“Children!” Doris tapped her spoon on her glass. “Quiet! Can’t we all just get along for one week?”
Silence ensued while they all got busy with their food. Arlene primly rearranged the napkin in her lap while still managing to shoot daggers at Paula. Even Ed’s hammering had stopped, which was kind of weird. Maybe he was taking a break. I should see if he wanted some breakfast.
Carla broke the silence.“Did you take the last pancake?” She jerked her head toward Bob’s plate.
Bob shoved a maple-syrup-soaked piece of pancake into his mouth and gestured toward the buffet and its empty silver pancake platter.“No one’s name was on it. Maybe you should fill your plate once instead of taking little bits and going up four times.”
Carla folded her arms across her chest.“I was going up for seconds. You always take the last pancake. It’s not fair.” She turned to her mother. “Right?”
Doris rolled her eyes again.
Merow!
“What was that?” Bob made a show of looking around the room, probably hoping to change the subject. “Is that one of those adorable cats you have here?”
Adorable? I supposed they were sort of cute when they weren’t pushing things off the counter or ripping the toilet paper off the roll… or finding dead bodies.
“Yes.” I glanced at the door to the hallway. The meow sounded far away, like it had come from the closed off west wing where Ed’s hammering had been. It also sounded eerily like the meows they’d made a few weeks ago when they were trying to alert us that a guest was dead in that very same wing. I glanced around the table. Nope, all guests accounted for, thankfully.
“Don’t try to change the subject.” Carla stabbed her fork into a piece of pancake on Bob’s plate.
“Hey!” Bob took his knife and tried to knock the pancake off Carla’s fork.
You’d think they were ten years old and not grown adults with children of their own. Thankfully they hadn’t brought any of them. I could only imagine whatthose kids were like.
Meoooo!This one was louder and more insistent.
Doris frowned and craned her neck to look out into the hallway from where the meows were emitting.
“I hate when he takes the last pancake,” Paula slurred and listed in her chair.
“Taking the last pancake is nothing compared to some of the things I’ve seen you people do,” Bob said.
Merow!Even louder.
I strained to hear. Was that Ed hammering again? It sounded like he was using the sledgehammer on something, but at least that indicated he was alive. Of course, it was silly of me to assume that every time the cats yowled like that there would be a dead body. But still…
Earl leaned forward, getting into Bob’s face. He was blissfully oblivious to the potential hidden meaning of the caterwauling. “What are you talking about?”
Bob shoved another piece of pancake in.“I think you know.”
Meroogh!
“What is with those cats?” Doris asked, ignoring the ridiculous pancake argument.
“I’m not sure. They might be hungry.” Yeah, that was probably it. Even though it sounded like they were in the west wing, they were probably near their food bowls in the kitchen. Sound tended to get distorted and carry from strange places in this old house. I started in that direction when….
Crash!
That came from the west wing.
Mewooo!
Mewargh!
“Josie!” Ed’s voice, loud but shaky, echoed through the house. “You’d better come see this.”
Two
“You stay here and enjoy your breakfast. I’m sure it’s nothing. Ed tends to get overly excited,” I reassured my guests, who were all staring at me.
I dashed off toward the west wing. Judging by the thunder of footsteps behind me, they didn’t stay put as I’d suggested. Darn it! The last thing I needed was some sort of disaster to make them want to check out of the guesthouse early with an unpaid bill. My mind reeled. What could it be? Was it the mold? I’d been told one of the walls was rotting and likely had mold inside. That might put guests off, even though I was fixing it. Maybe it was something else. Ed could have been hurt. Or the cats. Though judging by their meows no damage had been done to their vocal cords.
I really didn’t want the Biddefords to follow me, but they seemed determined. And besides, I would just have to go back in the dining room and explain whatever it was that Ed was yelling about to them anyway. I forged ahead full speed with the whole family on my heels. As I reached the door I glanced over my shoulder. Doris was right behind me. Who knew the old girl could run so fast?
Of course, the door to the west wing was locked, just as I’d been instructed by our new building inspector to do, so I had to detour into the kitchen and grab the key out of the drawer. When I came back, I had to clear the Biddefords away from the door to open it. Doris had been bent down peeking through the keyhole.
I unlocked the door, and it swung open. My gaze went immediately to the stairway on the right. That’s where the body had been just a few weeks ago. Today, though, there was only some dust. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Merooo!Nero ran over to me and then trotted back to the doorway that led to the room where Ed was. He stopped and looked over his shoulder as if waiting for me to follow. All sounds of hammering and sawing had stopped.
“Ed, are you okay?” I yelled. Ed was elderly, maybe he’d had a heart attack or something.
“I’m fine but I don’t think this guy is…”
This guy? I steeled myself as I entered the other room.
The room Ed was working in had been a ballroom at one time. It wasn’t gigantic but it wasn’t tiny either. It was in quite a state of disrepair; water-stained ceiling, wallpaper coming off in strips. Remnants of the original black-and-white marble-tile flooring were chipped and cracked, and most of the windows were boarded up. I was planning on turning it into a game room. Ed had been replacing the old plaster walls first since we already knew there was water damage.
He was standing in front of the worst damaged section of the wall. He’d made good progress and a large section of the old horsehair plaster had been removed to reveal the inside of the wall. The demolition had created a dusty pile of rubble, and I could see the slats inside the wall. Too bad I could also see something else. A skeleton.
A human skeleton.
“Talk about skeletons in your closet.” Bob came up beside me and leaned forward to peer at the bones.
Human bones didn’t faze me in the least. I’d been in the middle of training as a medical examiner before giving up my career to raise a family. I immediately took note of the appearance of the bones. They looked dry, brittle. No tendons or flesh stuck to them. The skeleton had been in there for a long time. What was it doing inside the wall? Had it been buried in the wall when the place was built or put in sometime later? And why had no one noticed? Seems like a dead body would have smelled, unless already a skeleton when it was shoved in there.
Paula dug a nip out of her purse and I recognized the black-and-white label of Jack Daniel’s. Guess discovering a skeleton called for the hard stuff.
“This calls for a drink!” She downed it in one quick swig to the disapproving glare of her siblings.
Doris didn’t admonish Paula. She was busy staring at the skeleton. Her face was pinched, her eyes narrowed. She swayed a bit and I was worried she might faint, but it turned out she was just trying to get a closer look. Before I knew it, she was crouched down beside the skeleton, lifting up its hand. It was wearing a ring—gold with an oval carnelian signet.
“Lordy! It’s Jedediah Biddeford! He’s come back to enact the curse just like he said he would!” Doris dropped the hand and the bones clattered as she shot up to a standing position.
Ed raised his brows at me.
The cats sniffed the ring.
“Wait a minute? What curse?” Arlene’s gaze shifted between Doris, Earl and the skeleton.