The Mint Julep Murders Read online

  “Watch it,” I said, trying to get him to sit back down.

  “Maybe I’ll make that sticker look like it’s surrounded by police tape,” Barbara continued. “Don’t worry. I won’t mention your name,” she added over Ellis’s curse. “That way, I don’t need your permission.”

  Ellis drew up to his full height with the help of his crutch, the banister, and sheer fortitude. “I don’t like this place, and I don’t like you,” he gritted out, towering over our host. “Now, where’s the generator?”

  “Downstairs,” Barbara said, with grudging admiration, “in the boiler room. With Crazy Charlie from my billboard.”

  “You made him up,” I said.

  “Or maybe I didn’t,” Barbara countered.

  It didn’t matter. Ellis would never make it down there. He was barely standing.

  “I can go,” I said quickly.

  “Good idea.” Ellis nodded, taking an unsteady step away from the stairs. “I don’t want you up here alone.”

  “I meant instead of you,” I said under my breath.

  “Not a chance.” He chuckled.

  Did I need to remind him he was having trouble walking at the moment?

  Ellis was invincible, except when he wasn’t. And we were about to go down into the underground passageways that might not be safe or well lit, even if there was no knife-wielding spirit in the “catacombs.”

  “Wait. Before we go, I need Frankie.” I searched for a familiar ghostly glow. The gangster needed to turn my power off. Just in case a maniac wandered those passageways, I’d rather not come face-to-face with him.

  It would also be good to know if my ghost had been able to find a Coke bottle and a hairpin. “Frank?” I called into thin air. I searched the lobby but didn’t even see the ghost guard in the back near the south hall. “Frankie, I need you to turn my power off.”

  “I am not your beck-and-call ghost,” Frankie said, shimmering into being next to me.

  “I’m not sure what you are,” I said. I was just glad he’d showed up. Hanging with Frankie was like having a cat—he’d turn up where he wanted when he wanted. And not always at the most convenient time.

  He leaned close so that only I could hear. “You’ll be glad to hear I picked the lock on Scalieri’s window,” he said, drawing off a pair of kid leather gloves.

  “You’d be wrong,” I countered.

  “I did it with a Dr. Pepper bottle and a rusty nail,” he continued, the corner of his mouth quirking up. “It was a thing of beauty.” He stowed the gloves in his suit jacket.

  The night was getting worse by the second. “You can’t go through with this,” I said, keeping my voice low. Just because I didn’t see the guard anymore didn’t mean he wasn’t around. “I’m not taking Scalieri out of here.”

  “Bruno doesn’t need your help to get off the property,” Frankie reminded me. “He just needs me to break him out of that cell.”

  “I forbid it,” I stated.

  “Afraid I’ll take all the credit?” he asked. “In any case, you did screw it up,” he groused. “I can’t get the man out of his leg lock because you touched my tool and it hasn’t come back yet.”

  “Good,” I told him. He was the one who’d shoved it into my hand and given me the shock of my life. Hopefully, we’d be out of here before it came back.

  The gangster heaved a sigh. “Things are always complicated when you deal with the living.”

  “It’s got nothing on dealing with the dead.” I scraped the hair out of my eyes and retied my ponytail. “Now I need your help. I’m going to the basement to help fix something, and I don’t want to see any ghosts while I’m down there.”

  “All right,” he said, yanking his power back so fast my head went light, and I had to brace a hand against the door to keep steady.

  “Thanks,” I rasped as my throat went dry and my knees buckled.

  “Don’t mention it. Now, be careful,” Frankie warned. “Scalieri was telling me some stories while I worked his lock. Seems at least one of the ghosts in this joint is extremely powerful.” He stiffened. “And quite possibly insane.”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t talking about himself?” I asked.

  Frankie let out a chuckle. “Right. Nah, I think he’s really scared of something. He’s not just breaking out for fun this time.”

  In a million years, I’d never understand these gangsters.

