The Halloween Haunting Read online

  I supposed Mike had a point.

  “What about Joe’s phone records?” Tony asked. “He must have called whomever he met and arranged to meet them.”

  “I pulled the records for his home, business, and cell phones, and didn’t find anything suspicious. The last person he called from his cell was his wife and based on the timing, I suspect he called her to let her know he was on his way home or maybe that he’d be late or perhaps that he needed to stop to pick something up, or something like that. I have a call into her so I can ask her why he called her that afternoon, but she is staying with her sister and not taking calls.”

  “And his home and business lines?” Tony asked.

  “All the calls to his business lines were incoming. I imagine he never had a chance to return them. I listened to his messages, but they all seemed to relate to the jobs he had going on. Most of the calls to his home line appeared to be for his wife.”

  “He might have had a burner phone,” I suggested.

  “He may have,” Mike agreed, “but if he did, that leaves me wondering why.”

  “Did you find evidence of a burner in his possessions?” Bree asked.

  “No,” Mike answered. “He didn’t have a phone of any sort on his person when he was left in the tower. His cell was in the glove box of his truck. I briefly looked around his home right after his body was found, but his wife became agitated and asked me to leave after only a few minutes. I didn’t have a warrant, so I left.”

  I frowned. “I would think she’d want you to find her husband’s killer even if you snooping around was causing her stress,” I said.

  “Unless the wife is in on whatever it is that happened to her husband,” Tony pointed out.

  “Maybe he left a mess in the kitchen, and she decided to end her torment once and for all,” Bree smiled innocently at Mike.

  I placed a hand over my mouth to hide my grin. I really did want to stay neutral when it came to marital spats between my brother and my best friend, but Mike was a slob, and in the end, I knew Bree would win, so I guess I found myself supporting her in my heart.

  “Do you have any suspects at all?” I asked.

  “If you take the fact that Joe’s body was found in the clock tower of a deserted house into account, I have no one. If you take the location where the body was found out of the equation, I have a few suspects in mind, although, in the end, not one of them could have actually killed Joe and then left him in the tower.”

  I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the table. “Okay. So let’s go over the list anyway. Maybe something will make sense.”

  Mike took a sip of his coffee before he began. “If you remember, Joe came to the house to help out in the first place because Grange recruited him. Initially, I thought Joe worked for Grange, and, as it turns out, he used to, but about six months ago, Joe decided to leave Plimpton Construction and start his own business. I spoke to Grange, and he seemed fine with the fact that his best employee had quit and become his biggest competitor, but apparently, Grange’s brother, Greg, who is also his business partner, has been having a lot of heartburn over the situation.”

  “So you think Greg might have killed Joe to get rid of the competition?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Mike answered, “but he does seem to have a motive. According to others I know in town who also work in the construction trade, Greg considered Joe to be a backstabbing traitor who used the training he and Grange provided over the years to betray them.”

  “It does sound like he makes a good suspect,” I said.

  Mike nodded. “He does, although there is no way Joe would have called Greg and asked him to meet him that night. The two men weren’t even speaking to each other.”

  “Okay, who else do you have?” I asked.

  “Ford Newland. I guess Ford hired Joe to do some work for him and from what I understand, Ford was not at all happy with the quality of the work he received. He refused to pay Joe for the work which Joe insisted was perfectly acceptable, so Joe sued him. I did some digging, and it seems that arbitration was not working and the case was probably going to go to trial. That would have been a huge expense for both parties, but neither party wanted to back down.”

  “Sounds like a good motive to kill a person,” I said.

  “I agree that Ford would be a good suspect, but Ford is seventy-two years old. I really don’t think he climbed up on the roof of the Vandenberg house and killed Joe. Besides, I really have no reason to believe that Ford even knew he was there. I guess the reality is the only person who would have known he was there in the first place is someone Joe told to meet him, and neither Greg nor Ford fit that bill.”

  Mike did have a point. Those people who had a beef with Joe would most likely not have even known he was at the house that night. “Any other suspects come to mind?”

  “Just one, but like the others, while he has a motive, he really doesn’t seem to have had the opportunity or the means. It seems Joe was in an auto accident two years ago. The accident was his fault, but he was never arrested even though the man driving the other car was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the collision.”

  “So why didn’t you arrest him if the accident was his fault?” Bree asked.

  “The accident didn’t occur here. It occurred in Missoula, so it was not up to me to arrest or not arrest him. Calvin Letterman certainly has a motive to want to do harm to Joe, but again, the person who killed Joe had to have been on the roof of the old house with Joe and Calvin is in a wheelchair.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “As you’ve pointed out, it does seem that if Joe called someone and asked them to meet him at the house, then the person who killed him is more likely than not someone he considered to be a friend.” In my mind, the fact that Joe was most likely killed by a friend seemed to make the whole thing a lot worse than it would have been if he’d been killed by an enemy.

