Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  Mom finished her bottle of beer and looked away, pretending to search for the recycling bin she knew perfectly well I kept next to the fridge. “I might have…mentioned something about it,” she said, making sure not to establish eye contact with me.

  Maxie stifled a giggle. When she died, Maxie was a twenty-eight-year-old who had probably topped out at sixteen on the maturity charts. Things hadn’t changed much since then.

  I decided to pretend not to notice Maxie and turned toward Mom. “So you’ve been bragging about my detective skills to your dead friends?” I asked.

  “Maybe a little. But you know, you don’t give yourself enough credit.”

  Sometimes it is very difficult not to roll one’s eyes heavenward. In this case, I found it impossible. For one thing, I know I’m not a good investigator—Paul does most of the brainwork, and I do the legwork—and for another, Mom wouldn’t know a good detective if she met Sherlock Holmes at the clubhouse of her condo complex. Which I wasn’t sure she hadn’t.

  Before the top of my head could blow off, Paul floated between Mom and me. “Do we have any details, Loretta?” he asked. “Do we know exactly when Mr. Laurentz died and how he was murdered?”

  Mom seemed much happier dealing with Paul, so I took a seat and considered having a drink myself but didn’t want to open a bottle of wine just for me. I’d have to look into wine six-packs.

  “I met Lawrence at the clubhouse in our development about two months ago, and he began coming around to the house every once in a while right after that. He said he had died a little over six months ago. Last June,” Mom reported dutifully. “He says he was electrocuted, but that the police think he had a heart attack or something.”

  Paul’s eyes perked up. “Electrocuted? How?”

  “He says someone threw an electric toaster into his bubble bath.”

  Maxie guffawed, and this time I was grateful. It covered my own involuntary yelp quite nicely. Mom gave Maxie a disdainful look.

  “The man was murdered, Maxine,” she reminded her.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Kerby.” Maxie sounded like a third grader being admonished by her teacher, but her grin was unmistakable.

  Mom huffed a bit, but Paul refocused her attention from Maxie’s (and my) insolence to his questioning. He seemed genuinely interested. Paul likes nothing better than an unsolved mystery. It’s one of the few things about him I find completely annoying.

  “How could Mr. Laurentz not know who threw a toaster into his bath?” he asked. “He would have seen the person enter the bathroom, surely.” Paul speaks with such lovely syntax, owing to his British/Canadian background. Or maybe he’s just really polite.

  Mom squinted, an indication that she’s concerned she’s about to say something that will be open to ridicule. I’m afraid Dad and I were rather merciless in our teasing when I was growing up, though in a loving way. Even Melissa, who is smarter than all of us and who loves her grandmother dearly, occasionally giggles at the things my mother says.

  “Lawrence said that the person who threw it was invisible,” she declared.

  In this crowd, that’s not so outrageous a statement, but I heard a stifled giggle from the game room doorway, and there stood Melissa, confirming her grandmother’s fears that what she’d said would be received with something other than complete reverence. Liss was holding the iPod touch her father had given her a few months before as a bribe. But under her arm was her school laptop.

  “You were supposed to be in your room,” I said.

  Melissa shot a guilty glance at Maxie, who quickly shut the laptop she had, let’s face it, stolen from me. Scowling, I walked to the spook, who did not think to rise up to the ceiling to avoid me.

  “What are you doing?” I intoned.

  Maxie made a sound with her lips that indicated she was unconcerned with my authority. She opened the computer and turned the screen toward me.

  It showed Melissa’s Skype name but nothing on the main screen because Liss had closed her laptop. On the tiny screen-within-a-screen below was a picture of the game room and the assembled therein in this case, Melissa, Mom and me, because the ghosts did not register on the laptop’s web cam.

  “You Skyped this to Melissa?” I said. “When I’d sent her upstairs?”

  “Oh, grow up,” Maxie said.

  “I was worried about Grandma,” my daughter tried.

  “Go to your room,” I said.

  “Mom!”

