Chapter Eleven
Eleven
A man appeared from around the stacks. It was none other than the ghost tour guide.
“Well, well, well,” Joel said. “If it’s not the famous Dr. Grae.”
“You startled me,” Harper replied, annoyed at his tone. “Don’t you know to say hello when you enter a room?”
“You didn’t hear the door creaking? It’s pretty loud, you know.”
“I guess I’m not sensitive enough.”
“Heh. Good one.” As he had during the ghost tour, Joel bounced as they talked. Harper wondered whether it was a self-soothing habit of some kind. “I looked you up, you know.”
“Is that right?”
“I saw that article you wrote on being buried alive. It seems like a very interesting…” He paused, as if searching for the right word. “…coincidence, wouldn’t you say? That you wrote about it, then happened upon someone who was actually buried alive?”
Harper did not deign to reply.
“So, what are you doing here?” Joel asked.
“I’m a historian. This is my natural habitat. How about you?”
“I’m a bit of a historian, myself,” said Joel. “As you know.”
“Yeah, I have a question about that: Where did you get the story about witch trials taking place here in Monterey? I can’t find any trace of them.”
“Not everything is written down. I should think you’d know that, Professor.”
“That’s certainly true. But witch trials were a big deal, and court records were usually kept,” she replied. “Can you at least tell me what year it occurred?”
Joel shrugged and looked about the room. “As the wise transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘All history becomes subjective; there is properly no history; only biography.’ ”
“He didn’t mean there was no such thing as historical facts. He was emphasizing the centrality of humans and human actions in history. And it’s true that written history reflects the philosophy and psychology and world view of the historian.”
Joel stopped wandering and stared at her. “Isn’t that what I just said?”
“No, it isn’t. Joel, you can’t go around making up something like a history of witch trials.”
“I beg to differ. Apparently, I can.” He took a deep quaff from his bright orange water bottle.
“You’re also not supposed to have liquids in here, Joel.”
“Such a stickler for the rules, you are,” he said with a smile. The humor did not reach his eyes.
“So, just to be clear: No actual evidence exists for these alleged witch hangings?”
He let out a dramatic sigh. “The Perles family was known to be ruthless. They took land that did not belong to them, and then forced impoverished workers to build their mansion for slave wages. It is said that the locals cursed them for it.”
“That isn’t a good enough story for a ghost tour?”
“Class warfare is a drag. People love the witch thing. You ever see what a tourist mecca Salem, Massachusetts, has become?”
“But Salem was the site of actual, documented witch trials.” Harper taught this sort of thing and knew the numbers well. “Nineteen people were hanged, one died of torture, and five died due to the appalling conditions of their incarceration.”
Joel ignored her, tilting his head, as if studying the labels on the boxes of documents on a nearby shelf.
Harper supposed he had a point: If people enjoyed getting spooked on a ghost tour, what was the harm?
Still, the trivialization of history, and of a societal trauma like the witch hunts, stuck in her craw.
“You mentioned that most of the Perles family died,” Harper said.
He nodded. “All save the brother and sister, Soren and Isabel.”
“Hence the curse?”
“Hence the curse.” He began to bounce again, this time swaying slightly on his feet. “Maybe the curse afflicted Delilah, too.”
“Did you know her well?” Harper asked.
“Oh, we’ve been…” Again he paused, as though searching for the right words. “We’ve been ‘associates’ for many years. In some ways, I dare say I knew her better than anyone.”
“In what ways?”
Joel took a seat beside Harper and leaned in uncomfortably close. Harper leaned back.
“I knew her secret,” he whispered.
“Which was?”
He shook his head. “I’ve kept it to myself all these years while she was alive; I won’t make it public now. Never let it be said that I’m not a gentleman.”
“That’s commendable, I guess. You mentioned that Delilah allowed you access to her garden.”
“And now, no more,” he said, his tone bleak. He let out a long sigh. “Poor Delilah. And poor me. We were on the cusp of going into business together, you know. That’s kaput now, too.”
