Killing in C Sharp Read online

  She turned to Aed. “What instrumentation are you using for the overture to ‘Kastély’?”

  Aed relaxed. “Flute, piccolo, English horn, bassoon, strings, of course. I included trumpets in the original instrumentation, but the result sounded too ‘William Tell.’ Martial instead of tragic.”

  “Would you—”

  Aed’s phone rang, cutting her off. He glanced at the screen. “It’s my assistant. Excuse me.” He stepped into the hall.

  Gethsemane lowered her voice. “Did Aed tell you about his wife?”

  Venus stiffened. “Ex-wife. He told me enough. She should have had more faith in him, should have been stronger, more loyal.”

  “Bernard implied Aed and a student were romantically involved.”

  “Implied, alleged, hinted. Never proved. The ex-Mrs. Devlin cared more for her reputation than for Aed.” The ex-Mrs. Devlin came from an extremely wealthy, extremely scandal-averse family. “Do you believe rumors and accusations about people who matter to you? Without any proof?”

  “You mean, like allegations of murder-suicide? No.”

  Aed came back into the room. “I’m sorry, ladies, I have to go. A minor crisis with the costumer.” He shook Gethsemane’s hand. “Thank you, again, for letting Venus stay here. Not even a Wayne hotel is big enough to house both her and Stoltz under the same roof.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay at the parish house with Father Tim, Aed?” She hesitated. “Or here? After today’s row, I worry no hotel is big enough to house you and Bernard under one roof.”

  “I’ll be all right. Damned if I let the likes of that gobshite send me packing. He better be wide or I’ll claim him, yeah.”

  “Please, not another fight. The one in the church yard almost turned deadly.”

  “I wish that statue had fallen on Bernard,” Venus said. “Good riddance.”

  “Don’t worry,” Aed said. “Bernard will get his due one of these days.” His phone rang again. He checked the caller ID but didn’t answer. “My assistant again. The crisis must have gone from minor to major. I’d better go. Until tomorrow, Gethsemane.”

  She shook his hand again. “Until tomorrow, school boys and ghost hunters in tow.”

  Gethsemane waited in the upstairs parlor a few minutes for Venus and Aed to say goodbye, then joined her house guest in the study. “So.”

  Venus sank into the couch. “So.”

  “Do we sit here all evening pretending either of us wants to be in this awkward situation or do we,” Gethsemane held up a bottle of Waddell and Dobb from the bar cart, “have a drink?”

  “Drink,” Venus said. “I take mine neat.”

  “One thing we have in common.” Gethsemane poured two glasses then joined Venus on the couch. “Here’s your chance. I’m a captive audience. Go ahead and ask all those probing questions so you can get the inside scoop for your book.”

  Venus sipped bourbon and took her time answering. “I’m not a bad person.”

  “If you mean you don’t pull the wings off flies and tie tin cans to cats’ tails, I believe you. But your books are filled with lies and innuendo and hurtful insinuations.”

  “They sell well.”

  “And public hangings used to be family entertainment.”

  Venus drained her glass and got up for another. “I used to be a legit journalist. An investigative reporter.”

  Poe had mentioned Venus’s exposés. “For the Tattler?”

  “That low-rent celebrity gossip rag? God, no. I didn’t investigate anything when I wrote for the Tattler, and I used the term ‘wrote’ only in the most generic sense of the word. I usually just made stuff up. As long as I handed something in before deadline, nobody at the paper cared if what I handed in was true. If anyone I wrote about complained, the editors called it satire and paid hush money. Since we focused on D-listers, they were happy to have the rent money. A few even called me up asking me to lie about them so they could get a payout.” She returned to the couch. “When I worked for the TV station, that’s when I was proud of my press credentials. I seldom had enough for food and rent in the same month, I drove a beater car that was older than I was, and I always drew the crappiest assignments, but I could hold my head up then. I could say, ‘I’m a reporter.’”

