Waltz Macabre Read online

  We left it at that. Teddy had my car key zipped up in a cargo pocket somewhere, and he actually gave me a hard time about refusing to let him have exclusive use of my car until the Austin-Healy could be delivered.

  “You got a boyfriend, right?” he said. “Use his car.”

  “He likes to use it himself. And you do expect me to get to Ed’s house somehow and pick up your dirty laundry, right? What am I supposed to do, hitchhike?”

  He slapped the key into my palm and told me to stop for a particular brand of red wine on my way back. That one I could refuse, and I did.

  But before I left, Teddy did it again: he kept me from being able to be really mad at him, as infuriating as he is.

  “Taylor, I want to thank you,” he said tenderly and quietly, pulling me aside so Wanda wouldn’t hear. “You managed to snap me out of it. This is just what I needed. I can’t be sitting around feeling sorry for myself when things like this are going on and I could be helping. It’s friends like you and Ed who give me the courage to go on. Bless you, Taylor.” He kissed my cheek and I muttered something and tried not to go soft in the head. Teddy can do that to you, but I wasn’t forgetting that when he looked at me, he saw the laundry lady. When I got back he’d probably tell me to get into the kitchen and rustle up some lunch.

  Come to think of it, I was hungry. Lunch wasn’t a bad idea. And it wouldn’t hurt Teddy to wait an extra hour.

  Before I could even put my car in gear, Ed called and asked how it was going. Just what I needed.

  As I went over Teddy’s imperial commands, I found myself getting worked up again, but Ed only heard one thing.

  “Teddy’s moving out of my house? Today?”

  “He’s not even going back. And he wants Porter, too.”

  “Porter is leaving?”

  “Right. Glory hallelujah, and good for you. But Wanda is after me to move in with her, too, at least while Teddy investigates. You know I can’t do that!”

  “I see, I see. The three of you together. Look, don’t be tempted to hold a three-cornered séance.”

  “Ed, I’m not moving in with her. Are you even listening to me?”

  “I’ve read some recent research papers on the subject, and the new protocol for séances seems to be that at least four persons are necessary for the safety of all involved. It’s a theory that’s been around for a while, with which I happen to concur, and it’s finally been confirmed. So I simply couldn’t condone an exception to the four-person rule.”

  “Ed, nobody’s talking about a séance.”

  “I should at least be there as an observer. You’re so cavalier about these things it worries me sometimes; what you’re talking about could be very dangerous. Call me in, if it comes to that. By the way, do you think Wanda actually is psychic?” he asked suddenly. “Initially, I doubted it. She looks a little too fairy-godmotherish to be real. What’s your assessment?”

  I wasn’t going to go there. Not yet, and not with Ed. “She has some teacups from the Carteret estate sale.”

  “In-deed?”

  “I know. Weird, right?”

  “Well, you seem to have the situation well in hand over there. Once you and Teddy are moved in, I’m sure Wanda will be safe from whatever has attached itself to her house. It’s as good as gone. I think you should come over here to The Bookery, though.”

  “Why? What’s happening.”

  “There’s no way I can describe it. Just come.”

  I looked at my watch. Michael was home that morning, so he was there if the volunteers at the shelter had any problems, but that was my job. I glared at the frightened ghost picture on my phone as if it were actually Ed.

  “Oh, all right, I’ll be right there. I’m taking orders from all the guys today. Everybody’s little helper girlie, that’s me. Can I do your laundry while I’m at it?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I’m on my way.”

  “Did you say laundry?”

  I hung up.

  Chapter 13

  By then, I had a headache, of course. As I drove down the alley behind The Bookery, it got significantly worse, and for a moment I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I sat there in my car staring at the back door to the shop until Ed came out to get me.

  “Good lord,” was all he said when he saw me; I guess the headache showed.

  I got out of the car on wobbly legs and stared at the back of Barnabas’s building.

  “Isn’t it a symptom of a brain tumor,” I asked Ed, “when you start seeing things?”

  “What are you seeing?” he quietly demanded, turning to look for ghosts hanging out of the windows.

