A Prickly Predicament (Mad River Mystery Series Book 1) Page 7

  “I mean, we would be able to sense that sort of presence. At least, I think we would.”

  “Would you check with the others and see what everyone else thinks about that?”

  “Sure. I’ll do that,” Mathias said.

  “I’d like to rule out that possibility if I can,” I said.

  “I’ll let you know if anyone else has sensed or seen an evil presence around here,” he assured me as his troubled features slowly faded from my sight.

  ~.~

  I quickly rolled up my sleeping bag, gathered up my things, and slipped out the front door of the Hanley House. I walked next door to the general store and peered through the front door. Nathan was sitting on a sleeping bag on the floor near one laden wall, and Nick knelt beside him, peering at a nasty cut on his forehead. “Man!” Nick said. “That just barely missed your eye.”

  “That settles it!” said Reverend O’Dell. “There are evil spirits in this town. This is proof!”

  “You should get that looked at, Nathan,” Nick said. Blood was pouring down the cameraman’s face. “I’ll give you a ride to the emergency room.” Nathan weakly nodded his assent. “Oh, Shelby. What are you doing here?” Nick asked.

  It was the second time in less than twenty-four hours he had asked me the same question. I smiled a little to myself. “I thought I heard something,” I told him. “What happened?”

  “A ghost pushed a spool of baling twine onto my head,” said Nathan.

  “Did you see the ghost?” I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw Nick give me an odd look.

  “I sure did,” Nathan answered. “Scariest thing I ever saw.”

  “C’mon, Nathan,” said Nick, helping the cameraman get to his feet. “Let’s get you taken care of. You coming, Reverend?”

  “I guess I should,” Reverend O’Dell said. “Shelby, you go on home now.”

  “Yes, sir,” I told him, intending to do no such thing.

  Reverend O’Dell turned at the door, looked toward the ceiling, and shouted back into the store, “You ghosts are on notice! My exorcism will rout all of you out of your hiding places this very night. This is your last warning!”

  As soon as the three men had pounded down off the wood planks of the store’s front porch and disappeared into the early-morning darkness, all of my spirit friends, including Adam, suddenly made themselves visible to me. “Have you all been listening all this time?” I asked them.

  “Of course we have,” answered Mathias.

  “What are we going to do?” wailed Jessamine.

  “Now, honey, calm down,” soothed Phineas.

  “Things really look bad for us,” Gladys rubbed her hands together. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ve gone over this store a thousand times,” said Josiah. “Let’s go over it one more time. Surely, we must have missed something.”

  “If we missed it, the police missed it, too,” said Jessamine.

  “That doesn’t mean a thing, honey,” said Gladys. She seemed to be recovering her old confidence. “C’mon. Josiah is right. We must have missed something before.”

  “Oh, all right,” Jessamine said. She wiped her eyes with the hem of her apron. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  “That’s the spirit!” I encouraged. “All we’ve got now are some sawed-off screw heads, and I’m not even sure the police have found them yet. We need some hard evidence that will nail this case shut, once and for all.”

  “She’s right,” said Mathias. “There’s got to be more. Let’s look.”

  A growing murmuring outside the front of the store drew my attention. When I looked through the front windows I was amazed at what I saw: a growing crowd of Mad River citizenry, many of whom I counted among my friends, and many of whom held up hand-painted placards reading “Exorcism Now!” and “Ban Killer Ghosts!” Uh-oh, I thought, word sure gets around fast in Mad River, even before dawn.

  I tried to slip through the crowd, unnoticed, but several people recognized me, of course. Mad River is a small town, after all. “See any ghosts, Shelby?” someone called.

  “Nah,” I lied.

  “Well, if Shelby didn’t see any, maybe there aren’t any,” someone else said.

  I let that comment lie where it lay. If that rumor should start making the rounds, it would be all to the good, I thought. Once I was out of Old Town, I practically sprinted home. I showered and dressed for work as if it were a normal day. It wasn’t, but I wanted to be prepared for anything.

  Harriet rolled out of bed just before I left again. “How did it go last night?” she asked, yawning.

  “Not so well,” I told her. “Nathan says a ghost pushed a spool of baling twine down on his head last night.”

  “Ouch!” she said.

  “That’s what I said,” I said.

  “But still, those spools don’t weigh all that much. He can’t have been hurt that bad,” she said.

  “That’s what I think, too,” I told her, “but now the people who are clamoring for an exorcism are getting louder and more insistent. Reverend O’Dell says he’s going to conduct the exorcism tonight.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You must be worried.”

  “I am.” I was so grateful for her understanding. It made me feel less alone.

  “Let’s meet for lunch,” she suggested.

  “Great idea!” I said. “We can compare notes then and get a better idea of how things are going and see if there’s anything we can do.”

  “Shelby,” she said as I walked toward the front door of our home.

  “Yes?” I looked at her over my shoulder, my hand on the front doorknob.

  “I love you,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

  “I love you, too,” I said and smiled. “I’ll see you at lunchtime.”

