It's Your Party, Die If You Want To Read online

  “Right. Instead it happened right after Lucinda rolled into town,” Nell said, arching one expertly plucked eyebrow. “We’re just gathering intel. Dave’s eventually gonna arrest somebody, you know. The more facts he has, the more likely it is he’ll arrest the right person.”

  “He could arrest you two right now for stalking,” I said. “I spotted you as soon as I drove up. Don’t you think Lucinda or a member of her entourage is bound to see you?”

  Jasmine looked at her watch.

  “Nell, I have to go mind the shop for a while,” she said, standing up and brushing off the knees of her jeans. “I’ll check in with you later.”

  “All right, hon. I think I’m going to go sit in my car for a while. Sindhu will text me if Lucinda leaves the building.”

  Jasmine walked toward the end of the block, while I walked across the street with Nell to the parking lot.

  “Why does Jasmine have to hurry off to the nursery?” I asked, thinking how the greenhouse was usually open limited hours by October, mostly just on weekends.

  “She’s not going out to the greenhouse, hon. She’s going to the store in town,” Nell said. “Belinda lets her have some shelf space for her products in one corner of the shop. She doesn’t charge Jasmine for it, says it draws more customers in. But in return Jasmine minds the store a couple of hours a week so Belinda can run errands.”

  Belinda Gosner runs a small stationery and gift shop. My best guess is that most of her revenue comes from wedding invitation orders, but she also sells a variety of gift items, such as scented candles, collectible Christmas ornaments, porcelain statues, and plaques displaying inspirational sayings. Jasmine’s cosmetic creams are actually a good fit for the store.

  Nell opened her car door and said, “I know you think we’re crazy, but I have to do something. I can’t just sit around waiting for someone I know to get arrested while the ghost whisperer in there gets away with murder.”

  I drove to the office, pondering whether the insistent stalkers were conspiring to frame Lucinda for murder or if they were nuts. I decided on the latter. Or maybe they wanted to hand the sheriff a suspect to get their own names off the list. Either way I hoped they would at least keep a prudent distance so Lucinda wouldn’t have them arrested.

  When I arrived at the office, I returned some phone calls and sorted through the jumble of papers on my desk before making out a deposit slip for the bank.

  I had received a few client payments that I really needed to deposit if I was going to pay the bills on time.

  I drove to the bank and snagged a parking space near the door. When I got in line, I was a little surprised to see Naomi Mawbry at the teller’s window, since her sister had passed away Friday afternoon. She had a pin fastened to a navy blue blouse that recognized her thirty years of employment with Dixie Savings and Loan.

  “Naomi, I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said as I stepped up to the counter.

  “Thank you. But my sister didn’t actually pass away,” Naomi said. “In fact, she’s doing much better.”

  “Oh, hon, I guess I got the wrong end of a rumor,” I said. “I apologize for speaking out of turn.”

  “That’s okay, Liv. I actually did get a phone call at the bank Friday afternoon from the hospital saying that my sister had died,” Naomi said. “I hurried home and packed a few things and took off to Mississippi crying my eyes out, wondering if my mama’s heart would hold up to the strain of losing a child.

  “I ran into the hospital and asked at the desk if they’d taken my sister away yet, and they told me she was still in her room. I raced down the hall, thinking Mama would be holding vigil and wondering if anybody else was with her. When I got to the room, Ruth was sitting up in the bed eating her supper. I about fainted.”

  “How in the world could something like that happen?” I said, trying to imagine how I’d react if I received such a call about my own sister.

  “I don’t know,” Naomi said. “Either the hospital made a huge mistake and got their patients mixed up, which they deny, or it was some kind of horrible prank call, which is even harder to believe. Ruth had undergone heart bypass surgery over a week ago, but seemed to come through it just fine. So I was shocked when I got the call. I’m just thankful she’s alive and that nobody had called my mama and told her Ruth was dead. In fact, it upset Mama so bad when I told her what had happened that I stayed through yesterday just so I could take Mama to her doctor for a checkup.”

