Alice Kimberley - The Ghost and the Femme Fatale

"Dr. Lilly isn't giving a speech right now because Dr. Lilly is dead."

"What!"

"Listen to me, Fiona, this is very important. Do you know what's missing from her suite?"

"No, I don't. Dr. Lilly wasn't staying in the main house. She wanted more privacy, so she took the bungalow in the converted Charity Point Lighthouse."

"Are you sure someone broke in?"

"Oh, yes. One of my maids came running back to our main house. She was frantic because the front door was obviously broken open and things were scattered about. She knew right away someone had violated the room, and she didn't want to be accused of stealing."

Hear that, baby? Jack purred in my head. The dead dame's hotel room was tossed. If that's not a lead, I'm the Spirit of Christmas Past.

"Stay put, Fiona, I'll meet you at the inn!" I said and slammed down the phone.

SEYMOUR AND I arrived at the Finch Inn around two that afternoon. Fiona greeted us at the front desk and took us to the parking lot, where the inn's guest transport vehicles were all neatly parked in a row. Seymour moved for the driver's seat, but Fiona immediately blocked him.

"Come on, Fiona," Seymour whined. "Let me drive."

"No way!" Fiona told the off-duty mailman as she vigorously shook her head. "I've seen the way you handle your ice cream truck. I don't have enough insurance to let you get behind the wheel."

Slight and brown-haired, Fiona was a fastidious, middle-aged woman with small, sharp features. I always thought of her as birdlike-an opinion reinforced by Fiona herself, given her vast collection of pins shaped like the feather vertebrates. Today, she wore a decidedly spring ensemble: a crisp white blouse under a pale yellow pantsuit, an enameled pink flamingo preening on its lapel.

Hearing Fiona's "no" on his request to drive, Seymour 's next move was to lunge for her keys. Smaller and faster, Fiona easily sidestepped his lumbering move and hugged the keys to her chest. They clanked against the enameled flamingo pin.

Seymour threw up his hands. "For the love of Guffman, it's only a golf cart! And you have three more."

"I had four more," Fiona shot back, "until a guest drove one into the duck pond."

Seymour smiled. "Yeah, I heard about that. But I'm not some bum driving along a badly lit path with a snoot-full. I'm a bona fide government employee."

"All the more reason not to let you near private property." Fiona pointed to the cart. "You have two choices, Tarnish. You can climb into the backseat or you can walk to Charity Point."

"Come on!" Seymour protested.

"Just follow the path along the pond for about a mile," Fiona said, climbing behind the steering wheel. "You'll reach the lighthouse in twenty minutes, if you walk faster than your typical snail's pace when you deliver my mail."

Seymour squinted at the diminutive yellow cart with its white-and-pink polka-dotted canvas top. "I need leg room. Why can't Penelope squeeze into the back? Then I can ride in the passenger seat."

"How gallant of you," Fiona replied dryly. "The answer again is no. Frankly, I don't wish to sit that close to you."

Seymour glared at the older woman, but he knew he'd met his match. Grumbling, he climbed into the back of the tiny golf cart. It took him a moment to settle in. I sat down, too, and we were on our way.

"Enjoying the ride?" Fiona asked as we sped by a small hand-painted sign for Chez Finch, the Finch Inn's brand-new gourmet restaurant.

"I feel like a set of Tiger Woods's golf clubs," Seymour muttered from the back, his knees around his ears.

The afternoon was luminous, with wispy high clouds in a cobalt sky. The landscaped and manicured grounds around Fiona Finch's Victorian inn smelled of lilacs, mingled with the salty tang of the ocean.

Situated on the shores of Quindicott Pond, the town's only bed-and-breakfast was owned and run by both Fiona and her husband, Barney. In less than a decade, the couple had turned a dilapidated mansion into a historical showplace, and a thriving business. Since then, they'd added the Chez Finch restaurant and a second, smaller rental dwelling called the Lighthouse, which was where we were headed right now.

"Have the police been here?" I asked.

Fiona nodded. "Right after I reported the burglary, Officer Womack showed up. He was all by himself, with a fairly rudimentary crime kit, which he didn't bother using. All he really did was look around, then rope off the area with yellow tape."

"That's it?" I said, surprised.

Fiona shrugged, eyes on the narrow trail. "Officer Womack said he thought the crime was committed by teenagers out to make trouble. He said fingerprints would be useless since the fingerprints of cleaning staff and other guests would make identification of the burglar nearly impossible. He also told me another investigation was going on in town and resources were tied up. I never imagined the two crimes were connected. Obviously, neither did Officer Womack."

I arched an eyebrow. Fiona was an avid reader of true-crime fiction and one of my best customers. She also had good instincts, and the curiosity and persistence of a natural-born investigator.

"So you do think there's a connection?" I asked. Fiona gave me a sidelong glance. "Odd coincidence if they're not."

I stared in thought at the trail ahead. "When did Dr. Lilly check in, exactly? Yesterday morning? Or the day before?"

"Much longer than that. She's been here a full week already, and she booked the Lighthouse for a second week, too."

I was surprised at that. "Dr. Lilly was in town for a week? It's odd that she never dropped by my store once. Last night, she made a big announcement about the post office losing her book delivery. Yet she'd never checked in with me or my aunt about it."

"She seemed pretty busy, if that's any help," Fiona said.

"Busy doing what?"

"One day, I saw her with a laptop in our restaurant, and another day it was a tape recorder and notebooks. I asked her what she was writing, and she said she was working on a new book."

Busy dame, that Dr. Lilly, Jack remarked. The ink's not even dry on her new book, and she's already scribbling the next one.

"That's not unusual, Jack," I silently replied. "Some authors are prolific. They have a lot to say. And most of them don't make much money, so they have to write a lot to make a living."

So what else is new. Every typewriter banger I knew had to hustle for every plugged nickel, too.

We'd come to the end of the pond and the golf cart's tiny engine really began to chug as we moved toward higher ground. Now the trail was bordered by a thick wooded area on one side, the rocky shore of the Atlantic Ocean on the other.

The only signs of civilization were the foot-tall, solar-powered lamps that Barney Finch had planted ten feet apart, along both sides of the trail to light up the path at night.

As we continued on, I began to spy patches of torn-up earth and deep tire tracks. I wondered about those tracks-the trail was far too narrow for a car to negotiate. I pointed out the damage to Fiona.

"Oh, I know," Fiona said in an exasperated tone. "This is private property, from here to the Lighthouse and a little beyond, but we get trail bikers racing through here some nights and almost every weekend. The noise is awful and there's been damage."

"Vandalism?" I asked.

Fiona sighed. "Probably not deliberate. A few of Barney's solar lights have been knocked over. I've spoken to Chief Ciders about getting a patrol up here, but he claims he hasn't enough manpower. He says the only way to do it is on a motorcycle, and he hasn't got any."

"That's the best he can do?" I asked.

"Oh, he suggested I hire my own security."

"When exactly did you discover the robbery?" I asked.

"No more than an hour ago."

A moment later, I spied the top of the conical tower. We were almost there. Clearly, the area was isolated, so breaking into and entering the Lighthouse bungalow and making an undetected search of the premises would have been a pretty easy proposition for any burglar.