“Who was closest to him when it happened?” Liss asked as soon as she took in the scene.
“You were there,” I said. “It was dark. There was no way to know.”
Mom appeared behind my daughter and shook her head. “You shouldn’t have been in there, Melissa,” she tried, but I waved a hand.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I told her, knowing it was a useless battle. “Liss is a big girl.”
“I’m a big girl, and I wish I hadn’t seen what I saw,” Jeannie contributed.
“I can’t figure it,” Josh said. “What was Bill even doing here?”
“He did say that he wanted to talk to me today, but Liz told him I’d be too busy,” I said, loudly enough that Liz, who must truly have been the embodiment of the adage that the sound people most respond to is someone saying their name, looked up and tentatively walked over, trying not to look in the direction of the hallway. “Maybe he came here because he needed to tell me something about Vanessa.”
“This is a weird place,” Liz said, apropos of nothing. I’m not saying it isn’t true but there really wasn’t a context at the moment.
“If Mastrovy had a message, he could have gotten in touch another way,” Paul said, floating where he could best see into the crime scene, as if the position of Bill’s fall would break the case wide open. “He knew your name. Did you give him a business card?”
“I think so.”
“You think so what?” Liz asked. She looked in the direction I was looking, except I saw Paul and she didn’t.
“She just does that,” Jeannie told Liz. “You have to go with it.”
“If you gave him a card, he could have just called you,” Paul went on. He’s gotten used to these conversations, too. “He didn’t have to come here. There has to be another reason.”
“Someone killed Mr. Mastrovy here,” Melissa said. “We don’t know who it was. Maybe whoever killed him also sent a message telling him to come.”
I put an arm around her shoulders. “You’re a smart girl, you know that?”
Liss rolled her eyes. “Mom.” And I saw my own mother giving me a familiar look.
Oliver made a waking noise that indicated he was awake, and the next thing I knew, Jeannie (giving me a look that indicated I should stay silent about her news) and Tony had picked him up and whisked him out to their car. Death, murder, ghosts, whatever: You don’t mess with a sleepy one-year-old.
Liz told A.J. it might be time for them to follow suit. He hadn’t said much since what I was now processing as the Incident. I had not provided a great evening for Josh’s friends to get to know me. Not that I could have anticipated what was going to happen, but that didn’t seem to matter much at the moment.
Once all the civilians (Josh does not fall into that category) had left, which felt like it had taken a very long time, Paul floated down a little and was stroking that goatee like he’s never noticed it on his chin before.
“The problem has multiplied,” he said. He says stuff like that and nobody blinks. If I ever tried to say, “The problem has multiplied,” I’d get laughed out of the room.
“Before we were investigating a four-month-old death,” Paul went on, oblivious to my resentment of his ability to project authority, “one that we weren’t even sure was a murder. What happened tonight definitely is one.”
My concerns were elsewhere. Now that everyone except her grandmother and the ghosts had left, I could ask Melissa, “Are you okay?”
She thought about it. “Yes. I didn’t really see anything, even though I tried. I’m glad you didn’t let me. Sort of.”
Paul went on as if I had not spoken, which is his habit. “We don’t know why Mr. Mastrovy was here tonight, and we can’t be sure who knew he would be here. But it seems logical that whoever killed him certainly had prepared for it and had probably been in touch with him, arranging for him to come to this house.”
“How does that help?” I asked. “The only people in the room were my guests, who couldn’t have known Mastrovy, Jeannie and Tony, who certainly didn’t kill him, A.J. and Liz . . .”
Josh, who had been understandably quiet since the lights had come back on, looked at me. “Please. They didn’t kill him.”
“Right, and us. And I’m pretty sure none of us decided to stick a knife into Bill Mastrovy’s back. I, for one, had no idea he was even in the house until he was dead.”
“You’re overlooking someone,” Paul said.
“Yes,” Mom said. “Vance McTiernan was here, and so was his friend Morrie Chrichton.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Vance and Morrie? They had barely shown up when the movie started. Besides, they were all the way at the front of the room and Mastrovy got killed out in the hallway, all the way in the back.”
Maxie gave me a look that had some pity in it. “Right,” she said. “They couldn’t have done this.” She swooshed back and forth from the movie room to the hallway through the walls three times before I could so much as raise a finger.
Not that I wanted to raise a finger. Well, maybe one finger.
“You’ve made your point,” I said when she finally stayed in one place long enough to make eye contact. Her smug grin was not a welcome touch.
Everett moved over from the entrance and put an arm around Maxie. “Stand down,” he said to her. “Ghost Lady is trying to work it out.” (Everett is the only person I allow to call me that.)
“Party pooper,” Maxie answered, but she snuggled into his shoulder.
“What we’re missing,” Paul said, trying to regain control of the meeting, “is that we have no physical clues; it’s all conjecture. We can guess motives for Vance or for Morrie, but we don’t know about anyone else.”
“Who else?” I said.
“Perhaps someone who slipped in to do the killing and out after,” Paul answered. “None of us saw the murder happen.”
“Thank goodness,” Mom said. She looked up at Dad, who floated down specifically to put his hand over hers.
