Page 20 of The Lost Empress

King Rudolf snapped his fingers and a bottle of red wine appeared. “With drinking. I think best when I lubricate my mind.”

“And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?” JoAnne asked, looking around at the others with a pleading expression.

“Stay silent until we question you,” Sherlock Holmes advised. “Or you can talk and incriminate yourself, but either way, I will discover which one of you is the murderer.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MURDER AMONG THE PAGES

Spellbound Pages Bookshop, Downtown Los Angeles, California, United States

It only took a few minutes for Sherlock and King Rudolf to conduct their investigation of Walter’s dead body and the surrounding area. The cat, Fran, sniffed around the scene too, but neither man seemed to mind. When the feline peeled away from the spilled soup with a hiss, Sherlock grabbed a pen off the nearby counter.

“Bernard, the ghost there, said that his cat, Fran, told him the soup was poisoned,” Gen explained to the detective as he dipped the end of the pen into the soup and sniffed it before handing it to King Rudolf.

“We don’t even know if the ghost can talk to the cat,” Summer pointed out, watching from the far side of the bookshop with the others.

“Why wouldn’t he be able to?” King Rudolf said, grimacing after taking a sniff of the soup. “And yes, that’s laced with strong amounts of eclipse dust, a potent street drug that has been known to cause cardiac arrest in mortals.”

Sherlock nodded, watching the cat. “Ghosts often can communicate with animals.” He glanced at Bernard floating beside the others. “Does your cat have any other input?”

“She’s hungry,” the apparition responded. “This murder has delayed me from feeding her on schedule.”

“I think he meant about the murder,” Boon pointed out.

Bernard shook his head. “She just said the soup stunk and was what killed Walter.”

“And you made that soup,” Summer accused, pointing at JoAnne. “You poisoned Walter, didn’t you, JoAnne? All because he wouldn’t reciprocate your feelings?”

“No!” JoAnne screamed, a fresh batch of tears falling down her face. “I loved him, but I’d never hurt him. I made his lunch every day because I cared for him. But I understood that he still was in love with his dead wife and couldn’t return my affections.”

“Maybe she did it by accident,” Bernard offered. “She is a school teacher and not a real chef.”

Anger flashed across JoAnne’s red face. “How dare you? I’m not incompetent. I’m trying to grow my business so I can quit my lousy job working at the inner-city schools. If anything, I bet it was you who killed Walter. You wanted him gone.”

All eyes swiveled to the ghost. He laughed coldly. “Right, because I have access to eclipse dust. If you haven’t noticed, I can’t leave Spellbound Pages Bookshop.”

“But that’s just the thing,” Summer stated. “You can’t leave this place and you hate that the rest of us are here and always bothering you. We all know that you want your bookshop back so you can read in peace and quiet. You killed Walter so that you could have your place back.”

“I admit that I don’t like that a mortal is running my magical bookshop,” Bernard imparted. “But I wasn’t going to murder anyone to get it back.”

“You can hold objects though, is that right?” Sherlock asked. “That’s unique for a ghost to have that power.”

Bernard shrugged. “I’m a magician. I have talents that all these dull mortals don’t. I can talk to my cat, which I could do when living and they can’t even fathom such things with their tiny brains.”

“You’re such a sad and pathetic spirit,” Summer muttered, shaking her head. “Why couldn’t we have a friendly ghost?”

“Because friendly ghosts aren’t really a thing,” King Rudolf answered. “The spirits hang around after their deaths because they are unhappy.”

“Well, fix your attitude Bernard and move on,” Summer fired at the ghost.

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Bernard offered. “You can’t stand that I do your job for you, making you useless. It was probably you, Summer, who killed Walter because he wouldn’t sell you the bookshop.”

“You work here?” Sherlock asked the hippie.

Bernard laughed coldly. “Work is a loose term.”

A growl shot out of Summer’s mouth. “Yes, I work here and I’d do more if that control freak of a ghost didn’t take all my jobs. Why don’t you die already!”

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