Page 8 of Gumbo, Ghosts, and Deadly Deception (A Midnight House Mystery #1)
FIVE
“What’s going on?” Pete from Houston asked me when I reentered the parlor. He was loaded down with shopping bags and wearing multiple strands of purple, green, and gold plastic beads around his neck.
Jan was sprawled out on a sofa. For a split second I thought she was also dead but then she shifted and mumbled a little.
“Is Jan okay?” I asked.
“She’s drunk,” Pete said. “The girls texted me that they’re locked in their room because someone died and they’re freaking out.”
I had informed the honeymooners and the paranormal enthusiast about Delia’s passing and offered to move them to another hotel.
The honeymooners had taken me up on the offer and had already packed up and left.
Arthur had chosen to stay. He mentioned he had met Delia at several previous events and wanted to hear what the outcome was.
The high school girls and Pete and Jan had been out for the evening but at some point the girls must have returned without me knowing.
I tried to downplay the death. “We’ve had an unfortunate incident, yes.”
Drunk or not, Pete wasn’t buying it. “Is someone dead or not?”
I nodded. “The authorities are upstairs.”
With incredibly unfortunate timing the coroner’s office chose that exact moment to bring Delia down the grand staircase in a body bag.
“Jesus,” Pete murmured. “What the hell happened?”
“It’s probably a natural death.” That was my theory and I was sticking with it.
In spite of a recording that claimed, “They’re here.” She might have just meant in general someone was in the house that she wasn’t expecting to arrive yet. Or something like that.
Jan heard the commotion and turned on the sofa to peer into the hallway. Her eyes widened and then she promptly vomited all over my antique rug.
Out of all my difficult days since I had taken over Midnight House, this was by far the worst so far.
The next morning came with the kind of brutal sunshine that New Orleans loved to deliver. Bright enough to make you squint and completely inappropriate given that someone had died in a bathtub twelve hours earlier.
I sat in the kitchen nursing my third cup of coffee and staring at Delia's letter, which I had read approximately forty-seven times since finding it on my back step. Each reading made it sound more ominous and less helpful.
The truth about Francine Darrow is hidden in your house. Odette made sure of that. Look for the room that doesn't exist on any blueprint. The key is in the recipe for her famous jambalaya.
"Famous jambalaya," I muttered to Teddy, who was sprawled across my feet as a reminder that at least someone in this house was capable of sleeping soundly.
Pete and Jan had decided they weren’t up to relocating to another hotel last night but they had bunked with the girls after I had dragged their mattress into the room and dropped it on the floor.
I had been exhausted but even then I had to admit that it popped into my head I was losing a ton of money because of this, which had made me feel instantly guilty.
Delia had died—bills didn’t matter.
At least not until next week.
"What famous jambalaya?” I asked no one, since Teddy wasn’t even listening to me. “Her recipe was just rice, sausage, and whatever was about to go bad in the refrigerator."
Teddy opened one eye and gave me a look that seemed to say, You're being very obtuse.
"Don't give me attitude. You're the one who's supposed to have animal instincts." I scratched behind his ears. "Any insights on the mysterious jambalaya clue?"
He yawned and closed his eyes again.
The crime scene tape across the staircase leading to Room Three when I left my own room in the attic this morning served as a grim reminder that my life had taken a decidedly noir turn.
Detective Broussard had left around midnight with promises to return "bright and early" to give me an update before he went into the police station.
My phone buzzed. A text from Maggie.
Coffee? Need to discuss last night's recording. Found something interesting.
I texted back.
Kitchen. Bring beignets. And possibly a new career plan because I think I'm done with the hospitality industry.
Twenty minutes later, Maggie burst through my kitchen door like a caffeinated tornado in leggings and a hoodie. She clutched her ever-present iced coffee in one hand and a white paper bag from the coffee shop down the street in the other.
"Okay," she announced without preamble, "I've listened to our recording from last night during the séance approximately fifteen times, and either we captured something genuinely supernatural, or someone is seriously messing with us."
"Please tell me it's the latter. I can handle ghosts. Humans who may or may not be murderers are above my pay grade."
Maggie plopped into the chair across from me and pulled out her phone. "Listen to this. I isolated the audio from right before the lights went out."
