The Mint Julep Murders Page 2

  “Is there anyone inside now?” I asked Barbara.

  She shook her head. “Not a soul.”

  “Except for that one,” Frankie muttered. “And probably about a dozen more.”

  He was probably right on that account. This had been a large facility. It did spark my curiosity that I could see the woman without Frankie’s help. It meant either the ghost was extremely powerful, or that the asylum itself held an unusual amount of energy.

  Maybe both.

  Perhaps Frankie was right to be uneasy.

  “I picked up this place for a song last year,” Barbara drawled as she led us across the weed-strewn lawn, toward the front stairs. “I’ve updated some of the electricity and brought most of the first and third floors up to code. Otherwise, I couldn’t have my haunted house going, or charge people to sleep on the death floor.” She grinned. “That’s what I call the third floor. For marketing purposes, mostly.”

  “Sure,” I said, ignoring Frankie as he glared at her. He didn’t like it when people made light of the deceased members of our community. I didn’t agree with it, either, but I could at least be polite. “Thanks for letting us inside.”

  She planted a hand on her hip. “Yeah, well, my last verified ghost hunters ran straight out the door after twenty minutes. I’m hoping you do better.”

  I glanced at Ellis. “She’s talking to a features reporter from the Knoxville News Sentinel—”

  “And a travel writer from the Memphis Commercial Appeal,” she interrupted. “That would be a big one.” She ushered us along. “The reporter is doing a piece on weekend getaways.”

  “Has she seen this place?” Ellis asked, sidestepping rocks in the parking lot.

  Barbara narrowed her eyes at him. “She’s looking for quirky, out-of-the-way finds.”

  “This certainly qualifies,” I said, scanning the windows for any more ghosts.

  Barbara charged ahead. “Both papers are interested in writing stories about Mint Julep Manor, but only if I have actual facts. A testimonial from a ghost hunter like Verity should do the trick.”

  Possibly. I tried to keep pace with her. The woman walked fast. “As I told you on the phone, I’d be glad to tell you what I see while we’re inside, but I’m only here to talk to one particular ghost.”

  “Sure, sure,” she agreed as if it was part of my act. “Just keep your eyes open and try not to freak out. I need stories, not screaming.”

  Ellis paused at the bottom of the steps. “What did the other ghost hunters see?” he asked as a cold drop of rain hit me on the back of the neck.

  “They won’t talk about it,” she said, throwing her hands up. “Fat load of good that does me.” She led us toward the darkened asylum. “Meantime, I’ve got to tell the newspaper something. They’re on a deadline, and it’s not like they were terribly interested in the first place.” A piece of the stone stairs broke off under her heel as she began her way up to the verandah. “I need some verified proof of paranormal activity that people around here will buy into,” she insisted. “We do have one documented ghost,” she said, pausing halfway up, “a crazy knife guy. He haunts the basement catacombs.”

  “Catacombs?” I halted so fast Ellis nearly ran into my back.

  She whipped a brochure out of her back pocket. “Catacombs has a nicer ring to it than utility tunnels, and people love the idea of a knife-wielding murderer down there.”

  “They do?” I asked, surprised. Barbara and I clearly hung out with different people.

  She shoved the brochure into my hands. “We call him Crazy Charlie after a real-life inmate who ran away back in 1917.” She grinned, relishing the story. “They did this massive manhunt for him. Never found him. I say he died down there—brutally—and that’s why he lurks in the tunnels and haunts the living.”

  “How terrible,” I said. I sure hoped poor Charlie wasn’t down there.

  “Can I shoot her?” Frankie asked, drawing the revolver from the holster hidden under his suit coat. “I know a ghost bullet won’t hurt her, but it would be fun.”

  “Cut it out,” I muttered. I wasn’t overly fond of Barbara or her so-called “haunted” catacombs, either, but this was our way inside. “You have to keep the bigger picture in mind.”

  “Fine.” Frankie threw his hands up, one still holding the revolver. “You can get us in there, but I’m not listening to her anymore.” He holstered his gun and sulked off toward a grouping of dead lilac bushes.