  “Oh, my goodness, Naomi. I just can’t imagine,” I said. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  “Thank you. Since it turned out to be a false alarm, I’m actually kind of glad I wasn’t at the retreat anyway. I knew Morgan her whole life. When she was little, she’d come visit her daddy here at the bank. While he’d be meeting with somebody, she’d sit on the floor in the lobby and count out Monopoly money to her little Cabbage Patch doll,” Naomi said.

  She teared up before turning away from the counter to blow her nose, honking loudly into a wadded tissue. It was actually kind of nice to know that someone other than Morgan’s parents was grieving for her.

  I drove back to the square and parked in front of my office. I waved through the window of Sweet Deal Realty to Winette, who was on the phone, before walking across the square to the diner. I nabbed a table in the seat-yourself restaurant and faced the window so I could watch for Winette, who was joining me for lunch.

  I ordered a glass of sweet tea and looked over the menu. I waved to Winette as she came through the door.

  “I’ll have some coffee, please,” Winette told Margie, who was walking past as Winette sat down in the chair facing me.

  “It’s getting chilly with that wind kicking up out there,” Winette said, briskly rubbing her upper arms to warm up.

  We both ordered catfish chowder, one of the daily specials featured on the chalkboard by the front door.

  “Well, I talked to Dorothy this morning and fortunately the mayor’s gone off the idea of postponing the mystery dinner,” Winette said.

  “Thank goodness.”

  “In fact, at the town council meeting tonight they’re supposed to vote on moving trick-or-treating in town from Halloween night to the thirtieth to keep trick-or-treating from interfering with the fund-raiser, or the fund-raiser from interfering with trick-or-treating, depending on how you look at it,” Winette said.

  “That’s probably not a bad idea,” I said. “I don’t know how it will sit with folks, though. Most people don’t like change.”

  “Dorothy said a number of people had actually requested that the mayor change the date. She asked around, and most people seem to like the idea, in light of all the other stuff already going on Saturday night. Plus there is precedent. Delbert County moved the date for trick-or-treating to a different date four or five years ago when the weather service was predicting that ice storm moving in on Halloween. People had been worried about kids trying to get around on icy roads and sidewalks.”

  “That’s right, I’d forgotten about that,” I said.

  Margie set our steaming bowls of catfish chowder in front of us and slid a basket of hush puppies on the table between us.

  “Mmm,” Winette said. “This chowder really hits the spot.”

  “And the hush puppies are piping hot,” I said.

  Relieved that talk about postponing the fund-raiser had died down, Winette and I went over a few details for the Halloween events.

  After lunch I made a quick stop in the ladies’ room before driving over to pick up my part-time assistant, Holly. She lives in an impressive Tudor home on the edge of town. As the widow of a retired general, Holly is the kind of employee most party planners can only dream about. She has experience entertaining military brass, government officials, and diplomats around the globe. Most fortunate for me, she does the work because she enjoys it. If I had to pay her based on her résumé I’d never be able to afford her. She has a quirky sixties’ fashion sense and refuses to work on Elvis’s bir
thday or the anniversary of his death. But I can live with that.

  Also fortunate for me, Holly was generally up for a road trip. Today we were driving to Jackson, Tennessee, to see a man about a screaming old lady.

  Actually, it was an animated Halloween prop we were checking out for the teen bonfire and hayride set for Halloween night. Homer Crego, who was hosting the event at his farm, had come up with several homemade thrills and frights to strategically place along the hayride route. But he wanted a real showstopper, and I had told him I’d see what I could come up with.

  Had we been holding the event anytime other than the week of Halloween, I could have borrowed, or at least rented inexpensively, a top-notch scare-the-dickens-out-of-you animated prop. But Halloween is when people who own such devices are making use of them.

