“Gil,” I snapped, pulling the towel tighter around me and waving at him to shut the door. But Gilley was currently ogling my boyfriend and stuffing his piehole with breakfast. “Gil!”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, finally tearing his gaze away from Heath’s bare chest and scantily covered rear. “Breslow is here to pick you guys up, so y’all better get a move on.”
I reached for my phone on the counter. “He’s early!”
“Well, how about I feed him a bagel and coffee and stall him?”
Heath squinted at the last few bites of pastry resting on Gilley’s napkin. “Didn’t your mom make Danishes?”
Gil shoved the last bite into his mouth and gave a muffled, “We’re all out.”
With that, he closed the door and I made sure to walk over and lock it behind him.
When I turned back around, Heath was pouting. “I was looking forward to one of those Danishes. They smelled awesome.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him they tasted even better. Instead I rushed through a quick blow-dry and got dressed while Heath headed out to fish around for some breakfast.
I found Breslow in the kitchen with a mug in his hand and his back to the corner as Mrs. G. did her best to grill him for information about what we’d all gotten ourselves into.
As Gilley’s mom tended to worry a lot, we’d done our best to keep the explanations brief and skip many of the more troubling details, but she was a wily one, that Mrs. G., and she knew there was more to the story.
“Ready to go?” I said loudly when I entered the kitchen, and Breslow jumped to his feet.
“Yep!” he said, setting his cup in the sink and tipping his hat to Mrs. G. “Thank you kindly, ma’am.”
She frowned at me. I suspected she’d been getting close to having Breslow tell her what she wanted to know. Heath was already waiting on the front porch, nibbling on a banana and a power bar. Sloppy seconds to the homemade Danishes.
For his part, Gilley was lying on the porch swing, rubbing his belly and looking as lazy and happy as a well-fed tomcat. I tapped his foot and said, “Hey. Have you done any research on that Ouija board like I asked?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said with a yawn. “I’m all over it.”
“Gil,” I said levelly.
“M.J.,” he replied, mocking my tone.
“I’m serious. I need to know where that board came from. We have to trace the roots of the Sandman and look for a weakness or something.”
Gil sat up and rubbed his eyes. “He comes from Louisiana.”
That took me by surprise, and I couldn’t tell whether Gil was making a joke or being serious. “Are you playing with me?”
Gil rolled his head around on his neck, which made several unsettling popping sounds. “No, I’m not. I was up most of last night searching and finally found a pretty obscure reference to the Sandman and that Ouija board from Louisiana back in the nineteen twenties.”
“How obscure?”
Gil went back to lying down. “An article in the Times-Picayune from nineteen twenty-two described how police were called to the scene of a house in the Garden District. A wealthy eccentric widow named Olivia Baumgarden had hosted a séance that night, and she’d invited a few friends over for cocktails and a bit of adventure.
“According to the article, Baumgarden had hired a spirit medium named Lady Madelyn.” I tensed. Madelyn was my mother’s full name. My father and her mother were the only ones who ever called her that, however. The rest of the time she’d gone by DeeDee. “Lady M. claimed to be able to call up not just dead people, but powerful forces capable of leaving no skeptics in the room,” Gil continued.
“What happened?” Heath said over my shoulder, and I realized he’d come up behind me and was listening to Gilley.
“Things went south shortly after ten p.m. One of the party guests, a retired general of some note, had apparently snapped, and he’d attacked several of the patrons including the host, Mrs. Baumgarden, who’d, tragically, suffered a broken neck.”
“He killed her?”
“Yep. Witnesses claimed that something weird had happened to the general as Lady Madelyn manipulated her planchette over her elaborately painted Ouija board. He suddenly started growling, foaming at the mouth, and he was quoted as saying, ‘The Sandman cometh for you!’”
“Then what?” I asked when Gilley didn’t continue.
“Then nothing. That’s where the article ends. The general was tried for murder, convicted, and hung a year later.”