  “That was good.” Barbara grinned. “It looked like you were really talking to a ghost.” She planted a hand on her hip. “You interested in working here? Ten dollars an hour to fake talk to whatever ghost you want to make up.”

  “No, thank you,” I said, a bit harder than I’d intended. I snapped open Barbara’s brochure. It showed a map of the network of tunnels under the old building, along with a glossy photo of the deranged-looking man from the billboard dressed in bloody surgical scrubs, wielding a knife. “I’m not the one making up stories.”

  “Right.” Barbara winked. “Anyway, Crazy Charlie’s feeling a little old hat, so I need something new, something really terrifying. It would be nice if you could find another insane killer in the underground tunnel system. That way, we wouldn’t have to pay a graphic designer to draw a map of a different crazy ghost lair.”

  “So you want souls to be trapped in this place?” I snapped. I couldn’t help it. These were people. Or at least they had been.

  “Let’s just get inside,” Ellis said, slipping the brochure from my hands. He was probably afraid I’d forget my manners and swat her over the head with it.

  “You don’t have to tell her anything,” he reminded me as Barbara continued on without us. “In fact, we can turn around and leave right now. We can find another way to free Frankie.”

  “We don’t have any other ideas,” I reminded him, keeping an eye on my ghost, who was lighting up a cigarette behind the bushes.

  I wasn’t so jazzed about Barbara or her eagerness to exploit whatever poor souls still wandered this place, but I did need to find Scalieri. I owed Frankie that much.

  While my ghost wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine all the time, I suspected some of his ill humor today sprang from the fact he was afraid of what Scalieri might tell him about his past. I’d be toying with his emotions if I left without giving this a chance.

  Barbara waited for us at the top of the steps. “Are you coming or what?”

  Her accent made her sound like she was from around here, but she didn’t act like it.

  I took Ellis’s hand and managed a smile. “Tell me. Who are your people?” I wanted to know what family hadn’t raised her right.

  She waved me off. “I don’t go for small-town small talk.”

  Wow. No doubt this was a woman who would slip a store-bought pie into her hand-me-down family pie pan and try to pass it off as her own—never mind that it was an inch too small on all sides.

  Yes. I’d met her type before.

  “The catacombs housed all the behind-the-scenes elements of the asylum,” she explained, gesturing toward the building. “The laundry, the boilers, the supply closets I plan to rebrand as punishment cells, and the morgue. But that’s all part of phase two.”

  “Of course,” I drawled.

  Little did she know, she had a real killer imprisoned on this property. Even as an inmate, Scalieri didn’t seem like the type who’d want to share his quarters with a crazy knife guy. From what I’d seen, the gangster had a low tolerance for people, living or dead.

  She inserted a key into the old lock. “This building is creepy. It has a reputation. I could make up any ghost story I wanted, and people would buy it.”

  “It seems like you have,” I said, knocking clumps of dark brown mud off the bottom of my white Keds.

  “Yeah, but I want something gritty and unusual. I need something real,” she said as the lock snapped open with a grinding click.

  I eyed my ghost, who skulked up the stairs, trailing smoke and wear
ing a bad attitude. “Be careful what you wish for.”

  2

  The heavy front door protested as our host pushed it open with a loud creak.

  If there were multiple ghosts at Mint Julep Manor, as Frankie had suggested, I already felt sorry for them. No one should be the feature of a circus sideshow in their afterlife. It was bad enough to endure gossip, but gawkers showing up at your door were even worse. At least at the height of my unfortunate scandal, the curious had come bearing baked goods and casseroles.

  Barbara stepped over the threshold, and as I joined her, I made a promise to myself and to the poor souls inside: If I ran into any ghosts, my first order of business would be to help them leave, to get away from Barbara and her decaying asylum. And if they did tell me any stories, I’d only give Barbara the happy ones.

  We stepped into a decrepit lobby littered at the edges with stacks of old plywood and building materials.

