Page 14 of Gumbo, Ghosts, and Deadly Deception (A Midnight House Mystery #1)

EIGHT

Maybe that was dramatic, but honestly, what was that clock’s problem?

Also, I needed a locksmith to change the locks on the doors because clearly the current ones were worth a whole lot of nothing.

"You need to talk to me, Hollis? About what?" I tried to keep my voice steady, but the papers in my hoodie pocket felt like they were radiating heat.

"I wanted to tell you a little bit about what’s going on with Delia’s case. What I can share, that is."

“I would love an update.” I was also distracted though. “Was my front door unlocked?”

“What?” Hollis looked behind us at the door. “I don’t know. I guess.”

I really was positive it had been locked.

Father Claude emerged from the kitchen, his expression grave. "Harper, child, you're playing with forces you don't understand. This isn't some ghost story for your little podcast."

That was really patronizing. I was instantly insulted.

"It's not a little podcast," I said, which was probably not the most important point to make at the moment.

“Maggie filed a Freedom of Information Act Request on the Francine Darrow case.”

That was smart of her. I could always trust Maggie to be three steps ahead of me. I couldn’t wait to share Odette’s journal with her. “So? We’re just trying to understand what happened to Delia," I said. "She left me that note?—"

"The note that you didn't turn over to police for eight hours," Hollis interrupted. "The note that could be evidence in a homicide investigation."

I was going to ignore that little fact. "You said it was an accidental drowning."

"I said that was the preliminary assessment. The official cause of death just came back from the coroner." Hollis pulled out his phone and read from it. "Cause of death: drowning. Manner of death: undetermined."

"What does that mean?"

“That it’s undetermined.”

Even as he said it, Hollis couldn’t quite fight a smile that was turning up the corner of his mouth. I would have been super annoyed by him except for that smile. It was oddly cute, catching me off guard.

I did not want to think Hollis was cute.

“Don’t be a jerk,” I told him flatly, now annoyed with both him and my own weird thoughts.

The smile fell off of his face. "It means we can't definitively say whether it was an accident, suicide, or homicide. But given what we found in the bathroom, I'm leaning toward homicide."

My mouth went dry. "What did you find?"

"That powder I mentioned? Lab results came back this afternoon.” He read from his phone screen.

“Angel's trumpet. Also known as Brugmansia.

It's a plant that contains scopolamine and other tropane alkaloids.

" He paused and looked up, watching my reaction.

"In small doses, it causes disorientation and memory loss.

In larger doses, it can cause seizures, coma, and death. "

I felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. "Someone poisoned her? Or she took it herself? That sounds…horrible."

"If they did drug her, it would be enough to make her compliant, disoriented. Easy to guide into a bathtub full of scalding water."

The image made my stomach churn. "That's very gruesome.”

"This is serious stuff, Harper. I need you to stay out of this."

"Why was Delia living in your house in 1984?" I asked, completely and thoroughly ignoring his demand for me to butt out.

Hollis was completely taken aback. “What? What are you talking about? My house?”

Claude's expression had gone carefully neutral. He did not look as surprised by this new information as Hollis.

"Hollis," Claude said. “We should?—"

"No, Uncle Claude." Hollis looked at me with a mixture of frustration and something that might have been concern. "How do you know that?” he asked me.

“It was her address at the time. We found it by doing a records search. Who lived there then?”

“My family has had the house since the fifties. I think my father was living in the house at the time, with roommates. He was a young beat cop then, but he's been dead for ten years so I can’t ask him. Maybe Delia was his friend, or hell, his girlfriend, I don’t know. She could have just been a renter."

"Maybe someone else knows," I said quietly. I turned to Claude. “What do you know?”

Father Claude shifted uncomfortably. "Harper, you need to understand?—"

"What I need to understand," I interrupted, "is why you're both so interested in what I know. Why you're both here, in my house, asking me questions instead of going out there looking for Delia's killer."

Teddy, who had been unusually quiet during this exchange, suddenly began chittering urgently. He jumped down from my arms and waddled toward the staircase, then stopped and looked back at us.

"What's wrong with him?" Hollis asked.

Claude just looked grateful for the interruption.

Before I could answer, we heard it. The sound of a door closing somewhere upstairs.

All three of us froze.

"I thought you said the house was empty," Claude whispered.

"It is," I whispered back. "I only have one guest until tomorrow and he’s at the convention. I saw him leave."

Hollis immediately went into cop mode. He pulled out his gun—his gun —and motioned for us to stay back. "How many ways are there to get upstairs?"

"Main staircase and the servants' stairs in the back," I said, my voice barely audible.

"Both of you stay here. Don't move."

I wasn’t going anywhere. I was still annoyed with myself for calling out, “Hello?” earlier. I wasn’t about to make Dumb Girl Move Number Two.

Hollis started up the main staircase, his footsteps deliberately silent on the old wooden steps. Claude and I watched him disappear into the shadows at the landing.

"This is my fault," Claude said quietly. "I should have told you the truth from the beginning."

I tensed. Maybe I should have gone with the man with the gun. Was Claude going to confess to murder?

"What truth?"

He was quiet for a long moment, staring up the stairs where Hollis had vanished. "I was involved with Mary Vallon in 1984."

Okay, I didn’t see that coming. " You were? Not Hollis’s dad?"

He shook his head. "No. It was me. I was in the seminary.

She was nineteen, beautiful, lost. She'd run away from a bad situation with her mother and stepfather and was living in our family home.

Because of the cost of upkeep it had been turned into a boarding house, like Hollis said.

His dad lived there, along with some medical students.

