Ding Dong Dead Read online

  Whimpering came from behind another stack of boxes. Nina edged through and extracted the schnoodle, giving her a big bear hug. “I was so worried.”

  “What is going on?” Caroline said. “You screamed like you were about to be murdered.”

  “It was terrible,” Nina said, her lip quivering. “But it’s gone now.”

  “What’s gone?” Gretchen scanned the room for poisonous critters. A black widow spider would have her leaping from the room, leaving the rest to fend for themselves.

  Her aunt didn’t even hear her.

  “Give me Tutu,” Caroline said, “before you drop her. And pull yourself together. You frightened us badly.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  While Caroline attempted to get an answer from Nina, Gretchen wandered the narrow pathways. A small wooden container about the size of a shoe box was propped open on top of one of the stacks.

  “That’s it,” Nina said, pointing at the little box with a trembling finger. “It came out of there.”

  Gretchen edged away. “What? A spider?”

  “No,” Nina said. “Nothing like that.”

  Cautiously, Gretchen made her way over and picked up the wooden container. “What a beautiful doll trunk!” Old-fashioned travel stickers were pasted on the trunk in random fashion. Flowered paper lined the inside of the trunk, and it had a tiny drawer on one side where accessories could be stored. “It’s old but in very good shape,” Gretchen said, bringing it back with her.

  “It’s also empty,” Caroline noted, glaring at her sister before saying to Gretchen, “Travelers used to apply stickers to their travel trunks. These are faded with age, and they are certainly authentic. Even the hinges are antiques. A lucky doll must have toured the world inside of it.”

  “This one is from Cairo.” Gretchen had to squint to make out the lettering on the worn stickers. “Another from London.”

  She glanced at her aunt. Nina was pale and leaned against the display case. “What came out of the trunk?” she said to her. “A bat?”

  “No, not even close.” She patted her hair down with both hands and eyed the trunk suspiciously. “You’re going to laugh at me.”

  “No we won’t,” Gretchen said.

  “Yes, you will.”

  Caroline crossed her arms and scowled. Gretchen closed the trunk lid and waited.

  “I came up here to look around like you asked me to, Caroline, to give you design ideas. The trunk was right over there where you found it, Gretchen, but it was closed. When I came in the room, I thought something inside of it called out to me.”

  “Like what?” Gretchen asked. “Like, ‘Nina, oh, Nina’?”

  “You’re laughing.”

  “No, I’m not. I believe you.”

  One time, when Gretchen had ignored her aunt’s warnings, brushing them off as fanciful imaginings, Nina had almost been killed trying to prove herself.

  Gretchen would never laugh at her aunt’s antics again. If nothing else, Nina added a little more spice to the already flavorful southwestern atmosphere. This, though, was the first time inanimate objects had spoken to her.

  “Okay then.” Nina finished arranging her wayward hair into a semblance of her bob, jeweled fingers fluttering. “I heard something like an ‘ooooohhh’ coming from the area around the trunk. As I went closer, I discovered that the sound was coming from inside it. The sound was like someone moaning or like the wind howling.”

  Gretchen and Caroline exchanged glances.

  “I opened the trunk. What a mistake.” She sighed heavily and let her breath rasp out. “Then,” she said, animated now, the actress in her coming to the surface, “a ghost flew out of it, right into my face and through my body like I didn’t exist. It was like a billow of smoke. For a second I thought I was a goner. But here I am.”

  Gretchen gaped.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Caroline said slowly.

  Loud sputtering laughter came from behind them.

  April stood in the doorway. “Ha, ha, ho, ho, hee, hee.”

  Gretchen was about to lose control, too. “April,” she warned, holding back her own belly laugh, “you have to stop.”

  “Hee-hee, haw-haw. I know, I know. I’m trying.” April pulled a tissue from a pocket and blew her nose. “What if you released a genie?” she said, cracking up again. “Wouldn’t that be sweet? We better find it and get our three wishes. Oh, this is rich.”