  “Not you,” I said to my daughter. I turned toward Maxie. “You.”

  The ghost looked at my face, huffed and flew up into the ceiling.

  Four

  It took a while for that to sink in. “Missing?” I asked. “How can a dead man be missing?”

  The private investigator in Paul had awakened, leaning forward and suddenly all attention. He had clearly decided to take over the “client interview.” “Slow down, Loretta,” he said to Mom in a soothing tone. He’d once told me that saying “slow down” was better than “calm down,” which only got people more agitated. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  His tactic obviously had the effect he’d desired: Mom exhaled audibly, looked in what can be seen of Paul’s eyes (ghosts are only sort-of opaque) and put a businesslike expression on her face.

  “I’ve been seeing Jack every Tuesday for a few years,” she said. “He’d appear in the house, like clockwork, right around eleven in the morning. Once in a while I could sort of call him, you know, talk to him aloud and he’d hear me if he was close enough and then show up. That’s what happened the night he came to help Alison.”

  I’d been so caught up in this convoluted tale that it hadn’t occurred to me until now: “Wait. You were talking to someone when I was in your house today. And it wasn’t your friend and it wasn’t on your cell phone. If that wasn’t Dad, who was it?” I asked my mother.

  “I’m getting to that,” she answered. “I’m more worried about your father right now.” What did that mean?

  I didn’t get a chance to push the point. “Why do you think your husband is missing?” Paul butted in and asked Mom.

  “He hasn’t shown up for the past three weeks,” Mom said. “And believe me, he never missed a week. I’d go to bed extra early on Monday nights because I knew he’d be there on Tuesdays, and I’d need my rest.”

  “Mom,” I reminded her, “your daughter is in the room.”

  “Oh, Alison,” she scolded. “Really.”

  Paul did his best to steer the conversation back to the primary topic. “Your husband, Loretta. You say he stopped showing up on Tuesdays. Isn’t there any other explanation? Could he have forgotten or simply been distracted?”

  “By what?” I asked. “He’s been dead for five years.” Then I remembered that I was in the presence of other similarly deceased people. “Sorry.”

  As had become practice, they ignored me. Mom’s eyes narrowed as she thought, and she shook her head negatively at Paul.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “You don’t know Jack like I do. He’d never forget and he’d never not show up without telling me.”

  “Still, that doesn’t really classify him as ‘missing,’” I noted, having decided to join ’em rather than try to beat ’em. “Dad wouldn’t ever leave without saying where he was going, but if he got caught up in something, he could lose track of time.”

  “There’s more,” Mom said, once again casting her eyes toward her brewski and looking uncomfortable. “I made the acquaintance of another gentleman.”

  “You’re two-timing Dad?” It slipped out. Or more like it forced itself out at warp speed.

  Mom looked up sharply. “Of course not!” she barked, her eyes flashing. “It never got…serious. We’re just friends.”

  “Wait,” Maxie said. I took in a deep breath, because anything Maxie was likely to interject here was not apt to be helpful. “This other guy…”

  “His name is Lawrence,” Mom said. “Lawrence Laurentz. He’s the one you heard me talking to this afternoon,
Alison.”

  “Lawrence Laurentz?” I asked. “Did his parents stutter?” Now you know the truth: I’m not tactful.

  “Lawrence,” Maxie said, as if I weren’t there. “Is he alive, or is he like us?” She gestured toward herself and Paul.

  “Lawrence is like you and Jack,” Mom answered. “He passed on about six months ago.”

  Paul decided to regain his authority as the lead investigator. “So how is it that you think your friendship with Mr. Laurentz led to your husband being missing?” he asked.

  Mom looked serious. “Well, Jack hasn’t been showing up for a few weeks, like I said. And I was going to come to you, Paul, and see if you could contact him.” Paul has the ability to sort of telepathically communicate with other ghosts; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. He and I call it the Ghosternet. “But Lawrence came to me a few days ago and said something was wrong with Jack and that he could help. I told him I was sure Jack would show up today, but today Lawrence was there again, not Jack.” She looked at me. “He was there to tell me that he knew why your father hasn’t been coming by. He said Dad was being kept away; he made it sound like Dad’s being held against his will.”

