There was the smallest sag in Steven's smug smile as he asked, "What?"
I gave a thumb wave over my shoulders. "Behind us. Those little huts? Those are beehives."
Steven squinted in the direction of the hives. "Yes, that is important. Come on; let's go see them."
We approached warily as I counted twelve hives. As we neared them, we could see that at least six were active hives, and these were all located on the left side of the group. They buzzed with the energy of thousands of little yellow-and-black honeybees.
Steven and I kept a safe distance from them, and stood silently for a little bit as we listened in awe to their collective hum. Motioning with his head, Steven moved closer to the six hives on the right, which were silent and obviously abandoned.
Upon inspection, I noticed that these hives were also more weather-beaten. Their paint was chipping and the wood was warped. I wondered if they were older than the other hives. Perhaps they had been the original six and the other group had been built to replace them.
Steven continued to walk forward while I hung back a bit, afraid that there might still be a bee or two hovering about inside them, ready to sting me. I watched as he walked in a circle around the first wooden box, and lost him around the backside as he knelt down. "Find something?" I called to him when he didn't reappear right away.
I waited another beat or two, wondering what he could be doing back there, when he popped back into view and held something up for me to see. It looked like a large rusted funnel and a plastic hose, both very old and very dirty. "What is that?"
"Private property," I heard a woman's voice say from behind me, right before I heard the distinct metallic sound of the cocking of a shotgun.
Chapter 11
Steven's eyes widened and his smile faltered just before he dropped the funnel and the hose and raised his arms above his head. I followed suit and turned ever so slowly around.
"State your business," a woman who looked very similar to Maureen's photo said, as she leveled the shotgun first at Steven, then at me.
"We're just looking," I heard Steven say.
"You're trespassing on private property," the woman snapped. "Give me one good reason not to shoot you."
"Okay, how about this. How about we're not trespassing," Steven said "I own this land."
I was watching the woman closely, and I saw the gun lower a fraction as she took her eye off the sight to stare up at Steven. The moment passed and she lowered her eye to the sight again. "What's your name?" she asked.
"Dr. Steven Sable. My grandfather was Andrew Sable."
My heart was pounding in my chest by now, the tension of having a large gun pointed right at me sending adrenaline zipping along my veins. The woman held her position another moment, and just when I thought we were going to have ourselves a little standoff, she abruptly lowered the gun. "I'm sorry about your grandpa," she said.
"Thank you," Steven replied, lowering his arms and coining over to stand next to me. "This is M. J. Holliday," he added, and seeing that my arms were still raised high above my head, he put a hand on my arm and lowered it. "You can put your hands down. I don't think she's going to shoot us."
The woman cracked a smile at me. "You're completely pale," she said.
I noticed suddenly how rapid my breathing was. "Can you blame me?"
Steven wrapped an arm around my shoulders protectively while I focused very hard on getting it together. "So, who are you?" he boldly asked the woman.
She regarded us a moment before answering. "The name's Mirabelle. This is my house and my land."
"I am begging your difference," Steven said evenly.
I rolled my eyes when Mirabelle gave him a quizzical look. "He begs to differ," I translated.
"Yes, that too," Steven said impatiently. "My grandfather purchased six hundred acres here, and built the lodge in the middle. I believe you're on his land."
Mirabelle smiled, but it wasn't a friendly one. It reminded me more of a crocodile. "You are correct. This was Andrew's property. He deeded over twelve acres to my mother forty years ago. And when she passed on, Andrew made sure it went to me. You can check the county records if you like."
It was Steven's turn to smile tightly. "Why would he do that?" he asked. "What connection did your mother have to my grandfather?"
"Gin," Mirabelle said, the crocodile smile widening.
"As in rummy?" I asked, totally confused.
"No, as in bootleg. This section of Massachusetts used to be made up of dry counties for a couple hundred miles. Times were when you'd have to drive clear to Boston to buy a bottle of hooch. Andrew saw a need within the community, and he filled it via my mother, who made the best damn bootleg gin around."
