Who Killed the Ghost in the Library: A Ghost writer Mystery Read online

  “But I can help you go through them.”

  “You don’t know what to look for, Cam,” Mike said.

  We glared at each other for a minute. “At least let me look at the report when you find it.”

  “I can do that,” he said as he pulled out his wallet. “I’ve got to get going.”

  “Are you sure I can’t go with you?”

  “For the last time, no. Go do whatever it is you do when you aren’t working on a book.”

  “I work at the bookstore or the coffeehouse, depending on who needs me more.”

  “Then go do that,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’ll call you later.”

  I pulled out my phone as he left and quickly looked up Cliff Scott’s address. Ten minutes later, I parked up the street from Cliff’s house and got out. It was a pale yellow clapboard house surrounded by oak trees that sat at the end of a cul-de-sac. There were two houses that sat at least 150 yards from his house on either side. An empty carport sat on the left side, and a porch swing hung from one of the large trees in the front yard. I wondered what was going to happen to the house now that Cliff was gone. I imagined a family with small children living there, the kids running around the yard chasing each other. It was the type of house that I hoped to live in one day with a family of my own. The house on the left looked empty, and the house on the right looked just like Cliff’s, except it was white.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I jumped, startled, and turned to see Mike standing there. “Don’t sneak up on a person like that!”

  “You aren’t even supposed to be here!” he said.

  “You said I couldn’t go with you. You didn’t say anything about me coming here on my own.”

  “Don’t split hairs, Camille Shaw,” he growled. “I could have you arrested for interfering in an official investigation.”

  “I’m just standing here! How am I interfering?”

  Mike started to answer me, but stopped and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”

  “Smell what?”

  “Gas,” he replied, sniffing the air again.

  “Now that you mention it, yes, I do.”

  He started toward the house and I followed him. “Stay there,” he said.

  “No chance.”

  “Don’t argue with me…”

  “Look!” I cut him off and pointed to the side of the house. “Fire!”

  “Get back!” he yelled, grabbing my arm and dragging me toward the street. He threw me to the ground behind his Bronco before throwing himself on top of me…just as the house blew up.

  Chapter 12

  Debris rained down on us. Mike reached for his walkie talkie. “This is Chief Penhall. We’ve got a house explosion and fire at 112 Oak Lawn Road. Send EMS and a couple of fire trucks.” He put the walkie talkie on the hood of his car. “Stay down while I take a look.” Standing up, he looked at what was left of Cliff’s house, which wasn’t much.

  “Can I get up now?”

  “I think so. Just be careful. There’s glass and wood everywhere.”

  I started to push myself up, but stopped when I felt a sharp pain in my left wrist. “Damn, that hurts.”

  “What’s wrong?” Mike said, kneeling beside me.

  “Nothing. I probably just landed on it wrong.” I brushed some leaves out of my hair with my right hand. “You’ve got some cuts on your face and arms.”

  “Not surprising, considering the whole house is gone,” he replied, helping me to my feet.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said. “How did we survive this?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  We heard sirens in the distance. Two fire trucks pulled up and Oliver Malloy, one of the lieutenants, jumped out of his rig and ran over. “What the hell happened, Mike?”

  “It blew up, Ollie. What do you think happened?”

  “Are you guys alright?” he asked as his men connected a hose to a nearby hydrant and started fighting the fire.

  “We’re fine.”

  “Dan!” Oliver called to one of his men. “Check those houses. Make sure no one’s home.” He turned back to face us. “EMS will be here in a minute. Get them to check out those cuts to make sure you don’t have any glass or splinters imbedded in your skin.” He ran off to help his men.

  “I guess we don’t have to worry about looking at that police report now,” I said.

  “Definitely not,” he said as an ambulance pulled up behind us.

  “Hey, Mike, what happened?” Kim Thurston, one of the paramedics asked as she got out. “Is this a new interrogation technique? Blow up their house to get them to talk?”

  “Very funny, Kim. Don’t quit your day job,” Mike replied. “Kim Thurston, this is Cam Shaw. I think she might have a sprained wrist.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Let me be the judge of that,” Kim said, gently taking my left arm in her hands. She gently pressed on it, and I winced when she got to my wrist. “Mike might be right, as much as I hate to admit it. Corey, bring me an ACE bandage.”

  “Well, at least it isn’t my writing hand,” I said as Corey, the other paramedic, came over with a small brown wrap.

  Kim expertly wrapped my wrist. “You’ve got a few cuts, but I don’t see any pieces of glass or splinters,” Kim said. “The folks at the hospital will do a more thorough job.”

  “Sounds like so much fun.”

  “Pure torture,” she laughed. “There are some real sadistic nurses in the E.R. who just love to dig around and look for foreign objects. They’re going to have a field day with you, Mike. I see stitches in your future.”

  “Later. Right now, I’ve got an investigation to start,” he said, pointing toward the fire.

  “I hope no one was in there,” Kim replied.

  Mike shook his head. “This was Cliff Scott’s house.”

  “Oh man,” Kim said. “I heard about the accident yesterday. He was a good man. He’ll be missed. Listen, can you drive yourself to the hospital? Corey and I need to stay here in case one of the firefighters needs medical attention. The other ambulance is on another call. An accident out on 287.”

