After work, Cordelia made straight for the Skarsvolds’ house. She was single-minded. On the hunt. Jane had tasked her with ferreting out who Quentin Henneberry, the elusive young man who shared the upper floor of the house with them, really was. Cordelia assumed he was up to no good and was intent on proving as much.
Because she didn’t have her Olive Hudson duds with her, just the blond wig, her idiom for the evening would, of necessity, be a little different. She breezed into the house wearing her tall black Cossack boots and black cape, ready with a story about being mugged by a Russian spy who demanded her clothing in exchange for his, but saw immediately that the only person around was the nefarious Mr. Henneberry, and he was watching TV in the den, unaware of her presence.
Climbing the stairs to her postage-stamp of a room, she whirled out of her cape and readied herself for battle by gazing at herself in the mirror over the tiny chest, fluffing her fake blond curls and applying an excessive coat of dark red lipstick. She stepped out of her room and was about to head back downstairs when she remembered Jane’s comment about the digital micro-recorder in the hallway by the credenza.
Creeping over to it, she got down on her hands and knees to do a thorough examination. The first thing she noticed was that it didn’t appear to be on. She put that down to voice activation. Next she noticed a wire coming out of one end. She followed it, her knees thudding against the wood floor, until she located a remote mic halfway up Eleanor’s doorway, stuck to the edge of the door frame by a piece of clear tape.
The plot thickened.
“Hey, there, you little pissant,” she whispered into the mic. “It’s not nice to snoop. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that? I may—or may not—report you to the FBI. Consider yourself warned.”
Struggling to her feet, she brushed off her jeans, straightened her ski sweater, smoothed each eyebrow, and then, squaring her shoulders, walked with all the dignity she could muster down the stairs.
When she entered the den, she saw that the diabolical Mr. Henneberry was sitting in a wing chair, scrolling through various Netflix offerings. She sank down on the recliner next to him. “Good evening,” she said, doing her most lugubrious Alfred Hitchcock impersonation.
He glanced at her sideways. “Hi.”
“I’m not picky about what we watch. As long as you have good taste.”
“You’re one of the renters. The one in the small room.”
“Let’s face it, Quentin. It’s a freakin’ closet.”
“What’s your name again?”
“Olive.”
He seemed ill at ease with her sitting so close, which was fine with her. This would be a chess game. She would use every advantage to win. If she was lucky, he wouldn’t have the brain power to play chess and would end up playing checkers. “You a student at one of our fine colleges?” By the looks of him, she figured he couldn’t be more than sixteen.
“I graduated from MIT last spring.”
“MIT,” she repeated. “You have a degree?”
“Physics, with an emphasis on quantum mechanics.”
Okay, so scientists weren’t always old or mega smart. He could be an idiot savant. Besides, she’d lived much longer than he had, experienced the world in ways he could only dream about. She remained confident that she could, by force of her razor-sharp intellect, ferret out his deepest, darkest secrets. “Impressive. You from the Boston area?”
“Austin.”
“Texas?”
“Minnesota. I’m taking a year off to earn some money. Among other things.” He edged away from her. “Before I go off to graduate school next fall.”
“Where’s graduate school?”
“University of Edinburgh.”
Okay, so she was well matched. He would be Moriarty to her Sherlock. She would need to use all her cunning to find out why he’d rented that room.
He clicked on the Netflix original, Grace and Frankie.
He didn’t seem like the Grace and Frankie type. “Already seen it,” she said. “Pretty awful about poor Lena,” she added, continuing to ease ever closer, invading his space to knock him off his game. “I assume you know what happened.”
“Could you stop crowding me?”
“Oh, was I? Sorry.” She moved back, but only slightly.
“I hear it was suicide,” he said.
“Really?”
“Liquor and Tylenol.”
“Heavens. Did you ever talk to her?”
He sat forward in his chair. “She mistook me for a ghost the other night.”
Cordelia hooted. “Being a student of physics, you probably thought that was rich.”
“Rich?”
“Peculiar. Silly. Uninformed.”
“I thought she was drunk.” He clicked on Orange Is the New Black.
“Already watched that, too,” said Cordelia. “FYI, I believe in ghosts.”
“So do I.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding, right?”
He shrugged.
“There’s this theater that I … where I work. The onetime owners, Gilbert and Hilda King, haunt the place. I know, I know. They’re dead. But I hear them on the stairways. They’re not scary. They bicker. And there’s a ghost cat. You think I’m crazy, don’t you. It’s okay. I’m used to it.”
