Ghost in the Wind

by E. J. Copperman

  “Nobody thinks you did anything. I need your help on something.”

  Maxie floated a little closer to the ceiling. “Me? Not Paul?”

  “Given Paul’s mood, I think I’m better off with you.”

  Maxie’s hand went to her mouth, I think to suppress a laugh. “You’re kidding,” she managed. Maxie thinks I hold a grudge because she dropped a bucket of wall compound on my head and started me seeing ghosts. She’s not entirely wrong.

  “Not even close to kidding. I want someone to keep an eye on Vance, someone who can follow him wherever he goes.”

  Maxie made a show of “getting it”: She turned her mouth into an O and nodded. “Okay. So what am I looking for?”

  “I’m not sure. I just want to know if I can trust Vance or not. Can you just keep an eye on him without him knowing it?”

  She gave me the “okay” sign. “Sure. Discretion is my middle name.” And she zoomed into the ceiling.

  So things were looking great already. And, no, I didn’t mean that sincerely.

  I turned to my laptop, which was, in computer years, about three hundred years old. And it wasn’t state-of-the-art back when I bought it, when I was still married to The Swine. It operated, mostly, but could not be called lightning fast. Or even disabled-snail fast.

  It was slow, is what I’m saying.

  Still, it was marginally better than nothing, so I figured that with a few minutes to spare, I might as well run a search for any missing men named Lester from Topeka, Kansas. (It was a distraction from what I really should have been doing, which seemed attractive at the time.) But the Internet, amazing tool that it has become, still came up dry on that one. I looked for obituaries of men named Lester (one first name, one last) in the Capital-Journal and found two, both from 2003. Neither was blond, either, based on the pictures, so probably not my guy.

  Next, I looked up Vanessa’s bandmates in Once Again. The only Samantha Fine I found in New Jersey worked in an investment firm in Red Bank, so that was no help. T.B. Condon could have been one of thirty-eight people in the New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania tristate area, none of whom at first glance was in a band or mentioned Vanessa McTiernan. William Mastrovy, the boyfriend, I saved for last. Just because McElone wouldn’t give me his address didn’t mean I couldn’t find it myself and then decide how much information I wanted to give to Vance, if any. The man wrote beautiful songs, but I reminded myself that he could still be dangerous. The Marquis de Sade was considered a really good writer in his day. One thing doesn’t necessarily assume the other.

  Since Mastrovy wasn’t the most common name in central Jersey (or anywhere else outside of Pinsk, apparently), even someone with my level of computer “skills” could zero in on him fairly quickly. There were only two Mastrovys within a two-hundred-mile radius and one of them was named Stanislav and lived in Delaware.

  The other was William. Or at least W. He lived in Asbury Park, not far from where I was sitting, although no street address was offered. But he wouldn’t be hard to find. Probably. If I wanted to.

  The Internet also told me that William Mastrovy was the front man for a cover band called Once Again that played local bars and clubs on the Shore. Once Again covered older groups like the Zombies, the Animals, Duran Duran and, yes, you guessed it:

  The Jingles.

  Once Again had an upcoming booking at the Last Resort, a small, seedy club in Manalapan on Route 9, the very next night. I considered going to see them, talking to Mastrovy and getting a gut reaction regarding whether or not he was a killer.

  In retrospect, I probably should have looked up the band first.

  The problem with my plan, of course, was that unlike Paul, Vance McTiernan was a mobile ghost who could easily follow me to the Last Resort by hiding in my car, and at this point in the investigation, I really wanted to keep Vance away from Mastrovy.

  I wondered if I could actually ask Paul for advice on this. He was not usually so petty, but would he hold a grudge about what was said the night before, or the fact that I’d asked Vance to join in the spook shows, and refuse to participate in the investigation at all?

  I decided that the only thing to do would be to gauge Paul’s mood later at the afternoon spook show. I’d play it by ear, and that was usually a reminder that I am essentially tone-deaf under such circumstances.

