“They are very rich looking. They look like antiques but…. Well, I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  “That’s the idea. They might look a little weird in the bright light of high noon, but that is something that tower room will never have. Here are some sketches of the meditation room as I picture it.” She pointed at an easel where her drawings were pinned to a corkboard. “I still have one more panel to do. Between the shelf and the hangings, the ghastly cherubs should be pretty well hidden. That will tone down the creep factor.”

  “They really bother you?”

  “I think whoever carved them had lizards in his brain.”

  Manoogin grunted.

  “You have a nice space here. I can see why you would prefer it to the courtyard at the castle.”

  “Yes. It’s easier to work here and transport them later than to risk something happening to the fabric which is more fragile than it looks.”

  Juliet didn’t explain about how she had been so disturbed by the invisible shadows tiptoeing around behind her back that she had decided to do all her work in the bungalow rather than on-site like the others. She would have to very carefully transport her hangings later, but it was worth the effort. She still didn’t believe in ghosts, but whether it was bad air—maybe fouled from the corpse in the chimney—or the poor lighting, she didn’t plan on spending any more time alone in the tower than she had to.

  “These are the jars you told me about?”

  “Yes, apothecary jars. Let me turn on some of the lights.” Juliet switched on the battery-powered candles and was pleased with the effect. It had taken her a while to achieve the colors of oils and water that she was after.

  “Is it insulting if I say that I’m surprised?” he asked after a few moments of quiet study.

  “I suppose it depends on your reasons for the amazement,” Juliet said with a small grin.

  “Everything else at the castle is so … not real. So over the top. Not what I can imagine anyone wanting in their home. But this is something you could actually have in your house.”

  “Thank you. Lieutenant—”

  “Vince.”

  “Vince, if you like real, you will probably love my t-shirts.”

  “I probably will. Do you have any here?”

  “A few. I need to do some more. The tourists have been generous this summer and the shop that carries them is almost out.” Juliet went to a cupboard and pulled out her few remaining samples. “Not that I have any problem with showing off my work to someone who admires it, but I think there was maybe something you wanted to say to me?”

  She was careful not to look at the lieutenant as she laid out the shirts on her work table. He appeared to be studying her printing press which she used in combination with silk-screening.

  “The thing is, I usually don’t like civilians getting involved in my cases,” Manoogin said at last. “In fact, I’m not even crazy about other branches of law enforcement getting involved, especially the Feds. It’s my sandbox and I prefer to play alone.”

  “No one can blame you for that. But if it is my federal ties that worry you, I am very, very retired.” Technically. “And so are Raphael and Esteban. There won’t be any official entanglements. Unless Dolph’s murder turns out to be about terrorism or related to the smuggling of classified material. That we would have to report. But I simply can’t imagine his death having any wider governmental implications. Dolph was a womanizing jerk, a kind of carnival barker who was rather phony but effective at drawing people into his schemes. He probably wasn’t always truthful with his tax returns, and may well have screwed over former business partners in his effort to get noticed. But so are lots of people.”

  “And I don’t suppose that … well, you already answered.”

  “Are you truly that upset at having other eyes—who know the art scene, the castle, and the players—looking out for suspicious things?”

  “No. If looking is all you do. Looking and reporting what you see,” he added.

  “I assure you that I have no ambitions to do anything of a physical nature. Vince, I am fifty-two years old. My days imagining myself as a super-agent have long since passed, and anyway I outgrew my desire to be Spiderman when I was about seven. My only aspiration in life—beyond eating a lot more pumpkin cupcakes—is to finish this project and get the hell away from that blasted castle.”

  “You wanted to be Spiderman?” He wasn’t bothering to suppress a smile. He also knew when to abandon a futile battle.

  “Of course. Didn’t everyone?” The lieutenant shook his head and went back to the t-shirts. “Oh, let me guess. You wanted to be Batman.”

  “Well, he had a cool car.” Manoogin excused himself as he picked up one of the shirts which was a caricature of her neighbor Mickey Shaw. Mickey liked doing yoga in the nude. The shirt showed a skinny lizard in a variety of yoga poses while he was being buzzed by a fat bee.

  “Do you have this one in a large?” he asked.

  Chapter 6

  There was no malingering the following morning however appealing the comforts of bed. A lingering thunderstorm and a hungry cat with an unwinking stare made sure she was up with the dawn.

  “Witch critter,” she grumbled but got up to fetch food for immediate gulping.

  The storm itself blew out quickly and Juliet was able to make the drive to Barclay with no more than a few sprinkles on her windshield.

  The back of her car had four sections of curved shelving which protruded out of one of the windows. Esteban had cut the shelves for her and was planning on arriving sometime that afternoon to help install them. If the tower was cleared for her use. Manoogin had seemed confident that the skeleton would be gone and they weren’t going to hold it as a crime scene since all evidence outside of the corpse itself would be long gone. All that remained was to get rid of the debris from the chimney facade, and they could work around the fallen tiles and masonry crumbles if need be, though hopefully the workmen would be available to clear it away. Things were probably going to be a bit disorganized until someone stepped in to take Dolph’s place. Juliet couldn’t think of an obvious candidate but there had to be some structure within his charitable organization. At the very least someone was talking to the newspapers and trying to downplay what had happened. Juliet had only read one paper, but the headline was harrowing enough that she fully expected to find the castle under siege by those looking for an exciting opening for the evening news, along with the merely morbid and various psychic kooks who showed up when the words corpses and curse were used in the same sentence.

