The Mint Julep Murders Read online

  “That’s why I didn’t warn you,” he concluded.

  Turning to let Ellis know exactly what I put up with, I saw Barbara and her guests staring openly. Well, dang.

  Ellis was right. I did need to watch my back. The last thing I wanted to do was put on a show.

  “Verity can have actual conversations with ghosts,” Barbara explained to the couple as if she were my teacher, trainer, and handler. “Frankie is her spirit sidekick.”

  Joan’s eyes widened. “Is he a wise sage?”

  “More like a fearless leader,” the ghost said.

  “Or an overgrown twelve-year-old,” I countered.

  “Verity came here to document the ghosts who haunt this asylum,” Barbara prompted.

  As long as we were stuck inside, I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to throw her a bone. “I met one today, actually.” Besides, the dedicated nurse I’d met deserved a little credit.

  “I saw her talking to a ghost right by that door,” Barbara said, pointing at the bored guard.

  Joan gasped.

  Meanwhile, Ellis lingered by the window, keeping an eye out for any break in the storm.

  “I met Nurse Claymore,” I said, focusing on Joan lest I see the dollar signs in Barbara’s eyes.

  “I can’t believe you just said that,” Barbara gushed, with an enthusiasm I would have enjoyed had it come from anyone else. “I have a picture of her from the archives.” She pulled out her phone. “Nurse Claymore was real. She was here, and I swear I didn’t tell Verity her name or anything about her.”

  “I have goose bumps,” Joan said, breathless, as if I couldn’t have looked it all up on the internet, which I hadn’t, but still.

  Tom rolled his eyes and checked out the art deco stairway spindles.

  “There she is. Nurse Claymore,” Barbara said, pointing to the picture as Joan hovered next to her. “Look at that mean medicine cart she has. And that crazy tight hairdo. Nurse Claymore is a regular Nurse Ratched, injecting her patients with monster shots.”

  “Hardly,” I broke in. I mean, the nurse hadn’t been all rainbows and warm fuzzies, but she wasn’t a Halloween caricature. “Nurse Claymore is a good person. I have a feeling she could move on if she wanted. She’s staying voluntarily because she cares about her patients.”

  “I swear I didn’t Photoshop the injections to look even bigger—” Barbara grinned “—even if that’s something another haunted house owner would do.” She held out her phone for me to see. It was the woman I’d met in the hall, looking intense. But that was how old pictures sometimes looked. “Beware of crazy Nurse Claymore.”

  “That’s wrong,” I said. “She’s not crazy. She’s trying to help people.” I felt sick. I should have kept my sighting to myself.

  This wasn’t a game.

  “I hope we meet her tonight. Does she haunt the death floor?” Joan asked, at last noticing that her husband was almost halfway up the stairs to the second floor.

  “For an extra two hundred bucks, I’ll bet she does,” Tom said to his wife.

  I sincerely hoped the picture of Dr. Anderson stayed on the wall. We didn’t need Barbara charging folks extra to hold the haunted photo. “Dang.” He checked his phone. “I still can’t catch a cell signal.”

  “We have a hotspot in the trailer,” Barbara said. “Once the storm lets up, I’ll go out and fiddle with it. We need you to be able to post pictures of your haunted experience. The hashtag is MintJulepGhosts, and if you find one of the tormented souls who haunt these halls and post about it, we’ll give you a free Mint Julep Manor haunted asylum T-shirt.”

  Heavens to Betsy. She really had turned these peoples’ afterlives into a carnival act. It was wrong, and it was mean, and I couldn’t do a thing to fix it.

  But I could make one thing better.

  “Why don’t I take you and your husband up to the third floor?” I offered to Joan. “We can see where the ghosts are.” And we’d keep her away from them, especially the sick souls who needed rest and quiet.

  “Yes!” Joan fist pumped.

  “Great,” I said, glancing to Ellis, who raised an eyebrow. I’d explain later. “Holler if the storm lets up,” I called down to him.

  “It’s a plan,” he said, keeping an eye on the brewing disaster outside. I loved how he trusted me. “Be ready,” he cautioned. “As soon as we get a break…”

  We’d be out of here.