  I turned toward Paul. “Is that even possible?” I asked.

  He gave me a “how would I know?” look. “I never got the handbook for the deceased,” he said. “But you know that we’ve seen things stranger than what Mr. Laurentz was suggesting.”

  That was true; there seemed to be no rule book overseeing the afterlife. In our short time inhabiting the same house, Paul, Maxie and I had seen ghosts who could move freely about the planet and others, like Paul, who were bound to a certain area of real estate. Maxie had recently developed the ability to leave my property but couldn’t actually transport herself independently with any speed faster than a brisk walk. She’d taken to materializing in my car on occasions I was going somewhere, which had almost caused a few accidents along the way. Maxie is anything but subtle.

  “So let’s assume that your friend is telling the truth. Do you think he’s the one holding Dad hostage?” I asked my mother.

  “I don’t know. After you left, he came back and we talked more, but I got so upset that I wasn’t thinking clearly,” she admitted. “Lawrence said he could get Jack out of whatever predicament he’s in, but he wants something in return.”

  That kind of talk always raises my suspicions. “Oh, really,” I said. “What is it he wants from you?” My mind wasn’t wrapping itself around this one comfortably. What could a ghost want? They can’t spend money. They can’t take ransom.

  “It’s not me he wants something from; it’s you,” Mom said to me.

  I could feel my eyes narrow. “What is it he wants?” I asked.

  “He wants you to find out who murdered him.”

  This had a familiar ring. When I’d first met Paul and Maxie, that was the very request they’d made of me, and it hadn’t been easy to fulfill. I was in no hurry to try doing something like that again.

  Paul sighed before I could. “I understand his torment,” he said. “But how did he know about Alison’s ability to see people like us? Does he know she has a private-investigator’s license?”

  Mom finished her bottle of beer and looked away, pretending to search for the recycling bin she knew perfectly well I kept next to the fridge. “I might have…mentioned something about it,” she said, making sure not to establish eye contact with me.

  Maxie stifled a giggle. When she died, Maxie was a twenty-eight-year-old who had probably topped out at sixteen on the maturity charts. Things hadn’t changed much since then.

  I decided to pretend not to notice Maxie and turned toward Mom. “So you’ve been bragging about my detective skills to your dead friends?” I asked.

  “Maybe a little. But you know, you don’t give yourself enough credit.”

  Sometimes it is very difficult not to roll one’s eyes heavenward. In this case, I found it impossible. For one thing, I know I’m not a good investigator—Paul does most of the brainwork, and I do the legwork—and for another, Mom wouldn’t know a good detective if she met Sherlock Holmes at the clubhouse of her condo complex. Which I wasn’t sure she hadn’t.

  Before the top of my head could blow off, Paul floated between Mom and me. “Do we have any details, Loretta?” he asked. “Do we know exactly when Mr. Laurentz died and how he was murdered?”

  Mom seemed much happier dealing with Paul, so I took a seat and considered having a drink myself but didn’t want to open a bottle of wine just for me. I’d have to look into wine six-packs.

  “I met Lawrence at the clubhouse in our development about two months ago, and he began coming around to the house every once in a while right after that. He said he had died a little over six months ago. Last June,” Mom reported dutifully. “He says he was electrocuted, but that the police think he had a heart attack or something.”

  Paul’s eyes perked up. “Electrocuted? How?”

  “He says someone threw an electric toaster into his bubble bath.”

  Maxie guffawed, and this time I was grateful. It covered my own involuntary yelp quite nicely. Mom gave Maxie a disdainful look.

  “The man was murdered, Maxine,” she reminded her.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Kerby.” Maxie sounded like a third grader being admonished by her teacher, but her grin was unmistakable.

  Mom huffed a bit, but Paul refocused her attention from Maxie’s (and my) insolence to his questioning. He seemed genuinely interested. Paul likes nothing better than an unsolved mystery. It’s one of the few things about him I find completely annoying.

