Weekends Can Be Murder, page 6
This time, the arm that linked with Larry’s belonged to Selena, much to his relief. “There’s a charming gazebo in the garden out back,” she told him. “Would you care to sit with me and watch the sun set on Georgian Bay?”
He accepted without hesitation. Outdoors seemed like a fine place to be right now, and the gazebo was undeniably pretty. Constructed with the same architectural detail as the house proper, it was lined with wooden bench seating for six (eight if they were close friends). However, since Norman and Blaise had beaten them to it and were having an obviously private moment, Larry and Selena remained on the back porch, sitting side by side on an artfully sculpted wrought iron bench.
Spread out before them was a large English-style garden. Mounds of yew and flowering bushes sprinkled with small yellow and lavender blossoms, speared at intervals by purple columns of delphinium, all butted up against a knee-high picket fence. Meanwhile, to either side of a gently curving flagstone path, pinks, geraniums, and something with doily-shaped leaves all crowded together like spectators waiting for a parade to pass. A delightful cocktail of fragrances wafted toward the porch, stirred by a tender breeze.
“That really is a gorgeous sight, isn’t it?” Selena said.
Larry wished he could appreciate it the way she did. To the west, it looked as though the lowering sun had ignited a firestorm. The entire horizon was lit up and burning, setting the sky ablaze. Closing his eyes didn’t help. The aromatherapy from the garden didn’t help either. A restlessness had invaded his core, and no amount of shifting in his seat could make the sense of urgency go away. If Selena was picking up on his discomfort, she gave no sign; and if she wasn’t, he really didn’t want to burden her with an explanation.
As he was opening his mouth to suggest they go back inside, she remarked, “Funny thing. When I was unpacking earlier, I noticed a trap door in the bottom of my closet. We’re on the second floor, so it isn’t a way into the basement. What do you think?” she said, her voice fairly percolating with excitement. “Are you up for an adventure, Mr. Holmes? Shall we go through the mysterious door and see where it takes us?”
Larry hesitated, a familiar tightness rising in his throat as unbidden memories flooded his mind. Backdrafts. Fiery blasts that lay in wait behind closed doors and shot out like a dragon’s flaming breath as soon as they were opened, catching the unwary by surprise.
Ending careers.
Filling coffins.
“It’s okay,” she said. The gentle pressure of her hand on his arm brought him back to the moment. “I meant what I said on the beach earlier. We don’t have to do it if you’d rather not.”
She was wrong. If he was going to tame the beast, he had to open that door, not because of what might lie behind it but because of what didn’t. He dredged up a smile and replied, “No, I want to. Really.”
About ten minutes later, Larry and Selena had both changed their clothes and were staring down through a rectangular opening in the floor of her room. He counted three steps on a crude wooden ladder. It was as far as the light from above could reach. Below that, he saw nothing but shadows.
Larry blinked, and all at once… he had a child in his arms and a mask on his face. A sheet of flame covered the floor between him and the exit. Smoke was billowing down from the ceiling in a smothering grey cloud. The wall beside him was roaring like an angry bear, and he could feel the heat of the fire right through the heavy fabric of his coat. He had to get Tamara out of there. He couldn’t break his promise…!
“Hey, are you all right?” The concern in Selena’s voice was a wake-up call.
He swayed in place a couple of times, gulping air.
“Maybe you’d better sit down for a bit.” She tugged him toward the bed.
He stood his ground and tugged back. “No, I’m okay now. It’s gone.”
Selena said nothing, just frowned inquiringly at him.
“It was a flashback. A memory, nothing more,” he told her firmly. “Now, do you want to go exploring or not?”
“It’s pretty dark down there. If just looking at it was enough to trigger—”
“I’m fine!” And to prove it, he went straight to the opening and climbed down the steps, into the unknown.
Without hesitation, Selena followed him. “You’ll need a light,” she told him, handing him her phone.