  “Aside from wanting to eat and have shelter at the same time, why give up television reporting? If you cut the sensational parts out of your books, they’d be as short as novellas, but they’d also be well-written examples of spot-on investigations. I hate saying this, but you’ve got talent. You’ve a knack for drawing the truth out of people with vested interests in concealing the truth. You disguise it under borderline libelous gossip, but it’s there. I liked chapters eight through fifteen of your book on the CEO of that pharmaceutical company that sold expired drugs in Malawi.”

  “That book had forty-two chapters.”

  Gethsemane shrugged.

  “Did you like any part of my book on the McCarthy murders?”

  “I didn’t read most of it. But you did make one or two good points about the shoddiness of the gardaí’s investigation. And I like that you’re now referring to the McCarthy murders instead of the McCarthy murder-suicide.”

  “I do, on rare occasion, admit when I’m wrong. Especially when I’m so publicly proven wrong. You solved a twenty-five-year-old cold case. That made news on both sides of the Atlantic.”

  “You never answered my question. Why’d you give up television news?”

  Venus fingered the pattern cut into the crystal old-fashioned glass.

  “Bernard Stoltz?”

  “What do you know about that?” She eyed Gethsemane sideways.

  “Nothing, specifically. But you nearly killed him in front of a priest, and you moved from a luxury lodging in the village center to the spare room of an old cottage on a cliff just to get away from him. You don’t know Aed that well, in the non-Biblical sense of the word, anyway. We all agree Bernard deserves a swift karmic kick in the ass for ruining Aed’s career, but your reaction seems extreme.”

  “I need another drink.”

  “Help yourself. Bar cart’s stocked. Will you tell me why you hate Bernard?”

  “I hate him because,” Venus drained a glass and poured another, “that subhumanoid POS cost me my job, broke my heart, and killed a dear, dear man whose only sin was to try and do the right thing.”

  The two women sat in silence. Gethsemane knew Bernard’s vituperative reviews had ruined more careers than Aed’s and his behavior had wrecked more than a few marriages, but she didn’t know of any deaths resulting from his words or actions. Classical music’s genteel veneer deceived people into believing nothing more salacious than a harpist uttering a mild epithet ever happened behind the scenes. In reality, classical music saw its fair share of vicious players and abominable acts—both on the performance and the business sides of the world—but killing? Gethsemane waited.

  Venus seemed to be far away from Dunmullach, lost in the bell-like note her glass emitted as she traced her fingernail around and around its rim. Gethsemane counted thirty seconds on the clock, sixty, two minutes, three. Finally, Venus inhaled sharply and returned to the study in the cottage on the cliff. She looked around and blinked. Without being asked, she said, “Bernard Stoltz was my lover. I’d been at KXBH for two years when I met him. He was the music reviewer for the local paper, owned by the same company that owned the station. I don’t remember what event we met at, but he was charming and funny and seemed more interested in what I had to say than my cup size. I was working on a story about a record label with a lucrative side business in pirating music by acts signed to competitors. Turns out, Bernard was accepting hefty bribes from several of the artists signed to that label. They paid him money, he wrote good reviews. If they refused to pay up, he’d sink them. His newspaper was small-time, but Bernard’s writing was influential.” />
  “Sounds like the same scheme that got him fired from Classical Music Today.”

  “Bernard was a pro at the art of the bought-and-paid-for review by the time he landed that job. Scuttlebutt says Classical hired him as part of a deal he made with the managing editor, whose daughter happened to be an up-and-coming cellist. And whose first solo concert Bernard had tickets to.”

  “What happened with the record label?” Gethsemane asked.

  “I discovered—too late—Bernard’s interest lay in neither my cleavage nor my intellect. He was after my little black book. I had a contact at the record label, an informant. The one honest man in the entire company. He provided me evidence of the pirating operation. Names, dates, master tapes, everything needed to blow the ring wide open and send a lot of people to prison. They’d have done anything, including selling their firstborns to the devil, to stop my investigation.”

  “They paid Bernard to find out who your informant was.”

