Murder On Waverly Place

none of them had any reason to kill her.”

“What reason did Nicola have?”

“From what they said, he was trying to convince the girl to leave here and go off with him. Maybe he was tired of this Gittings woman taking all the money and figured they could do just as well on their own. Whatever it was, they had a big fight about it yesterday.”

“If Serafina was going to run away with him, why would he have killed Mrs. Gittings?”

“She wasn’t. She’d promised to stay if Nicola could stay, too, but maybe Nicola wasn’t happy about that.”

She frowned again, but this time she was just disappointed. “I can see why you’d suspect him. But what about the Professor? He knew her. Couldn’t he have been the killer?”

“He said he was in the kitchen during the seance. Apparently, he doesn’t go into the room with them, and nobody saw him there. Besides, he was partners with the Gittings woman.”

Her face lighted up. “Maybe he was tired of sharing the profits with her,” she said. “That would be a reason to kill her.”

“If you can figure out how he got into the room, I’ll be happy to consider it,” Frank told her dryly.

She sighed. “So it looks like Nicola and Serafina are the only ones with a good reason to want her dead, then.”

“Yes, it does,” he told her with relief. He couldn’t believe she’d accepted it so easily. “So why don’t you take your mother home and let me sort this out.”

She gave him an apologetic smile that was just as beautiful as the regular smiles she gave him. “I know you want us out of here, but we can’t leave Serafina. And if you arrest Nicola, she’s going to be hysterical. You’ll be happy we’re here if that happens.”

“Nothing could make me happy you’re here,” he informed her, making her smile again. She was making him forget why he was here, though. He needed to get away from her and back to work.

“We’ll wait with Serafina until you decide if you’re going to arrest Nicola or not,” she said. “And maybe I’ll be able to find out something helpful from her.”

Defeated, Frank opened the door and motioned for her to proceed him out of the room. “Just don’t think you’re going to get involved in this,” he told her in a whisper as she passed.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she assured him without the slightest hint of sincerity.

Frank gritted his teeth to keep from saying anything else. He waited until she was safely back in the parlor again. Then he went upstairs to find Nicola.

He found him in one of the bedrooms with Donatelli. Nicola was sitting on the neatly made bed, and Donatelli was perched on a straight-backed chair, blocking the door.

“What have you found out?” Frank asked Donatelli.

“His name is Nicola DiLoreto. He’s known Serafina Straface since they were kids,” he reported, not taking his eyes from the prisoner, who stared back with defiance. “They met on the ship coming over from Italy, and their families settled in the same neighborhood. Neither one has any family left, to speak of, so they looked after each other. He worked odd jobs, and she told people’s fortunes on street corners for a few cents until this Mrs. Gittings came along. She’s the dead woman, isn’t she?”

“That’s right.” Frank was looking at the prisoner, too. A bruise was darkening on his cheek where somebody had socked him.

“The Gittings woman said she could set Serafina up in a first-class place, and people would pay lots of money to see her.”

“And that’s just what she did, isn’t it, Nicola?” Frank said conversationally. “So what was the problem?”

“We have no problems,” Nicola said. “Everything is fine.”

At Frank’s nod, Donatelli got up and let Frank have the chair. He moved it closer to the bed where Nicola was sitting, turned it around, and straddled it, resting his forearms on the back of it as he glowered at the boy.

“That’s not what the Professor says,” Frank told him.

“He is lying!” Nicola cried.

“Why would he lie?”

“Because he hates me.”

“Did you give him any reason to hate you?”

“No!”

“How about threatening to take Serafina away?”

“That is not true,” he claimed. “I would never do that.”

“Why not?” Frank asked curiously. “Now that you know how it works, you two could set up on your own. You didn’t need Mrs. Gittings and the Professor anymore.”

“We could never get a house like this,” Nicola pointed out. “You need a nice place if you want to get rich people to come.”

Frank glanced around the bedroom. The bed Nicola sat on had a cheap, iron frame. The only other furnishings were a washstand and a clothespress that looked like somebody had salvaged from the dump.

Seeing his expression, Nicola said, “They never come up here, the people who come. We kept the downstairs nice for them, though.”

Frank nodded. Why waste money on what the customers would never see? “Where were you during the seance, Nicola?”

The boy went rigid and his expression grew wary. “I was upstairs,” he tried. “Mrs. Gittings, she didn’t like the customers to see me.”

That made sense. She could pass Serafina off as a gypsy or something exotic, but people wouldn’t expect to see an Italian boy in a nice neighborhood like this. “I thought you were hiding someplace,” Frank said.

“I was hiding up here.”

“Not downstairs?”

“No, why would I do that?” He had started to fidget.

“I don’t know. Maybe you need to be in the seance room for some reason.”

“I was not in there,” he insisted. “Ask anybody. They will tell you I was not in there.”

“They wouldn’t have seen you,” Frank said. “Because you were in that big cabinet.”

His eyes widened in alarm. “No, I was not!”

“I think you were,” Frank said mildly, remembering the music that almost everyone in the seance room had said they’d heard. “I think you were in there to help make the noises during the sitting.”

“I did not make any noises!”

Frank smiled slightly. An innocent man would have said, “What noises?”

“Somebody made the noises,” Frank said.

“The spirits make them,” Nicola said. “They sing and they play music.”

“How do you know if you weren’t there?”

“Serafina told me.” He seemed proud of that answer.

“You’re in love with Serafina, aren’t you?”

“We are going to get married,” he said, even prouder of this answer.

“When?”

That stopped him. “When… when we have saved up enough money.”

“Didn’t Serafina make a lot of money doing the seances?”

“Yes, but… Mrs. Gittings was holding it for her.”

Ah, another reason for Nicola to want to get rid of the woman. “And she wouldn’t give it to Serafina if the two of you left here,” Frank guessed.

“We did not want to leave,” Nicola said, not very convincingly.

“I think you did,” Frank said. “I think you wanted to run away with Serafina so you could run your own operation, but Mrs. Gittings wouldn’t give you the money if you left, so Serafina convinced you to stay.”

“No,” Nicola insisted.

“And when you realized that Mrs. Gittings wasn’t ever going to give you the money, you knew there was only one way to get it.”

“No, that is not true!”

“So you hid in the cabinet, just like you did every time-”