  Chapter 6

  Friday, October 18

  I woke in the middle of the night to hear thunder rumbling in the distance. “Please don’t rain,” I whispered into the dark, praying the storm would dissipate, change direction, or simply blow through. The last thing I wanted to deal with on opening night was a downpour.

  Tony was sleeping on the far side of the bed, while my cats, Tang and Tinder, snuggled up between us. Tilly slept on the floor on my side of the bed, while Titan slept on the floor on Tony’s side. If Tony and I married one day and decided to have children, I really had no idea where we’d fit them in if, as children do, they woke up in the middle of the night after suffering a nightmare.

  I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but my mind was running a million miles a minute and refused to slow down in spite of my best effort to manifest nothingness in my mind. I’d convinced a lot of people to go along with my plans for the fundraiser, which made me feel like fail or succeed, it was all on me.

  Tony assured me that we were ready. He’d gone through every detail and operated every prop the previous day. We’d done a dress rehearsal with the volunteers who’d agreed to dress as monsters, ghosts, ghouls, and goblins. I knew in my heart that we really were ready, but for some reason, my mind refused to let go of the pointless exercise of imagining every single thing that could even remotely go wrong and then magnifying the chaos that would be created tenfold.

  After an hour of tossing and turning, I decided to get up. Tilly followed me, but the other animals stayed with Tony. We’d been at the haunted house late last night, so we’d stayed at my cabin which is a lot closer to town than Tony’s house on the mountain is. I liked to think we divided our time between his place and mine fairly equally, but the reality was that we spent a good eighty percent of the time at his place and only twenty percent of the time at mine.

  Of course, his place was larger and a lot nicer. My tiny cabin was fine for Tilly and me, but now that our family had grown, things had gotten a bit tighter. Still, I loved my cabin. It was my home. I really couldn’t imagine giving it up to
move in with Tony full time.

  After making a cup of tea, I tossed a log on the fire and curled up on the sofa. Tilly jumped up and snuggled in next to me. I tossed a throw over the both of us and willed the warmth and comfort of the moment to penetrate the stress I’d been feeling. As I’d predicted, the ticket sales for the event had been phenomenal once the episode of Haunted America had aired. We were pretty much sold out if we were going to stick to the occupancy limits we’d set up in advance. The haunted house was set up to be experienced by each guest as part of a tour. Each tour lasted twenty minutes, which allowed us to do three tours per hour. We’d decided that we wanted to limit the tours to twenty people per tour, which meant that sixty people could be served every hour. Since we were open for four hours per night, that allowed us to sell two hundred and forty tickets per night, which at twenty bucks a pop, was forty-eight hundred dollars per night times seven nights. That seemed to me to be more than enough money to get started on the expansion Brady and I had dreamed up one night after a training session. Still, I had to admit that the urge to increase the limits we’d set up was strong. Would the experience really be any less awesome with say twenty-five people per tour rather than twenty? I knew that if we had more spots to sell, we could sell them. Maybe I’d see if I could get volunteers for Monday through Wednesday of Halloween week. I supposed we should get through this first night and see how things went before making any changes.

  I ran my fingers through Tilly’s long hair as I stared into the fire. The scent of the pumpkin candle I’d lit last night lingered even though I’d extinguished it before going to bed. I pulled the comforter closer to my chest as the wind which normally preceded an incoming storm howled outside my window.

  The idea for expansion of the shelter had started out as a discourse between Brady and me regarding the training program we put each dog through and the advanced training we could expand upon with the right facility. With an expanded facility, we’d have room to recruit and train additional volunteers to handle the specialized training we offered for some of our potential adoptive parents. The better suited a dog and his human were, the more likely they were to be happy with each other for the long term.

  Once we’d discussed the advanced training we would be able to offer, we’d begun to create a dream list which included a permanent home for hard to place dogs and cats. Brady and I tried really hard to make sure every dog and cat had a friendly and loving forever home, but there were some animals, such as those with medical issues or those who couldn’t be broken of negative behavior patterns, who were destined to live out their lives at the shelter. Brady and I paid extra attention to those animals and made them as comfortable as possible, but a real house for them to live in with sofas to lounge on and a yard to play in right there on Brady’s property seemed ideal to both of us.

  “Of course,” I said to Tilly, “a facility like that will take a lot more than we will make from this event, but Tony made a huge donation, so I’m hoping we’ll make enough to add to his donation to get started.”

  Tilly thumped her tail on the sofa next to me.

  “I wonder if Tony remembered to set out the tombstones.”

  Tilly raised her head and looked behind her.

  “He remembered, but decided to wait and do it while you are at work today,” Tony said, yawning as he entered the room looking all adorable and tousled. “I know we discussed putting them out last night, but I wanted to wait in case the storm that seems to be hanging out over the summit decides to blow through.”

  “Are we going to need to pick them up after each weekend? They’re made of wood, aren’t they? I would think they’d be waterproof.”

