The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion: A Haunted Bookshop Mystery

anything to report?” The chief almost laughed in my face. “That’s the best you can do, Mrs. McClure? You , with your bookshop full of fantasy detectives!”
    “But Chief!”
    “What?”
    “Seymour Tarnish would never murder a poor, defense-less, little old lady! Seymour Tarnish wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
    A grunt sounded behind me. Without looking, I instantly knew Bull McCoy had come back outside.
    “You lookin’ at Tarnish for this, Uncle Wade—I mean, Chief ?”
    There was boisterous anticipation in Bull’s tone, if not outright glee. Sure enough, I turned to find the giant in a uniform smiling. Bull never could stand Seymour, and the feeling was mutual.
    “Pick him up, Bull,” Ciders said. “Now.”
    “Chief Ciders, please don’t do that!” I begged. “I’m sure you’re jumping to the wrong—”
    Stop, baby! Jack boomed in my head. Take a breath.
    My fists clenched. “Why?!” I asked the ghost.
    Because you should let the big lummox bring in your pal, that’s why. Maybe the letter carrier saw something you didn’t. Can’t be any harm in asking him to answer a few simple questions, can there?
    I exhaled, inhaled, exhaled. “No,” I silently told Jack. “I guess a few simple questions can’t hurt.”
    For once, doll, I’m actually in agreement with Chief Cornpone.
    “About Seymour?”
    Admit it, honey. Isn’t there some small part of you that’s dying to ask the mailman how he got that red stain on the back of his blue shirt?
    “Maybe,” I told the ghost. “But there’s a much bigger part of me that’s afraid of hearing his answer.”

CHAPTER 4
     
    The Chief’s Suspect
     
    You stand for your side of it and I’ll stand for mine.
I didn’t do it, and that’s all I stand for.
    —Frank Chambers, lying to the DA in
The Postman Always Rings Twice ,
James M. Cain, 1934
     
     
     
     
    FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Bull delivered my mailman to the Todd mansion. Chief Ciders escorted Seymour inside, sat him down, and started asking him those “few simple questions.”
    “Why’d you do it, Tarnish? Why’d you murder the old lady?”
    Seymour leaped out of his chair. “Are you crazy?! I didn’t murder anybody!”
    I gritted my teeth. Sunlight was streaming in through Miss Todd’s tall dining room windows. Ciders had opened them wide to air out the room, and a hot breeze was now making the sheer curtains billow violently. As far as I could see from my seat in the corner, an even larger amount of hot air was being produced by the humans in the room.
    Seymour wagged his finger in the chief’s face. “And another thing. I demand you return my uniform!” (Under Ciders’s orders, Bull had already dragged Seymour into the kitchen and forcibly removed his shirt and shorts.) “That uniform is property of the Postmaster General of the U. S. of A.! And in case you need a refresher course in civics, the federal government supersedes your puny jurisdiction!”
    “Sit down!”
    For a few tense moments, Seymour refused to heed Ciders’s command. I didn’t think that was such a good idea. For one thing, Ciders was bigger than Seymour. Not that Seymour was a little guy. He was actually on the beefy side with heavy arms and a moderate belly (per his ice cream addiction) on top of sinewy chicken legs and bony knees (from his hikes carrying mail every day). At the moment, however, with Seymour’s postal uniform impounded as evidence, he was dressed in nothing but his undershirt, a pair of Superman boxers, white tube socks, and black sneakers. Ciders, on the other hand, was packing a service weapon with (presumably) live ammo.
    “I said, sit down !” the chief barked again. “Or I’ll have you hauled off and booked right now!”
    Ciders’s voice was so loud it actually rattled the substantial collection of crystal displayed in Miss Todd’s colossal china cabinet. I knew this because my chair was located right next to the mahogany showpiece.
    Decibel level aside, I was seriously upset with Ciders’s treatment of Seymour. Not only was it brutish, I didn’t find it at all helpful to the investigation. I was also eager to question Seymour myself, but I knew Ciders well by now. If I made any trouble, he’d banish me from the house. The only reason I was allowed to watch this interrogation at all was to “finger” Seymour for the chief: Ciders told me that if he ran into trouble getting Seymour to “talk,” he intended to use my “witness statement” to pressure the mailman into