He was standing in a space the height and width of a doorway. The passage beside Larry’s room had had a safe and solid floor. Before allowing Selena to leave the bottom step of the ladder, he bounced a bit on the balls of his feet to make sure this one was equally sound.
Even without the glow from the screen of the phone, it wasn’t completely dark down here. As he’d found during his earlier exploration, faint blooms of light indicated the locations of grilles set into the walls of the rooms along the passageway. The one they were in now was more of an alcove, opening into a longer passage that apparently ran the length of the north wing. Larry remembered seeing a double row of large windows along the front of the building when he’d first arrived. How was he able to stand upright between the inner and outer walls? Then it hit him: like an elevator stuck between floors, this secret passageway, and the one he’d found earlier, had to be straddling the first and second storeys of the building.
Great. With a sawdust-strewn air pocket on either side, if this place ever caught fire, the north wing would be a death trap.
Selena tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you hear that?” she whispered. “Listen!”
There was a conversation going on in the room beside them, directly below Selena’s corner bedroom. It was a quiet discussion. However, by placing their ears close to the wall vent and paying careful attention, they could make out what was being said.
“Mother, I wish you would reconsider, for my sake if not for Arthur’s.”
“No, Harald. It was a mistake to come out here.” Edyth’s cold, hard tones were easily identifiable. “Andrew is making arrangements for the three of us to leave first thing tomorrow morning. That being said, I can’t force you to come with us. Remain here if you wish. Face your fate. But I’ve never sat through the second act of a play that I wasn’t enjoying, and I don’t intend to change my ways now. Turning this cursed house into an inn was bad enough. Now he wants to make it into a theatre? And why on Earth would he bring that boy back here again, when he knew—!” She let out an exasperated syllable, then fell silent for a moment. “I do not like being deceived, and a lie by omission—”
“—is still a lie. So, can I assume that you’ll be turning down Arthur’s request for financial support? That is the only reason he invited us here this weekend, you know. To wring some money out of the family trust.”
“And yet you want me to stay? Why?”
“He may be a dreamer and a spendthrift, but he’s also a Pyke. Think how it’s going to look if you walk out on him in front of his house guests.”
“I have thought about it, and those people may be his guests, but they are not his friends. Half of them are paid employees, and the rest are prospective sources of future revenue. Nonetheless, to spare Arthur any embarrassment, I’ve instructed Andrew to get us out of here as early as possible, certainly before breakfast. Your brother can tell his… associates whatever story he believes will explain our absence.
“As for the matter of the money, may I remind you that he has not received a penny from the trust for this project. I turned him down. So you can stop worrying about your inheritance. The only money Arthur has wasted on Rafferty House to date has been the bank’s. And whether or not I choose to assist him in repaying that debt will be my business, not yours.”
A pause. “Of course, Maman. I’m sorry.”
Privately, Larry didn’t think he sounded very sorry at all. Still…
“Now, run along and pack, if you’re coming with us,” Edyth ordered her son. “If you’re not, run along anyway. I wish to be alone.”
“Isn’t she a piece of work?” Selena murmured close to Larry’s ear. “I wonder who the boy is.”
“Ssh! Let’s keep going,” he whispered.
The room beside Edyth’s was dark and quiet, but there were voices coming from farther along the passage. Larry and Selena stepped carefully toward them.
“She’s going to ruin everything, going off-script so early on,” a female voice was fretting.
“Stop whining, Diane. Improv is what we do. And you have to admit, it was a much more dramatic scene than Lois created with her entrance. It’s no wonder she’s never been given more than six words to utter in a thirty-second TV ad.” This was Vaile speaking—or rather, the actor portraying him, minus the British accent.
“So much for her being a famous soap opera star,” Selena hissed in Larry’s ear.
“Ssh!” he hissed back.
On the other side of the wall, a door opened and closed.