  Tony sat down on the sofa next to me. “I put down frames which the part of the tombstone you can see fits into. I was afraid if we left them unattended for too long, someone might steal them. It won’t take long to pick them up at the end of this first weekend and then set them out again for next weekend.”

  “Did we end up making much money from the idea of selling the tombstones?” I asked, as Tony pulled part of the comforter Tilly and I had been sharing over his lap.

  “Over five grand.”

  My eyes widened. “Five grand? How on earth did you make five grand selling the right to put a personal message on a wooden tombstone?”

  Tinder jumped into Tony’s lap and began to purr. I suspected that Tang wouldn’t be far behind. “I decided to offer a bunch of little tombstones that would allow for a name, a date, and a sentence or two of text, for twenty bucks each. I also built twenty large tombstones that would allow the purchaser to create an extended message, which I sold for a hundred bucks each. Those who bought the large tombstones were mainly businesses wanting to offer sponsorship.”

  “That’s great.” I moved to the side when Tang finally joined us. Titan seemed happy laying on top of Tony’s feet. “I guess your idea really paid off. I feel like we’re as ready as we are ever going to be, but I still feel unsettled.”

  “It’s probably the fact that there have been so many really weird things going on that is causing you anxiety.”

  I laid my head back down on Tony’s shoulder now that everyone was settled. “I will admit that showing up on Monday to find the decorations we’d just hung the day before on the floor, and the walls we’d painted white on Saturday suddenly turned to green by Tuesday, was somewhat disconcerting. To be honest, I think the green walls work better than the white did, but still. How on earth did that happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Tony admitted. “Maybe vandals.” He stroked my arm with a finger. “Do you think we should hire someone to provide security at night and on those days the event is closed?”

  “Maybe.” The warmth from the fire, combined with the body heat created by Tony and I and all the animals, was making me drowsy. “It will be an added expense that will cut into our profit, however, and so far, the vandals, if that is even what is going on, haven’t really hurt anything. I guess we should just wait and see how things go once we actually open.” I closed my eyes as I struggled to stay awake. “Maybe I should have taken today off just in case there turns out to be a last-minute crisis to see to.”

  “I’ll take care of everything,” Tony promised.

  “I know you will, and I love you for doing so.”

  He stood up, picked me up, and carried me back to bed. Titan, Tilly, and the cats followed. After Tony climbed into bed next to me, I curled into the warmth of this man I loved more than life itself. He always knew how to help me to relax and calm my mind. I really don’t know how I’d ever gotten by without him.

  Chapter 7

  “Good morning, Bree,” I cheerily greeted my best friend as I dropped off her mail.

  “Well, you’re certainly in a better mood than I expected.”

  I rested an elbow on the counter Bree had decorated with fall accents. “Why wouldn’t I be in a good mood? The storm that was rumbling over the summit overnight has decided to head north, and it has turned out to be a gorgeous day, everything is ready for opening night tonight, and I am ahead of schedule, so unless something occurs to delay my progress, I might very well get off early.”

  “I guess you haven’t heard.”

  My smile faded just a bit. “Heard? Heard what?”

  Bree hesitated.

  “Heard what Bree?”

  “I guess maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. If Tony didn’t call you, he must not have wanted to worry you.”

  I felt my heart quicken. “What happened to Tony?”

  “Tony is fine,” Bree assured me. “It’s just that he ran into a few problems at the haunted house this morning.”

  Okay. I could deal with this. “What problems?”

  “For one thing, when Tony showed up, the front door was locked. All the doors were locked.”

  I shrugged. “So? We locked up when we left last night. Tony has a key.”

  “His key wouldn’t work. He had to call a locksmith. Apparently, someone changed all the
locks at some point between when you left last night and when Tony arrived this morning.”

  I frowned. “That’s crazy. Who would do such a thing?”

  Bree lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. Mike didn’t know. It is all rather odd.”

  “Totally odd. But I suppose that as long as Tony is in now, it isn’t a catastrophe.”

  “There’s more,” Bree informed me.

  I blew out a breath. “Of course, there is. So what else did Tony find when he was finally able to get inside the house?”

  “You know those walls downstairs that you painted white that turned green?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re black now.”

  “Black?”

  She nodded. “Mike says they actually look a lot better, and you probably should have painted them black in the first place. The white would have really stood out under the black light, and the green was a little too green if you know what I mean.”

  “I guess it is true that black is probably better, but the fact that black is better doesn’t really explain the fact that someone broke into the house in the middle of the night, painted all the walls, and then changed the locks before they left.”

  “That and the whole thing with the bathtub.”

  I felt the stress in my shoulders begin to build. “What whole thing with the bathtub?”

  Bree answered. “I guess someone filled the tub with water that they then died red. Once the tub was full, they put that big skeleton in the hallway into the tub, making it look as if the skeleton was bathing in blood. Mike says it looks cool, and Tony said he’d probably just leave the skeleton where it was, but Tony asked Mike to look into the break-in even though the vandal seemed to have actually improved on things.”