“You always look slightly suspicious when our paths cross,” said a voice behind me. I jumped half a foot in the air and turned to face John Dashiell, who was giving me his raised-eyebrows smile. “Are you spying on someone?”

  I lifted my chin. “As a matter of fact, I am. Connie and Derek have spent a year lusting after each other and everyone figured it out except them. They finally caught on,” I said, gesturing to the window.

  He peered out and said, “Ah. Good for them.”

  My gaze had returned to the window. Derek had lifted Connie so that she was sitting on the table. He was saying something, his face very close to hers, and she was laughing with an enviably carefree expression. “Yeah. I’m really glad. They make a sweet couple. It’s nice to think of the castle as a place of romance instead of— You know.”

  “Yes.” He waited until I looked at him again; he seemed suddenly tall and official, and my heart sank.

  “Oh, no. Why are you here? Did something terrible happen?”

  “Just asking some follow-up questions. How are you doing today?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Can we talk for a moment?”

  I pointed at the dishes and books. “I just have to put those in the kitchen and take the books upstairs.”

  “I’ll grab the dishes. You get the books. We can talk while we walk.”

  With one last peek at Connie and Derek (still kissing, still Hollywood-caliber visuals), I grabbed the books and joined John Dashiell as he walked toward the kitchen.

  “Anything happen recently that I should know about?” he asked.

  I struggled to keep up with his long stride. “Derek set a curfew for us.”

  “Good.”

  “And last night someone broke it.”

  His head whipped toward me; his eyes were almost glowing. “What happened?”

  “I didn’t even get out of bed. I had locked my door, and I’ve learned my lesson about going into the hall. I just heard a kind of shuffling, and I saw a light under the doorframe in that tiny crack between the door and the tile.”

  “It couldn’t have been Connie?”

  “I guess it could have been anyone, but the individual in question was moving southward. The same way as my skeleton friend.”

  A ghost of a smile appeared on his face, then vanished. I studied him for a moment, appreciating his strong-looking shoulders and his sharply carved jaw. I said, “What’s happening with Connie’s stalker? Is he in jail?”

  He nodded. “He is, and he’ll stay there because his bail was denied. Apparently Connie is not the first person who has reported him for stalking, which puts him at a class-three felony. He’s going to do time, maybe as much as five years. Whenever he gets out, Derek and I will both know about it.”

  “Ah. That’s good.” We had reached the kitchen, and Dashiell brought the plates inside, where I could hear him talking to Zana. I peered into the dining room and saw Renata and Elspeth eating with Bethany and her husband, Tyler. I waved at him, and he held up a hand in greeting. She leaned over to talk to him, her red head a stark contrast with his dark one, and I realized that they, too, made a handsome couple. That reminded me of Connie and Derek. Were they still kissing back there?

  Renata saw me and beckoned with a royal hand. “Come and have breakfast with us,” she said.

  “I just finished. Thanks.” I moved my hand in a general farewell, then went back to the hall, where Dashiell joined me.

  “Why are you grinning?” he asked.

  “Am I? I was still thinking of Connie and Derek.”

  “You’re a romantic, I guess.”

  “I absolutely am. I just think— Oops.” I had adjusted the books in my hand, and Connie’s bookmark fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and saw that it was the photo of Garrett and his girlfriend. “Oh—Connie must not have had this with her yesterday,” I murmured. Then I looked more closely at the shot.

  “Something wrong?” my companion asked, leaning in to study my expression.

  “Dash,” I whispered. I looked behind me at the dining room doorway, then said, “Come here.” I walked rapidly away, toward the main staircase, and climbed to the second floor. Dashiell followed me.

  When we got to the quiet landing, I said, “Connie was going to give this picture to Garrett’s girlfriend, Sora.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Yesterday we saw her unexpectedly, and I guess Connie didn’t have it with her. But that was the first time I ever met Sora.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve met her, right?”

  He nodded.

  I held up the photo. “This isn’t her.”

  He looked more closely, his face alert. “Are you sure? They’re pretty far away—”

  A sudden inspiration struck. “You took a photo of it on your phone. Can we look at that?”

  He nodded, taking out his phone and finding the picture in question. He used his fingers to pull the picture into a larger size, focusing only on the faces. They were closer now, but more pixilated. Still, what I saw made me gasp, and John Dashiell swore under his breath.

  The woman standing beside a younger Garrett Perth, with his arm slung around her, both of them smiling and relaxed, was definitely not Sora.

  It was Renata.

  16

  Chronicle

  I met the wide eyes of John Dashiell. “Did she ever mention—?”

  His jaw tightened. “No, she did not. Do you know where she is?”

  “I just saw her in the dining room.”

  He turned and began jogging down the steps; I left my books on a dark wood buffet that held some castle pamphlets and flew after him.

  I caught up to him just as he reached the dining room; Renata, Bethany, and her husband all looked up with shocked faces. Dashiell’s expression was intimidating.

  “What’s going on?” Bethany asked nervously. Tyler looked ready to jump out a window.

  “Could you two excuse us?” Dashiell said. “I’d like to speak with Miss Hesse.”