  “It frightened me almost to death,” Nina said, offended. “Even Tutu saw it. She ducked behind some boxes, and I dove for the floor and crawled under the display case as fast as I could. That’s when I got stuck.”

  That set April off again.

  Caroline attempted to hide a smile, but it finally got the best of her and she let loose and joined April.

  “This isn’t funny,” Nina said.

  “All I can see in my mind is you stuck under the case,” April screeched.

  “I’m so happy I was able to entertain you,” Nina snapped. “But something real flew out of that doll trunk, and I’m going to find out what it was.”

  “Nina,” Caroline said, attempting to get serious, “we have enough to do without chasing after ghosts. Quit trying to make life more complicated than it already is. Let’s get the luncheon over with and the museum ready for the opening. Then you can chase ghosts.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best advice.” Gretchen wasn’t about to let this opportunity get away. What a great way to keep Nina busy and away from the play production. “We’ll be spending a lot of time at the museum, and we wouldn’t want to share space with a malicious spirit, would we? I think it’s important that Nina pursue this.”

  “I plan to.” Nina was back in form. “Ghosts are real,” she said. “I just overreacted to its appearance because I wasn’t prepared. I’m going to the New Age shop for more information.”

  “Good idea,” Gretchen said.

  “But I already know a little something about the subject of ghosts,” Nina continued. “We need to be alert for strange sounds or weird smells.”

  “Lights going on and off,” Gretchen added.

  “Blasts of cold air.” Nina had a glint in her eyes. This was her kind of problem. “Objects moving. Someone has unfinished business on earth, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

  8

  Caroline steps from the car. Matt Albright waits in front of the police station to escort her inside. He has impeccable manners-opening doors for her, offering coffee, performing the obligatory small talk. How have you been? How’s Nina? By the way, you have a beautiful daughter with a matching soul.

  He scores extra points for mentioning Gretchen’s inner beauty.

  Caroline is sure he feels the same as she does under the circumstances, uncomfortable because of their personal relationship, wanting to get the unpleasant task over with as quickly as possible.

  The mother and the boyfriend size each other up.

  “After you,” he says, showing her into a room.

  She doesn’t really want to know the truth, so why did she make the call to the detective? Out of a sense of truth and justice? Yes. But also out of fear.

  He leaves her alone. A large mirror on the wall shows her that her face is as pale as her silver hair. Is it a two-way mirror? Is someone on the other side?

  She sits down at a square table in the middle of the room and rakes her silver hair with her fingers, thinking of her daughter. Two nuts from the same black walnut tree, her husband used to say when he was alive. Before the fatal car accident that took him but thankfully left her daughter physically unharmed. She hopes the emotional scars have faded if not totally healed. Gretchen assures her they have, but her daughter’s nightmares tell Caroline the truth.

  God, she misses him. Nothing could ever make up for her loss. Nobody, anywhere, could replace that man. Gretchen reminds her so much of him, although everyone else says mother and daughter resemble each other. They have the same strong build, but her daughter has her fa
ther’s inquisitive mind, boldly taking on and dealing with life’s hardships, sometimes acting a little too impulsively for her own good.

  Matt comes back into the room with two cups of coffee. He’s nothing at all like his chatty mother, Bonnie. He’s secretive and cautious.

  The detective sits across from her at the scarred table in the shabby room with tired furniture and bad lighting. A manila file folder lies between them.

  “How did she die?” Caroline asks, the word tumbling out beyond her control.

  Matt doesn’t answer her question. “You don’t have to do this, you know?” he says, but she can tell that he’s eager for anything that might assist him in his search.

  They have the same strong sense of justice.

  “What if I’m right?” she says. “You need to know as quickly as possible to catch whoever did this.”

  “What if you’re wrong? Either way, it isn’t necessary that you be the one to identify her. Give me a name and I’ll track down the family. It will be easy to find out if it’s the woman you think it is. Just give me a name.”

