Junkyard Man (Locust Point Mystery Book 2)

by Libby Howard

  “The door was unlocked,” Will insisted.

  “Entering,” Officer Adams amended. “And potentially breaking and entering, because he might be lying.”

  Again, I couldn’t see Will picking the locks, and the door didn’t look like it had been forced open. Maybe Mr. Peter forgot to lock it on occasion, or maybe the lock was so bad that a little jiggle of the handle popped it open. If so, then Bert really needed to look into additional locks.

  “No, I don’t want to press charges,” Bert finally said. The neighbors watching from the sidewalk heaved a collective sigh of relief. Or disappointment. It was hard to tell which emotion was prevalent.

  Officer Adams nodded. “I’m still going to need you to come with me, Mr. Lars.”

  Will’s eyes widened. “Why? I answered your questions. I’m not going down to the station.”

  “I would like to have your fingerprints, to exclude you from the other crime.”

  Kat gave an involuntary cry at the officer’s words. Will reached out a hand to her and she backed away from him.

  “I didn’t kill that man,” Will said. “I wanted him to clean up his yard, or move into a nursing home, or sell his house. I didn’t want him dead.”

  Officer Adams held out his hand, ushering Will toward the waiting squad car. “Good. Then you will no doubt be happy to give us your prints so we can check them against the murder weapon.”

  Will hesitated a second, then walked down the porch steps, sliding into his car. We watched him drive off, following the police car, then turned to see Kat stomp inside the house and slam the door.

  The neighbors made their way back to their houses. Bert locked his uncle’s house and climbed into his sports car to head back home. I walked across the street to Judge Beck, who stood with his two kids and Sean, watching the drama.

  And a few hours later, as I sat on the porch at sunset with my oh-so-familiar ghost by my side and the newer one occasionally visible prowling among the old washing machines in Mr. Peter’s yard, I saw Kat Lars haul a suitcase out of her house and into her car, burning rubber as she backed out of the driveway and headed down the street.

  Chapter 15

  “Make sure you zoom in close to her face when she tells me about her husband,” J.T. instructed. I was manning the camera today. Well, one of them. The other was on a tripod to get a second angle so that my boss could cut and edit the video footage like a pro. Actually, I was hoping that soon he would hire an actual pro, or at least a college student with a video major, so we could all get back to work.

  “Daisy, stop looking at the camera. You’re breaking the fourth wall.”

  Breaking the fourth wall wasn’t the only issue this dramatic reenactment suffered from. I’d been told twice that my hand-held shots were too shaky and that the lighting wasn’t optimal. Given that this was an office, not a Hollywood set, and J.T.’s only film experience was a book he’d picked up a few weeks ago, none of this was surprising.

  “It’s my husband, Gator,” Daisy exclaimed, waving her hand about as if she were a proper nineteenth-century lady about to succumb to an attack of the vapors. “He’s cheating on me, I just know it.”

  I zoomed in on Daisy’s distressed expression. She was actually pretty good—better than most our police force who usually served as our unpaid actors. I’d need to ask her if she’d done theater in her youth.

  The case we were “filming” was an unusual one that J.T. had worked eight years ago, before I’d begun working with him. What had originally seemed to be a spouse with a mistress turned out to be a spouse with a side job. He’d been working a part-time night-shift janitorial job, saving up to buy a hunting lodge that he and his buddies were looking at in Pennsylvania. The hunting trips were an annual event that his wife tolerated, and he knew she’d not be pleased about the purchase that would increase the frequency of those trips as well as the duration. J.T. had felt a bit sorry for the guy, and let the man know he had been found out, which gave Mr. Hunting Lodge a chance to use his second-job earnings to book a cruise for their upcoming wedding anniversary instead.

  My boss had revealed the job to the wife, keeping quiet about the hunting lodge part. The woman was overjoyed. In fact, she was so overjoyed that she said if he wanted to keep working the part-time job, he could turn the garage into a man cave for him and his friends. It wasn’t a hunting lodge, but he seemed happy with the compromise.

