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“I don’t want to create an alarm when there’s no need. Maybe Liam was here earlier and left the light on.”
“And the door open?” Bartholomew said doubtfully.
Katie shrugged.
She walked to the left, where the tour began once visitors reached the first floor. The first room offered one of Key West’s most dramatic tales—the doll story. As a little boy, Robert Eugene Otto had been given a very creepy doll, supposedly cursed by an angry family servant who knew something about voodoo. Robert Eugene Otto became obsessed with the doll, even naming it Robert, after himself. Robert the Doll moved about the house and played pranks. In later years he drove the real Robert’s wife quite crazy.
From the somewhat psychotic, the history in the museum became sad and grimly real with a memorial to the sailors who had died aboard the battleship Maine when it had exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898. The museum’s exhibit showed sailors working on the ship. From there, curtains segued into an area where dancers moved about at the Silver Slipper. World War I came and went. Prohibition arrived, and bootleg alcohol made its way in an easy flow from Havana to Key West.
A pathway through the pantry in back led around to the other side of the house. It was dark, with little light from the glow in the foyer seeping through. Papa Hemingway made another appearance as 1931 rolled in and Pauline’s uncle bought them the house on Whitehead Street as a wedding present.
Katie knew what she was coming up to—the exhibit on Count von Cosel and Elena de Hoyos. Just a small piece of the museum, really, in a curtained sector through an archway. It had always been a popular exhibit. Until, of course, the re-created figure of poor Elena had been replaced by the strangled body of a young Conch woman. The beginning of the end.
People liked the bizarre, the romance and even the tragedy of history, but with this event fear had suddenly come too close. It was one thing to be eccentric in the Keys.
Real violence was not welcome.
There was more, she thought, so much more, to the museum. It was sad, really, that the story got so much attention.
There was fun history. Sloppy Joe moving his entire bar across the street in the middle of the night, angry over a hike in his rent. Tennessee Williams, working away at La Concha Hotel, penning the words of his play A Street-car Named Desire. Another war, soldiers and sailors, the roadblocks that caused Key West to secede and become, if only for hours, the Conch Republic.
The rest of history paled beside the story of von Cosel and Elena. So it had always been.
Morbid curiosity. Had he really slept with the corpse? Ooh, Lord, disgusting! How?
Katie knew the story, of course. She’d heard it all her life. She’d retold it at college a dozen times, with friends denying the truth of it until they looked it up on the Internet. It was tragic, it was sad, it was sick, but it always drew people.
As it had tonight. She put her hand out to draw back the curtain leading to the exhibit.
“Don’t, Katie, don’t!” Bartholomew whispered.
She closed her eyes for a moment.
She was suddenly terrified that she would draw back the curtain—and stumble upon a corpse herself.
And yet…
She had to draw back the curtain.
She did so, and screamed.
Chapter Two
David nearly jumped, he was so startled by the sudden scream.
That irritated him. Greatly. He was thirty-two, a veteran of foreign action and a professional who trekked through the wilds and jungles of the world.
He was not supposed to jump at the sound of a silly girl’s scream.
Of course, it had been stupid to come here. He had thought that he’d come back just to sign whatever papers he needed to settle his grandfather’s estate. But he had come home. And no way out of it—the past had called to him. No matter how far he had gone, he had been haunted by that night. He’d had to come here.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find.
There were no fresh corpses in the old museum.
Elena Milagro de Hoyos rested in robotic finery—as sadly as she had, years ago, at the real funeral parlor.
But he could remember the night they had found Tanya. He could remember it as if it had been yesterday.
She hadn’t been killed here, she had been brought here. She had been positioned for the shock value. It was something certain killers did. This fellow wanted to enjoy his sadistic exploits and wanted his handiwork to be discovered.
The killer had never been caught. No clues, no profile had ever led anyone anywhere, even when the local police had pulled in the FBI. There hadn’t been a fiber, a speck of DNA, not a single skin cell to be analyzed. That meant that the killer had been organized. The Keys had even braced for a wave of such murders, because such killers usually kept killing. But it seemed that Tanya’s murder had been a lone incident. Despite the fact that he had been cleared, he had been the only person ever actually under suspicion, no matter how they worded it.
The Keys hadn’t been crime-free by any means. Accidents occurred far too frequently because people overimbibed and still thought they’d be fine on the highway—often two-lane only—that led back to the mainland. Crosses along the way warned travelers of places where others had died, and the police could be fierce on speeders, but deaths still happened. Gangs were coming in, just as elsewhere, but they were seldom seen in the usual tourist mainstream on Duval Street. Domestic violence was always a problem, and now and then, as Liam seemed to believe, “outsiders” came into the state to commit their crimes.
