The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion: A Haunted Bookshop Mystery

the night in Ciders’s hoosegow before,” Seymour told the man. “You go to the hospital. Make sure the docs take good care of Rachel!”
    Miss Tuttle and Stoddard left immediately for the ER, and the other séance members departed. April Briggs was sobbing and clinging to her mother on the way out.
    “I was just so frightened,” she said, sounding like a believer now.
    I looked around for Leo, wanting to ask why it took him nearly thirty seconds to turn on the lights after Stoddard called out. But before I could locate the man I heard his Harley cough to life in the parking lot. He was speeding away as I stepped outside.
    I found Fiona standing there, her face unnaturally pale.
    “I can’t believe Ciders arrested Seymour,” I told her.
    “It’s awful what happened,” she said. “Rachel’s such a sweet girl.”
    “You don’t think Seymour did it, do you?”
    “No, of course not. But the chief can’t hold Seymour long. He’ll make bail in the morning. Let’s just hope Miss Delve revives quickly and can tell us whatever she can about who really assaulted her.”
    “How long have you known Rachel, anyway?”
    “Over a year now. I met her when I purchased her beautiful set of seafaring paintings. You’ve seen them, in our lighthouse bungalow. Seymour liked them so much that I bought one for him, too, as a housewarming gift.”
    “So Rachel’s the mysterious artist ‘RD’?”
    Fiona shrugged. “I didn’t want to introduce her to Seymour for fear he’d make an ass of himself. Who knew they’d hit it off?”
    I glanced at my watch and groaned. “I can’t believe it’s nearly two in the morning—”
    “You can’t leave yet.” She took my arm. “We have to talk. Remember you asked me to find out what I could about Todd Mansion?”
    “Yes!”
    Fiona led me back up to the inn and into her private office. “Sit,” she said, pointing out a comfortable old leather chair.
    As I settled in, I noticed she had a pot of jasmine tea already brewed and sitting on a small service cart beside her mahogany desk.
    “I did a bit of snooping,” Fiona began, as she poured our tea and handed me a bone china cup and saucer. “The local library’s records weren’t any help, but I called a friend at the Rhode Island Preservation Society in Providence. Folks there have long memories—”
    “And?”
    “And she e-mailed me a number of documents from their records. I printed them out.” Fiona settled herself behind her desk, placed a pair of delicate reading glasses on the tip of her nose, and shuffled through a pile of papers. “The real history of the Todd house began back in 1948. Before that, the house was owned by the Philips family. Old Jeremiah was a banker hit hard by the Great Depression. Then he lost both boys in the war. He managed to hang on to the family homestead until he died in 1946, when the mansion fell into receivership.”
    Fiona paused to sip her tea. “The house was purchased after that but my contact is still digging for a copy of the deed.”
    “Who purchased it? Timothea Todd?”
    Fiona shook her head. “My contact believes the purchaser was a man named Gideon Wexler.”
    My spine stiffened. “Did you hear that, Jack!” I shouted in my head and then remembered. Because of the séance, I’d intentionally left his buffalo nickel on my dresser. Swallowing, I simply repeated the name aloud: “Gideon Wexler, you say?”
    “Yes, apparently there was a chapter written on Wexler in a book about Newport spiritualists. It’s long out of print, but it’s in the Preservation Society’s library and my contact scanned some relevant pages. Now let’s see . . .” Fiona shuffled more papers. “Apparently, after the Second World War, Gideon Wexler was a big hit among high-society types in New York City. Here’s his photo—”
    She handed me a printout. Wexler was the fat man in the portrait over the mantel, all right, as well as the ghost I’d seen floating across Miss Todd’s living room. He was also the man in the newspaper Jack had shown me—the one whose mansion had burned, killing eight people, including J. J. Conway’s mother.
    “He told fortunes,” Fiona explained, “helping wealthy war widows contact their dead spouses—for substantial fees. His occult group, called the Order of the Old Ones, was so popular that Wexler purchased and refurbished an estate on Long Island. It became the group’s ‘spiritual retreat.’ And according to witnesses, strange things