“So what happened to Lady Madelyn and the board?”
“That’s where the trail ends, sugar. I looked late into the night for another reference to her, but so far, nada.”
“So, somehow the Ouija board made it from New Orleans in the nineteen twenties to Valdosta in the nineteen seventies,” Breslow said over my other shoulder. Apparently everyone had come to gather around Gil while he told us what he knew.
“Wait a minute,” Heath said, and he disappeared back inside only to come out a minute later with Everett Sellers’s missing-persons file. “I was reading this in the car yesterday while you were in with Linda, Em, and . . .” Heath paused to flip through several pages of the file. “Where was that? Oh, here. Okay, so look at this.”
He handed me the file and I looked down at the sheet of paper, which appeared to be a summary of Mr. Owen Sellers’s business practices. “Everett’s dad owned a shipping company based in New Orleans,” Heath told Gilley and Breslow while I scanned the sheet.
I stared at the summary and wondered, “Could the board have belonged not to the Porters but to Everett Sellers?”
“It’s possible,” Breslow said.
Turning to Gil, I said, “Uh, Gilley?”
“Yeah, yeah, you want me to research the Porters and see if they had any ties to New Orleans. Got it. Right after my nap.”
I was tempted to insist that Gil get off his duff and do the research, but then I remembered he’d said he’d been up most of the night trying to find a reference to the Sandman, so I let it go. “Thanks,” I told him.
With that, we left Mrs. G.’s and Breslow talked about which leads we should focus on. “Today we definitely need to stop by Glenn Porter’s,” he said.
“I think it’s more important to talk to Sarah than Glenn,” I said.
“It’s not as easy to talk to Sarah as you’d think,” Breslow told me, and he seemed uncomfortable about something.
“She’s not dead, is she?” Heath said from the back, and I thought he was only half kidding.
“No, no, she’s alive. She’s just not quite all there, if you get my drift.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Heath and he shrugged. “We’re not getting your drift, Beau. How about filling us in?”
“A few years back Sarah Porter had a nervous breakdown. She’s a sweet lady, but she’s not all there,” Beau said, tapping his temple. “She startles super easy too, so we’ll have to tread lightly with her.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “But we still need to talk to her about that playroom. If she didn’t witness or wasn’t involved with the crime, she had to have known about the body in the playroom. I mean, all those toys in there belonged to a little girl, and she was the only little girl in the house at the time.”
“I hear ya,” Beau said. “But let’s tackle Glenn Porter first.”
A bit later we had come to a stop in front of an old home that’d been converted into an office building, which sat atop a hill overlooking lovely manicured lawns and well-kept gardens and was ringed by a fleur-de-lis capped wrought iron fence. The exterior of the building appeared freshly painted a light gray-blue with gleaming white trim and as a whole it represented a most charming facade.
The sign at the front read GLENN PORTER, LLC.
“What does Porter d
o?” I asked as we got out of the car and headed up the first set of stairs leading us to the front door.
“Mostly real estate investments,” Breslow told me. “At least that’s what I read in the paper about him a few years ago.”
“Have you ever met him?” Heath asked.
“Oh, yeah. Stopped him for a speeding ticket a year ago. He fought it in court and won. He was pretty smug about it too, the bastard.”
I squared my shoulders. “Well, let’s see if he’s as smug about a forty-five-year-old body showing up in his old house.”
We entered the building and I took note of the rather dim interior, the creaking floors, and the smell of a very old house.
“Hello, Deputy,” said a husky female voice. We all turned toward the sound and discovered a gorgeous woman with ebony black hair, bright blue eyes, and a porcelain white complexion. I took one look at her and wished I’d put on a little more makeup. Heath took one look at her and turned away, pinning his eyes on anything in the room but her.
Great. He thought she was crazy beautiful too; otherwise, he wouldn’t have made such a show of averting his eyes.
“Uh, hello,” said Breslow, quickly pulling off his hat. “How’re . . . uh . . . how’re you today, ma’am?”