"So I'm confused about this twelve acres," Steven said.
Mirabelle hoisted the gun in her hand to her shoulder, and the sudden movement caused me to jump. "Easy, there, girl. I'm not gonna hurt you," she said with a chuckle. "Why don't you all come in for tea and I'll explain it to you nice and slow." And with that she turned on her heel and walked away toward the house.
I looked at Steven with wide eyes and said, "She can't be serious."
Steven seemed to study her for a moment. "She seems to be."
"I'm not going in there with that crazy woman!" I hissed, keeping my voice quiet lest I upset the gun-toting luna-chick.
"Okay. I'll fill you up later," he said, and began following.
My jaw fell open as he walked off. "Damn it!" I swore under my breath. "This is a bad idea, M.J.," I muttered to myself as I caught up to Steven. "I see one body part in her fridge and I'm outta there!"
"Agreed," he said, and ruffled my hair.
The inside of Mirabelle's house was much like the outside. The decor was bright and springlike without overdoing it. She motioned us into her living room, which was painted a granny apple green with dark wood accents and patterned slipcovers. Steven and I sat side by side on the couch, he in a relaxed position, me on the edge of the seat ready to bolt at the first hint of trouble.
"I have Earl Grey tea; will that suit you?" she asked from the kitchen.
"That's fine," Steven said for both of us, then looked at me and whispered, "Will you relax?"
I scowled at him and held my ground on the edge of the couch. I looked around the room and something caught my eye. I could have sworn I saw movement in the hallway just off the living room. It was then that I noticed my energy was humming and I got a tugging sensation from my solar plexus. "Someone's here," I said quietly to Steven.
"Huh?" he said, giving me a funny look.
I didn't respond to him; instead I closed my eyes and reached out intuitively to the shadowy figure I'd seen in the hallway. Hello? Can you hear me? I'm M.J., and I won't hurt you but I'd like to know your name.
Mirabelle 's mom…
My eyes snapped open. I turned to Steven and said, "Maureen is here."
Steven sat forward and looked into the hallway I indicated with a head nod. "I thought she was at the lodge?"
"They can travel quite easily," I said to him. "It's not that far away, after all."
"What's not that far away?" Mirabelle said as she carried in a tray of steaming tea and cookies.
"Nothing," Steven said, and gave me a look that said, Shhhh.
"This is a lovely home," I commented. In my head I heard, Thank you.
Mirabelle offered the tray of tea and ginger cookies first to me, then to Steven as she said, "Yes, it is, and quite popular these days."
"Pardon?" Steven said as he took the tea from the tray.
"There's a Realtor in town who says he has a couple from New York who want to buy it—lock, stock, and barrel—for a huge chunk of change."
Something about her statement made me feel worried. I puzzled over it, then asked, "How would a couple from New York even know about this place? I mean, it seems pretty far off the beaten path."
Mirabelle shook her head and made a tsking sound. "The past year or so all sorts of out
-of-towners have been coming up this way and snooping around. They're all from New York, and they think they can throw their money around and us simple folk will jump to their every whim. In fact, that's who I thought you two were when I came home from my walk. I figured the gun was a good way to scare off any folks who thought they could wave a checkbook at me and get me to play nice."
She didn't answer my question, and I was about to push the point when Steven said, "You were telling us earlier about this booted gin and the deed to this property?"
"Ah, yes," Mirabelle said, taking a seat on the love seat directly across from us. "I don't know the full details of the bargain my mom and your granddad struck back in the day, because it was before I was born. But by the time I was five I was helping Mom with the sieves hidden in the beehives. Everyone in town thought she was scratching out her living making honey and selling it at the local markets, when in fact that was just a cover for the real operation.
"She and Andrew had quite the business. She'd make the gin, and maybe a little whiskey too; then in the middle of the night she and I would carry these big jars with honey labels through the forest, following a path that led to a tree not far from that big house Andrew had."