But there was nothing like the strangulation death and bizarre display of Tanya Barnard. Not in the decade since David had been gone.
When it had happened, Craig Beckett had tried to hold his head high. He knew, of course, that his grandson was innocent because they had been together during the time it had happened—only a small window of opportunity. The museum had closed late on Friday night because there had been a festival in the city—and Craig Beckett had agreed with his fellows in the business association that his museum should remain open until midnight. David had come in with the first tour just after nine the next morning.
And Tanya’s body had been discovered.
David understood that, to many, he might well appear guilty as all hell.
But he had an alibi.
He’d been at the museum the night before, filling in for Danny Zigler then, too. But it was a small museum. It was only open for tours. There had been times between tours, people reckoned, when he might have slipped out. Or, according to others, the coroner might have been wrong. He might have left the museum and gone to quickly kill Tanya before returning home.
Think about it. Just how long did it take for a tall, muscular man to strangle the life out of a small, trusting woman?
Luckily, the coroner wouldn’t be called wrong. He insisted on the time of Tanya’s death.
And there were enough tourists to swear that David couldn’t have gone far in between the tours.
And after? David and his grandfather had stayed up until nearly four, engaged in a chess match. Then they’d even fallen asleep watching a movie in the den; his grandmother had come in to throw blankets over the two of them. By seven in the morning, the family had been engaged in breakfast. David knew many people believed that his grandparents had just been covering for him, but the one thing that gave David strength was the fact that he had been with his grandparents, and they did know that he was innocent.
Craig had tried to maintain the museum. But when everyone coming in had wanted to know about Tanya and little else about the history of the island, he had given it up at last. He had cared for the place, but he had closed its doors to the public. He had dreamed of the right time to reopen it.
Now his grandfather was gone. They would never reopen the museum. Tomorrow, he’d talk to Liam about selling off the characters. He knew many were made with fine craftsmanship and were valuable. Then work could be done to restore the house, and it would definitely be a valuable commodity.
So what the hell was he doing here himself?
He’d had to come. And he’d found himself staring at the exhibit, wishing he remembered more about Tanya and yet aware that the sight of her on Elena’s bed was permanently embedded in his memory. Nothing of the girl herself. Everything about the horror of her death.
And now, this girl, standing there staring at him, her scream just an echo in their minds.
“Who the hell are you and what in hell are you doing here?” he demanded.
The girl flushed. She was an exceptionally attractive young woman, early to midtwenties, with deep auburn hair, long and loose down her back, and, even in the muted light, eyes so startlingly hazel they seemed to be gold. Her features were cleanly cut and beautiful, and her body, clad in jeans and a T-shirt that advertised a local bar, was lean and well formed. There was something familiar about her, but he wasn’t sure what or why.
She stared at him, obviously recovering herself. Her cheeks were red at first, but then she appeared to be angry, as well.
“Who are you, and what the hell are you doing here?” she demanded in return.
“What?” he snapped.
“You heard me—I asked who you are, and what in hell you’re doing here,” she said, an edge of real anger in her voice.
He stared at her incredulously.
“Are you drunk?” he demanded.
“No! Are you?”
He walked around from the rear of the exhibit to accost her. She stepped back warily, as if ready to run out of the room.
Good. He was tempted to come closer and shout, “Boo!”
He didn’t.
“I’m here because I own the place,” he told her. “And you’re trespassing. You have about two seconds to get out of here, and then I’m going to call the police.”
“You are absolutely full of it,” she told him. “I own this place.”
Again, he was startled.
“You’re wrong,” he said harshly, “and I’m tired of the joke. This place is owned by the Beckett family, and it’s not for sale—yet.”
“Beckett!” she gasped.
“Beckett, yes. The name that you see on the marquis outside. B-E-C-K-E-T-T. This museum has been the property of my family for decades. I’m David Beckett. It is four in the morning and I’m wondering what you are doing here at this time. I actually belong here—at any hour. Now, if you please, get out.” He spoke evenly, almost pleasantly. But he meant the get out.
It seemed now, after hearing his name, as if the young woman facing him had changed her attitude suddenly. She seemed to back away. I’m a Beckett. Oh, yeah, David Beckett. Person of interest! he almost shouted.
It had been ten years since he had left, determined that he wouldn’t let the past follow him, not when he was innocent, not when someone else had taken his fiancée’s life, long after she had taken leave of him.