  Caroline shakes her head. “I don’t want to be responsible for an incorrect identification. I don’t want to intrude on the wrong family’s life. Please, it’s important to me to make sure.” She glances up at the mirror. “I’ve never done this before, identified someone.”

  “It takes some getting used to.”

  “Will we go into the morgue?”

  Matt grins, but not with his eyes. “No. I have pictures.”

  She wants to take a sip of her coffee from the foam cup he has placed in front of her, but she knows that her hand will shake. That’s the tip-off. She might look calm on the outside, but the way she handles a coffee cup will reveal the opposite. Hers would slosh back and forth. She’d spill it.

  “I need to know how she died,” Caroline says again, her eyes flicking to a file lying on the table between them, wondering why the cause of death is so important to her.

  After all, dead is dead.

  “Blows to the back of the head,” Matt says. “With a blunt instrument.”

  Visions of a raised hammer, a clenched fist, the descent.

  Why did I even ask?

  He opens the file, withdraws what is obviously a stack of photographs, holds them so she can see only the back side, like a folded hand of cards in a poker game.

  “I’d like to see the doll again,” Caroline says, stalling for time. She sees Matt shudder and says quickly, “A picture, I meant. You must have one.”

  Not much gets through this tough detective’s steely coat of manly armor, but Caroline knows Matt’s embarrassing secret: he suffers from a condition known as pediophobia. In layman’s terms, he is afraid of dolls. Caroline has witnessed the panic attacks, seen him work up an unnatural sweat, watched him struggle to breathe normally whenever he came into viewing range of any kind of doll.

  He sorts through the file and hands a photo to her.

  Caroline stares at the fairy doll, even more sure of her suspicions.

  Matt busies himself by placing another picture on the table, facedown. Selects another. He returns the others to the file folder and picks up the remaining ones. “Ready?” he says.

  Caroline doesn’t answer immediately.

  Then she nods.

  9

  “A ghost?” Bonnie said, sitting on the edge of the stage and fussing with her handlebar mustache. “What that woman won’t think of next.”

  “She’s off to the historical society to go through records,” Gretchen said. “She’s hoping something will turn up in the history of the house to explain its ghostly activity.”

  April, surrounded by yards of billowing pink material, paused in the act of threading a needle. She glanced over the top of her reading glasses. “She wants all of us to stay away from the museum.”

  “That’s not going to happen.” Gretchen watched the amateur seamstress sew a ball gown for the six-foot Barbie mannequin. April spent more time ripping out and redoing than moving forward.

  “Hope Nina’s close encounter doesn’t come back to ‘haunt’ us,” April said, giggling.

  Bonnie put on the man’s wig over her own red one. “Nina should hire a ghost hunter to track it down and eliminate it,” she said.

  Gretchen’s cell phone rang.

  Finally!

  “I’m out of jail,” Daisy said from the other end of the line. “They got around to questioning me early this morning. I’m free, but I need a place to stay tonight. They won’t release my things to me yet.”

  The homeless woman could live without shelter, but take her shopping cart filled with junk and she didn’t know what to do.

  “Of course, you’re always welcome at our house.” More than she knew. One of these days, Gretchen hoped to permanently convert the homeless woman. So far, though, Daisy hadn’t stayed more than a night or two. Then she’d vanished, only to reappear back on the street. Maybe this would be the time she stayed and turned her life around. “Where’s Nacho?” Gretchen asked.

  “I haven’t seen him or any of the other men yet, but he’ll come around sooner or later. I’m not worried about him.” Daisy, usually in a delusional state, sounded amazingly lucid.

  “What happened in the cemetery, Daisy?”

  “We don’t get involved. You know that. All I can say is that we’d have been long gone if we suspected that kind of trouble.”

  “You didn’t see anything? Hear anything?”