  “Not things, exactly. Funny colors.”

  “Green,” he stated firmly. “I knew it. Like what you saw just before you fainted, correct?”

  In inhaled and exhaled raggedly, then I blinked, hard, but it didn’t help.

  “Well, we can debate the meaning of it later,” Ed said. “Right now, I think what it means is, you can’t go in there. Don’t even try it. Something is pushing you away, or more likely, holding you back. Bastet does not approve.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Bastet couldn’t care less what I do, unless it’s time to feed her, and Barnabas needs me.”

  I marched toward the door, noticing for the first time that Barnabas had hung a “Closed” sign in the window.

  * * * * *

  Barnabas was standing in the middle aisle, although “aisle” wasn’t quite what to call it anymore. The shelves were empty, and the books that had been on them were dumped into heaps, or stacked in crazy pillars. Within the pillars books were sticking out askew and akimbo, and it was hard to imagine how they could balance like that. I tried not to breathe on them as I passed by. Near the back of the store were about a hundred books that had simply been dumped together in a rough pyramid. They looked horribly like a mound of kindling piled up to be burned.

  Burned.

  I had answered the question of what else could go wrong before I’d even asked it. Sudden terror flashed through me.

  There seemed to be a murmuring around me, a purr of satisfaction. The dust in the air was thick enough to run my fingers through, and there was Barnabas, immobilized by shock.

  “We need to get him out of here,” I told Ed.

  “I’ve been trying to do just that, but he won’t go. He’s gotten the idea that the store is being killed, that it’s literally dying, and he wants to die with it.”

  We shared an uneasy glance, and I gently went up to Barnabas. As I reached him, he mechanically tugged at the ribbon in his ponytail and let it drift onto the floor. His hair barely moved, but he looked more disheveled, somehow.

  He noticed me. “This is the History Department,” he said.

  I looked up at the stack of books that reached a dangerous height above us.

  “You’re sensing Wendy, of course,” Ed said behind me. “She’s responsible for the sadness you feel. As you know –“

  “I know,” I shot back. “You told me. The little girl in the History Department.”

  He was adjusting his glasses, as if that would help him keep a grip on things.

  Barnabas looked at me inquiringly. “Do you feel sadness? I don’t. I feel fear. But perhaps your perceptions are sharper than mine.”

  I took his arm. “Barnabas, you can’t stay here. Why don’t you come out to Cadbury House and stay with Michael and me until Ed can get a handle on this.”

  “You’re very kind, my dear, but you know that that isn’t possible. This is my home. I won’t be driven out. I’m staying here, for better or for worse.”

  His cat, Ishmael, came streaking down the aisle, leaping over scattered books and winding around stacks until he was at Barnabas’s feet. Barnabas picked him up and tucked him into the crook of one arm, the way he always carries him.

  “Ishmael and I are staying, aren’t we, little friend?”

  The cat didn’t look so sure.

  “I’m staying too,” Ed sa
id quietly. “You see what it’s come to, Taylor.”

  I lifted my hands helplessly. “Ed, if I could help, I would. Besides, if your interpretation is right, I’m being warned to stay out of it, right?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  But he kept looking at me, and what made me feel even worse, Barnabas’s eyes kept drifting around blindly. He couldn’t take it in.

  “I really can’t do anything. I would if I could. You both know that, right?”

  They agreed. I told them I had to go and picked my way to the back door, stepping over and around books, feeling like a deserter.

  Chapter 14

  I stepped out into the cool, crisp air and tried to take in the freshness of it, but it wouldn’t come. Standing there with my hand braced against the warm hood of my SUV, I tried to get my mental balance back. Looking at it as rationally as I could, I decided that it didn’t help that I was hungry. Don’s Diner was right across the street, in a direct line through either The Bookery or Girlfriend’s, but instead of taking either shortcut, I walked to the end of the alley, went around the corner and crossed the street before walking back to the diner.

  At the other end of the block, I saw Michael walking toward me.