  “Perfect,” I told him.

  And then I got an even better idea.

  I stopped at the bottom of the staircase, one hand on the rail. “Sorry to say only Joan and Tom can go,” I clucked as Barbara—camera at the ready—joined us.

  “I’m the owner.” She waved a dismissive hand. “The ghosts have to do what I say.”

  Hardly. “My wise and strong ghostly spirit, Frankie, says that if I take more than two of you up, the ghosts won’t appear.”

  The gangster hit me with a cold spot that made the hair on the back of my neck prick up and sent goose bumps cascading down my arms. “Leave me outta this. Your wise and strong spirit guide is busy doing a job for Bruno Scalieri.”

  That was up for debate.

  Joan clapped her hands together. “I feel a chill!”

  I rubbed my arms to warm them. She’d feel Frankie in the desert at noon the way he was acting.

  With any luck, the storm would soon let up, and we’d be out of here. Then Frankie would have to do things my way.

  At least I could win right away with Barbara. The less I saw of her, the better.

  “I’m the owner,” she stated, her humor gone.

  “I’m not venturing up to the third floor unless it’s only me, Joan, and Tom,” I told her. “Those are my terms.”

  Warring emotions crossed her face, but she pushed through them and forced a smile for her thousand-dollar-a-night guests. “Get good pictures,” she said, “and I’ll just bill your credit card for the private tour.”

  “It’s on the house,” I said, my grin even bigger.

  That earned a glare from our host. Well, she deserved to be knocked down a peg.

  “Let’s go,” I said to the Burowskis. I was a woman on a mission, and we didn’t have much time before Frankie, Ellis, and I would be blessedly out of that place.

  6

  Nurse Claymore might not think much of me, but it didn’t matter. I would do right by her patients. Like it or not, I was the only one standing between the ghosts and Barbara Slater, entertainment director from hell.

  And the thought of poor Mr. Rink cutting himself… That chilled me more than any cold spot Frankie could whip up.

  “There are no lights on the upper floors,” Barbara warned.

  I pulled the flashlight from my purse and gave her a wave. I’d come prepared.

  “This is definitely going in my Yelp review,” Joan gushed, snapping a photo of me brandishing my light.

  Oh, brother.

  “What’d you say, dear?” her husband asked, checking his phone. Again. The poor man needed an intervention. I could only hope he would turn out to be some sort of online influencer. If Barbara’s guests had a boring night in an unhaunted room, maybe Tom Burowski would tell the world this place was a dud. No amount of pleading from me would convince Barbara to stop her thousand-dollar-a-night scheme, but if she had nobody paying, well, problem solved.

  “There are stairwells at each end of the hall,” Barbara called, following me up a step before backing down. “Those’ll get you to the third floor.”

  “Noted,” I said. If I did this right, it would take ten minutes. Maybe less.

  “Are you seriously going up there?” Frankie’s voice grated in my ear as I scaled the staircase toward the darkened second floor. “I can’t believe you’re spending your time with these people instead of helping me spring Scalieri.”

  “The objective has changed,” I stated as we passed frame after frame of black-and-white photographs of the doctors who had run this place all the way back to the late 1800s.

  Fran
kie shimmered into existence two steps ahead of me. “No. The deal is to break Scalieri out.” He pointed a finger at me. “You can’t go changing the deal. That’s not how it works.”

  “That’s how I work,” I said primly. Besides, I hadn’t agreed to anything. “There is no deal.”

  “Yes, there is,” Frankie said as if I’d just fallen off the turnip truck. “And you can’t control it. Scalieri made an offer. I said yes. That’s…” He held his hands out, palms up. “That’s how gangsters work.”

  Not anymore. “Scalieri isn’t going anywhere.” I dodged Frankie and felt the coldness of him as I did. “Remember what De Clercq said in his note: Scalieri is a lying psychopath.”

  Frankie glided next to me, glaring. “He’s also my friend.”

  Hardly. “You’re only saying that because he can give you something.”

  The gangster threw his hands up. “And thus we have the definition of friendship.”