  ~.~

  By the time I returned to Mad River Old Town, the crowd had grown in size and things were getting ugly. I tried to be cordial to the people in the crowd whom I knew, but I didn’t linger outside for long. I quickly unlocked the door to the business office and set about my job of taking care of Matt’s emails and calendar items. Doing so grounded me, as I could accomplish those tasks almost automatically, freeing my mind to consider those things I needed to ponder that day.

  Thank goodness, Matt had been too preoccupied lately to think up any more projects for me to do for him, such as a spreadsheet he couldn’t live without. I needed to be able to think today, to analyze the situation and act quickly when the need arose. I was like a cat on the prowl: eager, hungry for information and insights, and ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

  Regardless of how hard I thought about it, though, I had to admit I was stumped. I couldn’t think of a single living soul who would have wanted Adam Gaunt dead, no matter how obnoxious he had been while living. People don’t usually get bumped off just for being annoying. And I knew in my heart of hearts that the ghosts in Mad River hadn’t done it. That only left one option as far as I could see: There had to be an evil spirit lurking nearby. If Mom could hold herself distant from me in the spirit world, surely any other spirit would be able to do the same. Just because I couldn’t sense it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. An evil ghost just had to be the answer to the riddle I was facing.

  But wait, I thought. What about those sawed-off screw heads?

  ~.~

  Thoughts whirled around in my brain, getting me nowhere. When Wendy Carpenter walked in, I welcomed the interruption. “Hello, Ms. Carpenter,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hello, Shelby,” she said. “Is Matt around?”

  “He should be here any moment,” I told her. I motioned toward the couch across from my desk. “Would you like to wait for him here?”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t mind if I do.”

  “I just made a fresh pot of coffee,” I offered. “Would you like a cup while you wait?”

  “Why, thank you,” she said. “Do you have cream and sugar, too?”

  “Of cours
e.” I joined her on the couch, bringing a cup of coffee for myself as well as one for her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me for keeping you out of the office the other day,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it, dear. I know you were just doing your job.” She took a sip of coffee and placed the mug on an awaiting coaster on the coffee table in front of her.

  “Isn’t it awful about poor Adam Gaunt?” I asked.

  “Indeed it is!” she agreed. “I have adored those two boys for years.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. I never missed their show.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Their parents and I are longtime friends,” she said.

  “I had no idea,” I answered.

  “Yes, we go back a long way,” she said. “Those boys have been friends since they were little fellows.” She smiled. “They were pretty cute back then.”

  “I’m sure they were.” I answered absently. I took a sip of hot coffee and my tummy reminded me I hadn’t had breakfast. I looked at my watch. Lunchtime was still a couple of hours away. “How well do you—I mean, did you—know Adam?” I asked. I was still just making small talk, I thought, killing time while waiting for Matt to show up.

  “Pretty well, the little rascal,” she chuckled. “He was always making trouble, even as a little one.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Just like his father.”

  “Tell me more,” I said, settling back against the couch. This was starting to get interesting.

  Chapter Nine: That Poor Boy

  “Well,” she said conspiratorially, “rumor has it that Adam’s father and Nathan’s mother had an affair.”

  “Yikes! That couldn’t have been good for their friendship.”

  “The two families tried to keep it hush-hush, you know, but word does get around.”

  “So it does.” That had, indeed, been my experience, too.

  “Both of those marriages went through some rocky times around then, but I guess both sets of parents decided to stick it out with each other until the bitter end. Neither couple got a divorce.”

  “You think they’re all still bitter?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Life must have gotten hard for both Adam and Nathan during that time.”

  “You’ve got that right.” Wendy smoothed her skirt and touched her short gray curls. She took another sip of coffee. “Nathan and Adam were on the outs about it quite seriously for a couple of years while they were in college.”

  “Really? I thought they’d always been as tight as thieves.”

  “Nathan wouldn’t have anything at all to do with Adam for a while.”

  “You mean, he blamed Adam for what their parents did?”

  “Well, not exactly. My theory is that Nathan saw qualities in Adam that he could no longer tolerate, qualities that Adam shared with his father.”

  “I can see where that might be a logical conclusion for him to draw.”

  “I felt so sorry for Nathan during that time. He really took it hard.”

  “He seems to be taking Adam’s death pretty hard, too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that he has been jittery every time I’ve seen him since Adam died. Is he normally the nervous type?”

  “No, he’s usually pretty easy-going.” She stared off into space and tapped her upper lip with an index finger. “Is he taking Adam’s death hard?” she asked, almost as if she were talking with herself. “Hmmmm. I don’t know.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked. I was really getting curious now.

  “It’s just that Nathan doesn’t let go of grudges easily,” she said.

  “But they did repair their friendship, didn’t they? I mean, they have—they had—their show together and all.”

  “Yes, well, Adam had the idea for this ghost-hunting show several years ago, and he went to his old childhood friend to help him make it a reality. He had to practically beg him.”

  “I guess he needed Nathan to make it work, right?”

  “Yes. Adam had the money, but Nathan had the know-how.”