  I had no idea if other than changing names and some of the circumstances, J.T. had gotten any kind of signed releases for the subject of this video. That wasn’t my job. Filming wasn’t my job either, and I hoped that today would be the last time I was behind, or in front of, a camera.

  J.T. ran off to download the video and start editing. I poured coffee for Daisy and myself and eyed the large stack of Creditcorp files I had waiting for me.

  “So is Will Lars about to be charged with murder? And how long do the police think the robberies at Harry Peter’s house have been going on?” Daisy asked, perching on the corner of my desk. I’d gone to bed before Will made it home, but his car had been in the driveway when Daisy had come over for morning yoga. Noticeably, Kat’s car had not.

  “I don’t think he murdered Mr. Peter. And I’m pretty sure that the police don’t think so either.”

  I did wonder if the thefts that had cleaned out Harry Peter’s basement had been going on for a while. Ours wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where someone could pull a truck up to the curb and haul boxes out to it without being noticed, even in the middle of the night. So, whoever had been breaking into Mr. Peter’s house had done it regularly, taking only what he could carry, then making his way to one of the busier streets where he’d probably parked his vehicle. That meant he’d most likely carried the boxes for at least five blocks. And he’d taken the whole box rather than pulling the contents from it. Mr. Peter wasn’t the sort to get rid of empty boxes, and there were none in the basement.

  And Mr. Peter had clearly realized, most likely when he’d repaired the stairs, that he was missing quite a lot of items from his basement. Had the thief ventured upstairs that fateful night of the murder after taking practically everything that wasn’t nailed down from the basement? Had Mr. Peter caught him that night, confronted the man, only to get stabbed?

  The stairs had probably been unsafe for quite a while, but Henry’s visits had spurred my neighbor to fix them.

  “As for the robberies, they could have been happening for months,” I told Daisy. “And most likely were only brought to light during the recent repairs. I don’t know why Mr. Peter didn’t report it to the police when he fixed the stairs and found everything in the basement gone.”

  “Maybe he was killed before he could,” Daisy conjectured. “Maybe he knew the thief and wanted to handle it himself rather than involve the police.”

  I’d thought about that. If the thief was a family member, like Bert, or a minor, I could see where Mr. Peter wouldn’t want to involve the police, no matter how upset he would have been over the loss of his…stuff. But if Will was the thief, which seemed so very unlikely, I’m pretty sure Mr. Peter would have called the police right away. It made me realize that he must not have checked the video recorder that last night, or Will would have found himself in hot water last week.

  I held out my hands palm outward. “I don’t know if he knew the thief or not. That could be, or maybe he didn’t feel like he could trust the police and wanted to handle it himself.”

  That made me think. For all his eccentricities, Mr. Peter had seemed a self-sufficient man. After months of broken stairs to the basement, he goes to fix them only to realize everything down there has been cleaned out. Instead of locking the cellar door and fixing the window, he leaves them as is and just repairs the stair treads. Then what? He waits to confront the thief himself, an eighty-year-old man against someone who was probably much younger?

  Daisy snorted. “Right. What would I do? Well, I would have called the police the moment I saw that broken window, then in
vested in a security system, and a really large dog.”

  Me, too, but Mr. Peter was a hoarder. Would the police even believe that stuff had been stolen, that there had been a robbery in a house where every step was like a game of Twister around boxes and piles of stuff? A broken window could be anything. They’d take the report and do nothing. But if Mr. Peter had set up a video recorder and unlocked the door coming up from the basement to the house, he could have recorded the trespassers and gotten the police to take him seriously.

  “Well, I’m sorry the guy was murdered. I hated all the old appliances in his yard, but he seemed like a nice guy. Well, outside of nearly braining his nephew with a toaster, that is.” Daisy shifted the stack of Creditcorp files on my desk so she could scoot further over. I was never going to get to them. At this rate, I’ll need to come in Saturday and try to catch up.