  So I got out my phone and dialed Josh. “How’d you like to take me to a dive bar called the Last Resort to listen to a band that’s probably not very good destroy some songs you’ve loved all your life?” I asked.

  “Sounds great! When?” The perfect boyfriend.

  “Tomorrow night. Dress grungy, and I don’t mean Seattle Grunge, okay?”

  “Is this a detective thing?”

  “Yeah, but we’re keeping that quiet, okay? I don’t want Vance to hear anything about us going.” I made sure I said that quietly and looked around the room for any wayward shreds of ghost that might be visible in the walls, floor or ceiling. There was nothing.

  “Got it. I’m still seeing you tonight, right?” he asked. “You’re not canceling on me, are you?”

  “No, of course not. Dinner’s like always on a Mom night.”

  “Good,” Josh said. “So what’s our cover story?”

  “Ooh, something exotic. We’re going to the movies.”

  “Nah,” Josh said. “We’re watching a movie at your house the next night.”

  Oh, yeah. “Ghost,” I groaned.

  “Don’t be a sore loser.”

  “It’s okay. But we’re getting to Lawrence of Arabia sometime. I want to see it on that screen.” Okay, we needed a cover story to tell everyone, not just Vance. That would make it less likely a slip would occur.

  “I’ve got it,” Josh said. “We’re going to see friends of mine and you’re meeting them for the first time.”

  “Nobody will believe that,” I teased. “You don’t have any friends.”

  “Their names are A.J. and Liz and we’re meeting them after dinner.”

  There was something in his voice. “Are these real people?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out tomorrow.” And he hung up.

  So Josh wanted to have his fun. He deserved it. Not many boyfriends are willing to put up with a single mom who has two ghosts in her house. You have to be a little flexible about things when you find one who doesn’t consider that odd.

  I went downstairs, put out a couple of very minor fires for Tessa and Roberta (who seemed to be developing a friendship) and looked for Paul, who was not around.

  Phyllis called while I was in the den. “You sitting down?” she asked.

  “No. Should I be?”

  “Your choice. It’s more of an expression. I’ve got some information for you, which you can have if you tell me something useful.”

  “Spill,” I said. “Tell me what you’ve got, and I’ll let you know what it’s worth.” Phyllis brings out the tough-as-nails dame in me.

  “Who are you, Barbara Stanwyck?” She didn’t wait for a reply but I considered myself more a Jean Arthur kind of girl. “I talked to my friend at the medical examiner’s office. It took a little convincing, but he went back over the report on your pal Vanessa McTiernan. And there is something a little strange about it.”

  That was promising. “What?” I asked.

  “First, you gotta give me something.” Ah, Phyllis. The mistress of quid pro quo.

  “Okay. Look for a guy named Lester who vanished from Topeka, Kansas.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said.

  Phyllis’s tone, usually businesslike with a tinge of humor, was now just businesslike. “Something I want, please.”

  “What is it you want?” Okay, so I was stalling. I didn’t have any information Phyllis could use. I didn’t have information Phyllis didn’t already have.

&nbs
p; Let’s face it: I didn’t have any information.

  “You know what I want. Give me something that helps me with the story.”

  “I thought you didn’t think there was a story,” I reminded her.

  Maureen Beckman came into the den with her walker, inching her way toward what must have been the Promised Land: an overstuffed easy chair. She nodded at me as she entered, and I nodded back.

  “So you need to tell me something that convinces me there could be,” Phyllis replied.

  Well, I wasn’t going to make something up. “I’ve got Vanessa’s ex-boyfriend playing a gig with her old band in Manalapan tomorrow night,” I said, lowering my voice a bit. The den is a large room, and even if Maureen could hear what I was saying, it probably wouldn’t mean much to her. But why take chances?

  “That’s it?”

  I looked at the phone as if Phyllis could see my expression. “Am I mistaken, or are you the one who called me? Since when am I supposed to be the source of all crime information?”