  A security guard was on duty. Not the one who had been there the day before. Though the older guard recognized her, he peered into her back seat as though expecting to see the boogieman hiding among the pieces of lumber. He wrote down Esteban’s name and estimated time of arrival.

  The ancient oaks were drying out by the time she pulled into her regular spot in the lower lot. They were as placid after rain as they were after sun. Only their shadows were changed with the weather. Their shades were as pale as spider webs in the hazy light. It seemed appropriate if not particularly cheering.

  Lieutenant Manoogin’s car was in the lot along with another vehicle that looked a lot like an unmarked police car. She was glad to see that there was no yellow tape stretched across the castle’s giant doors.

  Though she knew that she should check in with the foreman, Juliet decided to borrow an empty cart and to wheel it down to the lot for fetching her shelves. The task took twenty minutes and left her sweaty, but there was real pleasure in making progress with her new plan of getting the hell away from the castle. Finding the body in the tower and getting rid of it should have made her feel better about her room. After all, surely that would lay the ghost, if ghost there was. But somehow Juliet was not reassured and she feared that they might not have seen an end to the violence, though whether it was old violence or new she couldn’t say.

  She paused in the courtyard to look over the various projects in progress. Most of the lumber being worked was pine or cedar. Both woods had distinct odors and hues. None of the sawdust matched what she had seen on Dolph’s body. Of course, that could have been a trick of lighting. Hazy daylight made things look muted.

  Coming in from the inner courtyard, which was still busy with contractors getting on with the earthquake retrofit, Juliet heard Manoogin’s voice in the kitchen. She followed the exasperated echoes down the corridor and discovered the lieutenant and a short stranger in the process of pressing and tapping the walls. He wasn’t in uniform but he didn’t need clothing to proclaim his profession.

  “I take it you haven’t found the secret panel that leads to the wine cellar,” Juliet said.

  Both men turned to look at her. Juliet was not exhibiting her talents for the fun of it. She was usually self-embargoed from displaying her insight since she preferred people remain ignorant of her abilities and think of her as nothing more than breathing wallpaper. The fact that she had to be involved at all was rather maddening. She hadn’t even liked Dolph Kingman. Truthfully, she never liked any of the people who got killed around her. Of course, that wasn’t terribly surprising. There was much less call for murdering nice people than rotten ones. Still, this case was likely to stall if she didn’t intervene because there was so much Manoogin didn’t know about the art world. The sooner this investigation was over, the sooner she could put Barclay Castle out of her mind.

  “Any guesses?” Manoogin asked. “I’m already tired of playing hide-and-seek and no one outside seems to know anything about anything.”

  Juliet considered. The wall with the fireplace was a facade of new brick—made to look like old brick, of course. There was obviously no place where it could open. It was also unlikely that the passage was in an exterior wall. She went over to the old coal stove and began inspecting the wainscoting.

  It was immediately apparent that someone had been disturbing the herbs. The air around the old stove was pungent with bleeding sap and oils. There were also a few flecks of sawdust on the floor. Red sawdust. She pinched up the small sample and sniffed but could smell nothing above the thyme.

  After a moment of consideration she stepped into the hall and checked the dimensions of the next room which appeared foreshortened and missing about three feet. She went back to the stove and began examining the wood paneling which now seemed rather strange to have installed in a stone castle, and was perhaps a modern method for disguising an opening in the wall. A delicate current of air brushed her face as she paused between two ill-fitting panels.

  It would be faster to ask the workmen outside where the latch was since they had supposedly been down there already to seal up the tunnel. They would talk to her when they wouldn’t a policeman. Or she could call Julia Mannering, the woodworker who had a black belt in karate, who was supposed to be doing the racks for the wine cellar, but Juliet decided that it was probably best for her future involvement if the police considered her to be a genius at this kind of thing. Since she was.

  A few moments of pressing and she had it. The wainscoting swung back and a narrow staircase was revealed.

  Manoogin snorted. Juliet interpreted the sound as half amusement and half frustration that he hadn’t been able to find it on his own. The latch wasn’t so much hidden as just made less obvious.

  There was a light switch by the opening which worked, and the air from down below was fairly fresh since ventilation had been installed. But there was still something uncomfortable about venturing down that narrow stair which had to have been an afterthought in the original design since it was not a practical way to move bodies into the morgue.

  Juliet examined the door and could see no obvious latch or handle that would open the cellar from below. There had to be one, of course. Unless it hadn’t yet been installed. As an afterthought, Juliet pulled down one of the blackened pots and used it to prop the door open.

