Hark! The Herald Angel Screamed: An Augusta Goodnight Mystery (with Heavenly Recipes) (8 page)

Vance felt in his pocket for the key to the house. “Anybody ready for a tour? I haven’t been inside since I was little but I remember thinking how beautiful it was. I’m curious to see it again.”

“I hope you won’t be disappointed,” I said, knowing that time and neglect hadn’t been kind to the old family home.

“I can hardly wait!” Jamie started walking a little ahead of the rest of us but she stopped suddenly and stood looking at the house. “Is somebody supposed to be in there?” she asked.

“Not that I know of,” I said. “Why?”

Jamie pointed to an upstairs window. “I thought I saw someone up there. Looked like a woman. Didn’t any of you see her?”

Vance frowned. “There shouldn’t be anyone in there. Are you sure you saw somebody?”

Jamie hesitated before speaking. “I thought I did … I could swear it moved, but I guess it could have been a curtain or something.”

I didn’t want to tell her there weren’t any curtains in the house. “Must’ve been poor Celia,” I said and told her about the family ghost.

“Ghost or not, I think we should check this out,” Vance said, turning to Ben. “What do you say we take a look inside? If there’s anyone in there I’d like to know who they are and what they’re doing here.”

“Oh no, you don’t!” I told him. “You’re not leaving me out here. If you two go inside, I’m going, too.”

Jamie nodded. “Count me in, too,” she said.

I slipped back into my jacket as we huddled on the portico waiting for Vance to unlock the heavy front door. And that was when we heard it. Someone was playing a violin and the music was coming from inside the house.

Suddenly it seemed to have turned much colder.

his is ridiculous!” Ben said, wiping his feet before entering—as if a few extra clumps of dirt would matter to years’ accumulation of dust. “There has to be a rational explanation for this.”

Vance, who walked ahead of us, stopped so short I almost collided with him. “Can you hear anything now? It seems to be over,” he said, putting out a hand to quiet us.

Standing there in a silent knot, we waited until my feet grew numb and I just had to shuffle a bit. “I think the concert’s finished,” I told them.

“Well, I’m going in search of the soloist,” Ben said, striding into what had once been my grandmother’s dining room. Vance chose to go in the other direction and began poking behind doors and into crannies in the drawing room leaving Jamie and me alone in the vast entrance hall, where even our whispers echoed around us. Clementine, who had chosen to chase a rabbit rather than accompany us inside the house, was of little or no use to us here.

“Kids!” Jamie said finally. “Has to be some kind of prank.”

“Most likely,” I said, hoping it was true. I didn’t tell her that Ellis had heard similar music the morning we discovered the body
beneath the balcony, and even Augusta had admitted to hearing a scuttling noise. Doors opened and closed and drawers slammed shut as the two men explored the rooms beyond, which included a large kitchen, small parlor, and two adjoining bedrooms in the back. Willowbrook was a solid square house built to last through the years, which it obviously had. The four rooms in the front shared two chimneys while the larger of the bedrooms in the back, the one that had been my grandmother’s, had its own fireplace. The smaller room adjoining it had none.

Jamie and I wandered into the drawing room, which seemed to be the sunnier, and therefore the warmer of the rooms to wait while Ben and Vance stormed about like a dedicated SWAT team thumping and bumping about. “Don’t worry,” I told her, “I’m sure they’ll be all right.” She couldn’t see that I had a death grip on the cell phone in my jacket pocket.

She managed a smile. “Vance has told me so much about this old place, I just had to see it—didn’t expect such an adventure! It is beautiful, though—or it could be. I can see why he cares so much about it.”

And I hope you care about him if you’re planning to live here
, I thought, sidestepping a pile of debris. The house smelled of mice and mildew.

“Come look at this.” Vance appeared in the doorway and led us into the larger of the bedrooms. “Somebody has been using this fireplace.” He kicked aside a couple of empty food cans and a crumpled bread wrapper. “It’s a wonder this whole place hasn’t burned to the ground.”

We found the charred remains of a fire in the grate and a few pieces of firewood were stacked on the hearth along with an empty half pint of some kind of liquor I’d never heard of.

“Trespassers are getting in somehow,” Ben offered. “Looks like you’re going to have to start boarding the place up.”

“I’ll ask Granddad to speak to Mr. Tansey. I’m sure he makes an
effort, but just locking the doors doesn’t seem to be working.” Hands on his hips, Vance stared at the clutter around the fireplace. “We can’t have this kind of thing!”

“Preacher Dave says he’s run off squatters from time to time, and I know he tries to keep an eye on the place, but with his other duties, I guess he can’t check on things like he should.” I found that I had trouble speaking through the knot in my throat. I was glad my grandmother couldn’t see her precious Willowbrook now.

We went upstairs in single file to find a similar jumble of litter. The fireplaces had been sealed off in two of the four bedrooms but a pigeon, which had apparently flown in through a broken window, lay dead in a corner of one, and a dirty, tattered sleeping bag had been tossed in another. I wondered if it had belonged to the man who plunged from the balcony. Mouse droppings were evident everywhere and I glanced at Jamie to see how she was reacting to her tour of her boyfriend’s ancestral home. Noticing the attention, she merely shrugged. “I think you might want to invent a better mousetrap,” she told him.

