The Case of the Sinister Spirit Read online

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jinx skulking along in the woods behind Charlie. Was he going behind him to make a sneak attack from behind? And here I’d thought he’d run off to save his own hide.

  “Why would I be working for Bud’s sons?”

  “You know why. You’re a private investigator. Land dispute.” He jerked the gun in the direction of Bud’s property again. “Those kids want to sell off Bud’s land to a big developer. But they need my portion over near the stone wall ’cause it gives them the amount of frontage necessary for the zoning laws. Maybe they sent you to try to figure out how to finagle it away from me. Well, I won’t have it! All I wanted was peace and quiet out here.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I saw Bernie Alcorn out there with his surveying equipment just last week.”

  Surveying equipment? Was someone surveying the land to try to figure out where the buildings had been in Mary Dunbuddy’s time? Maybe someone had a lead on where the treasure was and needed equipment to pinpoint the exact location. Or maybe Bud or his kids did want to sell the land. A ghost would have put a crimp in Bud’s plans to sell. Had that been the real reason behind hiring me?

  “Is that why you killed Bud? Was he selling out?”

  Charlie frowned. “Bud? No, he’d never sell.”

  Jinx had skulked up behind Charlie. I could see him contemplating his options. Just what was he planning?

  “So why did you kill him? The treasure? The feud?”

  Charlie lowered the gun, his face a mask of confusion. “What are you talking about, girlie? I didn’t kill Bud. Sure, we feuded, but we were friends underneath it all. I just wanted to scare those treasure hunters away.”

  “So you’re saying you killed Bud by accident.”

  “No. I don’t know what happened to Bud, but it sure wasn’t anything I did. I wasn’t even here that night.”

  I studied him. Given the sad look on his face and the fact that he didn’t have the gun pointed at me anymore, my private investigator instincts told me Charlie was telling the truth.

  Charlie sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Okay. I guess I might as well confess to the truth.”

  “Heeya!” Jinx launched himself at Charlie, hitting him straight in the chest and bouncing off. He fell to the ground, landing on his side, then jumped up and shook himself off. He arched his back and hissed at Charlie, who hadn’t even been fazed by the attack.

  Charlie jerked the gun toward Jinx. “Damn thing’s rabid!”

  “No!” I lurched forward, shoving the barrel away from Jinx. “That’s my cat. He’s just a little weird.”

  Jinx’s gaze flicked between the two of us. “Weird? I was saving you.”

  “I don’t think I need saving right now,” I said.

  Charlie looked at me. “Are you crazy? I could have shot you. Are you talking to that cat?”

  “No. No.” I needed to get him back to talking about himself, not me or my cat. While I appreciated Jinx’s attempt to save me, he’d launched himself at Charlie at the exact wrong time, interrupting his big confession. “What was that you were about to confess?”

  “I didn’t like all the people coming here and digging things up. Sounds at night. Cars driving by. Bud was always in his place by eight p.m. sharp. He never stayed out late. No noises or car headlights, seeing as those kids never came to visit him except that daughter-in-law. But ever since this treasure rumor started circulating, they’ve been swarming here like flies. So I put a stop to it.”

  A sickening feeling came over me. “Put a stop to it” sounded so final. I thought again about his murder vignettes. What had Charlie done? And whatever it was, had it resulted in the accidental death of Bud? “How did you put a stop to it?”

  “I rigged things up so it would seem like there was a ghost. Figured that would scare people away.”

  Wait a minute. “You mean the lights and sounds that everyone reported hearing was you?”

  Charlie nodded and pointed to the electrical cord. “That’s why I had electricity out there. See, at night, I would sneak down and set up some ghostly glowing lights and speakers to try to scare them off.”

  It made sense. That’s why Charlie’s miniature clue was in the barn. That’s why everyone thought there was a ghost. But it didn’t explain how Bud had ended up on the wrong end of a pitchfork.

  “Did you set stuff up inside the barn?”

