawling with Leo, given that he’s in a similar state on the floor in the hallway.

“I know you killed Douglas,” I say, staring defiantly at Lloyd. “You killed him, and then you stitched the knife inside your favorite teddy bear.”

Douglas is standing completely still, staring at his brother. “It’s true, isn’t it? I’ve always known it had to be you.”

“You can’t prove a thing,” Lloyd snarls, curling his lips back like a rabid beast.

“Get out of my house!” Donovan Scarborough shouts, belligerent and overwrought.

He’s lying face down on the stairs now, clearly exhausted.

He looks like a man who has spent too much of his time enjoying the high life and not enough time at the gym.

He’s exhausted and bleeding, and I’m not sure if he’s shouting at me or the whole lot of us, ghosts included.

“Oh, I’m going to prove it,” I counter, jabbing my chin out in defiance at Lloyd. “You just watch me.”

I turn to dash down the corridor toward the master bedroom, but I’m stopped in my tracks by the sight of Fletch walking out of that same room.

He’s covered in dust, dirt, and disintegrated rubber carpet underlay, and he’s carrying a saggy, dusty teddy bear.

“Thought I may as well save you a job, Bittersweet,” he says, casually handing me the bear. I hold it in my hands and, when I press its abdomen, I can feel something sickeningly solid insideit.

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you.” I’m thanking Fletch, but I’m also thanking Agnes Scarborough for leading me here. “How did you find it so quickly?”

He shrugs. “Studied the floorboards. One of them looked a bit off, as if a woman had nailed it down.”

Oh, he’ll suffer for that comment. Not right now, but later at some point. We head back to the top landing, back to the Scarborough brothers.

“Fletch, do you think you could take Donovan Scarborough downstairs? There’s one last thing I need to do.”

“It’s that gobbledygook bullshit again, isn’t it?” he asks, and when I don’t answer, he goes halfway down the stairs and stands beside Scarborough.

“You can get up and walk or I can drag you. I don’t care which.”

When Scarborough ignores him, he sighs. “Have it your own way then, fella,” he says, then drags Donovan down the rest of the staircase by one foot.

It’s super satisfying to watch him bump on each step, and I daren’t look directly at Fletch in case I forget what I’m supposed to be doing and run down there and rip his shirt off.

“I think you might owe Fletcher Gunn several favors now too,” Marina says, as we stand on the wide landing and watch him drag a still-protesting Scarborough across the tiles and park him against the wall by the front door.

“Go and find Artie and the others?” I squeeze her hand. “I’ll be out soon.”

She knows what this means, and she casts an uncertain glance in the direction of the Scarborough brothers and raises her hands in a forlorn goodbye heart symbol. She looks to me, nods just once, then heads off down the stairs.

As I turn to face the three brothers, I hear sirens in the distance.

“Oh-oh.” Douglas rolls his eyes. “Someone called the po-po.” Lloyd and Isaac look confused.

“ Brooklyn Nine-Nine ?” I ask, wondering if Marina recommended it, and Douglas laughs sadly.

“I quite like it. I’ll never know what happens at the end of the series now.”

It seems such an insignificant lament in the big scheme of things.

“I think it’s time to go, at last,” Isaac says. It has to be Isaac who releases them; it’s only right and fair after he’s carried the weight of injustice and loss through life and death for so many long, lonely years.

“Looks like the game’s up, old boy,” Douglas says, gesturing toward the bear hanging from my fingertips. “Only you could think to hide a murder weapon in such a goddamn childish place.”

Lloyd is shaking with fury. “You can’t have her,” he spits. “Not after all these years. Not now, like this.”

Douglas frowns, obviously as confused as I am by Lloyd’s outburst, and I can’t stop myself from asking the question that’s had me baffled throughout.

“Why didn’t you just confess after you died, Lloyd? I mean, you got away with murder. You didn’t need to hang around here all of these years, yet still you stayed.”

His eyes widen, and his cold laugh chills me. “Because if I stayed here, he had to stay too,” his eyes flicker toward Douglas for a second. “She can’t choose him if he’s not there, can she?”

“Your mother?” I say, trying hard to understand.

“Of course not my mother, you stupid, na?ve little girl,” he growls, as if he’s fast losing patience with me. “My wife.”

“Maud?” Douglas sounds genuinely shocked, and Lloyd rounds on him, enraged.

“Don’t you even speak her name!” he yells. “You never fucking got it, did you? She was my friend, but it was always you she wanted. She barely noticed me, because just like all the rest of them, she was always so goddamn starry-eyed over you.”

“You killed me to stop me from going near Maud, a woman I barely knew and had never shown so much as a flicker of interest in?”

Douglas looks utterly bereft at having lost his life over something so insignificant to him.

“Everything was always about you, wasn’t it, Douglas?

” Lloyd rants, exasperated and almost reveling in his big reveal.

“Except this wasn’t. It was about me, and about Maud.

Without you in the picture she finally saw me.

With you gone she finally loved me, and if you think I’m going to let you waltz back into her life looking just how you always did and steal her away from me now, you’re… ”

Lloyd shakes his head, his fists balled tight at his sides.

He looks every inch the old, unhinged man that he is; it must tear his unbeating heart out to look at Douglas now, forever young, strong, and handsome and to know that he made him that way.

Lloyd killed Douglas to keep him away from the girl he loved, and now, in death, he created a rival he doesn’t stand a chance of beating.

I could almost feel sorry for him, except for the fact that it’s Machiavellian and cunning and monstrous.

“You didn’t confess because you wanted to keep me trapped in this house?” Douglas almost laughs at the utter depraved absurdness. “Do you know how crazy that makes you sound?”

Lloyd seethes and boils and writhes, because there is nothing he can do anymore. He’s had a good run, but Douglas was right a couple of minutes ago. After more than a hundred years, the game is finallyup.