"How long did this go on for?" Steven said.
"Until she died in nineteen seventy-four. I had just turned seventeen then. In fact, I think it was a year or two before you showed up," Mirabelle said, giving him a little wave of her hand.
"You knew about me?"
"Sure did. Your grandfather talked about you all the time."
"He used to visit you, then?" Steven said, and I noticed how soft his voice had become.
"Couple times a week. He'd come through the woods and place flowers on Mom's grave, stay for tea, then leave. His visits got shorter and more sporadic as the years went by, but every once in a while I'd see him up there, placing flowers on her grave, and I knew he still cared."
Again I felt a tug in my solar plexus and I got the oddest thought. It sounded like, Tell about the ball…. In my mind's eye I saw a Christmas tree. I looked at Mirabelle and asked, "What's the deal with the Christmas ball?" thinking perhaps she had gotten a special present as a child for Christmas and this was some fond memory her mother wanted Mirabelle to talk about.
Mirabelle's reaction was unexpected. She looked at me as if I'd said something so offensive that I deserved to be slapped. It was a moment before she said, "So, you've heard about how she died?"
I shook my head and said, "No. I'm sorry; perhaps I should explain. I'm a psychic medium, and right now your mother is behind you in that hallway asking me to have you talk about some sort of ball that has to do with Christmas."
I had to give Mirabelle credit. She seemed to take my profession in stride, because she nodded at my explanation and said, "Andrew threw a big party at Christmas in nineteen seventy-four and invited my mother and me. I wasn't feeling well, and decided to skip it. Mom almost stayed home too, but I insisted she go. She'd been so excited by the invitation, and she'd bought herself a special dress to wear. I remember how beautiful she looked standing in the doorway right before she left. She blew me a kiss and that was the last time I ever saw her."
"What happened?" I asked.
"The morning after the party the sheriff was at my door saying there'd been a terrible accident, and Mom had fallen down the stairs at the Sable lodge. Someone said they saw her heel catch on the top stair, and there was nothing anyone could do for her. Her neck had been snapped and she'd died instantly."
At that moment something pushed me hard from behind and I fell off the couch and onto the coffee table in front of me. Steven leaned forward and grabbed me under the shoulder, "M.J.? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," I said, completely embarrassed. "I don't know what happened." I knew that the push had come from Maureen. Sitting back on the couch, I straightened my shirt and motioned for Mirabelle to continue.
"That's the end of it," she said sadly. "Mom died and a few weeks later Andrew came here and said that the house now belonged to me. He explained that Mom and he had struck a bargain many years before that made the house and twelve acres hers as payment for services rendered."
"So, she supplied him with gin; he resold it and paid her with land," I said.
"Yes."
"What was between your mother and my grandfather?" Steven asked. "Why is her picture in his house?"
Mirabelle blushed slightly and fussed with her napkin. "They had a long and secret romance," she said.
Curious, I asked, "Why was it so secret?"
"Because Andrew was married. His wife often stayed in Boston—word had it she didn't like it up here. Andrew would go hunting here on the weekends, and Mom would head over to his place. They broke up only once, and that was when she got tired of waiting for Andrew to divorce his wife, so she took up with my dad and married him. I was born a year later, and Dad left when I was two. From that point forward until she fell down the staircase, my mother and Andrew had a regular thing. To this day I'm convinced she was the love of his life."
"So, your parents divorced," Steven said, more statement than question.
"No," Mirabelle replied. "My mother was a devout Catholic. She thought it was okay for Andrew to divorce, but it wasn't a choice she was willing to make."
Turning to Steven I asked, "When did your grandmother die?"
“The late eighties. I never liked her."
"She was a bitter woman," Mirabelle said, then caught herself. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult your family."
"Do not worry over it," Steven was quick to say. "It was common knowledge."