  “I don’t get involved,” the homeless woman insisted. “Catch you later.”

  And Daisy disconnected.

  “Five minutes,” Gretchen called out to the cast. “And we’ll take it from the top.”

  “Get the pistol,” she heard Bonnie say. “We’re going to do us some shooting.”

  Gretchen worked with the cast all afternoon, going over the second act, the act when Doris was about to find out that all the women in the room had dallied with her husband. Bonnie flubbed one line after another. Julie ran interference, displaying a level of peacekeeping skills that Gretchen wished she had.

  In the corner of the room, April busied herself with her sewing project. The rat-a-tat of the sewing machine caused a brief flare-up among the doll club members that was extinguished when April agreed to wait until rehearsal was over to run it again. Instead, she fitted her creation on the enormous doll, sticking pins here and there. Gretchen noticed that one sleeve was much shorter than the other.

  Halfway through the second act, Gretchen remembered an important detail. “When is Karen coming to work on the lighting? Isn’t she the one who offered?”

  “She was going to do it,” April said through a mouthful of pins, “but she’s babysitting for her granddaughter the weekend of the performance. She can’t help.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Can you work them?” Gretchen didn’t have much choice. She’d take anybody she could get.

  “I’m way too busy with the museum and my sewing project.”

  “But you have to.”

  “I don’t know anything about lights, and I refuse to be bullied into it.”

  From the look on April’s face, she wasn’t going to budge from her position behind the sewing machine.

  One more thing for Gretchen to take care of.

  The afternoon went quickly, not exactly without hitches, but at least Julie fired the murder weapon at the right moment and Bonnie’s mustache stayed attached to her face when she hit the floor. It was a statement about the cast that Gretchen was thankful for such small things. At four o’clock Nina hustled in, led by Tutu, who pranced along on her pink leash.

  “Find out anything about the ghost?” Gretchen asked.

  “I’m pointed in the right direction. Where is he?”

  “Uh… where’s who?”

  “Brandon’s picking me up here. I absolutely love that man, hair the color of wheat and green brooding eyes that speak of depth and danger.”
>
  “Oh, brother,” April said.

  Nina had been casually dating a Scottsdale detective, Brandon Kline, who was a good friend of Matt’s. Brandon and Nina were made from the same cloth. He encouraged her when she went off on one of her New Age tangents.

  “I haven’t seen him,” Gretchen said.

  “I’ll help you direct until he arrives.” Nina swept toward the stage. The cast members saw her charging and were more nimble than usual in their race for the break room.

  Gretchen had to think of a distraction quickly to keep Nina busy until her man arrived. “What’s the story with the ghost? You didn’t tell me what you found out.”

  April tee-heed.

  “Are you smirking?” Nina confronted April.

  “Nope,” said April, bending over the sewing machine, making it roar to life.

  Nina took a seat in Gretchen’s director’s chair. “I found a picture of the family that lived in the house in the early 1920s. Spanish Colonial Revival architecture dates back to around that time, so the family must have built the home. The owner’s name was John Swilling, and, get this, he had a daughter.”

  April stopped the machine. “Well, that’s it then,” she said. “Either John or his daughter is the ghost.”

  Gretchen couldn’t tell whether April was seriously considering the problem or subtly mocking the idea. Nina suspected hidden sarcasm and scowled at her.

  “Go on,” Gretchen said.

  “Flora was the girl’s name,” Nina continued. “I found a sepia photograph of her. Flora must have been about ten years old at the time the picture was taken-it shows her holding a doll in her arms. And there’s more.”

  “Do tell,” April said.

  Another scowl before Nina addressed Gretchen, completely ignoring April. “That doll’s travel trunk is in the picture. I could even see some of the travel stickers.”

  She waited for a response.

  “Is that important?” Gretchen asked, suspecting full well that it was. She couldn’t put her finger on the reason, but something about the trunk intrigued her. She’d like to get another look at it.