The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion: A Haunted Bookshop Mystery

glass.
    “You’re out of uniform,” I said, unlocking the door.
    “Like it?” he adjusted the silver-and-blue silk tie. “I’m driving to Providence to give my final deposition on the Briggs-Wolfe mess. Lots of state officials and lawyer types.” He smiled. “Just like Seymour, I’m blending in to my environment.”
    “Come on in.” I led him to the counter, where Sadie greeted him and he helped himself to a warm, glazed pecan roll from the Cooper’s bakery box.
    “So what’s the almost final verdict?” I asked, pouring him black coffee from our thermos.
    “Plea deal all the way,” he said between bites of buttery roll. “Jim Wolfe cooperated, so he’ll do less time. But he’ll do time, and that’s what counts.”
    “And April?” I asked.
    “She’ll probably plea down to manslaughter on Miss Todd’s murder. ‘Frightened to death’ is a tough count to prove. But her stepfather is a whole other ballgame. When she confessed to killing him on the boat, that put her away. There’s a psychological evaluation pending, but I can’t see the shrinks helping her.”
    I didn’t, either. It seemed to me April’s sickness came from an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and a whole lot of greed. The psychologists haven’t identified those traits as pathologies. Not yet, anyway.
    “So what exactly was the story on April and her stepfather?” I asked.
    Eddie washed down another bite of roll with a gulp of coffee. “Arthur Fromsette got curious about what April was doing, taking that path from their house to Miss Todd’s folly so often. One day, he followed her. The scheme to scare her aunt to death came out. April admitted that she expected her mother to inherit Todd Mansion. Mother Fromsette always had been generous to a fault with her daughter—loaning her money, paying off credit cards close to the point of personal bankruptcy. So April figured anything her mother inherited was as good as hers. But Arthur was appalled. He knew about her affair with Jim Wolfe, too, and probably the fact that April was cooking Wolfe’s books with the tax man to keep his business going.”
    “Wolfe Construction was in financial trouble?”
    Eddie nodded. “Jim Wolfe underbid on so many contracts around the region that he ended up in debt. The upshot is that Arthur Fromsette wanted to convince his stepdaughter to change her ways by threatening to go to the authorities. It didn’t work. She killed him.”
    “Then it was April who attacked Rachel Delve at the séance?”
    “According to April’s confession, she believed Miss Delve was about to reveal the truth to her mother about her stepfather’s murder.” Eddie shook his head. “The act was good enough to convince April, even though it sounds like a lot of voodoo hooey to me. Talking to the dead! Can you imagine?”
    Maybe I ought to send a little chill Eddie’s way.
    “Shhh, Jack.”
    Eddie shrugged. “In any case, April was the one who doused the candle and struck Rachel in the nose with the heel of her palm. Rachel was lucky she survived—Mrs. Briggs learned the technique in a martial arts class. If that single blow had been a little stronger, it could have killed the woman.”
    Sadie cleared her throat. “Explain the timing to me again, Eddie. Those electronics were installed late last summer, weren’t they?”
    “Yeah,” said Eddie. “Pen was right about that. Jim Wolfe set all the special effects up during the two weeks Miss Todd was in Newport.”
    “But they didn’t use the devices to frighten Timothea for nine months,” Sadie noted.
    “With Arthur Fromsette’s disappearance, there was a police investigation and Jim Wolfe got scared. But as the months passed, Wolfe got deeper in debt, and more and more desperate. Finally, when April moved back in with her mother for the summer, she convinced him to go forward with their original plan.”
    I glanced around to make sure Spencer was out of earshot. “And what about that other matter?” I asked quietly.
    Eddie leaned close. “We buried Gideon Wexler in his real grave on the Old Farm early yesterday morning. Nobody noticed.”
    “What was in the original coffin?” Sadie asked.
    “A bag of rocks,” Eddie said. “God knows how Miss Todd pulled that one off.”
    I shivered, recalling the night I slept on that platform bed in Miss Todd’s master bedroom. Who knew I was sleeping over a mummified corpse?
    What’s the matter, baby, lose your interest in dead guys?
    “Funny,