  “By seducing me. Me falling in love with him was my own stupidity. Long, painful story short, Bernard stole my notes and named my informant to his bosses. They gutted him—framed him for embezzlement, tricked his wife into thinking he cheated on her, called Child Protective Services to report him for nonexistent child abuse. You name it, if it was evil and a lie, they did it. He held up as long as he could, but eventually the anguish of losing his job, wife, children, and reputation got to him. He went down to the train depot one night and danced with the 8:10 to Pine Bluff.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “I got off easy. All Bernard did to me was make it look as if I’d used fake quotes in a couple of my reports. The station fired me, I left town, got a job with the Tattler…”

  “No wonder you tried to put his eye out.”

  “Yeah, well, I at least bounced back. And Bernard eventually got what he deserved. Public disgrace and job termination.”

  “What do you think he’s doing here?”

  “Like I said, he’s here hoping to shred Aed again. I don’t think he’d try to bribe Aed for a good review. A, he’s got no clout as a reviewer anymore, and B, Aed would kill him. But if Aed’s opera is anything short of a smash, Bernard will write some piece of disparaging tripe and sell it to someone and destroy Aed’s chances to save his career. Smear jobs sell. I should know.” Venus gulped the remainder of her bourbon. “Someone should stop that little creep before he hurts someone who matters again.”

  Seven

  Gethsemane woke to the sounds of blood-curdling screams. She fell out of bed, cursed herself for leaving her shillelagh near the front door, and stumbled toward the back bedroom. She got as far as the doorway when she realized the screams emanated from the lower level. A quick glance at the bed told her Venus wasn’t in it. She scrambled to the stairs. Eamon materialized without warning on the landing at the head of the stairs. She crashed into him and passed through him, her skin on fire with infinite pins and needles. She pitched forward and tumbled down the stairs. Something grabbed her pajama collar mid-somersault and hauled her back up to the upper landing.

  Eamon, glowing the brightest purple-blue she’d ever seen him, stooped to stare at her eye to eye. “For the love of God, woman, make her stop!” He vanished.

  Gethsemane, wide awake and smarting from both bruises and her collision with Eamon, hurried downstairs. She followed the shrieks to their source in the kitchen—Venus, in silk robe and bare feet, wide-eyed with terror, with a kitchen knife gripped in one white-knuckled hand. The other hand pointed at an empty chair at the breakfast table. A pot of coffee simmered on the stove.

  Gethsemane stepped toward her terrified house guest, but the kitchen knife drove her back. “Venus, it’s me. Stop screaming. What is it?”

  The screams ended. Venus’s mouth moved, but no words came out. She kept pointing at the chair and kept the knife held between her and it. Either a flesh-eating demon zombie rat had run across her foot, or—

  “Oh my God, you saw Eamon.” Gethsemane face palmed. She didn’t need this on a school morning.

  Her alarm clock sounded upstairs. The shrill tone seemed to snap Venus out of her terror. She dropped the knife and collapsed into a chair. Gethsemane sprinted up to her bedroom to silence the noise, then returned to the kitchen.

  Venus shook and wrapped her arms across her chest. “A man, a man, there was a man with dark curly hair and green eyes, a big man, in that chair.” She nodded her head toward the chair on the opposite side of the table.

  Gethsemane moved to sit.

  “No, don’t sit in it!” Venus shouted and half-leapt out of her seat.

  “Okay, okay.” Gethsemane pulled Venus back down and knelt beside her. “I believe you. There really was a man there, you’re not crazy. Please trust me, I know exactly how you feel right now. Please also trust me when I tell you that you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “A ghost? A ghost?” Venus’s feared turned to fury. “I have the most terrifying experience of my life and you make fun of me by telling me I saw a ghost?” She came out of her chair again.

  Gethsemane wrestled her down. “I’m not making fun of you. I’m explaining what you saw. You saw the ghost of Eamon McCarthy.”

  “Ghosts. Don’t. Exist.”