She hit play. For a moment, there was just the sound of our voices around the table. Delia calling to Francine's spirit, Ginger making huffing noises, Father Claude muttering prayers. Then, just before the woman's voice answered about no one believing her, there was something else.
A whisper, so faint I almost missed it: "Not yet."
"Did you hear that?" Maggie asked.
"The 'not yet'? Yeah. Creepy, but it could have been anyone at the table."
"That's what I thought too. But watch this." She pulled up a video on her phone. It was security footage from the upstairs hallway camera I'd installed last month after Teddy kept mysteriously escaping my room and nearly caused a woman to fall down the stairs when she tripped over him.
It had turned out to be a young boy staying in Room Five who kept opening the attic door for Teddy to roam.
The timestamp showed 9:47 PM, right when the séance was happening.
The hallway was empty, dimly lit by the antique wall sconces.
Then, at 9:48, a shadow moved across the far end of the corridor.
Not a person—just a shadow, gliding along the wall like it had detached itself from whoever was casting it.
"That's definitely weird," I admitted. "But it could be a guest walking past the camera's range, or?—"
"Harper." Maggie's voice was unusually serious. "The shadow moved toward Room Three. And according to the timestamp, that was exactly when Delia disappeared from the parlor."
I stared at the phone screen, watching the shadow drift down the hallway like smoke in reverse. "You think someone was up there waiting for her? Or was that her?"
"She couldn’t have gotten up there that fast. She moved like an anemic turtle, not a track star. Besides, if she was running we would have heard her on the stairs. They’re very creaky.”
“That is very true. Except she did get up there that fast. That’s a fact. She was in the tub dead by the time we got up there.”
“I think someone knew exactly where she was going and when. Like, a prearranged meeting or something. Unfortunately, the camera only captures a sliver of the hallway and the attic door."
She gave me a meaningful look, like it was my fault. Which it was. I had only intended to watch my doorway, not make guests uncomfortable with surveillance.
Before I could respond, the kitchen door opened and Detective Broussard walked in, looking like he'd slept about as well as I had. His usually neat dark hair was mussed, and there were coffee stains on his shirt that suggested he'd already been working for hours. Or never slept.
"Morning," he said, helping himself to a cup of coffee from my pot without asking.
After living two doors down from me for six months, he'd apparently decided my kitchen was an extension of his own.
"We finished processing the scene upstairs last night. You can have the room back. If you have any new guests arriving today it won’t be an issue. "
"What did you find in Delia’s room?" I asked.
"Officially? Accident or suicide. Assuming she drowned. The coroner's preliminary examination shows no signs of trauma, no defensive wounds, no evidence of struggle." He paused, studying my face. "Unofficially? There are a few things that don't quite add up."
Maggie leaned forward. "Such as?"
"The water temperature. The tub was filled with scalding hot water. It was hot enough to cause unconsciousness within minutes if someone slipped and couldn't get out. But there's no way she could have drawn a bath that hot without noticing or gotten into it after it was full."
"Maybe she got in first and then filled it up?" I suggested. “The boiling frog theory?”
"Maybe. But there's something else." Hollis pulled out his phone and showed us a photo of Delia's room. "See anything unusual?"
I studied the image. The purple dress laid out on the bed, jewelry arranged on the dresser, shoes by the door. I shuddered, remembering when we had first seen it like that, we hadn’t known she was dead yet. "It looks like she undressed very carefully. Almost ritualistically."
"Exactly. People don't usually fold their clothes and arrange their jewelry before accidentally drowning in their bathtub. This aligns more with suicide, but in my experience women don’t generally get undressed before they take their own life, even in the tub."
My hand was shaking a little. I attributed it to the excessive caffeine but that probably wasn’t the only reason. “That seems accurate. Most people wouldn’t want to be found like that.”
“Naked women always make me suspicious,” he said.
I couldn’t help myself. I snickered a little.
Hollis drilled me with a hard stare. “A little maturity would be helpful.”
“Humor helps in stressful situations,” I pointed out. “You should try it.”
"Maybe she was preparing for a ritual bath," Maggie said thoughtfully. "Some spiritual practices involve cleansing ceremonies before contacting the dead."
Hollis and I both looked at her.
"What?" she said, shrugging. "I research weird stuff for the podcast. I know things."