  “Jeez,” she said. “Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed of nails. What are you so cranky about?”

  “I have to figure out who killed Vance McTiernan’s daughter four months ago, and one of my best friends is refusing to tell me something based on some strange journalistic barter system. That’s what I’m cranky about.” I looked up to see if Maureen had overheard me, but there was not a flicker, not a blink from her. I wondered if she had hearing problems, which would be unusual but not (no pun intended) unheard of in someone of her relative youth. More likely, she’d just tuned me out.

  “Okay, okay. Obviously you don’t know when someone’s just having fun with you.” Phyllis’s voice betrayed her words—she really did sound a little concerned that she’d hurt my feelings. I’d found a way to get to her and I wasn’t even looking for one (that was something to file away for future use). “Here’s the thing: There was soy sauce in her stomach.”

  I waited. I wasn’t going to give Phyllis the straight line she was waiting for. But she didn’t say anything else. She was holding out.

  “We knew that,” I muttered, giving in. I needed to hear the rest, and Phyllis obliged.

  “That’s just the thing. There was soy sauce. There wasn’t anything else.”

  How did that make sense? “What does that mean, there wasn’t anything else?” I asked.

  “No vegetables, no noodles. Just the soy. And going down pure, as it were, probably sped up the allergic reaction she had; there was nothing to absorb it.”

  “You’re saying she chug-a-lugged soy sauce?”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?” Phyllis demanded. The hurt-feelings thing had clearly worn off and we were back to standard operating practices.

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “Anyway, the contents of what she’d eaten included her lunch, which wasn’t completely digested, but nothing else.” Phyllis was back in reporter mode.

  “Except soy sauce.”

  “Precisely. And people think it’s the salt in that stuff that kills you.”

  That was weird. Who drinks soy sauce, without a chaser or anything?

  “Why didn’t the cops investigate further?” I asked, mostly to myself. “Did the ME sign off on an accidental allergic reaction?”

  Sometimes you can hear in a person’s voice when she’s smiling and Phyllis was clearly grinning from ear to ear. “That’s my girl,” she said. Phyllis thinks I have the makings to be a great reporter. It’s one of the many things she’s deluded about. “No. The coroner didn’t declare it accidental.”

  “Then what was it?” I asked.

  “Well, he didn’t rule it a suicide, but he didn’t say it wasn’t,” she answered.

  “No reason to think it was murder?”

  “Ask the cops. Maybe they did,” Phyllis said. “Another good question for our Lieutenant McElone.”

  “I did ask, and she said no.”

  “McElone’s good, but she’s not infallible. Go back and follow up.”

  Oy. My first inquiry with McElone had been awkward, and now Phyllis was suggesting I go back and ask why the Harbor Haven Police Department hadn’t done its job adequately? That was going to go over real well, I was sure.

  I looked over at Maureen, who had pulled an e-reader/tablet out of her purse and looked deeply engrossed in the screen, which I could not see from here.

  “I have an idea,” I told Phyllis. “Why don’t you ask McElone all about it and then tell me what she says?”

  “Because I have a newspaper to run, and because you’re the reporter on the story.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m the source on the story. You ask me stuff, I answer, and then you write it up for the newspaper you run. And by the way, I have a business to run, too, and might not have the time to go ask the lieutenant all those questions you want answered right away.”

  Phyllis laughed. “Coward,” she said, and hung up.

  I’d had better days than this one, and it wasn’t even three in the afternoon yet.

  Speaking of which, I had to go pick Melissa up from school. As I passed Maureen on the way out of the den, I caught a sneaky glance at the screen on her tablet. I was right; she did want everyone to know how smart she was.

  She was playing Jeopardy!

  Eight

  Melissa was running her teeth over her lower lip, a practice she calls “scratching,” which is an indication she is thinking hard.