  The young couple left so quickly, I almost laughed. Zana’s shocked face appeared briefly in the doorway to the kitchen, and then she, too, disappeared.

  Dashiell turned to me and held out his hand. “Do you still have that photo, Nora?”

  I did, and I handed it to him.

  He put it on the table in front of Renata, then sat down across from her.

  She glanced at it, unsurprised, and smiled briefly. “So you know,” she said. Her eyes met mine with something like resignation.

  * * *

  * * *

  For reasons unclear to me, Renata asked if I could stay for the interview. Dashiell said, “I have no objections,” although it looked as though he did.

  Renata sighed. “What did you want to know?”

  Dashiell’s lips were a thin line. “Let’s start with why your past relationship didn’t come up in our earlier talks.”

  She shrugged, seemingly weary. “It was in the past, so long in the past. We were just friends now. I helped him get this job, actually.”

  I remembered Sora saying that Garrett would never have gotten the job if not for a tip from a friend.

  Dashiell didn’t relent. “Were you jealous of his new relationship? Did you resent him for dating Sora?”

  She shook her head. “No. I was happy for him. She was mellow, kind, not mercurial the way we actors are. He needed someone to balance him that way. He and I were too similar.”

  I nodded, seeing the logic of this.

  “When did your relationship begin?” Dashiell asked.

  “Years ago,” she said. “Ten, eleven years ago now. It didn’t last. It was a workplace romance.”

  I thought of what Tim had said: that Garrett was rumored to have had an affair with a foreign-language teacher. Renata was German. I gasped. “Oh, my gosh—are you Mrs. Spellman?”

  Both Dashiell and Renata looked at me, surprised by my outburst. Renata said, “How did you know—?” just as Dashiell said, “What are you talking about?” He then swung toward Renata and said, “She’s right?”

  Renata sighed. “I was Mrs. Spellman. In another lifetime. Garrett taught drama at the same school where I taught German. A group of faculty members went out once after one of Garrett’s shows. We ended up being the last two to leave the pub, and it . . . started something. I was estranged from my husband, and Garrett brought out the actress in me. I was still acting, taking parts in whatever productions I could get into, but it didn’t pay a regular salary. That’s why I started teaching. He encouraged me to keep pursuing my art.” She turned to me. “How did you know—?”

  “Tim told me that Garrett left his job because there was a scandal about his affair.”

  “Tim?” she said, her brows high.

  “He was one of Garrett’s students back then.”

  “Really? I did not know it. How strange . . .”

  Dashiell had taken out a notebook and was jotting rapid notes. “So Tim has a connection to both Garrett and Renata?” he asked me.

  “Yes. He just told me last night. He was—apologizing for the scene during our bike ride.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dashiell’s eyes were steely when he turned them back on Renata. “And what else should we know, Renata? Because I think there’s more.”

  Renata sat up straight. She should have been wearing the crown that looked so good on her. “I went into Garrett’s room after his . . . murder. I was afraid to face—well, this. Interrogation. So I thought I would remove evidence of our past affiliation. I found a photo in a frame; I was going to take it out of the room, but I heard a noise. I tossed it out the window.”

  Dashiell acknowledged me with a nod. My theory had been correct.

  “The next morning I retrieved it. Nora saw me coming around the corner, the evidence still in my pocket, and I told her I had taken a walk.”

  “I should have known,” I said. “You didn’t smell like the outdoors. You smelled fresh, as though you’d just had a bath.”

  She nodded. “But what you should know, Detective, is that when I went into his room, it had already been ransacked.”

  “Oh?” Dashiell’s pen paused above the paper.

  “It frightened me. I didn’t know who had been in there, and after I threw the picture out the window, I thought I heard people coming up the stairs. I escaped to my room, but on the way out of Garrett’s space, I saw our old yearbook from West Vale on a shelf—Vale was the school where we taught—and I grabbed that, too.” She met Dashiell’s steely gaze. “Just as I was leaving, though, I thought I heard a sound.”

  “People coming up the stairs?” Dashiell asked.

  “No—a sound in the wall.”

  Dashiell became very still, and I stared at Renata. Realization dawned. “Oh, my gosh—Elspeth told us that there was a secret compartment that abutted Garrett’s room. She lets her cat walk around in there.”

  “Show me,” Dashiell said, his face intense.

  And then we were back in the hall, back on the staircase, bound for Garrett’s room on the third floor. Renata set a slow pace, and Dashiell was clearly impatient, but he remained politely behind her.

  When we reached the third floor, Renata pointed. “There are three ways to access the little passageway. Garrett was very excited about it when he was assigned this room. First, through the costume room.” She led us into the costume room and to a panel covered by a mirror. A small lever to the right of the panel had it swinging outward and revealing a narrow hallway. She pointed again. “That goes across the hall and comes out in the little broom closet just before Garrett’s room. Unless you keep going, in which case there is another exit in Garrett’s room itself.”