  “Yeah, actually, they do.” Gethsemane held up a hand against Venus’s sputtered protest. “I didn’t believe in them, either, until I moved up here and met Eamon. His ghost convinced me to investigate his and his wife’s murders.”

  “That’s not funny. That’s—that’s cruel.”

  “I’m not lying.” Gethsemane stood. “Eamon, Eamon, where are you? This would be a really good time to show yourself.”

  Eamon, still a frightened angry mixture of purple and blue, materialized in a corner as far as his waist. Venus jumped up, mouth wide open. “If she screams again, so help me—”

  Gethsemane clamped her hand over Venus’s mouth and pushed her back into the chair. “The rest of you, please,” she said to Eamon. His legs appeared. The stove and sink were clearly visible through him. “Try solid.”

  The appliances faded as he grew denser. “Satisfied?” He crossed his arms and leaned into the counter. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Wrong with—? She’s just seen her first ghost.”

  “You’d think she’d just peered into the very bowels of hell.”

  “I freaked out the first time I saw you.”

  “Not like that you didn’t. Not screaming to shame a banshee.”

  “I ran from the cottage into the path of an oncoming car.”

  Eamon grinned. His aura took on a green tinge. “I’d forgotten that bit.”

  “It’s not funny. Did you also forget I put a paper weight through the middle of your chest?”

  “After telling me about your softball prowess. Yeah, I do remember that.”

  Venus gasped words between ragged breaths. “What. Is. Happening. Here?”

  “Eamon McCarthy haunted this house for twenty-five years because he couldn’t rest in peace after being falsely accused of killing his wife then being erroneously buried in unhallowed ground as a suicide. He disappeared after I solved his, and his wife’s, murders, but came back after I recited a spell and fell off a catwalk that creaked the notes matching his sympathetic resonance. He frightened away a smarmy hotel developer, but now he’s stuck. We don’t know how to get him back.”

  “Not that I’ve any intention of going back to limbo. I told you.”

  “I heard you. I’m giving Venus the Cliff’s Notes version of events.”

  “But, those guys, the ghost hunters, Kent and the weird one with the hair, and the others. You said you told them the theater was haunted, that there were no ghosts in the cottage.”

  “I lied so they’d go away and not capture proof of Eamon’s existence, because Father Tim convinced me the world might fall off its axis if they did.”
/>   “The priest knows?”

  “He knows. He can’t see Eamon, but he knows about him.”

  “Shouldn’t he do something? Stage an exorcism? Call the Pope?”

  Gethsemane shrugged. “He’s a pretty broad-minded priest. And folks around here seem laid back about the idea of the paranormal. Adds local color.”

  “Local color?” The blue returned. “What am I, a feckin’ leprechaun?”

  Gethsemane stuck out her tongue.

  Venus looked back and forth between them. “Seriously? I’m witnessing firsthand tangible proof that life doesn’t end with the death of the body and you two are at each other like preteen siblings in the backseat of their parents’ car?”

  “At least she didn’t say like an old married couple.” A green glow edged out the blue.

  “Give her a break, Irish. You do take some getting used to. And don’t laugh at her.”

  “How do you know he’s laughing?” Venus asked.

  Gethsemane pointed to his aura. “Color-coding.”

  Venus patted her robe. “Where’s my phone? I have to call my editor. This is the biggest story since—since—the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls.”

  “Sissy…” The warning came through clear.

  “You can’t do that.” Gethsemane pinned Venus’s arms at her sides. “Maybe the shock of accepting the reality of ghosts kept you from paying attention, so I’ll repeat myself. I sent the Ghost Hunting Adventures boys to the Athaneum to keep them from finding proof of Eamon’s existence. You can’t call your editor and tell him Eamon exists.”

  “Her. My editor’s a her.”

  “Him, her, it. I don’t care. You can’t broadcast this.”

  “Of course I will. This is news.”

  Gethsemane glanced at Eamon’s fingertips. A large blue orb sizzled and popped. She released Venus’s arms and stood. “You know what, you’re right. Go ahead and call your editor. You can use the kitchen phone. It has long-distance.”