  “You’re welcome to join us in the basement,” I told him. He didn’t have to be alone.

  “I’d rather eat my eyeballs,” he said pleasantly.

  “Are you done?” Barbara prodded. “I mean, I get the show, but come on.”

  “I really don’t think you do,” Ellis said, leaning on his crutch.

  “No, I’m okay,” I said. Barbara was right for once. We were in a hurry. I smoothed my hair back behind my ears. “Be good,” I said to my gangster.

  “You know I won’t,” he assured me as I turned to join the others.

  Barbara opened a creaky door under the stairs, labeled Maintenance. “Lucky I know my way through the catacombs. It’s a maze down there,” she added as if we should be happy to be in this situation.

  The winding spiral staircase was pitch black save for the narrow beams of our flashlights, and I found myself missing the soft glow of the ghostly side. It made things simpler…and vastly more complicated.

  Naturally, Ellis wanted to go first. I gave him the banister side of the step and also gripped his elbow, trying to take as much of his weight as he’d let me handle. He didn’t even complain, which worried me more than I’d like to say.

  My other hand scraped against cinder block, then rough stone as we worked our way down, the chill of the basement seeping into my bones with every step.

  “So tell us about this ghost who roams the tunnels,” Ellis said, with a grunt of pain as he negotiated the next step.

  “The real story,” I said. “Remember, you’re not trying to impress us.”

  “The real story is better than anything I could make up,” Barbara said, with a sick pride of ownership. “Patients were never officially allowed in these tunnels, you understand, but they occasionally made it down here. Take Crazy Charlie. He didn’t like to play by the rules.”

  She was embellishing already.

  “So where is this generator?” I asked, ducking under the low-hanging transom at the bottom.

  “Just past the morgue,” Barbara said, her light and ours filtering down an uneven hallway with a packed-dirt floor. “Although,” she said, toeing the dirt, “I wouldn’t have put it past anybody back then to just grab a shovel and dig a grave any old place.”

  “Stop it,” I said. Her made-up stories were terrible. And mean.

  She seemed to enjoy making people uncomfortable.

  We stood at a crossroads. The hallway continued behind another spiral staircase, into the darkness. Another hall broke off to our right, blocked by a barred metal door. The same to our left.

  Barbara continued straight down the darkened hallway, her boots crunching over uneven patches of gravel.

  We trailed her past a wooden door marked Delivery.

  “Strange place to pull up a truck,” Ellis commented.

  “This here’s where they brought the bodies down.” She rapped the door with a knuckle. “Pretty clever. Want to check it out? It’s basically a dumbwaiter system from the second and third floors. With a coffin attached.”

  “Let’s just get to the generator,” Ellis said.

  “It’s connected to the morgue here,” Barbara said as we passed a second door, the lettering faded and all but gone. “Oh, look,” she said, pausing at the morgue door. “You’re both invited.” The door stood open a few inches as if someone were expecting us.

  Cold air filtered from inside, and even without Frankie’s power, I could swear I felt a presence of someone or something just beyond.

  Ellis reached out and took my hand, putting himself between me and the morgue door. He didn’t like it, eithe
r.

  A creak echoed from inside.

  “Okay, now that’s weird,” Barbara murmured.

  Ellis pushed open the door. “Hello?”

  He let go of my hand and lumbered inside before I could stop him. Bad idea. He could barely walk. We were getting off track. He didn’t need to investigate everything. It—

  Metal screeched. Ellis grunted and went down hard.

  “Ellis!” I leapt into the room, shining my flashlight down on him, on the metal folding chair that had toppled him, and on the steel exam table and the rusting body lockers beyond. I tried not to think about the neat handwritten labels on the front, brown with age, or the door that hung open on flagging hinges, revealing a dirty slide-out stretcher.

  “Son of a mother!” He rolled onto his back, gripping his injured shin.

  “That chair doesn’t belong in here,” Barbara said warily.

  “Well, why’d you leave it by the door?” I asked, rushing to Ellis as he sat up.

