Haunting Danielle 27 The Ghost and the Mountain Man by Bobbi Holmes (great novels to read TXT) 📕

her head and sighed. “I really don’t understand what happened. I like Ginny Thomas, and she has been most generous with the museum, but I don’t know her well. Yet she seemed sincerely upset, considering the way she clung to me the other day. It was right after Brian Henderson left and not long after the supposed incident.”

“Sorry you had to be put in the middle of this,” Danielle said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

“Yet, if I’m totally honest, Heather can get a little snippy. And it wouldn’t surprise me to hear she lost her temper and threw something. After all, I have seen her punch Chris’s arm a few times when he annoyed her. And he’s her boss,” Millie said.

“Heather has been working to break that habit,” Walt said, resisting the urge to smirk.

“But the thing is, I find it hard to believe Heather would throw something that belonged to the museum,” Millie said. “She used to be a docent, and she was always respectful of the displays and would get quite annoyed when someone came in and picked something up.” Millie lowered her voice and added, “Frankly, a couple of times I thought she was going to smack one of our visitors who picked something up when there was a no-touching sign posted. It’s one reason I was rather relieved when she said she couldn’t docent anymore. We really can’t have our docents hitting visitors.”

“What you’re saying, you can imagine Heather throwing something at Ginny if she annoyed her, yet just not throwing something from an exhibit?” Walt asked.

“Exactly!” Millie chirped. “Plus, she’s been instrumental in getting the Glandon Foundation to fund many of our projects.”

There had been changes made to the newspaper section of the museum that Danielle hadn’t noticed before today. Along the back wall, behind the table, they had installed a new bookshelf to store the additional volumes of newspapers, and no longer were any of the volumes stacked on the table. The table, now bare, provided a space for researchers to set volumes they wanted to read.

After Millie left Walt and Danielle alone, they located the volumes with issues from 1904 and set them on the table. Danielle sat down on a chair, while Walt took the second one.

They each spent the next twenty minutes looking through the newspapers and reading the various articles.

“Oh my,” Danielle muttered, looking down at the newspaper before her. “I found the article on the fire. There’s a picture of the house. Burned to the ground.”

Walt stood up and walked around the table to Danielle’s side. He looked down at the newspaper and its grainy black-and-white photograph.

“I remember that article,” Walt said as he returned to his seat across the table from Danielle.

“You do?” Danielle frowned.

“Yes. It tells about the furnace exploding, and how my parents were attempting to carry Maddie out when a beam fell, trapping them.”

“You were just a little boy when this article came out,” Danielle said.

“My grandmother kept a copy of it. I found it later in her things, after she died. I remember reading it. It gave me nightmares for days. Such a hellish way to die. But perhaps they were already dead. While no one wants to hear someone might have murdered his parents, I suppose it comforts me to think that perhaps their death wasn’t as horrific as I imagined. Oh, still horrific, but you know what I mean.”

Danielle looked down at the article and reread it. She flipped the page and found another article discussing the victims. “There’s a picture of your parents with Maddie, taken at a picnic. Maddie was a tiny little thing.”

“I don’t remember. My only memories of her are going to visit their house with my mother, but she was always in bed.”

“Your father, he was a tall man,” Danielle said.

“Yes, I remember that. Of course, I suppose from the perspective of most small boys their fathers are large.”

Danielle looked up at Walt and said, “I suspect someone staged the scene of the fire.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Think about it. Let’s say you don’t have your telekinesis powers. But we are in a fire with Lily. Lily has a broken leg. Would you and I carry her out?”

Walt frowned. “No. I would tell you to run for it and then carry Lily out myself.”

“Exactly,” Danielle said.

They skimmed through the rest of the newspapers for that year yet found no news stories that hinted at any conflict between Alex and either of his two friends. When they finished going through the papers for 1904, they started on 1905.

“I found an article on Teddy’s second wife,” Walt told Danielle.

She looked up from the paper she was reading and asked, “What does it say?”

“It paints Teddy as a most tragic figure,” Walt told her.

“How so?”

“Their maid found Josephine at the bottom of the stairs when she came in that morning. Supposedly, Teddy was in town at the barber when it happened. They claim he had left the house just minutes before his wife fell to her death. Poor man, to lose both wives under such tragic circumstances,” Walt scoffed.

“Really? How convenient for him,” Danielle said.

Walt closed the book and looked up at Danielle. “Let’s go. I don’t think we’re going to find anything here. Perhaps I’ll learn what I need to know tomorrow from Bud.”

Just as Walt and Danielle stood up from the table, Millie scurried over to them. “Did you find anything interesting?”

“A few things,” Danielle said. “I’m just glad Ginny didn’t dump all the old newspapers in the recycle bin.”

“So true! And she has some wonderful old photographs. People thought Emily was a hoarder, but she actually had some very interesting things.”

“The museum’s gain, that’s for sure,” Danielle said.

“I don’t imagine you’ve heard about the gold nugget Emily donated before her death,” Millie said.

Danielle frowned. “Gold nugget?”

“Yes. Actually, it belonged to Emily’s daughter, Caitlin. Poor girl, died of a drug overdose. Always was a troubled child. They had passed it down in the