  “Inside the barn? No. That would have been trespassing. I stayed on my own land. I wouldn’t do that to Bud. Like I said, after all the feuding, we were friends, and there’s loyalty in that. Course, if I’d known all my setting this up might have gotten him killed, I never would have done it.” Charlie’s eyes misted. Either he was a very good actor or my instincts had been correct. He was telling the truth.

  But what about that little bit of plastic I had found? I could have sworn it was from one of his vignettes. Maybe it had been on his clothing and had fallen off over by the stone wall, and someone else had tracked it into the barn on the bottom of their shoe. Possibly even Bud. Or his killer.

  “So the noises that Minnie and Sophie heard. The clanking. The moaning. The loud banshee wailing. That was you?”

  Charlie looked sheepish. “I didn’t want to scare Minnie and Sophie, but I kinda think they got a kick out of it. Gave them something to do. And I was careful only to run that tape before their bedtime so it wouldn’t disturb their sleep. It wasn’t that loud, anyway, just a little bit of moaning and clanking.”

  “Minnie said it was loud the night Bud died. She thought it was the ghost squealing that it had made a kill.”

  “Well, I didn’t have anything that gives out a loud screeching. Minnie can be a little fanciful. Maybe she was exaggerating a bit. And besides, I wasn’t home the night Bud died, so I didn’t even set up my ghost stuff.”

  That was odd. “You weren’t here that night at all?”

  “Nope. Was out at the widow Perkins’s. Oh, there was some moaning and groaning, but there wasn’t any ghost, if you catch my drift.” Charlie winked at me. He was downright jovial now. The man could change moods as quickly as my Aunt Gladys changed witch hats.

  “Gross. I need to get the backs of my eyes bleached now,” Jinx said. “I can’t unsee the image of this old guy and the widow Perkins in my mind.”

  I agreed. I was trying to unsee it myself.

  At my silence, Charlie added, “Go on and ask her. I told Sheriff O’Hara the same thing, and it must have checked out, because she ain’t been back to arrest me.”

  I thanked Charlie and left. Now that the truth was out, he seemed downright friendly toward me. But unfortunately, I had come away with more questions than answers.

  I still wanted to verify Charlie’s alibi, but if my instincts were correct and he was telling the truth, then there was no ghost and Charlie had an alibi. And if Dave Brown also had an alibi, that left only a few who could have done it—a member of Bud’s family. The question was, which one?

  Chapter Twelve

  “Sounds like everyone’s got an alibi,” Jinx said when we were back in the car, pulling away from Bud’s.

  “Yeah, but which one of them is lying?”

  “You could try a tell-the-whole-truth spell.”

  No. I wouldn’t do that. No matter how much I wanted to get to the bottom of this, casting a spell to get a suspect to tell the truth was against my principles. “That would be like cheating.”

  “Not really. You don’t have the means that the police have to intimidate people to tell the truth or the methods to check their alibis.”

  That was true, but neither did Mitch, and he didn’t need to depend on magic. I wasn’t going to either. “No. I’m going out to the Coven Cavern to see if I can catch Dave Brown before he leaves town and find out exactly where he was the night Bud died and also verify some of the things that Charlie told me about how he was the one pretending to be the ghost to get rid of the treasure hunters.”

  “Suit yourself. You coul
d speed things along if you cast a tell-the-whole-truth spell on them.” Jinx curled into a ball, apparently disgusted with my decision. “I’m taking a catnap. Wake me when we get there.”

  I didn’t make it to the Coven Cavern, though, because I spotted Dave’s beat-up brown Dodge in front of the hardware store. I pulled to the curb and got out just as he was exiting the store with a handful of shovels.

  “Oh, hi.” I hoped my voice sounded casual, as if I had just run into him by accident.

  “Hi. Just stocking up for my next treasure hunt.”

  “Oh, is there another treasure buried in town?”

  “Nope. Heading out like I told you before. So don’t even think about hitting me up to purchase a treasure permit.”

  “Where’s this new one located?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to get the jump on me and beat me to the treasure location? I’m sure it’s not within your permit jurisdiction.”