“Agreed,” Paul said. “But there might have been someone who had a grudge against Mastrovy and wasn’t on the guest list for the showing tonight.”
“But that person would have to know that Mastrovy was going to be here,” I argued. “Who could have wanted to kill him that bad and known he’d show up uninvited?”
Josh looked thoughtful. “Sammi,” he said.
It wasn’t much, but it provided, as Paul put it, “a path.” Tomorrow we—or rather, McElone, which was the plan I was advocating—could look into finding Sammi. Paul didn’t seem to have any serious objections.
It was a couple of months past Melissa’s bedtime and a school night to boot, so I made sure she went straight to her room. She protested, but not wholeheartedly.
Mom and Dad left soon after. It wasn’t only because the murder had put a serious damper on the evening; it was late, and the absence of their granddaughter just took a little of the allure out of staying.
I got Josh to come into the kitchen with me, ostensibly to help clean up, although the only thing that had to happen was for some pizza boxes to get recycled. Once there, I interlaced my fingers behind his back and gave him a very therapeutic hug.
“I didn’t do great with A.J. and Liz tonight,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Josh smiled at me with that what-a-nut-my-girlfriend-is look I get more often than I suspect most girlfriends do. “Did you kill Bill Mastrovy?” he asked.
“What? No!”
“Then I don’t see how this is your fault.” He held me a little closer, to which I did not object. “Don’t worry—I’m not going to dump you if you’re not best friends with Liz and A.J.”
That was, sadly, something of a relief. “You sure?”
“I’m sure. Hey, she annoys me sometimes, too. And besides, you offer things I can’t get from my friends.” He kissed me quite adequ
ately.
And that was when I heard the voice from behind me. And a little above.
“Isn’t that sweet?” Vance McTiernan said. “I do wish I had a camera.”
I must have broken off the kiss and turned at the speed of sound, because I think I still heard the smack of our lips when I was already facing Vance. “You have some nerve,” I said.
“Not really. I do that all the time,” Josh said. But he was looking up where I was looking, so he knew someone was there, even if he didn’t know who.
“Me?” Vance said. “I have nerve? What’d I do?”
“You keep showing up in my house, in my rooms, at times when I’d prefer to be left alone,” I said. “But the real point is, you vanished out of the movie room before the lights came back up.”
“I didn’t like the movie,” Vance said. “If I don’t like the movie, I leave the cinema.”
Josh leaned against the center island and watched me. I was, after all, the only other person in the room actually refracting light. I guessed. I’d have to ask Paul how that worked.
“When you can look me in the eye and say that, I probably still won’t believe you,” I told Vance. “Were you there for the main event? You know, when Bill Mastrovy ended up with a knife in his back?”
Vance seemed unfazed. “Yeah, I heard when it happened but I didn’t do it.”
“Of course not. You expressed a specific desire to do precisely that to that exact man, but you had nothing to do with it actually happening. Convenient. Did it occur to you that he might not have killed your daughter?”
Vance McTiernan lost the grin he’d been wearing when he thought he was being witty. Now, his face looked pained. I almost felt bad that I’d brought up Vanessa’s death. But the bloom was definitely off this rose. Yeah, he was the hero of my adolescence, but I wasn’t buying any of Vance’s acts anymore.
“Yes, it did,” he said with the requisite touch of sadness in his voice. “That’s why I didn’t kill him. Because from what you told me, I can’t be sure what really happened to Nessa. I wouldn’t have really done it, anyway. I’m a passionate man, not a violent one.”
“What about Morrie Chrichton?” I pointed out. “He was there with you before the movie started and nobody’s seen him since.”
“I can vouch for Morrie,” Vance said, raising his hands as if to hold me back. “I was with him the whole time.”
“I understand Morrie vanishing,” I told him. “Of course he did. There’s no reason to come back here now; the business is finished, isn’t it? What I don’t understand is why you came back at all, Vance.”
He looked me straight in the eye as if I were in the front row of a concert and he was putting over the most tender ballad you’ve ever heard. Like “Violet” on the Jingles album Enemy of the Mind, the one that had been playing on eternal rotation in Vanessa’s apartment when she died.
“I came back because I know who killed William Mastrovy,” he said.
Eighteen
“Speak very slowly and carefully,” Paul said. “I don’t want anything to be misheard or misconstrued.”
When Vance’s bombshell dropped in the kitchen, I immediately insisted he accompany me to the movie room, despite not having wanted to go back in there until a crime scene cleaning crew had done its magic. I’d have to find an affordable one on the Internet in the morning.
I wanted Paul to hear Vance’s claims and explanations directly. Maxie and Everett had left, heading to the Dunkin’ Donuts sign on Route 35, one of Maxie’s favorite vantage points. She used to enjoy moving the donuts in the shop around, to the consternation of the late-night crew, but Everett has mellowed her. A little.
Josh came with me into the movie room and made sure we were seated at the front of the room near the screen, facing away from the tape outline in the hallway. Josh looks out for me without my asking. I try to do that for him, too, but he doesn’t need very much. I’d have to grit my teeth and invite A.J. and Liz to dinner. He deserved it.