  I talked to someone from the Junior Chamber of Commerce in Hartville, which holds a haunted house fund-raiser each year, about helping me locate such a prop. I had high hopes when he called to tell me he had tracked down a Jaycees chapter in Arkansas that wasn’t running their haunted house this year. But we soon discovered they had already sold off all their prime scream inducers.

  Then yesterday the Hartville Jaycees president called to say he had found a guy in Jackson who collected and sold used Halloween and movie props. He thought the man would give us a good deal on an animatronic screamer. I had called the collector, who then e-mailed me a few photos. Holly and I were going to look at the props in person and see if we could rent something at a good price.

  The business wasn’t in an area of Jackson I was familiar with, so I had punched the address into the GPS. We found it without any trouble, but as we drove into a run-down part of town with several boarded-up buildings we began to feel a little uneasy.

  “Slow down, darlin’,” Holly said, the rough edges of her r’s polished smooth by a proper Southern finishing school. “Are you sure this is the right address?”

  I double-checked.

  “Yeah, this is it,” I said.

  “Perhaps the scary appearance of the place is for the benefit of customers,” Holly suggested.

  “I think he lives here,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  We pulled up on our respective door handles, opened the doors a crack, and then sat motionless for a moment, waiting for the other to get out first.

  Finally I said, “There’s two of us and I’ve got some pepper spray in my purse that Di gave me.”

  “I think you should put the pepuh spray in your pocket—just in case,” Holly said.

  I did, and we proceeded to the front door.

  The doorbell screamed when I pressed it. A man with wild eyes opened the door and said, “I’ve been expecting you. Come inside.”

  I took a deep breath and stepped across the threshold. I looked over my shoulder to see that Holly hadn’t moved an inch. I reached back, grabbed her hand, and pulled her up beside me.

  Cobwebs festooned the corners of the room. The eyes of a painting over the fireplace followed us, and eyeballs floating in liquid in ajar on the mantle stared back at us. I told myself they looked fake.

  Holly and I were still lingering near the door, which had creaked closed behind us without any visible assistance. The sun was shining outside, but the room was dark, dimly lit by just a few flickering gaslights.

  “Please, come on in. I’m Lucien. Which one of you is Mrs. McKay?”

  I glanced over to see Holly nodding her head sideways toward me. I hesitantly raised my hand.

  “Would you like me to give you a demonstration?” he said.

  “Of the props?” I asked in a shrill voice. “Sure, I suppose.”

  “Excellent,” Lucien said. “Watch the door beside the fireplace.”

  We turned a half step in that direction. In a matter of seconds, the door flew open and a witch with glowing red eyes flew up from the closet floor with a horrifying laugh, hovered near the ceiling for a moment, and then retracted into the closet.

  Her laugh was masked by the sound of our screams. I must have jumped a foot backward. By the time the witch retreated into the closet, Holly was behind me, her head buried between my shoulder blades and her arms locked around my waist.

  Lucien took a step toward me and said, “Was that what you had in mind?”

  Pull yourself together, I thought. You’re acting ridiculous.

  I peeled Holly off me and said, “I’d like to get a closer look at her with some lights on. Could you show us how it works?”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  He walked to the wall and flipped on an overhead light, along with a light in the closet.

  “Come closer,” he said, moving over to the closet.

  I followed him, and Holly followed closely behind me.

  He explained how pneumatics propelled the figure forward. “It can be activated by a motion sensor or by a controller, like this one,” he said, pulling a remote control from his pocket.

  I explained how the figure would be set up in front of an outbuilding along a trail for a teen hayride.

  “Ah, I have just the thing,” he said. “Follow me into the study.”

  Holly whispered, “I’m not going into another room with that man.”

  “Fine, stay here on your own,” I said quietly, trying to keep my voice from quivering.

  She came along, as I suspected and hoped she would.