“I’m so sorry; I should have known,” she said. “Actually, we’ve met. It was years ago, but I should have known, you do look a lot like Liam. I’m Katie—”
“I don’t care who you are,” he said, startled by his abrupt rudeness. He shook his head. “Just get out. It’s private property.”
“You don’t understand. I believe that I do own this place. I just have a few last papers to sign on Saturday. Tomorrow. Liam is, after all, Craig’s executor—okay, you both are, if I understand it right, and you’d told him to go ahead and act in his absence. Liam was ready to sell.”
David frowned.
Sell? Never. Not the museum. The museum needed to be dismantled, taken apart. He wasn’t superstitious, he didn’t believe in curses. But this place held a miasma. There was something that appeared to be evil in the robotics. The faces were too lifelike. The ones that moved didn’t jerk about—they looked like the real thing from a distance.
They invited idiots and drunks and psychotics to behave insanely. Commit murder, and leave the corpses behind, far more fragile than the imitations that might survive many decades.
David shook his head, feeling a twinge less hostile. He still couldn’t really figure out who in hell the girl was, but, at least she wasn’t a drunken tourist who had stumbled in. A Northerner, probably. Someone who had come to Key West convinced it was not only a sunny Eden, but a place to make a good few bucks off the spending habits of vacationers. But she’d said that they’d met?
“Whatever you might have thought, whatever you might have come to believe, the museum is not and will never be for sale. If it’s the house you’re interested in, it may come up on the market in a year or so,” David said flatly.
She stared at him steadily. Now it seemed that she was the hostile one. “So, you’re David Beckett, suddenly home and taking interest in the family—and the family property. How nice. Perhaps you should speak with the lawyers. I believe that the sale has gone through.”
“Look, Miss—”
“Katherine O’Hara, and don’t be superior with me, because my family has been down here as long as yours—or longer. I hope that you’re wrong, and that this sale can go through. I love what your family created. This is a beautiful place, and your grandfather and great-grandfather did such a fabulous job showing history, the simple, true and the bizarre. I don’t understand…”
Her voice had trailed as she stared at him. She looked nervous suddenly.
Was she thinking that no matter what the newspapers or police had said, he might be a murderer? A very sick one at that, setting a corpse into an historical tableau?
After all, she had said that her family had been here forever, and yes, he did know of O’Haras who were longtime residents, but…
“Katie O’Hara?” he said sharply.
“Yes, I just introduced myself,” she said with aggravation.
“Sean’s little sister?”
“Sean’s sister, yes,” she said. She left out the “little,” her aggravation apparently growing.
“Sean doesn’t have any part of this, does he?” His tone was sharper than he had intended.
“My brother is working in the South China Sea right now, filming a documentary, and no, he has nothing to do with this. But I don’t see what—”
“Nothing. Look, nothing has anything to do with anything. This place will never be a museum again, and I’m pretty damned sure you just looked at me and remembered why I feel that way.”
She inhaled, as if steeling herself to speak patiently.
“Something terrible happened. You were cleared. Your grandfather closed the place, but he always wanted to reopen it. We will never rid the world of psychos. I intend to have security, and locks and make sure that nothing so terrible could ever happen again,” she assured him.
He leaned back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, and stared at her incredulously. “And a bunch of frat-boy idiots wouldn’t try to put a blonde mannequin in here, ever, or suggest that you do a mock-up tableau of Elena with Tanya’s body? Haven’t you ever watched those horror movies with parts one, two, three, four, five and so on, where the same stupid people keep going to the same stupid, dark woods to wind up dead? What if the psycho who did it is still hanging in the Keys? What do you think of that kind of temptation?”
“I wouldn’t let it happen. All people are not horrible, and it’s a wonderful museum. I’ve worked really long and hard—”
“Right. You must be all of what now, twenty-two, twenty-three?”
“Twenty-four, and that’s hardly relevant. I already have my own business—”
“Katie? Katie O’Hara?” He laughed suddenly. “Katie-oke! That’s your business?”
She stiffened and her face became an ice mask. “For your information, Mr. Beckett, karaoke is big business these days.”
“At your uncle’s bar, of course.”
“You really have matured into a rather insufferable ass, Mr. Beckett,” she said, her tone pleasant. “I will leave. I’ll see you with my attorneys tomorrow.”
“As you choose. Good night, Miss O’Hara. And forgive me. I didn’t mean to laugh at Sean’s little sister.”