  “I thought that was how it was,” I said. “So you think there’s still bad blood between the two families? Between the two men?”

  “It pains me to think so, as I’m fond of all of them, but I’m afraid you’re right.”

  “But isn’t the affair in the distant past?”

  “Oh, there have been other things,” she said vaguely.

  “Like what?” I pressed.

  “Like, Adam isn’t always completely fair with Nathan with regard to sharing the profits from the show, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh really. That definitely would be a sore spot.”

  “Indeed it can!” Wendy set her coffee mug down on the coffee table with an air of finality that let me know she had said all she cared to say on that subject. “But don’t get me wrong,” she said after a moment. “I love both families dearly.” She smiled to herself, a little wistfully. “Especially the two boys,” she said. “They remind me of my brothers.”

  “Your brothers?”

  “Yes. You’re too young to remember, but both of my brothers were killed in Vietnam.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “That’s okay, dear.”

  “This difficult time must be bringing up painful memories for you.”

  “Yes,” she said. She retrieved a tissue from her purse and dabbed her eyes.

  I reached over and patted the back of her hand where it lay on the couch. “I’m just so sorry, Wen— I mean, Ms. Carpenter,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. She sighed and leaned her small head against the back of the couch. Turning her head, “I’ll tell you a little secret,” she whispered. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears.

  I smiled at her. “Tell me,” I encouraged her.

  “I know I shouldn’t play favorites,” she said, “but I really have a soft spot for Nathan.” She smiled again. “That Adam was such a rascal, such a ladies’ man.”

  “You didn’t like that about him?”

  “No, I certainly did not,” she said, “and neither did Nathan.”

  “About this exorcism,” I started.

  “What about it?” Wendy said defensively. Her little head sprang off the back of the couch and swerved on her neck to face me squarely. There was steel in her blue eyes.

  I knew I’d touched a nerve, but that didn’t stop me. “Do you really think we need to go through with it?”

  “Oh, absolutely, my dear girl,” she insisted, her voice firm. “Have you seen that poor boy’s injury?”

  By “poor boy” I assumed she meant Nathan. “He was bleeding pretty badly last time I saw him,” I admitted.

  “He’s got a terrible cut above his left eye and the doctors think he might have a concussion.”

  So probably not fatal, I thought. Not like poor Alan. Guess Nathan was her favorite. Aloud I said, “I’m sorry to hear that. But—”

  “No ‘buts’ about it,” she went on. “We have got to rid this town of ghosts. Reverend O’Dell agrees with me completely.”

  I wanted to argue the point with her, but just then Matt walked in, looking distracted. “Good morning, ladies,” he said. “Come on in, Wendy,” he said, motioning her into his office. “What can I do for you?”

  After Matt and Wendy went into Matt’s office, I tried to get some actual work done, but my mind was whirling even more than before and I was having a tough time concentrating. To my enormous relief, Josiah showed up within moments, fairly cackling with excitement. “What is it, Josiah?” I whispered when I saw him. I didn’t want Wendy and Matt to overhear me and start asking questions.

  “Baling twine!” he sputtered.

  “Yes, yes, I know. What about it?” I asked.

  “You know how they tuck the end of the twine into the spool so’s
you can hardly find the end to get it started?”

  “Yes, I know. They do that at the factory so it won’t come all undone until you need it.”

  “Right!”

  “Well?”

  “The twine on the spool that fell on that ghost hunter’s head has come unwound.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it couldn’t have gotten that way on its own.”

  “You mean someone found the end of the twine and pulled it out?

  “Yeah. That’s what it looks like.”

  “Thanks, Josiah,” I told him. “Good work!”

  No sooner had he left that Wendy emerged from Matt’s office, looking triumphant. “Bye, dear,” she called cheerily as she left.

  “Bye, Ms. Carpenter,” I said. It was all I could do to sit at my desk and pretend to get some work done until noon, but finally lunchtime did roll around. Harriet was already seated at a table at Zaharako’s when I arrived. She looked a little flustered. “What’s up, sis?” I asked in greeting.

  “It’s been a crazy morning,” she answered.

  “Must be something in the water,” I said.

  “Shelby, they’ve pushed the exorcism up to tonight.”

  “So I heard.”

  “The mood in town is ugly. Everyone is all upset that poor Nathan got hurt.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And Wendy Carpenter is not helping at all.”

  “What is she doing now?”

  “She and Reverend O’Dell are working the crowd into a frenzy.”

  “I’ve got to get out more,” I said wryly.

  “Shelby, you’re not taking this very seriously,” Harriet complained. “I’m trying to help you and your— your, um, friends.” She looked over her shoulder to make sure we were not being overheard.

  “Oh, believe me, I am taking this seriously,” I assured her. “I’m just not sure what to do next.”

  “Maybe you should tell Nick what you told me,” she said.

  “You mean about the screw heads?” This time I was the one looking over my shoulder. Zaharako’s was crowded, but no one appeared to be paying any attention to what the Whitaker sisters were talking about as they ate their lunch.

  “Yeah, that,” she said.