  I laughed. Hopefully my most charming and innocent laugh. “Oh no, just being conversational.”

  “Umm, yeah. Well, have a great day.” He pushed past me and started putting the shovels into his trunk.

  Movement on the other side of the street caught my eye. It was Agnes Newman running out of the pharmacy with a large bag. She was scratching vigorously in all kinds of unmentionable places as she made her way to her car. Aunt Wanda’s spell must’ve worked.

  Unfortunately, Agnes’s car happened to be parked at the curb in front of Mitch’s office, which drew my eye to something else I didn’t want to see. Mitch. He was coming out the door with a big cardboard box. What was up with that? I doubted he was really going out of business. Maybe he’d found even more exclusive digs.

  “Ahem.” Jinx jerked his head toward Dave, who was shutting the trunk.

  I walked closer to the car. “Hey, so I was wondering about the ghostly noises that you heard at the Dunbuddy place. Did they usually stop around nine p.m.?”

  He stood there, his hands in his pockets, as he thought. “You know, now that you mention it, I think they did. They didn’t go on all night, that’s for sure. I only heard them the few times I came earlier. But usually I waited until midnight and never heard a peep.”

  He shrugged and started towards his driver’s door. “What’s that got to do with anything anyway?”

  I started to panic. He was going to get away! “And the night that Bud was killed, where were you?”

  I knew what I was asking Dave was important, but for some reason I couldn’t keep my gaze away from the sidewalk, where Mitch was standing with the box. He wasn’t alone anymore. Sheriff O’Hara was talking to him. She was all smiles. I didn’t think I’d ever actually seen her smile before, and wait ... was she actually giggling?

  “Ahem!” Jinx said, more loudly this time, yanking my attention back to Dave, who now had the driver’s-side door open and was about to get into the car.

  “Oh one more thing.” I felt like Columbo during the big reveal. “You said you were out somewhere on the night Bud Saunders was killed. I forgot exactly where you said that was.”

  He looked at me over the roof of his car with narrowed eyes. “What business is it of yours?”

  Maybe I should’ve thought of a reason to make it my business before I asked. “Oh, nothing. I was just curious.”

  “Well, you know what they say.” His gaze dropped to Jinx and then flicked back up to me. “Curiosity killed the cat.” Then he got into his car, started it, and drove off.

  “See, you should’ve hit him with a tell-the-whole-truth spell like I said,” Jinx said. “Now you’ve got bupkis.”

  My gaze jerked back to Mitch. He had that charming smile that had always made me do things against my better judgment on his face. He looked up, and our eyes met in a zing of lightning. Not the good kind of lightning though. The really bad, unwanted kind.

  He waved. O’Hara noticed him waving and looked in my direction. Her smile snapped into a frown when she saw that it was me Mitch was waving at. She whirled around and headed toward me.

  “Great, now you’ve done it. Here comes Sheriff Oh-Horror,” Jinx said. “Hey, you know what? This could be good. I know you don’t want to mess with the suspects, but what about the sheriff? If you hit her with a blabbermouth spell, she might spill out the alibis for Charlie and Dave so you could verify them. That wouldn’t be against your high moral ethics, would it?”

  Would it? Technically, that would be information I could glean from the police files. Lots of private detectives had friends on the police force that would tell them these little details. Mitch had often used O’Hara for this very thing. She’d pretty much tell him anything. But she hated me and wouldn’t even give me the time of day.

  So in effect, Mitch had an advantage over me, and I could easily level the playing field with just one little spell. I reached into my bag and pulled out a piece of creamy milk chocolate. Blabbermouth spell it would be.

  O’Hara stormed up. “Were you badgering a former suspect?” She jerked her head in the direction of Dave Brown’s car, which was puttering down the street, backfiring as it went along.

  “No, I was just chatting with him.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t think so. I think you’re digging into Bud Saunders’s death. I could arrest you for obstructing justice.”

  “I haven’t obstructed any justice, and I’m not digging into Bud’s death.” I crossed my fingers behind my back.