  I shivered with a sudden chill, and tensed, knowing what was coming next. A shadow materialized in the corner of my vision. This time he was even more person-like, with a short, squat body and an actual face, although the features were blurred. I turned my head and the apparition vanished, only to appear again when I looked back at Daisy. Just like the other shadows, this one was only visible if I didn’t look directly at it.

  “Are you listening at all to what I’m saying?” Daisy complained.

  I wrinkled my nose and smiled apologetically. “Sorry. No, I wasn’t.”

  Daisy shivered and rubbed her arms. “What the heck…? Did J.T. suddenly crank up the AC or something?”

  She felt it, too? Could she see the shadow? Daisy didn’t seem to notice anything off in the corner. But if she felt the chill, then maybe she’d believe me.

  “Daisy, do you believe in ghosts?”

  She blinked in surprise. “Sure. Why?”

  My mouth fell open. Sure? Everyone else psychoanalyzed me, and Daisy just said 'sure’?

  “Um, because ever since I had my cataract surgery, I’ve been seeing ghosts.”

  She pursed her lips and gave me a short, sharp nod. “How many? And are you seeing them everywhere? Because with all the people who have died over the centuries, that would add up to a whole lot of ghosts.”

  I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. I couldn’t believe I’d waited three months to have this conversation with Daisy. “At first it was just one ghost, mostly in the evenings, but occasionally during the day. I think it might be Eli. It’s the one that’s around me the most, that seems to appear when I’m reminiscing, or upset, or lonely. My ophthalmologist said it isn’t due to the surgery, although that’s when I started seeing them. Reverend Lincoln thinks I’m imagining it because of my grief. The other ones are the murder victims. I saw one near where I found Caryn Swanson’s body, I think where she was murdered. And I saw one in Mr. Peter’s house when I found his body. I only saw Caryn’s, briefly, but Mr. Peter seems to be appearing more often.”

  I slumped in my chair with relief. To have Daisy so easily accept what I was telling her, to not have her look at me like I was some pitiful creature who was deep in grief, felt like a liberation of my soul. I was deep in grief, but unlike the others I’d spoken to, I believed these ghosts were a part of something else.

  Well, except for Eli. Eli’s ghost probably had a lot to do with my grief.

  “Spirits linger, and some people are sensitive to their presences.”

  “But I’ve never been sensitive before,” I argued. “This came out of nowhere, right after my cataract surgery.”

  “Which was right after Eli’s death,” Daisy countered. “You were emotionally vulnerable. You had a surgery that restored your ‘sight’. These things probably opened a doorway in your mind that had previously been closed.”

  “Can I close it again?” Although I wasn’t sure that I wanted it closed. I’d gotten used to the Eli-ghost. Actually, I found his presence kind of comforting. The others could go, though.

  “Probably not. The second sight might go away eventually, or you might always have this ability. Thankfully you’re not seeing every single ghost out there. Some psychics can hardly walk to the corner store without dozens of ghosts materializing in front of them.”

  I wouldn’t leave my house if that were the case. Taking a deep breath, I decided that I might as well get Daisy’s thoughts on what I was dealing with here. “So why do some ghosts appear more than once in different locations, like they’re following me around? And why don’t they speak, or look like actual people instead of shadows?”

  Daisy made herself comfortable on my desktop. “Sometimes the spirit is just a psychic impression, usually due to a traumatic event or a strong personality that left an imprint behind when he, or she, died. Those are the ghosts that just repeat the same actions over and over, and tend to remain in the same location. Eventually they dissipate, although in the case of a violent death, they can remain for centuries.”

  “Mr. Peter is going to be following me around for centuries?” I doubted it since I’d hardly be alive for centuries, but the thought was still disturbing.

  “These repeaters don’t follow you. They’re usually not even aware of your presence, they’re just doing their thing over and over and over. Other ghosts are impressions that seem to retain some kind of sentience. Those ones usually want you to do something. In the case of poltergeists, either they want you to move out of the house and leave them alone, or notice them and treat them like houseguests, or roommates. Some want you to find an item that meant a lot to them and do something with it, or bring to light an important event, or discover their murderer.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. Caryn Swanson’s ghost was clearly a repeater. Mr. Peter wanted something from me. I was guessing he wanted me to find his murderer, but given the man’s obsessive interests, maybe he wanted me to find some Polish pottery in the shed before his nephew mistakenly threw it in the dumpster. Eli… “So, what would the Eli ghost want?”