  Dashiell found a pair of latex gloves in his pocket, pulled them on, stepped into the passageway, and disappeared. Renata and I walked across the hall and peered past the police tape into Garrett’s room; moments later the wall near Garrett’s wardrobe opened, and Dashiell walked out. He was furious. “We could have searched here on the night in question. And no one thought to mention it?”

  “I didn’t know,” I said meekly.

  “I wasn’t there when you searched,” Renata said. “But I did keep things from you. I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll take the yearbook, please,” Dashiell said, his voice still icy. He pressed a button on his phone and said something about needing “the team” again.

  Renata went into her room and returned with a book called The West Vale Chronicle, dated 2011. “Here it is,” she said.

  She still had an aura of quiet dignity, despite Dashiell’s constant glaring. She opened the book to the theater page and pointed to Garrett’s picture. It was a standard faculty shot: Garrett wearing a suit jacket and a white shirt, his blue tie not entirely straight. There were candid shots, as well, and I spotted one in which Garrett was leading some sort of creativity exercise with a drama class: his hands were high in the air, his expression animated, and the students around him were laughing. A couple of kids on the outskirts of the group scowled in typical teenage fashion. What had Tim said? Sometimes there would be grudges.

  Renata tucked the picture of her and Garrett into the book and snapped it shut. “I’ve bookmarked it for you,” she said.

  Dashiell nodded.

  I noticed that Renata, for the first time since I had met her, looked uncomfortable. Nervous even. A moment later Dashiell noticed it, too. “What else?” he said.

  She cleared her throat. “I thought, when you came downstairs, that it was about the curfew. Derek asked us not to leave our rooms.”

  “Was that you last night?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep.” She studied her hands. “I was worried about the girls.” It took me a moment to determine that by “the girls” she meant Connie and me. “So much has happened, in such a short time, and I feared that somehow they had become targets. I’m afraid my anxiety got the better of me. I had to make sure that their doors were locked.”

  Dashiell’s face softened slightly. “I think they were quite safe.”

  She nodded. “Yes, yes. I’m glad to say that both doors felt solid.”

  “And that was all you did? Walk down the hall to their rooms and back to yours?”

  “Yes. I had my cell phone light on so that I could see.”

  “And did you see anything out of the ordinary?”

  “No,” she said. “But that hall is full of shadows at night; it’s quite frightening. ‘Hell is murky,’ ” she quoted shakily. And she had been like Lady Macbeth, walking with her candle in the darkness, plagued by guilt or anxiety.

  I reached out and squeezed her arm, trying to reassure her. “Thank you for checking on me.”

  Dashiell cleared his throat. “I have to ask, Renata. Was it also you in the monk costume the night that—”

  “No!” she cried, looking scandalized. “I would never terrorize this poor child that way.” She sent me a look of motherly concern. “Besides which, I don’t act with masks. Talented actors use facial expressions.”

  Dashiell looked at her, his face blank. “That person wasn’t acting, Renata. She—or he—was hiding. Anyone can hide.”

  She waved a dismissive hand, back to her regal self. “It wasn’t me, I can assure you.”

  Dashiell nodded, all business now. “If you’ll return to the first floor or to your rooms, perhaps? We have work to do now.”

  He turned away from us, but his manners had him turning back briefly to say, “Thank you for your help.” Then he went to the end of the hall and began to talk into his phone.

  17

  Unrequited Love

  For a few days, life seemed to return to normal at Castle Dark. June turned to July, and the days grew steamy under perpetual blue skies. We were working on our new scripts. Derek had indeed created a scenario in which I played a singer—in this case a singer in a cocktail lounge. Elspeth and Bethany were waitresses, Connie was a bartender, Tim was the club accountant, Renata was a regular customer, and Derek owned the club.

  Derek had decided that instead of eating with the Inspectors in the dining room, we would create an actual cocktail lounge in the second-floor ballroom and its foyer, where the piano would be authentically a part of the scene. For the dinner portion, I was supposed to play and sing, and Inspectors would be allowed to make requests and put tips in my jar. Then a “policeman” would come in (a rare appearance by Paul) to announce that a man had been found murdered outside—a fictional man named Chip Gillespie, who happened to be Renata’s stepson, Connie’s fiancé, Elspeth’s college friend, Tim’s roommate, Bethany’s crush, my sometime lover, and Derek’s enemy. We all had motives for wanting Chip dead, but ultimately it was Elspeth who killed him after she found out that he’d broken up her college romance by telling her boyfriend a lie. She had never found anyone quite like him. . . .

  Clearly, I mused as I read the script, Derek’s writing had been influenced by his own romance, which was now the talk of the castle. Connie floated around on clouds of happiness, grinning at everyone, and Derek wore a stupid smile almost constantly. At dinner the two of them gazed dreamily at each other and never noticed that the rest of us were good-naturedly poking fun at them.

  One night, after a late rehearsal, they left the table early because Connie said she needed to “proofread Derek’s notes,” and we managed to wait until they were gone before we burst into laughter.

  Elspeth wiped her eyes. “Oh, but it’s sweet. Clearly they were made for each other.”

  Renata nodded. “I am glad their great unspoken passion has finally been revealed. The castle was heavy with their angst.”

 

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