  Comfort filled my troubled mind, and that smile that I save just for him came onto my face. It was such a relief to see him, I felt my eyes growing wet. But by the time we met in front of the door to the diner, I had changed gears.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. (I hugged him first, of course.)

  “Well, hello there,” he said back to me jovially. “It’s nice to see you, too.”

  “I mean, who’s minding the shelter? I thought you’d stay there, since I was out this morning.”

  By then he was holding the door open, and I stepped inside. Our usual booth was empty, and we went across and slid into it on opposite sides of the table.

  “The shelter would not implode if neither of us was watching it every single minute. I needed to look something up in the law library at my house, so I came into town. It took longer than I thought. Anyway, what are you still doing here? I thought you were going to get Teddy settled doing whatever it is you cooked up for him, then walk away from the whole mess and get yourself back to normal.”

  “Oh, Michael, it’s all going sideways.”

  I got ready to tell him all about it, but first he signaled to DeAnn, the waitress, to just bring us the usual.

  DeAnn will get into it with you, if you like, coming back at you with her lines as if somebody else wrote the script ahead of time, but she can also be inconspicuous. Reading us accurately (waitresses are all unlicensed psychologists), she set our drinks on the table and put our food orders in without taking any offense.

  When I finished describing the disaster at the bookstore, he decided to advise something that I absolutely did not want to do. In fact, he joined Team Wanda.

  “Let’s spend a few days in town,” he said. “I think you should stand by your friends. Whether or not you can actually help them, it sounds as if they’re all counting on you, and you don’t want to let them down. You don’t have to stay at Wanda’s house if you don’t want to; you can stay in my house with me. It’s only a few blocks away from hers. I want to spend a few days in town anyway. I need some work done at my house.”

  I stared at him, open-mouthed, dismayed, and when DeAnn slid the sizzling plate of French fries and grilled cheese in front of me, I didn’t even look at it.

  “Eat, honey,” DeAnn said quietly. “It’ll do you good. You need to keep your strength up now. I know something bad’s going on at The Bookery.”

  I looked up at her, startled. “You do?”

  “Darlin’ everybody does. He’s been playing that awful music on the piano for days. Usually I like to hear him play, but not lately. It makes it seem like there’s a funeral going on in town. Something’s wrong. And today, he’s got the Closed sign out. He hasn’t closed The Bookery on a Tuesday since he inherited the store. The whole town’s worried.”

  Something attracted my attention to the pass window, across the dining room behind her. Don himself was looking through the window, staring right at me. I’ve eaten a lot of his cooking and we all hear his voice from time to time, but you almost never see his face. He paused to give me a solemn look, then withdrew.

  DeAnn gave me the same look, then impulsively patted my shoulder. “Just do what you can, honey.”

  We ate in silence after that, and though it was busy, the diner was unusually quiet the whole time.

  At the end of the meal, as Michael got up with the check, he looked down at me and raised his eyebrows, silently asking.

  “Yeah, I guess we should take a day or two and stand by our friends. But the shelter?”

  “Don’t worry about Orphans of the Storm, Taylor. Myrtle is running the house, and Carlene can run the shelter. I keep telling you, you need to take some time off every now and then, although . . . .” He let his eyes drift off. “This isn’t quite what I had in mind.”

  * * * * *

  As lousy as I was feeling, the fact that I was making Teddy wait a little longer for his dirty underwear brought a little smile to my face.

  Michael and I went back to Cadbury House to talk to Myrtle and Carlene and pack a few bags, and at the last minute, I remembered to pack up my laptop and bring it with me. Smaller devices are fine for weeding out the spam and asking quick questions, but to do any real work at all, I needed my laptop.

  After that, Michael took our luggage into town to get us settled in the house, and I went back to Ed’s house to pick up Teddy’s stuff, including his dog. Only when I was standing at the front door listening to Porter try to claw the door down did I remember that I’d forgotten to get the key from anybody.

