Free 4 Impression of Bones by Melanie Jackson

tape
stretched across the castle’s giant doors.
    Though she
knew that she should check in with the foreman, Juliet decided to borrow an
empty cart and to wheel it down to the lot for fetching her shelves. The task
took twenty minutes and left her sweaty, but there was real pleasure in making
progress with her new plan of getting the hell away from the castle. Finding
the body in the tower and getting rid of it should have made her feel better
about her room. After all, surely that would lay the ghost, if ghost there was.
But somehow Juliet was not reassured and she feared that they might not have
seen an end to the violence, though whether it was old violence or new she
couldn’t say.
    She paused in
the courtyard to look over the various projects in progress. Most of the lumber
being worked was pine or cedar. Both woods had distinct odors and hues. None of
the sawdust matched what she had seen on Dolph’s body. Of course, that could
have been a trick of lighting. Hazy daylight made things look muted.
    Coming in from
the inner courtyard, which was still busy with contractors getting on with the
earthquake retrofit, Juliet heard Manoogin’s voice in the kitchen. She followed
the exasperated echoes down the corridor and discovered the lieutenant and a short
stranger in the process of pressing and tapping the walls. He wasn’t in uniform
but he didn’t need clothing to proclaim his profession.
    “I take it you
haven’t found the secret panel that leads to the wine cellar,” Juliet said.
    Both men
turned to look at her. Juliet was not exhibiting her talents for the fun of it.
She was usually self-embargoed from displaying her insight since she preferred
people remain ignorant of her abilities and think of her as nothing more than
breathing wallpaper. The fact that she had to be involved at all was rather
maddening. She hadn’t even liked Dolph Kingman. Truthfully, she never liked any
of the people who got killed around her. Of course, that wasn’t terribly
surprising. There was much less call for murdering nice people than rotten
ones. Still, this case was likely to stall if she didn’t intervene because
there was so much Manoogin didn’t know about the art world. The sooner this investigation
was over, the sooner she could put Barclay Castle out of her mind.
    “Any guesses?”
Manoogin asked. “I’m already tired of playing hide-and-seek and no one outside
seems to know anything about anything.”
    Juliet
considered. The wall with the fireplace was a facade of new brick—made to look
like old brick, of course. There was obviously no place where it could open. It
was also unlikely that the passage was in an exterior wall. She went over to
the old coal stove and began inspecting the wainscoting.
    It was
immediately apparent that someone had been disturbing the herbs. The air around
the old stove was pungent with bleeding sap and oils. There were also a few
flecks of sawdust on the floor. Red sawdust. She
pinched up the small sample and sniffed but could smell nothing above the
thyme.
    After a moment
of consideration she stepped into the hall and checked the dimensions of the
next room which appeared foreshortened and missing about three feet. She went
back to the stove and began examining the wood paneling which now seemed rather
strange to have installed in a stone castle, and was perhaps a modern method
for disguising an opening in the wall. A delicate current of air brushed her
face as she paused between two ill-fitting panels.
    It would be
faster to ask the workmen outside where the latch was since they had supposedly
been down there already to seal up the tunnel. They would talk to her when they
wouldn’t a policeman. Or she could call Julia Mannering, the woodworker who had
a black belt in karate, who was supposed to be doing the racks for the wine
cellar, but Juliet decided that it was probably best for her future involvement
if the police considered her to be a genius at this kind of thing. Since she