  Against my advice, Melissa had quit the tech club, so she was coming home at her regular time. I was trying to find a way to suggest, once again, that she might have been hasty, but she had launched directly into a discussion of what she referred to as “our investigation.”

  “So it was a straight ingestion of soy sauce that killed Vanessa,” she said. Melissa had left much of sixth grade behind her when she’d gotten into my Volvo wagon and was now in her best Encyclopedia Brown mode, where she took all the facts I gave her and told me what they meant in relation to the case I was working. “So if Vance is right and someone did murder her, it’s possible that her killer forced Vanessa to drink the soy sauce, right?”

  I know; you’re going to say that most eleven-year-old girls don’t talk like that to their mothers. I’m very proud.

  “Or it’s possible she drank it because she was depressed and didn’t want to live anymore,” I said. “We can’t be sure. We don’t know anything yet. We can’t get in touch with Vanessa to ask her, and as far as we know, nobody was there when she died.”

  Liss, I could tell even while driving, gave me a sideways look. “You realize this would be a lot easier if Paul was involved.”

  “Yeah,” came a voice from the backseat. I drew a sharp intake of breath and managed—valiantly, I believe—not to drive into the next lane and cause a six-car pileup.

  “Maxie!” I hadn’t known she was there. Maxie loves to hitch a ride in the car, not make her presence known (often by riding on the roof or hiding in the trunk or the engine block) and then pop out at an inopportune time, like ever. “Don’t do that!”

  “Sorry, sorry,” she drawled, not sounding the least bit sorry at all. “Who knew you were so excitable?”

  “You should, from the seventy-five times you’ve done this to me before. What are you doing here?”

  “I can’t take a ride in the car?”

  I was going to respond, knowing fully that wasn’t why Maxie had secreted herself in my Volvo, but Melissa gave me a warning look that said my reaction wouldn’t help, which it wouldn’t.

  “Anyway,” my resident poltergeist went on (as if I had rudely interrupted her thought), “I agree with Melissa. This is the kind of thing Paul loves to do and he’d be a big help.”

  I stifled a groan. “May I remind both of you that it wasn’t my idea for Paul to stay away from this investigation? He was the one who didn’t want
to help Vance, for reasons I can’t begin to explain.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. You know when you say something and no one responds . . . and you get the distinct impression it’s because what you just said was so self-delusional they’re trying to figure out how you could possibly be that blind and still drive a car?

  “What?”

  Melissa cleared her throat, which I would bet cash money didn’t need clearing. “Well, you know, um . . .” That definitely wasn’t helping.

  “You told Paul you didn’t want him on the case,” Maxie blurted.

  “What? I did not.”

  “Yeah, you did. You told him that if he didn’t want to be on the case, you’d just do it yourself, and then you walked out of the room without even giving him a chance to talk.” Maxie didn’t even sound as gleeful as I would have anticipated. Which was troublesome, because it meant she was being sincere.

  “That’s not the way it was,” I insisted.

  Melissa made another very uncomfortable sound. “Yes it was, Mom,” she said. “I’m sorry,” she quickly added.

  Was that true? Had I actually ordered Paul to stay away from Vanessa McTiernan’s death just because I felt disrespected?

  “But he said I was a bad detective and I didn’t know what I was doing,” I tried.

  “No he didn’t,” Liss told me gently. “He said he didn’t think Vance was telling us the truth and he didn’t trust him. He said it was dangerous to get involved with a case when you didn’t know the facts and you couldn’t depend on your client.”

  “It went further than that,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” Maxie—of all people—agreed. “But both of you pushed it there; it wasn’t just Paul.”

  My head was swimming a little. I actually considered pulling over to the side of the road, but I got my second wind and soldiered on (it helped that we were pulling into the driveway). “I’m gonna have to think about this,” I said.

  “You can just ask him,” Liss suggested. “He’s, like, really good at this detective stuff.” She sounded like she was worried about my progress if I didn’t have Paul’s guiding hand behind me.