  “We’re still building the actual ticketed haunted house part,” Barbara said confidently, and I could see where workers had drilled supports for some kind of maze into the beautiful old floor. “We’re going to make it so visitors can be ‘in’ the asylum, but not anywhere that hasn’t passed inspection.”

  The ceiling soared up to a landing on the darkened second floor. Dust and spiderwebs clung to the rails overlooking the area where we stood, and I suddenly felt very exposed.

  Frankie hovered next to a box of rubber ghost masks, the ethereal smoke from his cigarette trailing out behind him. “And I thought the gang and I did some low-down dirty things to earn a buck. This woman takes the cake.”

  “Come on,” Ellis said, glancing at the second floor. It felt like we were being watched. I’d bet his cop instincts were flashing a warning sign right about now. “Let’s do this while we still have light.”

  “And before the weather gets worse,” I said, drawing closer to him. The sky was darkening by the minute and it wasn’t even suppertime.

  “So no ghosts in the lobby?” Barbara sighed, as if we were supposed to order them up from a menu.

  “Just one, but he’s really obnoxious and he doesn’t come with the property,” I said. I couldn’t resist even if my comment earned a frown from Frankie.

  He responded by hitting me with a blast of power that knocked me sideways into Ellis. “Verity!” Ellis held me upright, and I clung to his arm as prickling waves of energy cascaded over me. “What did you do to her?” Ellis demanded as Frankie’s power wound through me like a thousand tiny army ants wriggling into my very being.

  “Nothing I haven’t done before.” Frankie took a hard drag from his cigarette. “She’s fine,” he added defensively.

  “Fifteen dollars an hour,” Barbara gushed. “Just do that once every ten minutes for the people in line.”

  “Not a chance,” I gasped, glaring at the gangster as the initial shock subsided to a dull thrum in my ears. “Take it easy next time.”

  He winced. “Sometimes, I forget how alive you are.”

  I’d take that as a compliment. Maybe.

  Luckily for him I lost interest in debating it as the other side came into focus. I saw the asylum lobby as it once was—pristine, elegant, and gently lit with standing brass lamps designed to resemble large torches.

  A faint medicinal smell tinged the air, and the unmistakable sound of a woman weeping echoed from the floor above.

  “Are you getting a bite?” my host asked, as if she were counting the money in her head. “You’re the real thing, I can tell. Not that I’d mind if you were a fake, as long as you sign off on the stories. But we might as well make this the best spook show we can!”

  If she’d meant to be inspiring, she missed the mark.

  Then I saw the glimmer of a ghost among a tangle of real-life parking-lot signs propped up against a closed door. He wore a badge and gun; and as the other side shimmered into better focus, I recognized him.

  “Sir?” I asked.

  He tipped his hat. Oh, yes, I knew exactly who he was. When a persnickety police inspector had turned my ancestral home into a ghostly prison, this man had guarded the gate. He wore a dark, turn-of-the-century police uniform with a five-pointed badge. His mustache twitched, and his eyes narrowed when he took me in.

  He must have recognized me as well.

  “Thought you’d know to stay out of trouble by now,” he said by way of greeting.

  “You’d think,” I agreed, approaching him cautiously, all the while rubbing the back of my neck where some of Frankie’s ghostly power still tingled. “We’re here to see Bruno Scalieri.” A ghost friend of mine named Graham Adair had gotten us on the visitors’ list. The long-deceased king of Sugarland society knew all the important people, at least the dead ones. “My name is Verity Long,” I continued, as if the guard who’d helped lay siege to my house could forget. I indicated the gangster beside me. “And you know Frank Winkelmann.”

  “Frankie The German,” he corrected, as if his mob nickname would clarify things.

  The guard gave me a long look before consulting his clipboard.

  A bright flash to my right nearly blinded me. “What the—?”

  I turned, and spots exploded in my line of vision just as Barbara took another photo with a Kodak camera obviously set to stun.

  “You’re really doing it,” she said as if she hadn’t quite believed I could. “Talking to a ghost,” she added as if she were narrating the movie version of my life. “I don’t even care if it’s a boring ghost. I can slap this on a billboard and make bank.”