“No,” he said, giving her another sideways look. “I think it’s more than possible that this theater is haunted. Is it old?”
“Turn of the century, give or take.”
He switched off the TV. Rising from his chair, he dragged it in front of her and then sat back down. “In fact, I’d like to know more about the theater.”
“You would?”
“When I was a kid, I had a friend who lived on a farm not far from town. We both liked playing in the barn. We were up in the hayloft one sweltering summer afternoon and because we were thirsty, he offered to go get us some cold black cherry pop from the kitchen fridge. It’s always been my favorite.”
Her eyes widened. “Seriously? Do you like strawberry?” If she’d been straight, he’d be her dream man.
“Oh, sure. That’s the other one. Love the stuff.”
He might be Moriarty, but at least he was a fellow gastronome.
“Anyway, while he was gone, I began to feel this presence. It was an old woman. I’m not sure I ever actually saw her, but I sensed her, if you can understand that.”
“Oh, I do.”
“I was sitting with my back against a hay bale when I suddenly felt my hair being stroked. It was very gentle. Nothing scary. It actually happened a couple of times. She would only come out when I was alone. It was something I never forgot.”
“Bet your physics professors wouldn’t much like hearing that story.”
“You’d be surprised.”
This was turning into a more interesting, less adversarial, conversation. Cordelia scolded herself for not challenging him more, not demanding answers. She needed to stay on point, not be sidetracked by their similarities.
Quentin sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “That’s why I’m attending the University of Edinburgh. It’s the best school out there for people who want to get an accredited degree in paranormal studies. I’m hoping to get my doctorate. But before I dove in, I wanted to have a good grounding in quantum physics. See, at heart, even though I’m what they call a ‘sensitive,’ I see myself as a skeptic. Quantum theory posits that the universe splits into separate branches, only one of which corresponds to our view of how the world works. There’s a bigger connection between science and anomalous experience than most people would guess. That’s what I want to spend my life pursuing. It’s why I’m here in this house.”
Cordelia blinked. Could it be this easy? “Why are you here?”
“I don’t usually announce the fact that I’m a ghost hunter, but if asked, I wouldn’t deny it.”
“I’ll be jiggered.”
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“But why here? Why this house?”
“My parents are always on the lookout for stories about haunted houses. My mom read something in the paper about this place, so I thought I’d spend a week seeing what I could track down.”
“That’s why you set up the digital recorder upstairs.”
“Oh, you saw that?”
Trying her best to look innocent, Cordelia said, “I may have whispered something into the mic that wasn’t … entirely appropriate.”
He laughed.
“But tell me. Are there ghosts in this house?”
“Nothing conclusive. One cold spot. An odd compass reading. Oh, and there were a couple times when I had the strong sense of being watched. I haven’t downloaded anything from the voice recorder yet. I did stand in the middle of the landing upstairs and ask a bunch of questions. I do that every day, when nobody’s around. And I took all the normal baseline readings. Relative humidity. Temperature. Normal decibel levels in the house. My feeling is, that yes, the house does have some paranormal activity. As a scientist, I would simply point out that what we don’t know is far greater than what we do know.”
“So … you’re not related to the Skarsvold family.”
“What? No, of course not.”
“And you don’t know anything about the bones of the murdered man found in the garage?”
“Murder,” he said, sitting up straight.
“Did you see Lena last night while you were out doing your nightly wandering?”
“I didn’t see her. I did walk past her bedroom. The French doors were closed, but I could hear her talking to Eleanor.”
“What were they saying?”
“Ghost hunters don’t make a habit of eavesdropping.”
“What time was it?”
“Oh, maybe one in the morning. I spent some time in the basement. I was in bed by two. Before I fell asleep, I heard Eleanor come up and go into her room.”
Cordelia would need to run this past Jane, but if memory served, Eleanor had said she’d gone up to bed around eight last night, not two in the morning. If that statement turned out to be accurate, Eleanor had lied to Jane. “You’re sure it was Eleanor you heard?”
“Pretty sure. I’m used to hearing her door open and close. Who else would go into her room that late at night?”
Who else indeed, thought Cordelia, drumming her painted nails on the arm of the recliner. The plot, in her estimation, hadn’t just thickened, it had completely curdled.