“Tony, we’ve got a problem,” said a second female voice. “I was in the drawing room, doing a quick run-through with Lois, and I noticed that our prop gun is missing from the desk drawer. It was there before dinner, and now it’s gone.”
“Damn! There were a lot of people in that room after dinner, and all eyes were riveted on Georgina, including mine,” said Tony/Vaile. “Someone could have walked off with half the furniture without anyone noticing. Where’s Farley?”
“I don’t know. Probably out back, having a smoke. Want me to find him?”
Silence. Tony/Vaile was most likely shaking his head.
“It’s loaded with blanks,” Diane’s voice pointed out. “It’s not like anyone is actually going to get shot with it.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. Those wads still pack a punch,” he told her. “At close enough range, they can break bones, cause internal bleeding… There’s a reason starter pistols are fired into the air. And this one is ours, dammit!”
“So, what do you want us to do?” asked the second woman.
He let out a gusty breath. “Nothing. I’ll do it. Mr. Pyke will have to be informed that there is a thief under his roof. And given her limited ability to improvise, it appears that I’ll have to revise Lois’s script yet again. Tell her she’ll have her new side as soon as I’ve written it, and everything’s on hold until then.”
Larry could sense Selena’s growing agitation. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered, turning her around and giving her a nudge back the way they’d come.
The wall grille beside Edyth’s was still dark. Moving as quietly as they could, Larry and Selena rounded the corner, found the ladder, and scrambled up it to her room. He dropped the trap door back in place, then sank with a sigh onto the chair beside the bed.
“Wow. That was… very informative.” Selena looked torn between smugness and consternation.
Larry set the phone down on the nightstand and said flatly, “We weren’t meant to overhear any of it. It feels like cheating.”
“You’re right. It is. On the bright side, however, we now have a leg up. We know how the victim was going to be killed.”
“…and that something has gone wrong,” he added, frowning, “and could become even worse. A weapon has been stolen, meaning it’s probably going to be used to do someone actual harm.”
As though on cue—crack-crack.
“Two shots. Check the time,” Selena urged him, pointing to her phone. “I want to see who’s coming out of whose bedroom.”
“What? Wait!”
Ignoring him, she raced for the door and… it wouldn’t open. “Shit!” she spat after struggling with the knob, in vain. “We’re locked in.”
“Before we went down there, didn’t you—?”
“Yes, I locked it from the inside. And I unlocked it again from the inside just now, and the knob is turning, but—”
“Let me try,” Larry said.
It wouldn’t budge for him either.
They stared at each other for a second, then said in unison, “The trap door!”
But it wouldn’t open, even with both of them pulling on the recessed handle simultaneously.
At last, Selena flopped down on the edge of the bed. “It would appear we’re stuck here, Mr. Holmes. Any suggestions?”
“To be honest, I’m just as glad you couldn’t run out there to confront whoever fired those shots,” he scolded her. “That would have been reckless. It could have gotten you hurt, or worse.”
“You’re assuming that the sound we heard was actual gunfire. It could have been made by something else,” she pointed out reasonably.
“And you’re assuming that whoever took the gun didn’t remove the blanks and replace them with live bullets,” he countered. “In case you weren’t aware, many guns will fire both kinds of ammunition, and we don’t know—What?”
Her cheeks were dimpling. “You’re thinking like a sleuth.”
Larry shut his eyes briefly and willed himself to slow down. “So you figure everyone hearing a sound like gunfire was just Vaile improvising that part of the murder mystery? When we clearly heard him say that everything was on hold while he revised the script?”
“On hold for Lois,” she corrected him. “Not necessarily for everyone else. This is supposed to be an entertainment, Larry. You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to. Or, you can dive in and help us unravel the mystery.” She glanced around her with growing dismay. “Of course, in order to do that, we’ll first need to get out of this room.”
That was his cue. Larry tried pulling on the knob again, still without success. Then, frustrated, he hammered on the door with the side of his fist. “Hey! Is anyone out there?” he shouted. “Anyone? We can’t open the door!”