  “I didn’t,” Barbara said, inspecting the room with her light. “It wasn’t in here before. I don’t like this one bit.”

  Well, that made three of us.

  Ellis was in serious pain. He’d gone deathly pale, and if he passed out, we were in real trouble. “We’ve got to get you out of here,” I said. “Can you use your good leg?”

  “Yeah,” he said, gripping the wall as I helped him up and got his crutch under his arm.

  Barbara didn’t lift a finger. She just stood there, frowning, shining her light every which way.

  “We’re going back up,” I said.

  I wanted to get away from her and this place.

  “Fine. I’ll handle the generator myself,” she said, backing out of the room.

  “You do that,” Ellis grunted. He looked ready to fall over any second. I shoved his larger flashlight into my back pocket and wrapped an arm around him, using my teeth to grip my mini light. This was going to be interesting.

  “It may take a few minutes,” Barbara added, her voice traveling away from us, down the hall. “There’s a lot of junk in front of the old generator.”

  Sure, she had it rough.

  I kept Ellis steady, trying to run my fingers comfortingly over the small of his back as I supported him up the stairs, trying not to think about what might happen if one of us slipped.

  “We’re good,” he huffed, understanding my concern as only he could.

  “Really?” I murmured.

  “Well, no. I think it’s broken,” he admitted.

  I took the light out of my mouth and took a few seconds to recover. “As soon as Barbara gets the power on, we’ll call an ambulance.”

  “And swim across the creek,” he added, his humor falling flat.

  We were a team. We’d find our way somehow.

  Shadows flickered across the passageway up ahead. Surely, a trick of the light. I wasn’t tuned in to Frankie’s powers at the moment, nor did I want to be.

  Scalieri said at least one of the ghosts in this joint is extremely powerful. And quite possibly insane…

  “We’ll be out of here soon,” I promised.

  I eased Ellis out into the lobby, where we both slid down onto the floor and leaned against the wall next to the staircase. I was sitting on his flashlight. I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it to him as I wiped my mouth, my jaws aching from holding my own flashlight.

  “That was awful,” Ellis managed.

  “Let’s see what your leg looks like,” I said, reaching for him in the dark.

  “Let’s not,” he said, patting my thigh.

  “Okay, well, we’re in a good spot for now.”

  “We’ve been in worse,” he agreed.

  We’d made it out of the basement. Barbara would get the power on. We’d leave and never come back.

  I leaned my head back against the wall. “What do you think that was in the morgue?”

  Ellis thought for a moment, his breath still coming hard. “I don’t know, but now that I’m actually physically experiencing this, I’m starting to think your job is as dangerous as mine.”

  I laced my fingers with his. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “I almost wish I’d had Frankie’s power downstairs.” If only to see what had happened.

  “No, you don’t.” Ellis sat up straighter. “I…” He cleared his throat. “I’m behind your ghost hunting most of the time. But I’ll be glad when we leave this place.”

  Me too.

  “What’s taking Barbara so long?” I asked, waiting for the lights, the stream of power that would break us out of the dark.

  “Maybe there was a lot of junk to clear.”

  And so we waited five more minutes. Ten.

  “She wouldn’t leave us here, go out another way.” Would she?

  “I doubt it,” Ellis said. “There’s no reason for her to sneak out. She needs to turn the power on and then call for help. The electricity’s not on yet. We left the lobby lights blazing.”

  True. I clicked on my light. “I’m going to check on her.”

  “Don’t,” he warned.

  I slipped away from him. “I’ll be fine.” The sooner we got out of there, the quicker we could get Ellis’s leg set.

  “It’s like you’re not even thinking about the bad stuff down there,” Ellis murmured to himself.

  I lingered a few feet away in the darkness. That was where he was wrong. I knew my job could be dangerous—the same as his was. But there was nothing to be done about it.

  Just like Ellis, I tackled the task at hand.

