Ghost in the Wind

by E. J. Copperman

  Vance McTiernan’s daughter died in Harbor Haven less than five months ago and I didn’t know about it? I was a disgrace to obsessive fans everywhere.

  “It’s not true,” Vance interrupted.

  “We know,” my mother assured him. She’s a champ at getting people back under control. She learned to do it when I was about Melissa’s age. “But Maxie isn’t responsible for what was written in the newspaper.”

  I knew who was responsible for that, and she was going to be my first phone call.

  Vance eyed Maxie up and down. “I can tell you what she could be responsible for,” he said. It’s part of the rock star persona to be a ladies’ man. He probably couldn’t help it. But it would have been nice if he’d had better taste.

  Maxie ignored him and went back to reading. “Vanessa, forty years old, had been a singer and keyboardist for the local band Once Again until two years ago. She was currently employed as a coding specialist for a medical records firm in Asbury Park. Survivors include her mother, Claudia Rabinowitz, and a half brother, Jeremy Bensinger. The brother’s in Marlboro but there’s no address for Claudia.” She looked up at Vance.

  “Claudia,” he said almost wistfully. “I met her on tour. We played the Garden State Arts Center and she was backstage. We hit it off.” (Just to be accurate, the venue is now called the PNC Bank Arts Center. The name change hasn’t made any difference to the music.)

  One of the later Jingles albums included a song called “Claudia” that I’d especially loved in my early teens. It sang of new love, possibilities and devotion that would never die.

  “How long were you married?” Mom asked.

  “Married?” Vance said. “We were only together that one night. I didn’t see her again until she filed the paternity suit.”

  “What’s a paternity suit?” Melissa asked.

  “Something fathers wear for special occasions,” my own father said, coming down from the ceiling to shelter his granddaughter, who clearly knew he was lying. “Come with me into the kitchen, peanut. I want to talk to you about what you’re making for dinner tonight.” Melissa has been taking cooking lessons from Mom, who has finally realized I’m a lost cause in the kitchen and moved directly on to the next generation.

  Liss, who is a very intelligent girl, gave her grandfather a suspicious look. “You’re just trying to get me out of the room, aren’t you?” she asked Dad.

  “That’s right,” my father said.

  Melissa thought that over. “Okay,” she said. She loves her grandfather and finds it hard to say no to him, especially since he is deceased. Besides, we both knew that no matter what inappropriate subject matter might arise after she left the room, Maxie would clue her in later.

  I looked up at Vance as soon as Liss and Dad went into the hallway, presumably to go to the kitchen. “Vanessa,” I said. “She used your name? Not her mother’s?”

  “Only professionally. Her mother’s name wasn’t going to open any doors in the world of music, love,” Vance said. “Her mother was a girl from New Jersey and I was the Jingles.”

  That was the second time he’d chosen to say it that way. There’s a certain braggadocio among performers and artists, but in this case Vance wasn’t just being an egotist. It was common knowledge among those of us who loved the Jingles that he was not only the heart and soul but the brains of the outfit. He wrote (until two minutes ago I would have said cowrote) all the songs, arranged and sang them, and although Martin Wellspring got credit for producing the band’s recordings, all the interviews in later years—even with Wellspring himself—admitted that while Vance might not have been physically turning the knobs, he was charting out exactly when and how far they should be turned.

  “Okay, so, please, explain what you think happened and what you want us to do.”

  “Indeed,” Paul chipped in. “I don’t see how we can help you much in this case.” Paul and I had apparently undergone one of those mind-switching things that happens in some of the cheaper live-action Disney movies—I’m usually the one trying to get out of an investigation, and he’s the one being patient and polite with our (usually ghostly) potential clients, in the hopes of getting the case.

  As if there were so many other spirit detectives on the Ghosternet Craigslist that we had to compete.

  “I think you can,” Vance answered. “See, here’s the thing: I was in England when I died, and that’s where I showed up like this.” He gestured toward himself in a sweeping motion.

  I remembered when Vance had died. I’d read about it in the newspaper and sat stock-still for I don’t know how long. The Swine had come down from our bedroom and looked at me carefully. Then, being a swine, he had asked if I’d gotten any Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast.

  “So what are you doing in New Jersey?” Paul asked.

  “We were always bigger in the UK than here, so Vanessa’s death was news. When I heard it on the telly, I had to come here to find out what really happened,” Vance said. “It’s funny what you can do when you don’t have to actually follow physical laws at all.”

  “Still, you couldn’t have flown here in minutes from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,” Mom said.

  “Of course not,” Vance admitted. “It took months for me to walk here.”

  “Walk?” Maxie said. “From England?”

  “Absolutely. It’s not like I could drown, is it? And I have to tell you, there are some amazing sights down there, when there’s still light enough to see. Sometimes I’d float to the top and hover a bit, fly over the water and watch the whales jump. But mostly it was walking.”

  “Couldn’t you have taken a plane or a cruise ship or something?” Mom asked. “It would have been faster.”

  “Needed time to think,” Vance said. “Needed a lot of time. To think.”

  “But you didn’t find out everything you needed or you wouldn’t be talking to us,” Paul reminded Vance, bringing him back to the subject at hand. Paul is a master at staying on topic.

