Page 32 of Gumbo, Ghosts, and Deadly Deception
"Oh my God! Is she breathing?" I asked.
Hollis knelt down and checked her pulse. "Yeah, but barely. Her pupils are dilated." He looked up at the window, which was open. "She must have climbed up the fire escape from the courtyard."
Or she had come through the very front door that never seemed to be locked.
I dialed 911 while Claude examined the scattered powder. I barked out my address into the phone and told them a woman was unconscious.
"This is probably angel's trumpet," Claude said grimly. "Same as they found Delia in the bathroom."
We were leaping to conclusions but if there was ever a time to leap it was now. “Did she take this herself? Ginger killed Delia?" I felt a mixture of relief and confusion. Relief that the killer had been caught, confusion about why.
Concern that Ginger was going to die. If she was another victim or the perpetrator I didn’t want to see her life end right in front of me. The 911 operator was asking me questions but I panicked and handed the phone to Hollis. He told her he was law enforcement and to send an ambulance and then he ended the call.
Distraught, I saw him put my phone in his pocket but didn’t really register that as odd.
"Maybe she ingested it herself," Hollis said. He was doing chest compressions on her, but I noticed he didn’t attempt to give her mouth-to-mouth. Clearly too risky. "Or maybe someone wanted us to think she did."
"What do you mean?"
He pointed to Ginger's hand, which was clutched around something small and metallic. She was holding a brass key. Old, ornate, with a fleur-de-lis design.
The same key I'd found behind the pantry baseboard.
Except that key was currently in my pocket.
"How many of these keys are there?" Hollis asked.
Before I could answer, the sound of sirens filled the air. Within minutes, the house was once again crawling with paramedics.
As they loaded Ginger onto a stretcher, she briefly regained consciousness. Her eyes found mine across the room, and she mouthed a single word. "Basement."
Then she was gone, rushed to the hospital with an uncertain prognosis.
"Basement?" Hollis asked. "This house doesn’t have a basement."
"No," I said. But even as I said it, I was thinking about the hidden room behind the kitchen, about Aunt Odette's journal entries, about all the secrets this house had kept for forty years.
"Harper," Claude said quietly. "What aren't you telling us?"
I didn’t feel like I needed to tell Claude a damn thing. I looked at him, this man who had taken advantage of the woman I now knew as Delia. He had been complicit in whatever happened to Francine Darrow, in whatever small way, and had spent forty years regretting the choices he’d made.
I made a decision.
"There's something I need to show you both," I said. "Something Aunt Odette left for me to find."
I pulled the journal pages from my pocket and handed them to Hollis. "But first, you need to read these. All of them. Because I think Ginger wasn't trying to hurt anyone tonight. I think she was trying to find the same thing Delia was looking for."
"Which is?"
"Proof of what really happened to Francine Darrow. And I think I know where it is."
As Hollis began reading Aunt Odette's journal entries, his expression growing darker with each page, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were running out of time. Ginger's whispered "basement" felt like a warning to me, not a confession.
Because if she hadn't killed Delia, then the real killer was still out there.
And they now knew exactly how close we were to uncovering the truth.
NINE
