Chapter Two
Two
“Delilah?” Tariq whispered. As he peered closely at the woman’s face, streaked with mud, his expression shifted from shock to horror to outrage. He sprang up and bolted toward the mansion.
Harper again glanced at the silhouetted figure still visible in the upstairs window. If that wasn’t Delilah Mason, the owner of the house, then who was standing there, looking down at them?
“Tariq! Wait!” she called out.
But it was too late. Tariq had been swallowed up by the black void of the mansion’s open door.
Harper looked toward the street, hoping to spy the flashing lights of an approaching police car or ambulance. Nothing yet.
She could not let Tariq face a potential murderer alone.
“You’ll stay with her?” Harper asked Lamont. He nodded.
She ran toward the house, through the open door, and paused in the dark foyer.
“Tariq?”
The house was cloaked in shadows, lit only by the hazy light sifting in through the windows from the streetlamps and the garden lights. She groped for a light switch and turned it on.
Something was staring at her.
She jumped back, startled by a taxidermied raccoon in a wall niche. It was dressed as a cowboy, with a red scarf around its neck and a miniature Stetson on its head.
Harper took a deep breath and willed her heart to stop pounding.
The mansion’s ceilings were low, the adobe walls thick.
The interiors had been sculpted from adobe and stucco, creating benches, inset niches, and organically shaped built-in shelves emerging from corners.
The main hallway opened onto large rooms on either side of the front door.
She poked her head into a crowded living room.
The cowboy raccoon was just the start of the oddities: The house was chock-full of tchotchkes, collectibles, and curios of all sorts.
Glass-fronted wooden cases were jammed not only with books but numerous jars and assorted figurines.
A paint-stained wooden easel stood in the center of the room, and colorful paintings and half-finished canvases were scattered throughout, leaning against walls and furniture.
A huge fireplace was crowned by an ornate, gilt-framed antique mirror that had been draped in a gray shroud.
“Tariq?” she called again. There was no response, but she heard a muffled screeching sound overhead, as if a chair were being dragged across the thick wooden planks of the floor. What was he doing up there?
Hurrying down the hall to the stairwell, Harper started up.
As soon as her foot hit the third step, she started to feel strange.
Dizzy. Confused. She thought she was mounting the stairs, and yet when she looked down, her feet were not moving.
The walls began undulating, the stairwell growing thinner then thicker on either side of her, as if the walls were breathing.
She grabbed for the wooden banister, gripping the rail, worn smooth and slick over the centuries, like a lifeline.
She heard faraway music in her head: a soaring requiem for the dead.
Harper paused, closed her eyes, and tried to regulate her breathing. I must be more affected by the shock than I realized.
The welcome sound of sirens approaching outside indicated that help was on its way.
“Tariq? The police are almost here!”
Still no response. Then she heard something behind her. A barely-there rustling. Tariq must be downstairs after all.
At least…she hoped it was Tariq. Why wasn’t he answering her?
With effort, Harper made her way back down the few steps and into the hallway. As soon as she stepped off the stairs, she felt more herself.
Another muted rustling sound. It seemed to be coming from the living room / art space.
Picking up a heavy ceramic bust to use as a weapon—just in case—she stepped in, her eyes darting about, but the large room appeared just as before: cluttered with objects but nary a soul.
Two doorways on the other side of the room led to other hallways or rooms. How deeply into the bowels of this mansion did she dare to venture?
Out of the corner of her eye she spotted something move and whirled around. What was it? She saw nothing now, but…there was something about that shrouded mirror over the fireplace. Swallowing hard, she approached slowly, reached out to lift the shroud, and—
“Boo.”
She jumped, whirled around again, and punched Tariq in the chest.
“Jackass!” Harper said, her heart racing. “Where were you? And where did you come from?”
“Came through the back. There’s a servants’ stair that leads off that little hallway.”
“Did you see anyone upstairs?”
He shook his head, his eyes sad. “No, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Police! Everybody out, hands over your heads,” came a shout from the open doorway. “Now.”
The garden of the Perles Mansion had been transformed, illuminated by bright search lights as well as the flashing red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles on the street.
The EMTs examined the victim and gave her oxygen, while Lamont quietly explained where they had found her and what they had done to help her.
Still unconscious, Delilah Mason was loaded onto a gurney and rushed to the hospital, siren blaring.
The next few hours would have been dreamlike had they not been so nightmarish.
Harper, Tariq, Joel, and the retired couple watched in silence as the so-called Séance Garden was documented, photographed, and processed by forensic techs.
All the other tour participants appeared to have fled, and Harper could hardly blame them.
A uniformed police officer took their names and brief statements, and told them to wait by the garden wall, away from the scene, to speak with the detective.
“I can’t even…I mean, what just happened?” Harper said, leaning back against the adobe garden wall.
Tariq shook his head. “Whatever it was, it’s the stuff of horror movies.”
“I was a nurse for thirty years,” Lamont said. “The last five in the ER. I’ve seen some mighty weird things. But never anything like that.”
Margene nodded in agreement. “Buried alive? That’s a new one, for sure.”
When the homicide detective arrived, he introduced himself as Detective Tom Serrano.