  It would not have been beyond imagining if Julia Mannering had gone ahead and installed some manacles and maybe a skeleton or two, but the cellar was free of bones and cobwebs and even dust. The place had been recently power-washed and shop-vacced. Still, the expression I wouldn’t be caught dead here occurred to Juliet.

  As of yet there was no wine in the cellar but some of the redwood racks had been installed. Just to be clever they had been laid out in a maze pattern that made the place feel like a labyrinth. The smell of new wood was still strong enough to cover the general smell of damp, but there was also a hint of baking earth floating on the air. It didn’t quite cover the old musty odor, though it helped. Juliet was of the opinion that they could stock the cellar with all the wine in California and it wouldn’t completely hide the fact that this room had been used for something unpleasant.

  “I’m glad there are lights. And no rats,” the stranger added. His words which probably hadn’t been intended for Juliet’s ears echoed oddly.

  “Amen,” Manoogin answered.

  In spite of its cleanliness and artificial light, Juliet found the whole place to be rather sinister, perhaps because of knowing its original purpose, but Manoogin and the stranger seemed to feel that nothing was amiss as they examined the space with only cursory attention.

  “Should a wine cellar be this damp?”

  “No. It’s been recently power-washed.” Perhaps to try and rid it of the unpleasant smell.

  Juliet looked around carefully and couldn’t see any sign of recent brickwork, which there should have been if Dolph had truly sealed up the old morgue tunnel. It could be that the new wall was concealed behind some of the racks, but there should have been an odor of curing mortar, which there was not.

  Had Dolph been delaying the repairs, hoping that everyone would reconsider his idea of some kind of a gruesome ghost tour of the old morgue? Or were there money problems with the project that had caused a delay?

  The eddy of baking earth smell rubbed by her face again.

  “Check for another door,” Juliet said softly.

  “What?” Manoogin turned toward her.

  “Check behind the racks against the wall. It may be that the original entrance wasn’t actually bricked over after the supposed cave-in. Maybe, if there was a cave-in, it was simply cleared instead of sealed.” She pointed at a brick barricade which was old, but that had been laid in a different pattern suggesting a different set of builders had been at work in a different era. When no one reacted she explained: “There may still be some other way in and out of the castle.”

  “There is another entrance to the wine cellar?” the stranger asked. He sounded affronted. “That’s stupid.”

  “Yes, it would be, if you were building a wine cellar from scratch. But this cellar was the hospital morgue back in the twenties, and I doubt that the bodies were brought up or down through the kitchen on that narrow stair. At the very least there would have been another larger staircase coming down, perhaps from the courtyard. They also probably had an entrance away from the hospital where the hearse could come and go without upsetting the other patients.”

  “You have any proof of this?” The tone rather than the question itself was confrontational. It was early days, but Juliet was betting that this was a man with a limited linguistic database. That usually happened when someone had only predictably small thoughts. It was another strike against him.

  “It may be that I can eventually find some blueprints to show you where the exterior entrance was, but for now we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. There is fresh hot air coming in from somewhere. Follow the smell.”

  Esteban would be the one to find blueprints if any existed but there was no need to drag his name into things, especially since this new cop was so hostile.

  “And you know this how, Mrs…?” the stranger asked again. She gave him credit for being dogged.

  “Excuse my manners,” Manoogin said. “Juliet Henry, this is my partner, Detective Weston. Juliet is one of the artists working on the project. Her room was the one in the tower with the body in the chimney. She’s done some research on the building.”

  That was a strange introduction but probably the most relevant of the facts for the new policeman to know.

  “Detective.” Juliet gave a small smile and got one in return, but only after Weston had sent his partner an odd look. She gathered that Manoogin had been truthful when he said that he generally didn’t involve civilians in his investigations, and that Manoogin apparently had not shared her work history with his partner. Whether this was to preserve her privacy or because he didn’t trust his partner remained to be seen.

  “Mrs. Henry.”

  She didn’t correct him about her marital status and made herself speak pleasantly.

  “As Lieutenant Manoogin says, I’ve been studying the castle, looking for history about the room in the tower and have discovered a few other things in my research. I don’t know if the original castle had some kind of dungeon back in Scotland, but when the castle got here, it was discovered that there were caves in the cliff below the plateau which were deemed appropriate for storage and later for use as a place to hold bodies before their burials. Probably because it is naturally cold. Based on geography, it’s unlikely that the caves run north-south so the cave openings would be either east or west.” Juliet pointed again. “Let’s start here. The brick pattern is different on that wall.”

  Neither man argued though she had the feeling that Weston wanted to on general principal.

  Again it was Juliet who discovered a ponderous door behind one of the wine racks which had not yet been screwed into the mounts in the wall. The floor below it was slightly scuffed, suggesting the heavy rack had been moved recently.

  The old timber door was locked and there was no key, but Juliet only shook her head at the detectives when Weston expressed a belief that no one could have come or gone that way.

  Juliet sniffed the lock and then went to fetch a pair of flathead screwdrivers and proceeded to force the lock on the door.

 

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