Ben seemed to be taking careful note of the walls, paying particular attention to areas around the fireplaces. In one of the front-bedrooms, cabinets had been built on either side of the fireplace and he meticulously investigated both of them, tapping from every angle.

“Maybe there’s a lever somewhere that makes it revolve,” I teased. “That’s the way it works in the movies.”

“I did think we might find a tape recorder or something like that,” Ben said, running his fingers along the sides of the cabinets. “That music had to come from somewhere.”

Vance stood at one of the two long windows that faced the front. A shutter hung crazily to one side and pale winter sunlight cut a crooked pathway across the grimy floor. “There’s a drainpipe loose out here,” he said, “and the wind
was
blowing earlier. Do you think that might have been what we heard?”

“If it was, it was playing a tune!” Jamie told him. “And I think I’ve heard that song before.”

It had sounded familiar to me, too, I said. “Did you recognize what it was?”

Jamie shook her head. “No, but I’m sure it didn’t come from any drainpipe!”

I repeated the snatch of music in my head. The notes were from a few bars of a longer composition, and I knew they would haunt me until I learned what it was. During the drive home I hummed them aloud so I wouldn’t forget, and Ben agreed that what we had heard at Willowbrook had been deliberately played for our benefit.

We had found nothing in any of the bedrooms upstairs or in the large room behind them that ran across the back of the house. Mimmer had told me that at various times that room had been a ballroom, a schoolroom, even quarters for a bachelor uncle, and later a storeroom for the family’s discards. When we emptied the house after Mimmer died I rescued a perfectly beautiful Windsor chair that now sits in the corner of my living room from what my grandmother referred to as “the junk room.”

“I hope Vance and his family won’t waste any time closing up that house,” Ben said as we waited at a traffic light. “The kids around here have obviously heard rumors of your family ghost, and some have even claimed they saw a woman in a hoopskirt on the balcony. That poor fellow’s death out there just added fuel to the fire.” He reached over to nuzzle Clementine’s ears as she once again snuggled between us. “If anyone is injured in a fire out there—God forbid—your cousin Grayson would be held responsible.”

“And I doubt if he even has insurance,” I admitted. “It’s almost impossible to get a policy on an empty house.” Although I knew from my grandson that local students were out of school for a teachers’ workday, I really didn’t believe our mysterious violinist was part of a harmless prank. After all, Augusta herself had said
we hadn’t seen the end of the trouble at Willowbrook. And Augusta was usually right.

Ben had a meeting about an order for a cherry writing desk with somebody in Columbia that afternoon, but he took time to help me get the tree in a stand and put it in my living-room window before leaving. Later that evening my son, Roger, and his wife, Jessica, would drop by with Teddy to help me decorate. Meanwhile, Augusta got us started by stringing the lights and the delicate garlands that looked like miniature red apples. Charlie had brought them to me from a business trip several years before, and for a while after his death I couldn’t bring myself to put them on the tree.

“I believe it’s almost as pretty as the one we got for the church,” I said as Augusta swirled strings of tiny white lights in a perfect pattern. I told her about the music we had heard that morning but didn’t try to repeat the tune. Augusta loves to sing but her notes don’t always ring true, and I knew it would be a waste of time to ask her if she knew it. Why, she told me herself she had never even been allowed to audition for the heavenly choir.

Now she stepped back to appraise what she had done, and apparently satisfied, sank onto the rose brocade rocking chair by the fireplace. I seldom keep a fire in there as we usually spent our time in the small sitting room, but since the family was coming tonight, Augusta had agreed to build one, and now a happy little blaze crackled in the grate.

“Did you ever find the source of that music?” she asked, trying to avoid rocking on Clementine’s tail.

“No such luck, and believe me, we looked that whole place over, room by room. Ben took a lot of time checking those cabinets on either side of the fireplace, too, but he couldn’t find anywhere that might be a hiding place.”

“I don’t suppose you heard anything else?” Augusta fingered her dazzling necklace, flashing gold and amber in the fire’s light.

“You mean like the scuttling sound you heard?” I said. “No, but there must’ve been an army of mice in there! The whole place is a mess! Mimmer would just be sick if she knew.”

“Well, she doesn’t know, so don’t worry on her account, but it is a shame to see a fine old home go to ruin.” Augusta rose to check the macaroni and cheese she had made for supper and I followed to pop some corn for the tree. I’m hard put to come up with something to serve my daughter-in-law, Jessica, since she’s a vegetarian and won’t even indulge in an innocent hamburger now and then. Thank goodness she isn’t one of those people who won’t eat any animal products or I’d really be in a bind.

Corn popped in the microwave while Augusta sprinkled nutmeg over a bowl of homemade applesauce and I put together ingredients for a green salad. Supper was ready to serve and the two of us already had a good start on stringing the popcorn when Teddy burst in the back door and threw himself down to wallow with Clementine on the kitchen rug. Augusta, as usual, disappeared from view.