  “How could Mr. Laurentz not know who threw a toaster into his bath?” he asked. “He would have seen the person enter the bathroom, surely.” Paul speaks with such lovely syntax, owing to his British/Canadian background. Or maybe he’s just really polite.

  Mom squinted, an indication that she’s concerned she’s about to say something that will be open to ridicule. I’m afraid Dad and I were rather merciless in our teasing when I was growing up, though in a loving way. Even Melissa, who is smarter than all of us and who loves her grandmother dearly, occasionally giggles at the things my mother says.

  “Lawrence said that the person who threw it was invisible,” she declared.

  In this crowd, that’s not so outrageous a statement, but I heard a stifled giggle from the game room doorway, and there stood Melissa, confirming her grandmother’s fears that what she’d said would be received with something other than complete reverence. Liss was holding the iPod touch her father had given her a few months before as a bribe. But under her arm was her school laptop.

  “You were supposed to be in your room,” I said.

  Melissa shot a guilty glance at Maxie, who quickly shut the laptop she had, let’s face it, stolen from me. Scowling, I walked to the spook, who did not think to rise up to the ceiling to avoid me.

  “What are you doing?” I intoned.

  Maxie made a sound with her lips that indicated she was unconcerned with my authority. She opened the computer and turned the screen toward me.

  It showed Melissa’s Skype name but nothing on the main screen because Liss had closed her laptop. On the tiny screen-within-a-screen below was a picture of the game room and the assembled therein in this case, Melissa, Mom and me, because the ghosts did not register on the laptop’s web cam.

  “You Skyped this to Melissa?” I said. “When I’d sent her upstairs?”

  “Oh, grow up,” Maxie said.

  “I was worried about Grandma,” my daughter tried.

  “Go to your room,” I said.

  “Mom!”

  “Not you,” I said to my daughter. I turned toward Maxie. “You.”

  The ghost looked at my face, huffed and flew up into the ceiling.

  Five

  That had been a lot to absorb, and I wasn’t feeling very absorbent at the moment. So I reminded Mom that we were expecting a great deal of snow and encouraged her to head back to her town ho
use. I told her Paul and I would confer on the Laurentz matter and I’d get back to her after the oncoming blizzard was shoveled off my front walk and my driveway. It was already starting to get dark outside.

  Unfortunately, Paul had heard me tell her about the “conferring” and thought I actually wanted to do so as soon as Mom had left. I’d really just been trying to stall, forgetting Paul’s weakness for unsolved crimes.

  I asked Melissa to call Murray Feldner about the plowing (partly to get her to go elsewhere in the house and partly because I figured she’d guilt Murray into it) and Paul followed me into the kitchen, staying directly behind—and a little bit above—me.

  “An invisible person throwing an electric toaster into a bathtub!” he marveled. “It seems impossible, but we’ve seen stranger things happen, haven’t we, Alison?”

  I ignored him in pursuit of dinner, figuring I should probably feed myself and my daughter sometime soon. The refrigerator, more fully stocked than usual, contained a loaf of bread, some eggs, milk, an actual bag of lettuce, orange juice, English muffins and one Red Delicious apple. There was some meat in the separate freezer downstairs and bacon in the meat compartment here in the fridge. In other words, I was completely ready to make breakfast. And a salad with lettuce and an apple.

  It was, as I said, better than usual. Yeah. I know. Would Sun Star Chinese Noodle deliver once the snow started falling?

  “I really didn’t think we were going to talk about this now, Paul,” I told him. “I’ve got to plan for my first major snowstorm with guests in the house. I have to deal with possible meals cooked here and activities for them if we can’t go outside tomorrow.” (Actually, I wasn’t that worried because I know how quickly this area digs out from even heavy snow and was fairly sure I wouldn’t have to do more than maybe cook breakfast, turning the place into a B and B for all of one morning.) “Can’t the crazy ghost who thinks he got fried by a toaster wait?”