“Really? What kind of business?”
“She was working on a line of apothecary products.”
“I’m surprised to hear that, given her success as an artist.”
A strange look came into Joel’s eyes. “After moving into the mansion, Delilah started to get sort of radicalized. In a good way. She became worried—obsessed, really—about all the new viruses going around. Covid and super-flus, that sort of thing. She believed she had access to ancient recipes and special waters that enabled her to brew unique natural cures.”
“What do you mean by ‘special waters’? Special how?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, what did she tell you about them?” Harper said in the gentle tone she used when trying to get one of her students to focus.
“She went on and on about its magical qualities, but if you ask me, the main thing was that it was free of what they put in tap water. Fluoride and chlorine and maltodextrin, and who knows what else.”
“There’s no maltodextrin in tap water, Joel. That’s a carbohydrate.”
Joel looked nonplussed. “I mean, the point is, you don’t drink tap water, do you?”
“I take it you think that’s not a good idea?”
He gave her a sage nod. “I’d avoid it if I were you. Delilah said her work with the spirits gave her access to otherworldly knowledge, which she was hoping to share with others once she nailed down the microdosing process, and that sort of thing.”
“I’m intrigued. Do you have any of these concoctions?”
He shook his head. “Wish I did. I was hoping to get back into her house, but the cops have it shut up tight. Sold the last of my supply to a lady a few days before Delilah died. Rotten timing.”
“Delilah was selling her products?”
He looked away. “It was sort of an entrepreneurial situation. No flies on me, as my mama used to say. Delilah didn’t believe in profiting off people’s bad health.
Also, she didn’t believe her products were ready to be distributed, which was ridiculous.
I’ve been using her products, and I’ve never felt better. Look at me: I’m the picture of health.”
“You actually look a little pale.”
“Pfffft!” Joel replied, and took another swig of water.
“Who did you sell the last of your supply to?”
“I’m more of a salesman than a record keeper, if you catch my drift.” He shrugged, then brightened. “There might be more, though, in Delilah’s laboratory.”
“Delilah had a laboratory?”
“Duh.”
“Where was it?”
“In her basement.”
“There’s a basement at the Perles Mansion?”
He widened his eyes. “Are you sure you’re a historian? No offense.”
“Pretty sure. I just didn’t realize historic adobe buildings had basements,” Harper said. She thought of the blueprints Constance had shown her. There was no basement noted on them.
“Not many do, but this one does. And it’s a doozy. Old Dr. Perles, the mad scientist himself, outfitted it originally, I guess.”
“Soren Perles was a mad scientist?”
Joel sighed dramatically. “You were on my tour. Weren’t you listening?”
“I might have been distracted.”
“I noticed. You and that Tariq guy.” Joel looked around, as if worried they might be overheard. In a low voice he said, “How well do you know him?”
“We’re friends.”
“Did you know he and Delilah had a thing?”
“Yes. He told me so himself.”
Joel looked deflated, as though vexed to be deprived of delivering salacious details. “Okay, then. Did he also tell you he’s been having money problems?”
Harper assumed Tariq’s aquarium job was not exactly lucrative, but he did not seem to have many expenses. He drove a twenty-year-old Camry and rented a tidy but modest one-bedroom apartment downtown. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m from here, you know. I know people. Important people. Like in the police department.”
“And what did these important people have to say?”
Joel leaned in again. “Tariq said he was at work when Delilah was murdered, but my source in the police department said they’re trying to figure out if he had enough time to do the deed before joining us on the tour.
Hard to gauge something like that, on account of how long does it take to bury someone?
I mean, you have to dig the hole first, right?
Now, I’ve never dug a grave, but that looks like an awful lot of work to me. ”
Harper was speechless.
“Just sayin’,” Joel continued with a smug smile. “You might want to be careful, lest the story of your violent end be added to the ghostly lore of Monterey.”