  Daisy winced, and suddenly she was looking at me with the same expression that my ophthalmologist and Reverend Lincoln had when they’d spoken with me. “Oh, honey. I think Eli feels bad, and he’s tethered here because of unfinished business.”

  I suddenly felt like there was a grapefruit lodged in my throat. “I’m holding him here. I’ve clung to his spirit because I didn’t want to let him go.”

  Daisy reached out and grabbed my hand, squeezing it firmly. “No, he’s made himself stay behind because he feels he left things undone, or unsaid. He was a man who was trapped inside a broken body and a broken brain, but death frees us all. And free, he realized there were things he wanted to communicate, or that he needed to help you transition, that he owed you the comfort of his presence for a while longer. He was not the sort of man who’d rest easy leaving you suddenly after a car accident, or after ten years of being a changed person. It’s not you who holds him here, Kay, it’s Eli himself.”

  That did make me feel better. Daisy left soon after, and I got to work on the Creditcorp files, ignoring the spirit that I was sure was Mr. Peter as he lingered around the filing cabinets. He was still there after J.T. had left for the day and I was wrapping up my work.

  “I don’t know what you want,” I told him. “I helped your nephew. We discovered the theft. There was nothing on your video camera besides what I’m sure was just an idiot lapse of judgment by Will Lars. The police are investigating your murder. Bert will take care of any items he knows have been stolen. There’s nothing for me to do.”

  The ghost didn’t appear to move, or even acknowledge my statement.

  “I wish you’d left some sort of inventory,” I told him. “If you had a list of what you had in the house, where it was stored, and maybe even receipts showing where you got it and how much you’d paid, then finding the thief, and probably the murderer, would be a whole lot easier.”

  There was a thump behind me and I turned to see that the salt shaker had fallen over, spilling white grains across the table and onto the carpet. The hair went up on the back of my neck
. Had the ghost done that? They’d never done anything that I could call poltergeist activity in the past. Maybe the salt shaker had just fallen over on its own.

  I righted it and wiped up the spill, and when I turned around, the ghost was gone. For a moment I felt guilty, as if I’d let him down. But there was nothing more for me to do.

  Actually, there was more for me to do. I could continue to help Bert. I could assist Henry in research and in his efforts to document what he knew of Mr. Peter’s collections. And I could be nosy. Two things were very clear in this whole mess. Somebody had been stealing from my neighbor, and the person with the best motive and opportunity to kill him was that thief. But who? Who would know about the contents of a somewhat paranoid hoarder’s home? Who would have the nerve to repeatedly burglarize the house of a man who never left his home? And who would, upon discovery, decide to ram a sword through an old man rather than just flee the scene, killing him and jamming the weapon into a nearby box in what I could only think of as a fit of rage? Who?

  Chapter 16

  “What’s this?” Daisy pulled a stack of papers over toward her. We’d finished up our sunrise yoga and were eating gingerbread muffins and drinking coffee. Judge Beck hadn’t made it downstairs yet. In fact, I hadn’t even heard him moving about or the shower running. I wasn’t sure if he’d overslept the alarm or was going in late today, but I wasn’t about to wake him. The poor guy had been up late both Sunday and Monday night trying to play catch-up now that the kids were with Heather. I was starting to worry about him. If I saw that he was skipping dinner again tonight, I was going to fix a plate and take it in to him. Meatloaf. I’d had a craving and had bought extra ground beef so I could have leftovers for lunch on Wednesday. Even sharing with my roommate, I should still have enough.

  “That’s Henry’s research. Heather brought it by last night so I could give it to Bert. He’s taking this job very seriously.” And I was so proud of him. Whether he decided to become a professor, an auctioneer, or a lawyer like his father, this boy was going to go far.