She stifled a smile. The deputy was clearly also a bit thrown by her beauty. “I’m fine. What can we do for you today, sir?”
Breslow’s face went blank. It was like a switch was flipped and he lost the ability to think. I stepped forward and said, “Hi, I’m Deputy Holliday, and these are my associates, Deputy Whitefeather and Deputy Breslow. We’re here on a matter of some urgency. Is Mr. Porter in?”
“Oh! Of course, let me just go in and tell him you’re here. Won’t you please have a seat?” She made a motion for us to sit in the small area near her desk, which held a fainting couch and two wing chairs. The boys took the wing chairs, and I was left with the couch. It wasn’t lost on me that the chairs faced the gorgeous woman’s desk, while the couch was angled away from it.
We’d barely gotten comfortable when the woman came back and smiled sweetly at us. “Mr. Porter is just finishing up a phone call. May I interest you in a cup of coffee, or water, or maybe a soda?”
“I could go for a cola,” Breslow said.
“I’m good,” Heath said, again keeping his eyes trained on anything in the room but her. His gaze landed on me and I gave him a pointed look. “Okay, maybe a cup of coffee?” he said, misinterpreting my expression.
I rolled my eyes before turning to her and saying, “I’m sorry—what was your name?”
“Chloe,” she said. “And I’m the one who should be sorry. I should’ve introduced myself to y’all.”
“Don’t worry about it, Chloe. I’d love a water. Either bottled or tap is fine.”
She moved over to a small credenza at the opposite end of the room and got our drinks ready before placing them on a tray and bringing them to us. She moved with a beautiful fluidity, and Breslow practically swooned when she handed him his soda can and accompanying glass.
“You look very pretty today,” Heath said to me immediately after he lifted his drink off the tray.
I did my best not to give in to the temptation to roll my eyes. “Thank you, Heath.”
“Your water, ma’am?” Chloe said.
After taking the water and thanking her, I hoped like hell Porter wrapped up his phone call soon.
I got my wish a very short time later when the office door Chloe had disappeared through earlier opened and out stepped a very handsome man in an impeccably tailored suit. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, brushing a hand through his dark blond locks and flashing the most winning smile at us.
I turned to Heath. “You look pretty today.”
He chose to ignore me and focused on standing up without spilling his coffee. Breslow and I also got to our feet and Porter said, “Deputy, won’t you and your associates please come in?”
Breslow took a step forward but then seemed to hesitate, unsure what to do with his glass of soda.
“Would you like me to hold on to that for you?” Chloe asked.
Beau’s cheeks went scarlet red. “That’d be great!” he said with a bit too much enthusiasm. He seemed to realize it because he immediately cleared his throat and added, “Thank you, Zoe.”
Her solicitude never faded and I had to hand it to the girl for keeping nothing but a pleasant smile on her lips. As we headed toward Porter’s office, I nudged Breslow. “By the way, if you work up the courage to ask her out later, you really should get her name right.”
He looked almost panicked. “What? Why? Isn’t her name Chloe?”
“Yes, Deputy, but you just called her Zoe.”
He rather subtly slapped his forehead right before turning into Porter’s office. I glanced at Heath, who was behind me, and he grinned and shook his head. He’d caught the deputy’s slipup too.
When I turned to face forward again, however, I nearly walked right into Breslow, who’d stopped unexpectedly just inside the doorway. “Beau?” I said, tapping his shoulder.
But he wasn’t moving. And then it hit me why he’d stopped dead in his tracks. “What the . . . ,” I heard him whisper, perfectly mirroring my thoughts as I took in the interior of Glenn Porter’s office.
“Holy shit,” Heath whispered from behind me. He’d seen it too.
“Come in, come in,” Porter told us, waving his hand enthusiastically as he took a seat behind an enormous desk covered in folders and paper.
