No Ghosts Need Apply

Dan Andriacco

Description

A ghost story becomes a matter of murder."The world is big enough for us," Sherlock Holmes once told Dr. Watson. "No ghosts need apply."But amateur sleuth Sebastian McCabe and his chronicler Jeff Cody don't have a choice when a popular TV reality show comes to Erin, Ohio, to record a Halloween special about the entity disturbing a local gastropub known as The Speakeasy.Jackie O'Brien was a bootlegger and speakeasy owner gunned down in 1920. Ever since, his unquiet spirit has been said to haunt the building where it happened - one which, after many transformations over the years, is once again a speakeasy of sorts. There may be skeptics, but Erin's exorcist is not among them. Nor is Sebastian McCabe, who has been up close and personal with the ghost. Both are among those interviewed by Stuart Diamond, specialist in the strange, who has come to town along with Chef Stephen Lipinski and his producer wife to record the episode of the show Dining (Way) Out. What was expected to be some fun publicity for the gastropub turns into a nightmare after someone is shot to death one night in the same place and in the same way as Jackie O'Brien almost exactly 100 years earlier. Police Chief Oscar Hummel recognizes this as Mac's kind of case, but Mac and Jeff are forced to become virtual sleuths most of the time when the restaurant and many other businesses are shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before he solves the murder-and a second homicide-Mac makes an embarrassing blunder in one lesser case and scores a great triumph in another.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781787058231
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Front Matter
Title Page
Publisher Information
Dedication
McCabe and Cody
No Ghosts Need Apply
Chapter One: Ghost Story
Chapter Two: Coffee Talk
Chapter Three: Spirits
Chapter Four: Bad Times, Hard Times
Chapter Five: The Body at the Bar
Chapter Six: Grilling the Chef
Chapter Seven: Home Office
Chapter Eight: Virtual Sleuthing
Chapter Nine: The Man Behind the Mask
Chapter Ten: YouTuber
Chapter Eleven: Murders Old and New
Chapter Twelve: Doubly Dead
Chapter Thirteen: Background to Murder
Chapter Fourteen: Digital Salon, Virtual Suspect
Chapter Fifteen: Requiem for a Fraud
Chapter Sixteen: Ghost Town
Chapter Seventeen: Social Distancing
Chapter Eighteen: Justice Denied
Chapter Nineteen: Crime on the Rocks
Chapter Twenty: Unrest Home
Chapter Twenty-One: Contact Tracing
Chapter Twenty-Two: Dead on the Water
Chapter Twenty-Three: Murder with a Past
Chapter Twenty-Four: A Sister’s Story
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Last Gaffe
Chapter Twenty-Six: Homicide Deterred
Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Dead Man Speaks
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Square One
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Gun Play
Chapter Thirty: Murder Most Simple
Chapter Thirty-One: Loose Ends
Back Matter
A Few Words of Thanks
About the Author
Praise for the McCabe–Cody Mysteries
Also Available



Front Matter



Title Page
No Ghosts Need Apply
McCabe and Cody Book 10
Dan Andriacco



Publisher Information
Published in 2021 by
MX Publishing
www.mxpublishing.com
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2021 Dan Andriacco
The right of Dan Andriacco to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Brian Belanger



Dedication
This book is dedicated
to my friend
Monica Schmidt, ASH, BSI
a force to be reckoned with