  Vance pointed a finger at him. “Absolutely right, mate, absolutely right,” he said. His accent got a little thicker when he talked to Paul. His manner was more jovial, too, as if he momentarily forgot the reason he’d been talking to us in the first place. “I don’t know who did it and I don’t have a guess about how, but the problem is, I have no information. I was back in England and Nessa was here. So I need professionals like yourselves to find out who killed my little baby daughter.”

  Maxie looked up from her screen. “Your daughter was forty,” she said. Maxie will never be forty, so she thinks that’s old.

  “They’re always your babies, love.”

  Paul raised his finger, no doubt to lecture Vance on the finer points of investigation and motive, that one needs reliable, verifiable evidence and so forth—but I jumped in before the professor could begin to profess. “We’ll do everything we can,” I said to Vance. Paul looked at me with an expression of utter amazement on his face but no way was I going to let him turn down a case with Vance McTiernan just because he clearly was jealous of our client.

  The man who might have had slightly more justified reason to be jealous—my boyfriend, Josh—would certainly take my side of the argument. That is, he would if he were awake. Right now, he was nestled against my shoulder like a puppy, eyes closed and breathing regular. He even had the good taste and breeding not to be snoring. But I couldn’t count on him for support just now.

  “What Alison means,” Paul countered, “is that we will try our best to determine if your daughter’s death was actually a homicide. We’re not going to enter into a situation where we find some patsy on whom you can take out your frustrations. Is that clear?”

  “Crystal,” Vance agreed.

  “Very well, then,” Paul said, settling the matter. “We will report back to you as soon as there is news about the case.”

  “Right,” Vance said
.

  I got the impression Paul expected Vance to leave at that point but the rock ’n’ roll ghost stayed put and watched my friend, the detective, float in place.

  Paul studied him. “Is there anything more you can tell us that might help?” he asked.

  Vance made a show of thinking about it—I was noticing that he made a show of just about everything, not that I minded—and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Very well,” Paul repeated.

  “Okay.” This was getting tedious.

  “Okay, fellas,” I said. “Let’s get the ball rolling. Vance, we have a client form we’d like filled out. It gives us information about you and the case and fills in all the information we’d want to ask you later when you’re not here.”

  “When I’m not here?” Vance asked. “Where am I going, love?”

  “Don’t you have a place to stay?” Mom asked.

  “Why would I? I just strolled in from the Atlantic. I’m sure you’ll find this hard to believe, but now that Vanessa’s gone, I don’t actually know anyone else in New Jersey. Except you.”

  Paul’s eyes widened. Mom’s narrowed. Maxie, as ever when the situation didn’t involve her, was distracted by her own thoughts and was circling the ceiling slowly. Her rate of speed increases when she’s agitated but now she was downright tranquil.

  “I can stay here, can’t I?” he asked.

  “Of course!” I answered before Paul could object. My inner fangirl was screaming, Vance McTiernan’s going to stay in my house! Vance McTiernan’s going to stay in my house! Vance McTiernan’s going to stay in my house! Would I get to hear him sing? What if he wrote a song about me if I found the truth about his daughter’s death? Was that too much?

  Next to me on the sofa, Josh stirred a little and his eyelids fluttered. I lowered my voice a little to let him sleep—the man owns a paint store and has to be up at the crack of dawn to open in time for all the painters stocking up for a day’s work—and added, “I have a room that’s not being rented if you want to set up shop in there.”

  Maxie’s mouth twisted on one side. “He’s a ghost,” she said from the ceiling. “Do you think he brought bags with him?”

  “Would be nice to have a base of operations,” Vance said, looking me straight in the eyes, just as he once had from the vintage poster I’d had tacked up on my wall as a tween. “Please take me there.”

  “Follow me.” I figured if I hustled him out of the room, Paul’s noticeable irritation at Vance’s residency might not be vocalized.

  I was wrong. “You intend to stay here for the duration of the investigation?” Paul demanded of Vance. “To watch us every step of the way?”

  Vance, who had been following me out of the room, turned and looked back at Paul, who had dropped about calf-deep in the floor but was still advancing toward us. “Well, yeah,” Vance said. “Why not? Is there something you don’t want me to see about the way you’re going to find my daughter’s killer?”

  Paul stopped. You can make fun of his Canadian politeness. You can question his priorities. You can even tell him he wasn’t the best investigator ever when he was alive, as Maxie often does.

  But you don’t dare question his integrity on any level.

  “Of course not,” he got out through essentially sealed lips.

  “All right, then. I’ll be here to help if you need me, but I promise I’ll stay out of the way when you don’t, okay? You won’t even know I’m here.”

  We turned back toward the hallway and I walked, Vance floated toward the stairway so I could show him his room.

  But as we made it to the movie room archway (there is no door there), I heard Paul mutter, “I’ll know.”

  Three

  I was immediately annoyed that I couldn’t give Vance (I got to call him Vance!) my best room because I’d rented it to a living, breathing, paying person. I continued to ignore Paul’s uncharacteristic arguing against taking the case, but aside from that, the rest of the night proceeded more or less as usual. Josh woke up and went home to sleep. Melissa and Dad arrived back from the kitchen with plans for dinner that included ordering a pizza.