And with that Joel stood up quickly, then grabbed the table for balance. “I feel sort of funky…”
“Do you need help?”
“Naw, I’m good,” he said, and winked at her. He shuffled down the aisle and around the crowded stacks. A moment later the door to the research room creaked loudly then thudded shut.
Had Joel been drinking? She hadn’t smelled alcohol on him, but he seemed a bit off.
And what about those insinuations he was making about Tariq?
Surely the authorities weren’t seriously suspecting her old friend of Delilah’s murder.
That was no doubt just gossip, the result of the populace trying to figure out what had happened, indulging in the very human need to fill in the blanks and make sense of the horror.
Tariq, her Tariq, would never have been involved in such a thing. Impossible.
But…when she got down to it, how well did she really know Tariq? They hadn’t been particularly close in grad school and in the years since then hadn’t exchanged more than a few texts and emails before she came to town six weeks ago.
Harper tried to shake off Joel’s odd remarks and lose herself, once again, in her research.
She found several newspaper articles casting doubt on Soren Perles’s professional abilities, but she still wasn’t convinced.
It was common at the time for people to refuse to go to hospitals or to summon a physician unless they were already on their deathbed, which no doubt skewed the statistics.
Besides, in Soren Perles’s day, becoming a physician did not require going to medical school, and even those trained at the best medical schools were flying pretty much blind a good portion of the time.
Essentially, medieval theories were still the go-to explanations for illness and disease.
Physicians lost a lot of patients, and many medications and practices were sketchy or outright harmful.
She turned back to the account book.
Soren’s script was cramped and wildly slanted, the ink blotchy, as if his pen had pressed too hard at times and not hard enough at others.
Demerits for penmanship, Dr. Perles. The book contained lab notes, lists of chemical solutions he had ordered and how much they cost, the patients he had visited each month, and how much he had charged them.
Nothing especially noteworthy or unusual that she could see.
Harper turned the pages of the old bound volume carefully, stopping at references to what appeared to be addresses: El Encinal, San Carlos, El Carmelo, La Vieja.
Under each was a series of names or initials.
Harper checked the clock—she had to leave soon to make it to class on time. She used her phone to take photos of some of the more interesting parts of the account book, carefully packed the papers and logbooks back in the manuscript box, and returned the box to the shelf.
She paused. There was that tingling sensation again; the feeling that she was being watched. Had someone else come in while she was lost in her research?
“Joel?”
She heard the scraping of a shoe on the old boards, a creak.
“Constance? Hello?”
Harper thought she heard someone breathing, but in the deathly quiet archive the sound was drowned out by her own heartbeat.
That did it. She reached into her pocket and grabbed the pepper spray, holding it aloft as she peered around the stacks.
She would immediately be banned from the archive and her membership revoked if Constance spied the pepper spray, but this felt like an emergency.
As quietly and quickly as she could, Harper crossed the room to the door to the archive lobby, then slipped the pepper spray back into her pocket before flinging the door open. It made a loud, creaking protest.
Constance was murmuring into the phone, and a gray-haired man at a computer terminal was grumbling about forgetting his password. A fluorescent lightbulb hissed and flickered overhead.
Harper glanced behind her into the research room and repeated, “Hello?”
“Everything okay there, Harper?” called Constance, hanging up the phone.
“I think so. Did anyone come through here, into the research room?”
“Joel was here a few minutes ago. He was looking for inspiration for his tour, he said. But he rushed out, said he didn’t feel well.”
“Besides him?”
“Nobody but me and Mr. Jones,” Constance said, indicating the older man at the computer. She smiled. “Sounds like a song, ‘Me and Mr. Jones.’ ”
“I could have sworn someone was in there with me, just a moment ago.”
“Betcha it was Senor Sanchez,” Mr. Jones said, looking up from the monitor.
“Who’s Senor Sanchez?” asked Harper.
“Our resident ghost.”