  “Oh no? I got a complaint that you were lurking around over at his place.” She folded her arms over her chest. “And why would you be going there unless you were going back to the scene of the crime? That’s what the killer does to make sure there’s no evidence.”

  “You can’t seriously think I killed Bud.” I popped the chocolate into my mouth and focused on the blabbermouth spell.

  “I don’t know what to think. All my suspects have alibis. For example, Charlie Henderson—you know he’s a little kooky, right? In fact, he comes into the station all the time looking for pictures of old murders, and then I find out he’s making little dollhouses out of them. How weird is that? So naturally I suspect him right off, but turns out he was with Melinda Perkins. Oh yeah, at first she didn’t want to tell me. It’s apparently supposed to be some big secret even though the whole town knows the two of them are knocking boots. I finally got it out of her with my superior investigative skills.”

  Apparently the blabbermouth spell had worked. I wanted to encourage her to keep talking, so I said, “Wow. That’s really great detective work.”

  “Yeah. And that treasure hunter. Dave? He was a good lead. You know, he was digging around that property, and I figured maybe Bud caught him and then he had to kill Bud. But his alibi was ironclad.” She pursed her lips in disappointment.

  “Oh really? Where was he?”

  “Turns out he was at a treasure hunters’ meeting over in Keene with more than fifty witnesses.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. So who else do you suspect?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it past those sons of Bud’s. Nasty bunch, the two of them. And the older one.” She leaned closer to me and lowered her voice. “I hear he cheats on the wife. Cheating don’t hold no muster with me. I don’t think it’s a big stretch to turn from cheating to murder. But he’s also got an alibi, and the wife verifies it. And why would she do that if he wasn’t home and could be the killer? Because in my book, that would be a great way to get rid of him. That leaves me with son number two. Steve. He says he was home alone. No way to verify that.”

  “That’s interesting. You sure are doing a good job investigating.” I almost choked on what was left of the chocolate getting the words out of my mouth.

  “Yeah, so I have only one guy on my suspect list, and if that isn’t bad enough, I’m being pressured to find the killer at every turn. And Connie keeps writing those damn articles, and those get Vera all worked up, then she complains to the mayor, who complains to me. You know it’s not good for tourism to have a killer
running around, not to mention I have to work all these extra hours, and ... ”

  Apparently the blabbermouth spell had worked too well. Now I couldn’t shut her up. I stood there listening to her ramble on about all kinds of things I didn’t want to know. Like how the department was cutting back and making her job harder. And how her bunions were killing her because she was on her feet for so many hours. And how Hightower was getting on her nerves about this case. But it was the last thing she said that caused a chill to dance up my spine. It was a warning.

  “Yeah, and you better watch out for your aunt. Reports are she was down at the Witch’s Brew Lounge drinking up a storm earlier today and acting crazy. You ask me, something is going on with her, and it ain’t something good.”

  I went straight home after talking to O’Hara. It was almost suppertime anyway, but what she’d said about Aunt Gladys had me worried.

  Hooter was sitting on a perch in the foyer. He flapped his wings and craned his neck toward me as I entered. “Who? Who? Who?”

  “Well, if you must know, I’m here to see Aunt Gladys.”

  He swiveled his head and then jerked it in the direction of the stairs. Apparently, Aunt Gladys was upstairs. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well after her afternoon at the Witch’s Brew.

  “Aunt Gladys is napping. We’re in the kitchen.” Tess’s voice drifted down the hall, and I headed toward the kitchen.

  Tess and Aunt Wanda were sitting at the scarred pine kitchen table, their hands wrapped around steaming mugs. A pile of fresh brooms lay on the patio outside.

  “Someone said they saw Aunt Gladys down at the Witch’s Brew Lounge. Is that true?”

  They both rolled their eyes.

  “Yes. Seems she got into the bubbly down there. You know how she can’t hold her liquor,” Wanda said.

  Tess held up a large cobalt vial. “And she drank the entire bottle of potion I gave her.”