McCabe and Cody



No Ghosts Need Apply
A Sebastian McCabe—Jeff Cody Mystery





Chapter One: Ghost Story
“Believe in the supernatural?” Sebastian McCabe repeated, arching an eyebrow at my wife, Lynda. “Of course, I do! That is an inescapable part of my faith.”
Tall, blonde Johanna Rawls wrinkled her Nordic brow and demonstrated the inquisitiveness that makes her such a good reporter. “I didn’t know Catholics were into ghosts.”
“Oh, ghosts!” Mac said. “I was thinking of God, Satan, angels, demons, the immortality of the soul—that sort of supernatural. Ghosts are another matter altogether, and a rather murky one, theologically speaking.”
The broad, bearded McCabe phiz looked thoughtful. Being a professor in his day job, you can hardly blame the big guy for shifting into lecture mode, even though we were in a watering hole and not a classroom.
“The Bible mentions ghosts in both Testaments. In the First Book of Samuel, for example, the ghost of the prophet Samuel appears to King Saul—although the Church Fathers thought that to be a demonic apparition rather than a genuine specter. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, the apostles mistake Jesus for a ghost when he walks on water, while in St. Luke’s he calms their fears by assuring them he is not a ghost after the Resurrection. So, clearly, ghosts were known and feared in biblical times.
“Nevertheless, even the saints are divided on whether the souls of the dead can return. St. Augustine in the fourth century rejected the idea. St. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages thought otherwise, however. The Divine Doctor believed that both saints and souls in purgatory could appear to the living.”
Mac quaffed from his mug of Poltergeist Porter, brewed in the same building where we were drinking and yakking. “Myself, I think that spirits are real and nothing to trifle with, though perhaps the nomenclature ‘ghosts’ is best avoided as both prejudicial and overly dramatic.”
“Well, ghosts are just what I had in mind when I asked about the supernatural,” Lynda clarified. That’s not the only kind of spirits she’s interested in, as evidenced by the Manhattan cocktail in her hand.
“Whatever you call them, Father Juan says they’re real,” reported her gal pal, Sister Margaret Mary Malone—Sister Polly to most people; Triple M in my mind. “He told me he’s blessed several houses that were disturbed by unquiet spirits. He’s an exorcist, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know!” I said.
“Well, he doesn’t talk about it a lot. Publicity for an exorcist is not necessarily a good thing. It can attract a lot of nutballs.”
No surprise there.
I made a mental note to talk to the good father about his side gig in the ghostbusting line. As communications director for St. Benignus University, a small, Catholic institution in also-small Erin, Ohio, I’m always on the lookout for press release material concerning our faculty and staff. The Reverend Juan Diego Ortega—Father Juan—is our director of campus ministry, and thereby Triple M’s boss.
We were gathered at The Speakeasy gastropub on that Martin Luther King Day, which was also the beginning of the last week of SBU’s winter academic quarter, to celebrate Triple M’s 41st birthday. With short black hair, parted in the middle, Triple M doesn’t look her age to me. Maybe there’s an aging portrait of her in Dorian Gray’s attic.
Mac and Kate (his wife, my sister) were just back from Baker Street Irregulars Weekend in New York, where Mac hobnobs with his fellow Sherlockian wizards and whatnot, which provided a third reason to get together. Their oldest daughter, Rebecca, almost 21 and in the throes of a change in her major at SBU, was watching the three Cody offspring.
The Speakeasy features open rafters, visible pipes, and brewing vats that patrons can see from the bar and the dining tables. Starting with six varieties of beer from an India pale ale to a bourbon-barrel stout at its launch about four years earlier, the gastropub now serves up a brewer’s dozen of malt and hop beverages. It also offers high-quality edibles, as indicated by the “gastro” on the front end of “pub.” On a warm day we could be out on the sidewalk or the popular roof garden with its view of fireworks after Erin Eagles baseball games. In the waning days of January, that was a distant memory. Lynda wore a dark chocolate turtleneck sweater, so distractingly form-fitting it kept us both warm.
“Maybe Father Juan should bless this place to get rid of the ghost of Jackie O’Brien,” she said, “but not too soon. There’s a reason I brought up the supernatural. Tell them, Johanna.”
Tall Rawls, looking even taller in after-hours attire of short skirt and three-inch heels, was Lynda’s protégé back when Lynda was news editor of the Erin Observer & News-Ledger . My wife still keeps in touch with all of her former colleagues while not changing diapers, writing family saga novels, or handling the occasional freelance writing gig. As Mrs. Cody has no secrets from me, I knew what Johanna was going to say:
“We have a story in tomorrow’s paper—well, it’s actually in the Online Observer now—that the Wine & Spirits TV Channel is coming to Erin to make a Halloween episode about our local haunt. It’s perfect because Jackie O’Brien became a ghost, if he did, when he was killed right here on Halloween night in 1920, when this was a real speakeasy.”
I loved her journalistic qualifiers.
Mac’s expressive visage expressed interest. By that I mean he arched an eyebrow.
“Isn’t WSTV your favorite channel?” Kate asked Lynda.
“Yeah, I love it. I could watch it for hours.” You do watch it for hours. The gold flecks in my beloved’s deep brown eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. Or maybe it was just the lighting. No, she was jazzed.
“The show that’s coming here is Dining (Way) Out ,” Johanna went on, making the parentheses with her hands. “That’s the one where these two brothers from Santa Fe, Stephen and Karl Lipinski, go to quirky bars and restaurants—ones that are shaped like a flying saucer, or underwater, or built as a movie set with low ceilings so the actors looked tall, or were once patronized by Albert Einstein, who ran up a tab and never remembered to settle up.”
“You’re making that up,” I said. I never watch that stuff.
“She’s not,” Lynda informed me, brushing honey-colored curls off her lovely oval face. She wore it chin length at the time. “Those were all actual episodes, darling.”
“So how does Jackie O’Brien’s ghost fit into the format of that show?” wondered Kate. She’s a no-nonsense woman for an artist, older than me by 18 months and with the same shade of red hair.
“Well, it is ‘way out,’” Johanna said. Air quotes. “The gastropub having its own resident spook, I mean. Besides, this episode is a bit of an outlier by necessity. As you will read in my story, Karl Lipinski—”
“The funny brother,” Lynda put in.
“—had a heart attack that’s going to put him out of action for months.” Too many pastries; I’ve seen him on TV on my wa