He scrolled through his contacts, found Jack’s number, even as people in the lower part of the cemetery began to cry out, “What’s wrong? Where are you?”
“Help! Help!” Julian yelled from inside the mausoleum. Which really didn’t help matters.
The phone began to ring on the other end just as the pound of footfalls on damp earth reached his ears. Someone was coming up the hill fast—someone whose cell phone was ringing.
“Ellery?” Jack called. He sounded slightly out of breath.
“Here. Over here.” Ellery turned to Julian, who was still shouting. “Stop that!”
Jack’s silhouette topped the rise a second before Jack. Ellery went to meet him.
“What’s wrong?”
Inside the mausoleum, Julian stopped yelling as abruptly as he’d begun.
Ellery blurted, “Brett Ainsley’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“We found him in the mausoleum. I think he’s been shot.”
Jack barely checked, striding past Ellery toward the mausoleum. Ellery followed.
“Stay back,” Jack warned him.
“Don’t worry,” Ellery muttered. Compared to his reaction the first time he’d bumbled over a body, he was relatively composed. He didn’t feel composed, though. He felt sick and shocked. He wished he had not had so much champagne. He wished he had not eaten so many lobster toasts. He wished he had not gone ghost-hunting with Julian Bloodworth.
Jack flicked his flashlight beam first on Julian, who stood motionless by the gold statue of a monk, then on Brett. It was not a pretty sight. There were ominous dark splotches over the front of Brett’s blue-velvet doublet. His face was slack and stupid, eyes staring in surprise.
Jack gave a startled exclamation and squatted down beside the corpse.
“I can’t believe this,” Julian said. “What was he doing here?”
Given the pool of blood soaking the tiles? Dying. But Ellery didn’t answer. All his attention was on Jack’s quick, cursory examination.
Jack shook his head, rose. “He’s still warm.”
“Well, he would be,” Ellery said. “We saw him alive only a little while ago.” Was that right? Come to think of it, how many hours had passed since Brett had been ushered outside to cool off? One? Two? It was like time had stopped from the moment he’d walked through the doors of Blood House.
Anyway, didn’t it take about twelve hours for a body to cool to the touch?
“This can’t be happening,” Julian protested.
Neither Ellery nor Jack bothered replying.
“Did either of you touch anything in here?”
“I picked up the gun,” Julian said.
“Y—” Jack cut off the rest of it. He looked at Ellery.
“No,” Ellery said. “I might have rested my hand on the entrance. I don’t remember.”
“All right. It’s going to take some time to get a crime-scene team up here. I need you to round up everyone below and get them back to the house. No one is to leave until we’ve got everyone’s statements.”
“Right. Okay.”
“I’ll phone ahead, but I want to make sure nothing gets lost in translation.”
Ellery nodded.
“Julian, go with him.”
Julian assented dully.
“Come on, Julian,” Ellery said.
It turned out that no real rounding up was required. The remaining ghost hunters were climbing up the hillock as Ellery and Julian started down.
“There’s been an accident,” Ellery answered the calls for information. “We’re all supposed to go back to the manor and wait.”
“What kind of accident?” a woman called.
“The fatal kind, obviously,” someone else returned.
“Chief Carson thinks I did it,” Julian muttered.
“Don’t say that.” Ellery threw a quick, uneasy glance at their companions.
“It’s true. He thinks I shot Brett.”
“No, of course not,” Ellery said, although he wasn’t so sure.
“I saw his expression.”
“Why did you pick up the gun?” Ellery asked.
“Instinct.”
Ellery was trying to be understanding, but he couldn’t help the note of exasperation that crept in. “What instinct would make you pick up a possible murder weapon?”
Julian’s voice rose. “I don’t know. I was in shock.”
Ellery didn’t press any further. For one thing, they were getting strange looks from their fellow ghost hunters. For another, he thought Julian probably was in shock. Because what else could explain his behavior?
* * * * *
Ellery’s memories of what happened once they got back to Bloodworth Manor were hazy.
Most of the Masquerade guests had departed not long after the ghost hunt had begun. About twenty die-hards were enjoying a cold supper in the stately dining room when the police arrived—which was a few minutes after Ellery and Julian led their party inside.
Julian had gone straight to his mother, which was understandable, though Ellery knew Jack would have liked to forestall that. Ellery was now an experienced enough connoisseur of mystery to know that the police liked to observe their prime-suspects’ reactions upon learning of a sudden death, and Marguerite, as the spouse of the murdered man, had to be the number-one suspect.
When the police showed up, the remaining guests had been shepherded into this large, formal dining room. Stoic-looking servers provided coffee and tea and pastries, though no one seemed to have much appetite. A young officer, Jack’s latest recruit, stood inside the room, silent and expressionless as he watched everyone and no doubt took mental notes for his chief.
It would be interesting to know what the fresh-faced, earnest Officer Battye made of this cast of suspects. Ellery wasn’t sure what he made of them.
As grieving widows went, Mrs. Bloodworth-Ainsley seemed somber but composed. She had removed her mask—they were all maskless by then—and her face was colorless and drawn. There was no sign of tears, but Ellery was guessing she was someone who preferred to do her weeping in private.
Or her not-weeping in private.
As far as prime suspects went, Julian would be running a close second to Marguerite.
To Ellery’s eye, Julian looked haggard and withdrawn. Which was normal and understandable.
What was not normal or understandable, what continued to nag at Ellery, was why he’d picked up that gun even as Ellery had told him not to? Okay, shock. But why had he insisted on going up to the mausoleum in the first place? The view. Okay. But then why had he insisted on opening up the mausoleum?
Ellery wanted to believe it was all innocent, an unfortunate series of coincidences, sheer bad luck, but the problem with reading as many mystery novels as he’d been reading over the past five months was it made you suspicious, skeptical, even cynical.
And if he was feeling unwillingly suspicious, skeptical, and cynical, Jack would be feeling all of that multiplied by ten.
But just the little he had observed of Brett Ainsley that evening made Ellery think there would be plenty of suspects outside the immediate family circle. Plenty of suspects who might be sitting right at that very table.
Not all of them, though.
He remembered Nan Sweeny implying that Klementina Harwood was having an affair with Brett—and that she was not his first nor would be his last. Klementina and Brett had had a very public altercation mid-masquerade, so absolutely Kezzie Harwood had to be high on that list of suspects.