  “We’re driving this bus, not Scalieri.”

  “There is no bus!” Frankie pleaded.

  He reappeared on the landing at the top of the stairs. “We have to give him what he wants, or he’s not going to tell us what we need to know.”

  “It’s the wrong plan, Frank. Think,” I said, joining him at the top. “We can get Scalieri’s box while he’s here, and once we show him we have it, he’s bound to agree to our terms.”

  “But he won’t.”

  “Because he thinks you’ll let him out.”

  We were interrupted by clapping. “Oh, that was wonderful,” Joan gushed. “Tom? Did you get that?”

  Her husband held up his cell phone camera. “It’s dark up here, but I think so.”

  Oh, great. They were filming us.

  “I’m sorry. No cameras,” I told them as they joined Frankie and me on the second floor. The last thing we needed was me talking to thin air on the internet.

  Joan’s expression hardened. “I’m paying a thousand dollars a night. I can do what I want.”

  “I’m doing this for your safety, not mine,” I said, wishing I could leave her on the landing. “My mystical, slightly evil ghost will follow you home if you don’t erase your recording.”

  “The heck I will.” Frankie wrinkled his nose. “You couldn’t pay me to hang out with those yahoos.”

  “You really think this is real,” Tom said, incredulous.

  “Yes,” Joan and I both answered.

  He held up his phone and showed me as he erased the recording.

  “Thank you,” I said over Joan’s groan of anguish.

  “I would love a personal ghost,” she hissed at him as she ventured first down the abandoned south hall.

  She could have mine.

  “I wonder if I could buy one on the internet,” she suggested to her husband.

  “I’d like to give her a cold spot where the sun don’t shine,” Frankie said, watching her go.

  A bad feeling swept through me that had nothing to do with our fellow guests or my bullheaded ghost. “This floor doesn’t feel right.”

  It wasn’t only that the abandoned second story looked dark and foreboding. It felt unfriendly.

  Wrong.

  “Yeah. I’m getting the signal loud and clear,” Frankie said, glancing around as if he could find the source. “You know I don’t like haunted places.”

  “Isn’t everywhere you go technically haunted?” I asked.

  Frankie rolled his eyes. “I mean bad haunted. There are ghosts out there with powers that’ll blow your hair back. I like to avoid that kind. Unlike some people.” He gave me a pointed look.

  “So what is it saying?” Other than a warning. “Can you tell?”

  He blew out a breath. “It’s saying get yourself downstairs and help Frankie do his job.”

  “I’m not what you’d call a criminal asset,” I remarked.

  “You’re good at distractions,” he countered.

  “Said the pot to the kettle.” I glanced down to where the Burowskis had paused to check out a bed frame rusting against the wall. “Maybe the bad feeling I’m getting is coming from that nurse I met.”

  I couldn’t let it get to me. I was going up there. “Come on,” I said. The Burowskis were getting ahead of us. “This won’t take long.”

  “It’ll take even less time for me because I ain’t going.”

  I stopped. Closed my eyes. “Frank,” I grated out.

  “It’s a bad idea,” he warned. “You already know it.”

  I did. But I didn’t have a better one.

  “Ten minutes,” I said, tracking the beams from Joan’s and Tom’s flashlights up ahead as I hurried after them.

  “You might be easily distracted, but I’m not.” Frankie’s voice trailed after me.

  “In what universe is that?” I said over my shoulder.

  “You never learn,” he called after me. “You think you’re in control because you’re living, but you’re not. You don’t know who or what is lurking in this place. I hate to be the one to tell you, but bad things happened here.”

  “I get it. I do.” But I couldn’t stop thinking about that poor ghost the nurse had told me about, the one cutting himself because of stress. If these paranormal tourists were determined to spend a night up in one of the rooms, I was equally set on sticking them in an empty one. I was half tempted to lock them in.

  Besides, we didn’t have much time. I had to be ready to leave whenever the storm let up, and I wasn’t going to waste even a minute arguing with Frankie.

  Frankie started gliding backward toward the stairs. “Yeah, well, while you’re busy with that, I’m gonna spring the lock on Scalieri’s window with a Coke bottle and an old hairpin.”