  He stepped inside a book-lined room while we hovered in the doorway. He turned the dimmed lights up slightly, revealing an old woman in a rocking chair with her head down, straggly gray hair obscuring her face. The rocker began to rock with an eerie creak. In a moment, she slowly lifted her head, unveiling a skeletal face and glowing eyes. Then she leapt up screaming and sprang forward three or four feet.

  “I like this one better,” I said. “Holly, what do you think?”

  “Me too,” she croaked, before clearing her throat and saying, “Yes, I like this one, as well.”

  He turned up the lights so we could take a better look at her.

  “It’s a used prop, but in excellent condition, as you can see,” he said.

  “I’m sure it would work nicely, Lucien,” I said.

  “I’ll let you have it for twelve hundred dollars,” he said.

  That was the scariest thing I’d heard all day. I think he noticed I had stopped breathing.

  “It sells for more than two thousand new,” he said.

  “I’m sure it does. But we just want to rent it for one night,” I said, “not buy it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I misunderstood you on the phone. I don’t generally do rentals,” he said.

  “Does generally mean never?” I asked in my sweetest voice. “It is for a charity fund-raiser.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Darlin’, let me tell you about our charity,” Holly said, looping her arm through his and walking him over to the fireplace.

  Over the next few minutes Holly employed her considerable talents of persuasion to impress upon him the worthiness of our charity and the joy and excitement this prop would bring to our young people.

  After some haggling, he agreed to rent it to us for $200. It was a bit more than I wanted to spend out of our cash donations. But unlike the children’s festival that was basically a break-even affair to provide childcare for those attending the dinner, the teen event was a fund-raiser. They were paying twenty-five dollars apiece for a bonfire, roasted hot dogs and s’mores, a haunted hayride, and a cheesy horror movie under the stars. Since the food, the cost of showing the movie, and the firewood were donated, I thought the frightening prop was a worthwhile investment.

  I even managed to talk Lucien into letting us take the prop with us after promising to recommend his wares to the Dixie and Hartville Jaycees as a haunted house resource and assuring him that the expensive prop would remain locked up in a secure place. I was extremely happy we wouldn’t have to make a return trip.

  He showed us how to use the controller and how to use the prop with a
motion sensor. He said Mr. Crego could phone him if he ran into any problems getting it set up.

  Lucien refused, however, to help Holly and me load the heavy prop into my SUV. I had a feeling that not going out into the sunlight was part of the creepy mystique he put on for effect. At least I was pretty sure it was just a put-on.

  Back in Dixie, Holly and I lugged the old lady into Holly’s house. I didn’t have room for it in my office and figured it would be safer at her place than in the construction zone I called home. Lucien had made me leave a $500 deposit with him, in addition to the $200 rental fee. If we ended up damaging the animatron, I’d pay him the 500 bucks. But I planned to put a stop payment on the check just in case he happened to decide the rental fee we had agreed upon wasn’t enough for his mint-condition prop.

  * * *

  After a busy day, Larry Joe and I had just finished our homemade Taco Tuesday supper. I was putting away the leftovers while Larry Joe stacked the dishes in the dishwasher when we heard a tap at the back door. It was Di. She opened the door and stuck her head inside.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Di said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner.”

  “We’re done, just clearing up,” Larry Joe said. “Come on in.”

  “We’ve got leftovers if you want me to fix you a plate,” I said.

  “No thanks, I’ve eaten already,” Di said.

  “What’cha know?” I said.

  “I know that Dave arrested Jasmine Green for Morgan’s murder today,” she said.

  “What? Really? Did Dave say why?” I said.

  “I haven’t talked to Dave. I heard from someone else.”

  “A reliable source?” Larry Joe asked.

  “Yep. Doug, the UPS driver. He was dropping off a package at the sheriff’s office when they brought Jasmine in. I ran into him on my route.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have thought she had it in her,” Larry Joe said. “But I’ll sure be glad if Dave is able to wrap up this case quickly. If you ladies will excuse me, I’m going to chain myself to the computer and go through McKay’s third-quarter financials.”