  “I told you, I’m not leaving,” Mike said.

  “And I’m telling you that you need stitches. It looks like it is going to take them a couple of hours to get this under control. That is more than enough time to go to the hospital and get checked out.”

  “Alright, alright,” he grumbled. I grabbed my messenger bag out of the 442, and he helped me into his Bronco. After a quick word with Oliver, he got in and drove off.

  “What did Oliver say?”

  “He’s going to call the gas company and ask them to turn it off in the neighborhood until they get the fire under control.”

  “I wonder why the other houses didn’t blow up, too.”

  Mike shrugged. “Beats me. I’m sure the arson investigator will figure it out.”

  “I forgot to say thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For saving my life.”

  “You shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

  “I know.”

  “So why were you there?”

  “Because I don’t like being told that I can’t do something. And I just wanted to help.”

  “Your need to help nearly got you killed.”

  “Wow, do you always react this way when someone says thank you?” I asked as he pulled into the hospital parking lot. “And one other thing: if I hadn’t been where I wasn’t supposed to be, you would have been in the house, which means you would be dead right now. So I saved your life, too. You’re welcome.” As soon as he put the Bronco in park, I opened my door, got out and slammed it shut to show him my frustration.

  We didn’t say anything to each other as we walked into the emergency room. Mike flashed his badge at the attending nurse, and she showed us to a room. “What happened to you two?” she asked as I sat down on the bed.

  “He was twisting my arm, trying to get me to giv
e up some valuable information, but I wouldn’t talk,” I said.

  She gasped and glared at him. “Really, Chief Penhall! How could you?”

  Mike rolled his eyes. “I did not torture her. We were near a house that exploded.”

  “You mean that one on Oak Lawn?” He nodded. “We heard about that. Are there any other people who are hurt?”

  “No, we’re the only two,” he assured her.

  “I’ll send the attending in here. I’m sure he is going to order X-rays on that arm, but we need to clean up those cuts first. We need to make sure there’s no glass or metal in them.”

  She left for a few minutes, and came back with another nurse. Each nurse had a stainless steel basin, antiseptic, tweezers and bandages. Twenty minutes later, the first nurse was done cleaning my wounds. She walked me down to X-ray while the attending doctor came in to stitch up Mike’s arm and forehead.

  “How are you doing?” he asked me when I came back in.

  “Not exactly what I had planned for today.”

  “Same here.”

  “My parents are going to freak out when I show up with all these bandages.”

  “I’m sure your mother will feed you lots of muffins and chocolate chip cookies.”

  “No doubt.” We sat there for a few minutes, not saying anything. “Mike, why would someone blow up Cliff’s house?”

  “For the same reason they ran him over yesterday.”

  “I thought he was retired. Has he been working on anything lately?”

  “He did come in last month, asking me about a missing person’s case from the 1960s.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say. I couldn’t find anything in our files about it.”

  “Do you think it could be connected to the Ashtons?”

  He shrugged. “No clue.”

  “Do you remember the name of the person?”

  “Nope, but I might have a note about it at the office. I’ll have to check.”

  The attending doctor came in at that moment. “It’s just a bad sprain, nothing broken. We’ll give you a splint for it. Wear it for a couple of weeks and follow up with your regular doctor.”

  “Thanks.”

  An hour later, I had a dark blue splint with Velcro strips and a prescription for pain medication. “How am I supposed to use my keyboard with this bulky thing on?” I groused as Mike drove us back to Oak Lawn Drive.

  “Very carefully. Hen pecking works well.”

  “Oh, you’re a lot of help. Keep it up, funny man, and I’ll club you on the head with this thing.”

  “It will hurt you more than me,” he pointed out as he parked behind one of the fire trucks.

  I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at him as we got out. Oliver met us near my car. “The fire’s out. The windows were blown out in the nearby houses, but no one was hurt. We didn’t find a body in the remains of the house.”

  “He was killed yesterday in a car accident,” Mike said. “He was one of us.”

  “Who?”

  “Clifford Scott.”

  “Man, that’s horrible. He was a great guy. You’ll let us know when the funeral is, right? I know a lot of our guys will want to pay their respects.”

  “Absolutely,” Mike replied. “Is there anything you can tell me about how this started?”

  “What did you see when you got here?” Oliver said.

  “I smelled gas first. Cam saw a fire on the left side of the house. We managed to duck behind my Bronco right before it blew.”

  “You mean you threw me to the ground,” I said. “How do you think I got the sprained wrist?”

  “Better to have a sprain than to die from an explosion,” Oliver pointed out.

  “Good point.”

  “So whoever started the fire must have driven off just before you got here,” Oliver said.

  I shook my head. “I got here first, and I didn’t pass anyone.”

  “Me, either,” Mike said.

  We all looked toward the house. “There are some trees a few hundred yards behind the house,” Oliver said. “There’s a street on the other side. Maybe whoever did this went that way.”

  “Grab some of your men for a search,” Mike said. “We’ll spread out and search the area from the back of the house to the other street.” He turned to me. “You stay here.”