“I know who killed William Mastrovy,” Vance repeated, slowly and clearly. “It was Claudia.”
Claudia? “Claudia Rabinowitz?” I blurted. “Vanessa’s mom?”
“The same.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “We don’t even know where Claudia is, and she certainly wasn’t in the room with us tonight. We would have seen her.” Vance was clearly just rambling or trying to divert our attention from something.
Before he could ask, I relayed the conversation to poor Josh, who was sitting there watching my face get more and more concerned and not understanding why. “Is this recent or before Vance came here?” he asked.
“Her presence drew me to this house,” Vance answered, though only Paul and I could hear him. “And then when I was in the room, I could tell she was near. The same thing tonight.”
Too much information was coming at me at one time. “You think Claudia was here all along? Like her spirit lives here? Impossible; she’s alive. Isn’t she?” I said.
“No, I don’t think she’s a ghost. I think she came here as a guest.”
There was silence for quite some time after that one. “You think one of my guests is actually Claudia Rabinowitz, and that she came here specifically to kill Bill Mastrovy? That’s crazy.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Vance suggested. I couldn’t actually think of one, and I live in a haunted house.
Paul, stroking away at a breakneck pace, considered Vance, and to my horror, seemed to be taking him seriously. “Do you think Claudia is here now or was here as a past guest?” he asked.
Vance shook his head. “Can’t be sure,” he said. “You know how you sense a presence sometimes? I get that pretty strong for Claudia. It’s what drew me here. But you have to remember I only . . . met her . . . the one time, and that was more than forty years ago. I have the feeling, but I can’t say I’m perfectly certain on it.”
He’d flown right past it, but that caught me. “Wait. You only met Claudia once? The night Vanessa was conceived?”
Vance’s face registered surprise, like that point should have been obvious. “Yeah. What did you think?”
“You fathered a child with this woman, she grew up here in Jersey and you never once came to see her? Not even when you were on tour, playing in New York?”
Vance must have seen the trap closing on him, but it was so outside his life—or death—experience that he didn’t know how to react. “Well, no. I sent money.”
“How does that help your daughter have a father?” I demanded.
“Alison,” Paul suggested, “this might not be the time.”
“No, really! What kind of a dad never sees his child?”
Vance held up his hands. “Now, I didn’t say that, love. Didn’t say that. I said I hadn’t seen Claudia again, because that was the way she wanted it. I saw Nessa. She came over to see us once in a while and I always visited when we played the States. Always.”
“And what about your will? You didn’t leave her a dime!” I’d had such admiration for Vance McTiernan. Before I knew him.
“The sad truth is, there wasn’t much of anything left, love.”
“How is this about the murder?” Josh asked. And he hadn’t even heard the other half of the conversation.
They were right; I was off topic. “Okay. So you believe you sensed Claudia’s presence in my house, both tonight and once before, when you were playing that song—“Claudia”—in my library. How did you know it was her?”
Vance looked at Paul for some kind of affirmation. “You know how it is,” he said to the other ghost. “You can’t really say how you know something, but you know it?”
Paul nodded. “It’s true,” he told me. “It’s similar to what you call the Ghosternet. I don’t hear the messages from other spirits as much as I feel them. It’s difficult to describe.”
“But it’s reliable?” I asked.
“I have found it to be, yes.”
Okay, if we were going to treat it that way, I could dive in. I turned and looked at Vance. “You said the ‘presence’ you felt drew you here to the house. When did you first sense it? Were you still walking the ocean at the time?”
“No. It was when I had arrived here in New Jersey. I had come this way because of what I’d seen about Nessa, because she had been here.”
“Why should I believe you?” I asked. “You haven’t said one thing that held still long enough to be true since I met you.” I was playing it a little over the top, but it felt right. A showman like Vance would respond to that. But I had a clincher. “You even got some female ghost you know get in touch with Paul and say she was Vanessa, didn’t you?”
Vance looked away and tilted his head. “I did. This bird I knew in Leicester. A very long time ago. I thought it would give you a little more push. At the time I wanted you to stop digging, stop doing what you were doing. I pushed too hard. I do that.”
“You lied to me and you lied to Paul,” I told him. “That’s not the way you get people to do the things you want them to do. That’s how you make us feel we can’t trust you.”
“I deserve that,” he said, his voice slightly wounded and ashamed. He was a much better actor than I would ever be. “I don’t have any reason to give you. I can’t say you should believe me because I mean it this time. I would have said that all the other times, too. But the fact is, I know Claudia was here tonight.”
“Even so,” Paul interjected. I think he was trying to defuse the situation. “Let’s work on the assumption that you are correct and the woman with whom you had a daughter was in the room. What proof do you have that she killed Mr. Mastrovy?”
Vance’s head was hanging like a schoolboy caught trying to grab a cupcake without paying at the bake sale. “I have none.”
“All that from intuition?” Paul asked. He shook his head. “It’s more than I could do.”
“I can’t explain it. If it was a lie, I’d be able to make it sound more plausible.” Of course, his saying that made it sound more plausible. It was a difficult conundrum.
Ghost in the Wind Page 18