I eyed him more keenly now and dismissed the initial thought I’d had at such a handsome man. “It’s okay, Beau,” I whispered. “Heath and I have enough magnets on us to stop any spook in its tracks.”
This may or may not have been true, because all Heath and I had on us were our fishing vests, and considering that we were up against a room where every single square inch of wall space was occupied with a hanging planchette, I wasn’t especially confident in anything except my ability to run . . . very, very fast if necessary.
“Do you like my collection?” Porter said, sitting down rather elaborately and waving to the walls.
Breslow took three tentative steps forward into the room and Heath and I stuck close on either side of him. “Is this some kind of a joke, Mr. Porter?” Beau managed in a horse voice.
Porter adopted a confused look. “Joke? What joke would that be, Deputy . . . ah . . . ?”
“Breslow.”
“Deputy Breslow. What kind of joke do you believe I’m trying to make?”
He was toying with us, the son of a bitch. “Maybe you think you can outsmart the investigators on a forty-five-year-old murder?” I suggested. “That’d be a great joke, wouldn’t it, Mr. Porter?”
Porter turned his steely blue eyes on me. “Forty-five-year-old murder?” he said with forced surprise. “What are you people going on about?”
“We found the remains of a young man in your home,” Breslow said bluntly.
Porter put a hand to his chest and widened his eyes. “In my home?” The deputy nodded. “Well, first, I will repeat that I have no idea what you’re talking about, and second, I hope you obtained a warrant to search my residence?”
“We didn’t need one,” Heath said, but Porter talked over him.
“Well, I can’t possibly think that you would enter my home without my permission or a warrant. Furthermore, as I’ve only owned my house for the past six months, I can’t possibly imagine why you would think I had anything to do with anything suspicious dating back to that property from forty-five years ago. If there was a murder committed on my premises, it was well before my time there.”
I wanted to smack him. He knew damn well what we were talking about and he seemed to be enjoying playing semantics with us and forcing us to explain ourselves.
“The skeletal remains were found in the hidden playroom inside Porter Manor,” Heath growled. He didn’t much care for Glenn’s antics either.
“Inside Porter Manor?” Glenn repeated. “Well, I sold that home several months ago. . . . Er . . . who did you say you were?”
“Deputy Whitefeather,” Heath said, and for emphasis, he coolly flashed the badge Beau had given him.
Porter merely smirked at him. “I didn’t know the Valdosta sheriff’s department was keeping its deputies in plain clothes these days.”
“We think the remains belong to Everett Sellers,” I said.
“You think?” Porter said, his cunning eyes shifting to me. “The coroner hasn’t confirmed to whom they belong?”
“Not yet,” I said, without elaborating.
“So, how can you possibly know that these remains aren’t far older than forty-five years?” Porter said, his amused and overly dramatic antics starting to really irritate me. “I mean, that house was in our family for seven generations! Those remains could have been anyone’s, including another one of my relatives who died of natural causes and was, for whatever reason, stored in the house in this hidden room you claim to have found.”
“We don’t think so,” Breslow said.
Porter picked up the receiver on his phone, dangling it in one hand. “Yes, well, assuming I’m about to be accused of something, I’ll call my attorney and have him head down to the morgue to see this body for himself and tell me what he thinks.”
“It ain’t at the morgue,” Breslow told him, a bit anxious to have Porter set down his phone.
“Why not?”
“The remains were stolen,” Breslow admitted. I was a little irritated that he’d done that, but then I realized that if Porter had killed Everett, then he most likely would’ve snuck back into the house to remove the remains and he’d know already that they weren’t at the morgue. “Do you know somethin’ about that, Mr. Porter?”
“Stolen?” Porter said, a wicked smile lifting the edges of his mouth. “From the morgue?”
Breslow was quiet, and that seemed to be all that Porter needed to set down the receiver and settle smugly back into his chair. “I see,” he said, barely keeping back a snicker. “Well, if you don’t have a body, Deputy, then you don’t have a murder.”