  I also helped two of my guests, Roberta and Stan Levine, find a suitable restaurant for dinner. I don’t serve food, so my guests are on their own in that department, but it doesn’t mean I can’t throw a little business in the direction of the Harbor Haven Diner or Rascal’s for dinner or the Stud Muffin for breakfast. I like to support local businesses, especially the ones that support me by sending a small percentage of the profit they make on each customer I send their way.

  Roberta and Stan headed out, as did the rest of the guests, including Maureen after I called a taxi for her. The walk into town would have been too difficult, but she wasn’t going to stay in the house all week, she said. This was a shore vacation!

  Maxie cut out right before dinner, saying she had a date with Everett, a ghost for whom death had actually improved things. Everett had been a homeless man on the streets of Harbor Haven in the last years of his life, but had reverted in spirit form to the clean-cut, disciplined military man of his past. Maxie announced that the two of them were going “down to the mini golf course to move the balls around when people aren’t looking.”

  The five of us left in the house (Vance had stopped by to say that he was going to “gallivant about town by way of exploring”) gathered in the kitchen when the pizza arrived for Mom, Liss and me.

  “I’ve never seen you like this, Alison,” Paul said from his perch over the stove (he knew there was no danger it would be used and besides, what damage could it do to him?) as I was getting paper plates out of the cabinet. “You’ve never actually wanted to take a case before and now suddenly you want this of all cases?”

  “What’s wrong with this case?” Melissa was finding cups in a cabinet closer to her reach, under the countertop by the fridge. But “her reach” is growing and Dr. Stewart, the pediatrician, insists she’ll be taller than me in a couple of years.

  “For one thing, I don’t believe one word that man says.” Paul was looking at me as he said that, and all I was doing was getting a pitcher of water out of the fridge. “He walked here from England? He has it on ‘good authority’ that Vanessa didn’t die of natural causes? It’s so clear he’s lying. I don’t understand it, Alison. Why are you trying to talk me into doing the bidding of a man I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw him, if I could throw him. What makes you so sure about him?”

  I stopped and considered it.

  “The tide of love and truth

  the idea of love in the sea

  was the only bright part

  of my misspent youth

  that meant the world to me.”

  I looked up at Paul and folded my arms.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “It’s from the Jingles song ‘Misspent Youth,’” Mom informed him.

  “It’s a terrible lyric,” Paul insisted. “It strains to rhyme and confuses the number of items it describes. What has that to do with the murder—if it was a murder at all—of Vance McTiernan’s daughter?”

  “A man who can write with that much sensitivity is open to pain,” I said. “Imagine how he must feel with his only child dead by someone’s hand and powerless to do anything about it?”

  “He’s not interested in evidence. He doesn’t need proof. He wants us to help him get revenge,” Paul said. “He wants us to identify a killer and then you can bet Vance will take matters into his own hands.”

  I turned on the oven because I like to keep a slice or two warm. It was a very mild September, but the heat from the oven wouldn’t be oppressive and warm pizza, while fabulous, is not as fabulous as hot pizza.

  I had put two slices in the oven on a piece of aluminum foil (keeping with the fully disposable theme of the dinner) and was taking another out of the box to put on my p
late. Liss was already set up with a slice and we sat on bar stools at the center island, a pitcher of filtered water between us.

  “Vance is in deep pain,” I said. “Maybe it’s his unfinished business on earth. Maybe he needs to solve this crime so he can move on to the next stage, did you think about that?”

  Paul’s lips straightened out into a horizontal line. “Vance has shown no sign whatsoever of any mental anguish,” he said. “So far, all he’s done is tell us a fragmented story, put off filling out our intake form and charm you into letting him stay in the house. You’re being played, Alison, and I even think you know it.”

  I didn’t answer Paul because, frankly, what he was saying hit a little close to home. Also, I was busy eating. (The pizza tasted great, but then, when does it not?) I had never been enthusiastic (or even willing) to take on an investigation before. But Vance McTiernan wasn’t just some guy who’d sang on records. He was the guy I’d listened to in my adolescence when nobody understood me—but he had understood. He was the singer whose voice would echo my angst, whose lyrics spoke the feelings I couldn’t express. Even as an adult, when Melissa’s dad, The Swine, had left me for a younger, blonder woman, I had spent two full weeks listening to nothing but the Jingles.

  I was halfway through my slice when I asked Paul, “What reason would he have to con us?” Defensive? Moi? “What’s his motivation? You’re the one who advertised our services on the Ghosternet or Vance would never have known to come here and talk to us. And if his daughter wasn’t murdered, what possible reason would Vance McTiernan have to look into it?”

  Melissa said, “He could just be wrong. He might think the evidence supports the conclusion of murder when in fact all he has is circumstantial evidence and innuendo.”

  It’s possible Melissa has spent a little too much time around our investigations.

  Paul was pacing, which is always weird to watch since his feet don’t touch the ground. I’ve seen it many times before but it’s still a little disconcerting, as was how I could see the calendar on the wall behind him despite the fact that his body was in front of it.