He appeared to be in his forties with a well-padded frame, his sandy-blond hair in a military-style crew cut that made his head into a nearly perfect square.
He reminded Harper of the old detective shows her father used to watch on late-night reruns, but more in the mold of Joe Friday than Columbo.
In a polite but no-nonsense, “Just the facts, ma’am,” tone, the detective asked to speak with the retired couple over near the house.
Harper and Tariq waited in silence, taking it all in. When Harper drew an audibly shaky breath, Tariq put his arm around her. Grateful, she sank into his warmth.
After another several minutes, Detective Serrano called out, “Tariq Johnson?”
“Wish me luck,” Tariq said to Harper, and pushed away from the wall.
Detective Serrano spent much longer with Tariq than he had with Lamont and Margene. It made Harper uneasy, and she strained to hear their conversation, but without luck.
The detective at last came over to Harper. “You Dr. Grae?”
She nodded.
“MD?”
“PhD. I’m a history professor.”
“Uh-huh,” the detective said. “Tell me what you saw. Don’t leave anything out.”
“The whole evening or only from when we got here?”
“From when you got here.”
“We were outside on the sidewalk. While Joel the tour guide was talking, I saw someone in an upstairs window,” Harper said. “I told the responding officers. That’s why Tariq and I went in.”
“Which window?”
“That one.” She pointed to the now-dark window.
Detective Serrano frowned and conferred with a younger uniformed officer, who had been among the first to arrive.
He told the detective that after securing the scene, seeing to the victim, and ordering Tariq and Harper out of the house, he examined all the doors of the mansion, which appeared to have been not only closed, but locked.
“Get the key,” Detective Serrano snapped at the officer before turning back to Harper. “What did this person in the window look like?”
“I couldn’t really tell you. I only saw a shadow.”
“Male? Female? Any distinguishing features?”
Harper shook her head. “It was a silhouette, so the features weren’t clear enough to describe. I think the hair was short, but it might have been tied back or something. I mean, I didn’t see long hair, just the figure of someone silhouetted against the curtains, with the light behind her.”
“Her? So it was a woman?” Detective Serrano asked.
“At the time I assumed it was Delilah Mason.”
“But Mason was here in the garden, buried alive. It couldn’t have been her.”
“So it seems.” Harper, ever the good student, felt as though she had disappointed a teacher who had held out hope for her great promise.
“Wait here,” he said, nodding to the young officer, who came to stand by Harper.
Two uniformed officers went to the rear of the house, while the detective pounded on the front door, yelling “Police!” Then he stood back, and on the count of three, two men slammed a large red battering ram into the door with a loud crash.
The historian in Harper was horrified at the sound of the centuries-old wooden door splintering.
She caught herself. A murderer is at large. Keep some perspective, Harper.
Rapid footsteps and muffled shouts emanated from within the dark house as the police raced through.
She imagined boots clomping along the old floorboards, clumsy young men knocking over furniture and sending valuable antiques and artwork crashing to the floor.
After what seemed like a very long time, Detective Serrano returned.
“Anyone?” she asked.
“Not a soul.” He looked at her thoughtfully, his head cocked. “What’s more, the doors and windows appear to be locked. From the inside. That’s why we had to use the key to get in.”
“You had the key?”
“That’s what we call the battering ram. Works like a key to open doors. Personally, though, I call it the Enforcer.” He shrugged at her blank stare. “Cop humor, I guess. The question is: Are you sure you saw someone inside?”
“Maybe they’re hiding, and you couldn’t find them? Old buildings like this sometimes have hidden rooms, back hallways, that kind of thing. Tariq mentioned a second staircase.”
“Maybe so. A K-9 unit is on its way. If someone’s inside, the dog’ll find them. My question is: How did that door get locked when you were just in there?”
“Good question.”
He stared at her.
“I honestly have no idea,” Harper continued. “There must be someone inside after all.”
“Run this by me again—why did you and your boyfriend go inside the house?”
“Tariq isn’t my boyfriend. We’re old college friends, went to Berkeley together.”
“Good school.”
Harper nodded and said in a weak voice, “Go Bears.”
“You touch anything inside? Do anything, see anything?”
She shook her head. “It was dark and seemed empty.”
“And you were on this ghost tour? Led by Joel Aristide?”
Harper nodded.
“A dark night, an old house, lots of spooky ghost stories…Any chance you thought you saw something that wasn’t there?”
“No,” Harper said flatly.
“You sure?”
“Positive. I’m not a ghost person, Detective. Or, to rephrase, I suppose in a weird way I am, but I’m a skeptic and I thought the ghost tour was silly. I’m a historian, a professor at Monterey College.”
“Oh yeah? My neighbor’s kid goes there. What kind of history do you teach?”
“I’m sort of a history department of one, so I teach it all.
But my research specialty is the social and cultural meaning of witchcraft, ghost stories, and tales of rising from the dead, that sort of thing.
Botanical poisons are a sideline. I’m currently writing about being—” She stopped, realizing she might incriminate herself in some way, given the circumstances.
Never, in a million years, would she have thought her historical research would make her a possible suspect in an attempted homicide.
“Being what?”
“Being buried alive.”