  Well, I wasn’t driving all the way back to Tropical Breeze to get it. If I had to break a window to get in, I might actually enjoy it. I needed a little tension reliever. And just let Ed even think about billing me for it. Getting rid of Teddy would be worth every penny to him. I was standing there enjoying my breaking-and-entering fantasies when I heard Dan coming across the street.

  “I don’t think Ed is home,” he said.

  “No, he’s in Tropical Breeze. I just came from there. I’m supposed to pick up Teddy’s things and get Porter so he can move into town with somebody, but I forgot to get the key. Do you know the garage code?”

  “Sure, but I can do better than that. Ed and I traded housekeys a long time ago. I’ll go get it. Be back in a second.”

  “Thanks, Dan. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “I’ll even help you pack and carry,” he added with a devastating grin. “If it’ll get Teddy out of Ed’s hair, I consider it my civic duty. The man’s driving Ed crazy, and as we all know, it’s not a long trip.”

  I giggled.

  It wasn’t until we were shoving Porter into the crate I always keep in the back of my SUV that the subject of Rita came up. I had been burning all over to ask what he thought of her, but didn’t want to be obvious. In the end, he saved me the trouble and brought her up himself.

  “Nice lady, that friend of yours. You know, Rita?”

  I overplayed my hand a little, gushing, “You really like her?”

  “Oh, yeah. Nice lady.”

  He signed off with a curt nod and went back across the street, leaving me with the feeling that all clouds have silver linings, even the kinds of clouds I’d been dealing with.

  * * * * *

  I had gotten about a mile and a half down the road when I realized that Porter had found something in the cargo bay to play with. He was in a pet crate, which made it all the more mysterious. When I pulled over to investigate, I found him chewing on a portion of a dirty tee shirt that he’d managed to pull through the bars. He was pretty happy about it, and when I lifted the hatch door, he panted and grinned at me with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth and a wet blob of something that smelled like Teddy jammed through the side of the cage.

  “No
, I can’t do this to her,” I said to myself. “Wanda’s got enough problems.”

  So I stopped off at Cadbury House and delivered Porter to Carlene, with instructions not to spoil him.

  “Teddy seems to have convinced him that he’s a star,” I told her. “I think a little tough love is in order; maybe another pass through boot camp.”

  I was looking down sternly into popping brown eyes over a sloppily panting tongue. He seemed to be grinning hysterically, but as we all know, dog’s faces do not express emotions as human’s do. The experts tell us that. The ones without dogs. Porter had figured out where he was as soon as we turned onto the dirt road leading to the house, and he seemed to think the party was on. Without really understanding anything that goes on in that dog’s mind, I was pretty sure he’d forgotten that Orphans of the Storm existed as soon as he’d left it. Now he was making little yips of joy, puddling saliva in the sandy dirt of the driveway and rotating his eyes in their sockets trying to take it all in at once.

  Carlene went down on her knees and proceeded to burble at him, wanting to know if “widdle Pow-tah missed his bestest gur-friend?” By that time, Porter’s tongue had reached her mouth, and the rest of her boo-boo baby talk was wiped away as with a wet rag. Disgusting. And absolutely not what you hope for from a drill sergeant on the first day of boot camp.

  “You know you’re only going to make him worse,” I observed.

  When she tipped over, laughing, and started rolling around on the ground with him, I wished her luck and got back into the SUV.

  The smile was off my face by the time I made it to the other end of the dirt road. Now to deal with Teddy.

  Needless to say, I hadn’t touched his laundry bag, other than to shove a few more things into it that had been strewn around Ed’s guest room. I won’t mention the condition they were in. In all fairness, Teddy hadn’t expected them to be handled by a lady. In all honesty, he wouldn’t have cared.

  Teddy hadn’t mentioned his laptop, the men’s toiletry articles that made the guest bathroom look like The Chippendales got ready for their act there, or the boxes of ghost-hunting gear that he hadn’t touched since his arrival. I pointed it all out to Dan and asked him to heave it into my Escape and not mind the breakage. The stuff weighed a ton, but Dan just grinned and took it all out for me like it was no big deal. There were no books. Not even on the night stand.