Mirabelle smiled and gave Steven a nod. Then she glanced up at the clock and said, "I really do have to get a move on. The bees need some attention before it gets too late in the day. Come by anytime and we can chat again," she offered.
"As long as you don't greet us with the gun," Steven kidded.
Mirabelle giggled. "Promise." She showed us to the door.
We made our way back up the hill, and Steven asked me, "What happened in there when you fell forward?"
"Maureen pushed me."
"Pardon?"
"Maureen gave me a shove," I said, giving him a direct look that said I wasn't kidding.
"Why?"
"I don't know, but now we know who pushed Gilley down the stairs, and I'm guessing we know that Maria didn't trip on her little tumble either. Maureen's intent on pushing people."
"So she really could have pushed my grandfather off the roof," Steven said.
I considered that before answering him. "I know that it's possible, Steven, but in my gut I just can't see it happening that way. When Mirabelle was talking about Andrew and Maureen, there was something in Maureen's energy that told me she loved Andrew very much. I can't see her murdering him."
"Then why all this pushing?" he asked me.
"I think she's trying to tell us something about what happened the night she died. I don't think her heel caught. I think she was pushed, and she's reenacting what happened to her." Steven looked at me thoughtfully, and just as he was about to speak, my cell phone bleeped.
"I've got dirt," Gilley said when I picked up the line.
"Dish," I said.
"I got a hit on your ghost Maureen, whose last name is Emerson. She owned some property smack-dab in the middle of the Sable land."
"That's old news," I said. "Steven and I discovered that, like, an hour ago."
Gilley made a snarfing noise on the line. "Hello!" he said. "Could you have told me?"
"Sorry, we were sort of in the middle of things. But let me ask you, did you happen to get any info on how she died?"
"Hang on," Gilley said, and I could hear him typing into the computer. "Her obit says she fell down a set of stairs on Christmas Eve. Wait a sec," he said, and I heard more typing. "Here we go, local paper has an online archive, thank God. Most of these small towns aren't that sophisticated. Maureen Emerson, longtime Uphamshire resident… blah, blah, blah . .. yadd
a, yadda… found it. Says she was attending the Andrew Sable Christmas Eve ball when her heel caught on the top stair and she took a tumble, snapping her neck and killing her instantly, according to an eyewitness."
"Does it say who the eyewitness was?"
There was a pause on Gilley's end as he skimmed the rest of the article. "Nope, just says it was one of the attendees."
I scowled. Why weren't things ever easy? "Gil, here's the drill. I think that Maureen was the ghost that pushed you down the stairs the other day, but I don't think she meant to hurt you. I think she was reliving the night she died. I think someone pushed her down the steps and then claimed to have seen her heel catch on the stair."
"That's a lot of assumptions, M.J."
"Yeah," I said. "But my gut says I'm right. Can you dig a little deeper into Maureen's death? Maybe find someone who might have been at that party that night?"
"M.J., that was over thirty years ago!"
"I know it's a long shot, Gil, but if anyone is going to work a little magic on that end of it, it's you."
"Just don't expect a miracle," he grumbled.
"Also," I continued, "I need you to look into the background of Maureen's daughter, Mirabelle. I think she's clean, but the fact that she knows her way through the woods to the secret entrance of the Sable house has me a little bothered."
"What secret entrance?"
I'd forgotten that I hadn't filled Gilley in on the tunnel cave-in, and I didn't want to open up that can of worms right now. "Nothing, just work on both of those, would ya?"
"Along with working on this Roger guy, too, I suppose."
"Yep. Along with that," I said, smiling. I knew I was giving Gilley a lot of work, but it was his forte, after all.
I filled Steven in on Gilley's end of the conversation as we made our way back to the lodge through the woods. When we got home we were both famished, so we drove into town to eat. When we arrived at the local diner, Steven hesitated as we were about to walk in, looking through the window of the eatery. "What's up?" I asked.