Moments later, an answering chorus of banging and muffled cries erupted from the hallway.
“It sounds like we’re not the only ones,” he remarked.
Selena had been pacing restlessly back and forth. “I suppose we could tie the bedsheets end to end and escape through the window. Mr. Pyke probably wouldn’t appreciate that, but…”
All the windows on the east-facing side of the house were the same—double casements in wooden frames, opening shutter-style from a narrow centre post. Larry’s firefighter eyes had noted them automatically as he approached the building earlier. The two frames locked in place on the inside with rotating tongue-and-bracket latches.
It was worth a try. He unlatched both frames and pushed on them simultaneously. Neither side moved. He shifted all his efforts to the right-hand frame. It still refused to give, by even a millimetre.
“What the hell…?” he muttered, taking a step back.
Selena had evidently set her phone to vibrate. Larry wheeled and found her answering a call.
“We’re okay, Liz, we just can’t get out. The door and window are both jammed shut. Even the trap door is—Yes, I said ‘we’. I’m with Larry.” A pause. “Mr. Pyke would know. Let me see if I can reach him.”
As she made the call, Larry stood near the window, taking mental inventory of all the items in the room that he could use to break the glass panes if necessary, then calculating the distance to the ground and comparing that to the diagonal lengths of the sheets and blanket on Selena’s bed.
“Mr. Pyke, it’s Selena Watt. We have a situation here, and you need to call me back as soon as possible. Please!” Turning worried eyes to Larry’s face, she terminated the connection. “It went directly to voice mail. It shouldn’t have done that. He told me he’d keep himself available.”
And the gun shouldn’t have disappeared from the desk drawer. And under no circumstances should every door and window in a house stick closed at the same time. An icy shiver crossed Larry’s shoulders. “There is definitely something strange going on,” he declared. “Maybe we should involve the police.”
Her concern morphed into disapproval. “To free us from our rooms? Really? Because that’s all we’ve got for them right now. Everything else can be explained away. And you should know better than any of us on this island how first responders feel about nuisance alarms from remote locations.”
He did. Larry had rescued his share of cats from tree branches. However, in each case he’d known before setting out from the station house what to expect when he arrived.
Hmm. Now, there was a thought. Back at the station house, there were blueprints and floor plans of every major structure in town. The platoon captain held regular briefings and drills, arming the company with the best strategy for dealing with fire in each building.
“I think we need to know a lot more about this place,” he decided aloud.
She misunderstood. “About its history, you mean? I did some casual research a couple of weeks ago. Nothing unusual stood out, but then, not everything makes it onto the internet. Arthur can probably fill in the gaps. Or his mother can, if we catch her before she leaves tomorrow morning. That’s if any of us are able to open our doors by then,” Selena observed dryly.
All at once, someone was knocking on theirs.
“Selena, open up, luv,” came Liz’s voice from the hallway.
Selena and Larry traded startled glances. Then he strode to the door and swung it wide. Liz Sampson sailed across the threshold, spread her arms, and gave Selena a huge, relieved hug.
“What just happened?” Selena asked.
“I haven’t a clue,” Liz replied, “and for me, that’s saying something. One moment we were trapped, and the next moment we weren’t. Since Arthur’s not available, Hugh is gathering everyone for a meeting downstairs to find out what’s what. Join us in the drawing room in about ten minutes.” She turned and gave Larry a wink and a knowing smile. Then she was gone.
Six
So many footsteps. So many incursions into private places. And so much tension.
Raised voices. Coldness. Physical blows. This was not the family the house had been expecting.
The games weren’t fun anymore.
And now blood had been spilled. Again. Warm and slippery, it was pooling on the floor, sliding into cracks, trickling along grain-defined crevices deep inside the still-aching wood of the frame. Falling, drop by drop, onto the cement floor of the basement.
