Free Sewed Up Tight (A Quilters Club Mystery No. 5) (Quilters Club Mysteries) by Marjory Sorrell Rockwell Page A

came in a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka.”
     

 
    CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    Striking a Happy Medium
     
     
    H arry Houdini was a great escape artist, able to slip out of handcuffs, chains, straightjackets, even free himself from sealed milk cans while holding his breath under water. But he achieved an equal fame debunking false psychics. As Houdini’s notoriety as a “ghostbuster” grew, he was forced to attend séances in disguise in order to catch mediums off guard.
    Houdini wrote a book about his exploits in exposing fake mediums, titled A Magician Among the Spirits . It cost him his friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Despite his character’s analytical mind, Doyle himself was a firm believer in Spiritualism.
    This tradition has been carried on by other stage magicians. The Amazing Dunninger wrote an exposé titled Inside the Medium’s Cabinet . James Randi still offers $1,000,000 to anyone who can provide proof of psychic phenomena. And it was magician Joe Nickell who exposed those fake mediums at Camp Chesterfield.
    As James Dunninger said, “There is one primary rule in the fakery of spirit mediumship. That is to concentrate upon persons who have suffered a bereavemen t .”
    Maisie Threadwhistle Daniels had been “bereaving” ever since her husband Joe caught his necktie in a weaving machine at the E Z Seat chair factory. He’d been a shift supervisor so he dressed for success, wearing a so-called power tie. Used to watching the weavers “kiss the shuttle,” he had leaned in too close to inspect the warp and weft of a new design. Goodbye, Joe.
    That’s when Maisie started seeing Madam Blatvia. The old mystic had been a great comfort to Maisie, bringing messages from Joe that had helped her manage in his absence.
    Skookie had scoffed at the séances, but now his mother expected he’d be singing a different tune as soon as Poncho located him on the Other Side. Madam Blatvia had assured her Skookie would be making contact with them soon.
    The timing worked out. Maisie had all but run through Joe’s life insurance money, so thankfully Skookie’s would be kicking soon. The Teacher’s Union offered a pretty good policy for high school principals.
    The woman was angry with Police Chief Purdue for not taking her accusation of murder more seriously. That congenital bad heart had thrown him off the trail. That or he didn’t know how to arrest a ghost.
    Madam Blatvia had been quite clear: Poncho told her that Major Samuel Beasley was responsible for frightening her son to death. That wicked old spirit wouldn’t get away with this bad deed, no sir. Maisie would see to that.
    It took a number of long-distance phone calls, but Maisie finally located a defrocked Catholic priest in Chicago who claimed to do exorcisms. Only $200 plus travel expenses, a bargain. This priest would flush Old Sam out of that confounded haunted house and send him packing off to Hell where he belonged.
    ≈ ≈ ≈
    Police Chief Jim Purdue figured he had much better things to do than go chasing ghosts. Dutifully, he wrote up a report of his inspection of Beasley Mansion … uh, Beasley Arms, as the mayor wanted him to call it. The report detailed how he had arrested a trespasser, thought to be the face in the window that had accidentally frightened Robert “Skookie” Daniels to death. Case closed.
            No charges were filed in the high school principal’s death.
            Charges had been made for trespassing on town property.
            Other charges were pending (i.e. bank robbery).
    He called a small press conference at Mark the Shark’s insistence to issue a formal statement. Two reporters showed up, Bradley Hancock from the Burpyville Gazette and Lucius Plancus from WZUR , a small AM station down near Pitsville.
    Mark Tidemore was happy with the squib in the Gazette :
     
    ‘Ghost’ Turns Out to Be Vagrant
     
    The reported sighting of a “ghost”