  “You’d better not.”

  I glanced over my shoulder toward him and the light from the first floor. He waggled his fingers at me and disappeared.

  Lovely.

  Now I just had to get this done before he located a vending machine and a woman’s purse.

  A sudden bolt of lightning lit up the window at the far end of the hall and outlined the dirty beige paint peeling in strips from the walls, along with chunks of drywall and debris littering the cracked linoleum floor.

  I’d been in worse places.

  The beam of my flashlight caught the ruins of a wheeled hospital cart rusting outside an empty examination room.

  I directed my light inside. Rain pelted the frosted windows and reflected my light back over the remains of an instrument cart next to a narrow bed, the mattress half eaten by rats and other vermin, the leather wrist and ankle restraints untouched.

  Frankie was right. Bad things had happened here.

  “You see something?” Joan whispered, nearly scaring me half to death.

  “Please don’t sneak up on me,” I hissed, blood pounding.

  “We doubled back for you,” she said as if they were doing me the favor.

  A large round examination light hovered over the scene, the glass bulbs shattered long ago, leaving only the skeleton of scraggly filament.

  “Okay, now that’s cool,” Tom said, searing the room with a camera flash.

  “Let’s go,” I said, backing away, my heart seizing in my throat when a light began to flicker at the end of the hall. “Oh my,” I murmured.

  “What?” Joan asked, sticking close. “What are you looking at?”

  The single bulb stuttered like a strobe light, illuminating a small figure huddled in the corner.

  “Nothing,” I said to her, daring to press forward once more. I’d come to help. If this entity needed assistance, then I was glad I saw it glowing in stark black and white in the corner of the old hospital.

  It was small, too small to be a toddler even.

  Dread crawled up my spine.

  Please don’t let it be a baby.

  “There’s a rusted-out bathtub in this room,” Tom said, from across the hall. “And it looks like blood on the wall.”

  “I’m sure it’s not blood,” I said, not at all certain
.

  “Want to…get some measurements?” Joan asked, her voice shaky.

  “Later,” he said. His voice held a warning. This didn’t seem like the Tom I’d met in the lobby, the one who I’d assumed was only there to support his wife.

  “You’d better not wander around too much tonight,” I advised. “It’s not safe.”

  And it could upset the ghosts.

  He didn’t respond.

  I glanced over my shoulder just to make sure no otherworldly trouble had cropped up behind me. Tom aimed his light into the room a few doors back. But I was relieved to see no ghostly glow coming from inside.

  Just the one dead ahead.

  Heart pounding, I left my living companions behind and pressed on toward the tiny figure in the corner.

  “Hey there,” I said as I drew near.

  I didn’t want to startle it.

  And I was fully prepared to run.

  When I drew close enough, I saw it in the flickering light.

  It was a teddy bear, a child’s toy. I heaved a sigh of relief. It wasn’t alive. This wasn’t a horror movie. I was just a girl who could see ghosts, wandering around in a haunted asylum.

  The discarded bear glowed gray, its shiny glass eyes staring at the ceiling.

  Jagged lightning lit up the sky outside. Hail slammed against the window.

  “Oh, good. There’s the stairwell.” Tom cracked open the door just beyond the flickering light. “Ladies first,” he joked. “Hey, you okay?” he asked, shining his light into my eyes.

  “I’m fine,” I said, holding up a hand to block the worst of it. “Do you mind?”

  “You look like you saw a ghost,” he quipped.

  “Me? No…” I said, brushing it off. “Nothing to see here.”

  Just a phantom light and a child’s toy. It could very well be the spirits trying to connect in some way, but I wasn’t about to tell them that.

  The ghostly light sputtered and died as Joan passed her light over the space in the corner. The bear had disappeared, and in its place lay a tangle of old rags.

  “Scary,” Tom quipped.

  If he only knew.

  “Let’s go,” he said, “on to greater adventures.”

  I pasted on a smile. This was a man used to giving orders. And while I might not appreciate his manners or his attitude, I would do my best to play along if it meant getting us all out of here.