And Mary. I would go to hang out with Claude and I met Mary.

" He rubbed his forehead. "I thought I was helping her. "

That was a new way to phrase it.

"Helping her do what ?"

"Stay safe. Keep an eye on what the Circle was uncovering. Report back to my brother Claude when things got too dangerous."

I really, really wanted to ask why they were both named Claude, but this did not seem like the time. I stared at him. "You were spying on them? For the police?"

"For the city. There were concerns about the group—rumors that they were involved in something more than just séances. Some of the missing women they were investigating...their disappearances were connected to ongoing police investigations. Sensitive ones. They were sticking their noses where they shouldn’t. "

"So you seduced a nineteen-year-old girl to get information?"

Claude flinched. "Not at all. It wasn't like that. I thought I was in love with Mary. I wanted to leave the seminary for her.”

Note: he didn’t. I was struggling to champion Claude as a knight in a shining white collar.

“I really thought I was protecting her. But when everything fell apart, when Francine was taken..."

"What happened to Francine?"

"I don't know!" His voice was barely audible. "That's the truth, Harper. I don't know what happened after my brother and his team picked her up for questioning. The arrest report was filed, she was released, then she disappeared. And Mary..." He trailed off.

"Mary what?"

"Mary saw me with them. She saw me talking to my brother, saw me give him information about where Francine was hiding.

She realized I'd been reporting on the Circle all along.

" He looked up at me with eyes full of old guilt.

"She left the city that next day. I never saw her again until she showed up at your aunt's funeral. "

"She was at Aunt Odette's funeral?" I could have sworn she wasn’t there.

"In the back, wearing a veil. I recognized her immediately. After the service, I tried to approach her, to apologize, to explain. But she just looked at me and said, 'Some sins don't deserve forgiveness, Claude.’ Then she was gone again."

I felt like the ground was shifting under my feet. "So when Delia DuMont came to town..."

"She contacted me and invited me to the séance. Which made it clear she'd come back for a reason."

That also made me very suspicious of Claude. Did he have a reason to want to silence Delia? Was there more he wasn’t telling me?

A crash from upstairs made us both jump.

Then Hollis's voice came, sharp and urgent. "Harper! Call 911!"

Claude and I looked at each other for a split second, then both rushed toward the stairs. I fumbled for my phone as we climbed, Teddy trailing us.

We found Hollis in Room Three—Delia's room—standing over a figure sprawled on the floor near the window.

Ginger St. James lay unconscious, her flowing black robes tangled around her legs, a small cloth bag scattered across the hardwood floor. White powder dusted the area around her head.

"Oh my God! Is she breathing?" I asked.

Hollis knelt down and checked her pulse. "Yeah, but barely. Her pupils are dilated." He looked up at the window, which was open. "She must have climbed up the fire escape from the courtyard."

Or she had come through the very front door that never seemed to be locked.

I dialed 911 while Claude examined the scattered powder. I barked out my address into the phone and told them a woman was unconscious.

"This is probably angel's trumpet," Claude said grimly. "Same as they found Delia in the bathroom."

We were leaping to conclusions but if there was ever a time to leap it was now. “Did she take this herself? Ginger killed Delia?" I felt a mixture of relief and confusion. Relief that the killer had been caught, confusion about why.

Concern that Ginger was going to die. If she was another victim or the perpetrator I didn’t want to see her life end right in front of me.

The 911 operator was asking me questions but I panicked and handed the phone to Hollis.

He told her he was law enforcement and to send an ambulance and then he ended the call.

Distraught, I saw him put my phone in his pocket but didn’t really register that as odd.

"Maybe she ingested it herself," Hollis said. He was doing chest compressions on her, but I noticed he didn’t attempt to give her mouth-to-mouth. Clearly too risky. "Or maybe someone wanted us to think she did."

"What do you mean?"

He pointed to Ginger's hand, which was clutched around something small and metallic. She was holding a brass key. Old, ornate, with a fleur-de-lis design.

The same key I'd found behind the pantry baseboard.

Except that key was currently in my pocket.

"How many of these keys are there?" Hollis asked.

Before I could answer, the sound of sirens filled the air. Within minutes, the house was once again crawling with paramedics.

As they loaded Ginger onto a stretcher, she briefly regained consciousness. Her eyes found mine across the room, and she mouthed a single word. "Basement."

Then she was gone, rushed to the hospital with an uncertain prognosis.

"Basement?" Hollis asked. "This house doesn’t have a basement."

"No," I said. But even as I said it, I was thinking about the hidden room behind the kitchen, about Aunt Odette's journal entries, about all the secrets this house had kept for forty years.

"Harper," Claude said quietly. "What aren't you telling us?"

I didn’t feel like I needed to tell Claude a damn thing. I looked at him, this man who had taken advantage of the woman I now knew as Delia. He had been complicit in whatever happened to Francine Darrow, in whatever small way, and had spent forty years regretting the choices he’d made.

I made a decision.

"There's something I need to show you both," I said. "Something Aunt Odette left for me to find."

I pulled the journal pages from my pocket and handed them to Hollis. "But first, you need to read these. All of them. Because I think Ginger wasn't trying to hurt anyone tonight. I think she was trying to find the same thing Delia was looking for."

"Which is?"

"Proof of what really happened to Francine Darrow. And I think I know where it is."

As Hollis began reading Aunt Odette's journal entries, his expression growing darker with each page, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were running out of time. Ginger's whispered "basement" felt like a warning to me, not a confession.

Because if she hadn't killed Delia, then the real killer was still out there.

And they now knew exactly how close we were to uncovering the truth.