CHAPTER 14
It was the sound of Mitch touching down on the floor of Spence Sibley’s closet that brought Des running.
Not that she had even the remotest idea what had happened. Her first thought was that Astrid’s Castle had just taken a direct hit from a short-range ballistic missile. It shook the floorboards and sent everyone spilling out of their rooms into the hallway, terrified. Everyone except for Spence, that is. When Des heard two-count ’em, two- male voices coming out of his room, she pounded on Spence’s door and was greeted by none other than Mitch. Also by a huge white Maine coon cat that Des hadn’t realized was even around until that very second.
How did Mitch and that cat get inside of Spence’s locked room?
She didn’t know. She only knew that Spence looked very unhappy.
Mitch, meanwhile, was grinning at her like a gleeful, moon-faced boy. “There’s a trapdoor,” he explained, tugging her toward the closet so she could see for herself.
“Time out. Where did this damned cat come from?” Des demanded, utterly bewildered. She also didn’t like to be tugged. Never had.
“That’s Isabella,” Jory answered from the doorway, where she and the others were clustered. “She’s the castle’s unofficial mascot. Hey, Izzy. Here, girl…”
The big white cat padded right over to Jory, who bent over and picked her up. Isabella scrambled up onto her shoulder and perched there contentedly.
“She patrols the gardens most of the year,” Jory said, stroking her. “Just loves being outside, don’t you, girl? When it gets cold, she takes up residence on the third floor. We have a problem with mice up there. Plus Les couldn’t be around her. He was allergic to cats.”
“So she’s got food up there?”
“She’s got everything up there,” Mitch answered. “A bed, a litter box, hot and cold-running mousy toys.” He lowered his voice, adding, “The towels in her bathroom are damp, by the way,”
“Who takes care of her?” Des asked Jory.
“Norma did. Izzy was her cat, really.”
“Was Norma likely to go up there in the middle of the night?”
“If she was awake, sure.”
“Jory, why didn’t you mention this to me before?”
“I wouldn’t have let her starve or anything.” Jory stuck her chin out defensively. “It just seemed like you had more important things to worry about.”
“True, that,” Des conceded, studying the opening in Spence’s closet ceiling. “What can you tell me about this trapdoor?”
“It’s a fire escape. Most of the old three-story houses had them. Otherwise, folks could get trapped in their top-floor rooms if a fire broke out during the night. Actually, those trapdoors were the only fire escape system Astrid’s had when Jase and I were little. Remember, sweetie?”
Jase nodded his furry head.
“Then the fire code got stricter and they had to install a sprinkler system and fireproof steel doors to the back stairs.”
“Are you telling me that all of these second-floor rooms have trapdoors like this?”
“Well, yeah,” Jory replied. “They carpeted over them upstairs but the rugs are just kind of toenailed in. In an emergency, there’s no harm in having an extra way out.”
“I do not believe this,” Des fumed, realizing she hadn’t gone in their closet last night. Hadn’t so much as opened the door. Just thrown her clothes over a chair and jumped into bed, as had Mitch.
“Hey, look at it this way,” he said brightly. “We can definitely set aside our ghost theory now.”
“Mitch, did you just land on your head?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Can you keep an eye on these folks for me?”
“Absolutely.”
Des herded everyone into Spence’s room, then unlocked the housekeeping closet out in the hall and fetched a broom. She went from room to room, checking the closet ceilings. Each had a trapdoor, just as Jory had said. With the broom handle, each trapdoor could easily be pushed open under the detachable third-floor rug-including the trapdoor in the very room she and Mitch had slept in. She positioned the dressing table chair underneath theirs. Standing on it, she did not find it particularly hard to pull herself up and into the closet of the third-floor room directly overhead. Admittedly, it was her business to stay fit. But any of these people could have managed the physical part of this, she believed. With the possible exception of Teddy. And Teddy wasn’t an issue since he had been downstairs playing the piano, not locked away in his room.
Des nosed her way around the chilly, vacant third floor, her mind quickly playing it out. Once Les’s killer had made it up here, he or she could have accessed the staff stairs by means of the third-floor hallway door and taken those stairs straight on down to the kitchen, bypassing her second-floor lookout entirely. After cold-cocking Mitch and killing Les, he or she had then stashed their wet things somewhere and returned to the third floor by those same stairs-using the towels in Isabella’s bathroom to dry off before dropping back down into their room, completely undetected. A well-positioned chair would have prevented the seismic disturbance that Mitch had set off when he’d touched down.
Des stretched a length of crime scene tape across the bathroom door, wondering how many sets of fingerprints they would find in there, and to whom they might belong. She also devoted a great deal of energy to beating the living crap out of herself for not hanging up her pants in the damned closet last night. If only she’d gone in there. If only she’d gone in there and looked up. If she had, Les Josephson would still be alive right now. This should not have happened. No, it should not. She was off her game. Enraged, she paced the third-floor corridor, calling herself any number of vile, politically incorrect names.
Her cell phone squawked. She went over by the windows in Isabella’s room to answer it.
And Soave said to her: “Yo, you are on a roll, Master Sergeant.”
“Could have fooled me,” she growled back at him.
“Hey, I don’t like your tone of voice. You sound down to me. Are you down?”
“Rico, I don’t have very much to be up about right now.”
“You can’t do this to me, Des. I need you to be up.”
“Yeah, why is that?”
“You’re my mentor, that’s why. If a boy sees his mentor falter, it completely wrecks him.”
“Rico, maybe the blood to my brain is starting to freeze, but you actually sound serious.”
“Des, I totally am.”
“In that case, feel free to cheer me up. What do you have? And please make it good.”
“Yolie got through to Tom Maynard of Dorset Pharmacy.”
“What did Tom have to say?”
Des’s heart immediately started beating faster as Soave told her.
“So, what, you’re not getting anywhere at your end?” he asked when he was done reporting.
“Starting right now I am, Rico,” she said, gazing out the window at the frozen outside world. “Believe it or not, the snow has just about stopped here. How is it where you are?”
“Same. The SP-One pilot says he’ll be good to go by the time we get there. Yolie’s on her way over here right now. I figure we’ll be on your doorstep in an hour, maybe ninety minutes. Sound good?”
“Way better than good. See you then, wow man.”
After she rang off, Des idled there by the windows for a moment with her engine revving. Then she shook herself and went down through the open trapdoor into Spence’s closet, with an assist by Mitch.
“Okay, everyone, new plan,” she announced briskly. “We’re moving downstairs to the taproom until the Major Crime Squad arrives.”
“Oh, thank God,” Carly sighed in relief.
“Amen,” echoed Teddy.
“Sanity restored,” Aaron declared, nodding his large head in agreement. “At long last.”
“Is it okay if I make us some sandwiches and coffee?” Jory asked.
“Good idea.”