  “Not a chance. You need all the eyes you can get to find this guy,” I said, moving toward the woods. I heard him say something to Oliver as I walked off.

  Oliver called for four of his guys, and the seven of us spread out. There was lots of debris from the house back here as well, so we had to make our way carefully around it, making sure we didn’t get cut or stabbed by anything. “You see anything?” Mike called out to me.

  “Nothing yet. You?”

  “Negative.”

  I walked a few more yards before a sound stopped me. I stood quietly and listened. Somewhere to my right, I heard a low moan. I moved toward it, stopping every few feet to listen. The third time I stopped, I heard it again, louder this time. I went a few more feet and almost stumbled over a man. “Mike! Over here!” I knelt down next to the man and felt for a pulse. He was still alive, but he had a large piece of wood sticking out of the middle of his back.

  Mike and Oliver came running up to me. “Holy cow,” Mike said, kneeling down next to me. “Is he still alive?”

  I nodded. “You think this is our arsonist?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Mike said, checking the man’s pockets. “No wallet.”

  “Maybe he was in one of the other houses,” I suggested.

  Oliver called for the paramedics. “Let’s worry about who he is later. Right now, he needs to get to the hospital.”

  Kim and Corey showed up a few minutes later, did what they could for him and loaded him face down on a backboard. The four firefighters carried him out, with Kim, Corey and Oliver right behind them. “We should get going, too,” Mike said.

  “I say we keep going.”

  “Why?”

  “I wonder if this guy has a car on the other street.”

  “Good question,” Mike replied. “Let’s go.”

  It took another ten minutes to walk through the woods to the next street. Care to guess what we found parked by the curb?

  A 1970s gold Cadillac.

  Chapter 13

  “Well, this is a surprise,” I said as we approached the Caddy.

  We looked at the front end of the car, and what I saw made me flinch. I could see the point of impact where the driver had hit Cliff, the cracked windshield as he had gone up and over. I bit my lower lip to keep from crying. Mike reached over and squeezed my right hand. “You ok?” I nodded. “Is this the car that you saw yesterday afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  Mike walked over to the passenger side and tried the door handle. It swung open. “Let’s see if we can find some identification for our mystery man.”

  A complete search of the car turned up nothing. “I can’t believe there isn’t even an insurance card in the glove box,” I said.

  “I can run the VIN number and get a name that way,” Mike said, walking around to the driver’s side. He used his cell phone to call his dispatcher. “Are you sure, Kathy? From where? Alright, call Artie and have him tow this thing to the impound yard.” He hung up. “You won’t believe this.”

  “It’s stolen.”

  “Good guess. Stolen out of San Marcos a week ago. It belongs to a Maybelline Reynolds.”

  “And she only drove it to church on Sundays.”

  “Actually, she is the madam of the local brothel.”

  “Wow.”

  “She’s threatening to sue the San Marcos police department because the car was stolen out of their impound yard. It was confiscated during a raid on her brothel.”

  “So we’ve got nothing?” I said.

  “We don’t have anything. I have an unconscious guy at the hospital.”

  “Oh come on, Mike.”

>   “No, Cam,” he said. “It’s bad enough you followed me to Cliff’s house…”

  “Excuse me, I got there first.”

  “It doesn’t matter who got there first. You shouldn’t have been there at all! Your father is going to have my head on a platter when he sees that splint of yours. Go home, take it easy.”

  “I might go see my grandmother.”

  “Don’t go there,” Mike warned me.

  “Go where? I’m allowed to go see her if I want to.”

  “You’re going to go complain to her, and she’ll complain to my grandfather, who will tell me off.”

  “I would never do anything like that,” I said innocently.

  “Bull,” he replied. “This is an active investigation, with no indication that this is connected to what you are working on. If and when I find a connection, then we’ll talk. Until then…”

  “I know, I know, butt out.”

  “Exactly. By the way, Oliver told me that your car isn’t drivable.”

  “What?”

  “He said some wood punctured the two passenger side tires. He’s arranged for it to be towed to Artie’s Garage.”

  “That was nice of him. Guess I better call Randy.”

  “He took care of that, too. He’ll be waiting for you over on Oak Lawn.”

  “Well, alright then. I guess I’ll walk back over there. Thanks for the ride to the hospital.”

  “Sorry I sprained your arm.”

  “You saved my life. I think it all evens out.”

  “Make sure you tell that to your parents.”

  There wasn’t much to say after that. I really wanted to go home; my arm was really throbbing inside the splint, and I didn’t have any adrenaline left. I said goodbye and walked through the woods, where I saw Randy waiting for me. “What happened to you?” he said as I got into his car.

  I pointed at the remains of Cliff Scott’s house. “That’s what happened.”

  “Tell me everything!”

  So I gave him a rundown on everything that had happened. As I finished, Randy parked in front of the coffeehouse. “Do you think this is connected to the Ashtons?” he said.

  I shrugged. “Mike’s right. We have no proof that there is any connection at all. Right now, it’s a total coincidence. This could have something to do with one of his old cases. And since the house went sky high, we can’t get our hands on the old police report about Stanley’s death.”