  At the moment, that meant descending a winding staircase into a maze of tunnels, where I just had to retrace my steps past the body chute and the morgue.

  And so I did. I crept down into the darkness.

  My light bounced off the rusted metal of the staircase and cast shadows over the dreary passage below.

  It was normal to be afraid. Anyone or anything could be down here. I didn’t ignore the danger and I didn’t take this lightly.

  I hurried along the dank passageway, feeling very alone.

  Exposed.

  I kept my cool and walked a steady pace until I saw the morgue up ahead.

  Dang it. The door was still ajar.

  I didn’t want to think about what might still be inside.

  Focus.

  We needed a working generator and a way to escape. I skirted past the morgue and turned the knob to the boiler room.

  Why would Barbara close herself in when she was trying to move things out of the way?

  Then again, why did Barbara do anything?

  I aimed my flashlight inside the cluttered boiler room and saw a cleared path among boxes of tools and masks and junk. And at the end, the asylum owner hunched over a metal box.

  “Barbara?” I pressed forward.

  She didn’t respond. She didn’t move. When I drew closer, my light fell upon her bloodied head and I understood why.

  8

  Blood pooled on the floor beneath her.

  Sweet Jesus. It didn’t look good. Still, I touched two fingers to the skin on her neck. It was still warm. I felt the pulse point. Nothing. I looked into her vacant, glassy eyes. Barbara was dead. She was very, very dead.

  I took a step back, and then about three more.

  Deep breath.

  I’d run into far too many bodies in the last year and a half, but at least that meant I knew what to do. Once I had things squared away down here, I’d get Ellis. Thank goodness he was close by, even if he was injured.

  Something clattered out in the hall.

  I froze.

  Barbara’s killer was near—there hadn’t been time for him or her or them to go far. And now I was sort of a witness. Or at least the girl standing over the body. Alone. In the basement. With only a flashlight to protect me.

  Snap out of it. Nothing good would come from running like blazes.

  With swift, deliberate movements, I walked as wide a path as I could around the murder scene, trying not to disturb any
footprints the killer might have left in the dirt. At least I was wearing Keds. My prints would be obvious.

  I found a cleaning rag in one of the boxes and used it to pluck the keys from Barbara’s back pocket, trying to preserve any fingerprints. Then I retreated the way I’d come and walked straight for the door.

  Locking her in the boiler room would keep the crime scene intact—as long as the killer didn’t also have a set of keys.

  I stopped cold, chewing my lip.

  Strange things had been happening in this place from the minute I stepped onto the lawn. Someone or something disturbing Barbara’s body through a locked door would be just one more unexplainable incident to add to the list.

  All right, then. An idea formed, and I eased the cell phone from my back pocket. I couldn’t use it to call for help, but I could make it work for me now. Quickly, deliberately, I took as many photographs as I could find angles. Then I took a calculated risk. I couldn’t email the photos anywhere yet, or even upload them to the cloud, but I could still do one more thing to monitor the scene.

  I set my phone to record audio and hid it in the nearest box of junk. It pained me to leave it behind—I was nowhere near finished paying it off, and it was my phone.

  Still, Ellis had his. We’d be able to call for help. And with my phone hidden near the body, we could at least hear if anyone disturbed the murder scene. We might even get a lead on the killer. And I doubted anyone would be looking for an iPhone in a box of plumbing supplies.

  “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” I said to Barbara as I locked her into the boiler room. She might not have been my favorite person in the world, but she didn’t deserve to die like this. Nobody did.

  I wrapped Barbara’s keys in the rag and slipped them into my pocket. I’d done my best, I told myself as I leaned up against the boiler room door. The body was as secure as I could make it.

  Now my friends and I were merely stuck in a haunted asylum with a killer.

  I’d fix that, too.

  In the meantime, I’d have to watch my back on the way out of here. I aimed my light down the hallway past the boiler room. The packed-dirt floor in that direction appeared soupy, with standing puddles in a few spots. So if I heard splashing from that direction, that would be bad.