The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion by Alice Kimberly Read Free Book Online Page B

car door. I rose up, hoping to catch a glimpse of Eddie and the medical examiner, but it was just two more of Ciders’s regulars. With a sigh of disappointment, I sat back down.
    “Okay, Tarnish. Let’s change the subject,” Ciders declared. “Tell us what you were doing last Tuesday night.”
    Seymour blinked. “Huh? What night?”
    “Last Tuesday,” Ciders said. “On most weeknights, your ice cream truck’s parked down at Quindicott Pond. But for some reason, you weren’t there last Tuesday.”
    “Wow,” I whispered to Jack. “Guess I haven’t been giving Chief Ciders enough credit for his powers of observation.”
    Jack laughed; his cool aura fluctuated colder for a moment. I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion so quick, doll.
    Gaping, Seymour looked impressed, too. “How do you even know that?” he asked the chief.
    Ciders shrugged. “My two granddaughters wanted ice cream cones. You weren’t there. It ticked me off.”
    “Let me guess why you were ticked,” Seymour said.
    “You had to drive all the way up to Cold Stone Creamery on the main highway. Well, boo-hoo.”
    I rolled my eyes. So much for Ciders’s powers of observation.
    “Where were you, Tarnish?” Ciders barked.
    “I took the night off, okay? So what?”
    Ciders glanced at Bull. “You tell him.”
    Seymour smirked. “Tell me what?”
    “Funny thing happened that very night. We got a call from Miss Todd. She wanted us to investigate strange noises.” Bull put air quotes around the words strange noises .
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Seymour said, imitating the air quotes.
    “It means the old lady probably heard someone trying to break into her house,” Bull replied. “That’s what it”—(air quotes again)—“means!”
    Ciders rubbed his jowly jawline. “My men did a routine investigation. They didn’t come up with anything, but it seems pretty clear that someone was harassing Miss Todd. She reported ‘strange noises’ again a number of nights after that first report. Since her doors and windows never showed any attempt at forced entry, I figured it was just pranksters—local teenage crap. But seeing what you did to Miss Todd, I’m thinking there was a pattern here.”
    “What pattern ?” Seymour threw up his hands. “And how the heck did you find a way to shoehorn me into it?”
    “You’re sitting here without a solid alibi for why you weren’t working your ice cream truck last Tuesday.”
    “Oh, for pity’s sake. I have an alibi! The brakes on my truck were on the fritz! Cost nearly a grand to get them fixed, too. Call Patrick Scotch at Scotch Brothers Motors if you don’t believe me. It was Paddy who did the scalping.”
    Ciders shook his head. “Miss Todd made a number of noise complaints, all of them at night. I think it might prove interesting to match the dates of those calls against the receipts from your ice cream truck.”
    “Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” Seymour replied. “Prying into my private life like jackbooted fascists!”
    In a disturbing coincidence of timing, the clomp-clomp-clomp of heavy boots sounded in the foyer. Eddie Franzetti entered the dining room a moment later, wearing his perfectly pressed blue uniform.
    Eddie was more compact than Bull. He had a runner’s physique with leaner muscles and a smaller stature, but his expression was light-years sharper. Under his flat-topped cop’s hat, he had a thick head of black hair, like all the Franzettis. His complexion always appeared lightly tanned, even in the winter. And when he walked in the room his big, long-lashed, cow-brown eyes (the ones that made all the girls swoon in high school, including the girl he married) surveyed the room in a microsecond. The first thing he did was nod to me. I silently waved back.
    Ciders appeared to notice Franzetti’s arrival and the fact that I was still in the room at the same time. His face darkened when he glanced at me. Then he directed his words to his deputy