  “Would you stop talking about them like they aren’t here? These are people,” I said, gesturing to the guard, who glared at her. “Same as you and me.” Only dead.

  “They aren’t people anymore,” she said blithely.

  I was about to tell her how wrong she was when Barbara’s cell phone began blaring the theme to Zombieland. She drew it out of her pocket, pointing at me the whole time. “Five hundred bucks if you find me a serial killer or, better yet, a cannibal. Or how about a cannibalistic serial killer?” She cocked a grin and answered the phone. “Yeah?” With a grimace, she pressed the phone to her chest. “I’ve got to go handle an issue with the electrical hookup. This place is running on spit and a prayer.”

  I let her leave. Gladly.

  “She’s everything a Southern lady should never be,” I said to Ellis.

  “You’re not going to fix her,” he reminded me.

  Somebody should.

  “You’re cleared to enter,” the guard said, handing me a pair of ghostly visitor badges that chilled me to the core. “Scalieri’s in room 138. But before you go, I have something for you.” He flipped up the pages on the clipboard and drew a single sheet from the bottom. “Inspector De Clercq left you a note,” he said, holding out a folded piece of paper with my name scrawled on the front.

  I didn’t know that was possible. “I thought he went to the light after our last adventure.”

  “Yet he still gets to deal with you.” The guard kept holding the note out, but I didn’t want to take it. Contact with ghostly objects was uncomfortable at best and disastrous at worst. Once I came into contact with the ethereal paper, it would soon disappear. I could take the risk with a visitor’s badge. That could be replaced. But I wasn’t so sure about the letter.

  Frankie saved me the trouble and snatched the paper out of the guard’s hand. With a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, he unfolded it and scanned the contents. The gangster took a long drag and glanced at me before reading it out loud. “You don’t have to do this,” he read, “but if you feel you must, then be careful. Scalieri will escape in any way possible even if it means getting into your head.”

  “Let me see that,” I said, crowding him. Frankie showed me the hastily scrawled note.

  The guard merely nodded. “De Clercq’s special order gives you three visits, tops. Scalieri is a manipulative psychopath. We have him in isolation for a reason.”

  “I’m more than a match for that old croo
k,” the gangster said as the guard drew open the industrial door that led to the south wing of the hospital. I took that as my cue to grab the real one.

  The gangster paused in the open doorway and pointed a finger at me. “Remember. Confidence is key. Show any weakness and Scalieri will eat you alive.”

  “I dealt with him on my front porch, I can deal with him here,” I vowed.

  A gray institutional hallway greeted us, with a real antique wheelchair—thankfully empty—about halfway down.

  “Let’s do this,” Ellis said. “A simple in and out.”

  I sure hoped so. I pinned the icy visitor’s badge to my chest, and Frankie did the same. Ellis wouldn’t know if they tried to kick him out anyway.

  “Good luck,” the guard said, returning to his post.

  Think positive, I reminded myself, even as an odd creaking sound echoed from the hall.

  “You hear that?” I asked Frankie.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said the gangster, taking a hard drag on his cigarette.

  The old empty wheelchair inched toward us on its own.

  It had to be a ghost, one that had chosen not to reveal itself to me. I detected no gust of wind. Nothing to move it as the wheels slowly turned.

  Ellis drew up sharp. “Now that’s something you don’t see every day.”

  “You okay?” I asked. I mean, he’d seen weirder things. He’d saved me from drowning in a haunted mansion, a poltergeist had tried to take the roof off his police cruiser, and he’d been leaving carrots for the ghost horse at his restaurant for several months now.

  “I’m fine,” Ellis insisted, straightening his black leather jacket. “I just don’t always know what to expect.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “Are you two done with the tea party?” Frankie asked, trailing smoke as he strode down the hall.

  “We’re coming.” Dang, he could be bossy.

  It felt good to have Ellis beside me, even if he couldn’t hear the scratching sound coming from the door on our right.

  Room 132.

  “Hold up.” The small window was barred, the glass clouded with dirt and age. But I sensed movement inside.