Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  Penny shot me a look that indicated I was being cruel, and I felt like she was right. “You know perfectly well what I found,” she said.

  I couldn’t apologize; for all I knew, this whole story was a lie and Penny had tossed the toaster in to French-fry Lawrence while he bathed. “Did you call the police immediately?” I asked instead.

  “It was obvious he was…that I couldn’t revive him myself,” she exhaled. “I dialed nine-one-one on my cell phone. It felt like hours, but I’m sure they were there very quickly, really. I did do one thing while I was there, though.”

  My ears perked up. “What?” I asked.

  “I turned off the water.” Penny sniffed another time or two, and took a tissue from a box on her desk. She used it.

  After a few moments of sniffling, I figured I’d exhausted the information I’d get from Penny about that night, so I figured I’d switch lines of question entirely: “How come Tyra Carter thinks you won’t hire her back because of me?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” Penny said. “Have you talked to Tyra?”

  Does being threatened count? “Sort of,” I said. “Do you want to hire her back?”

  Penny looked like she hadn’t considered the possibility before. “I don’t know,” she said. “Tyra was moonlighting while she worked here.”

  I figured if I could help Tyra’s employment picture, I could get her to stop calling me up and saying unsettling things. “I think she’d really like to come back,” I suggested. “You might want to give it a thought.”

  “Maybe,” Penny agreed. “I’ll call her.”

  One less threatening figure to worry about, I thought.

  On the way to pick up Melissa, I placed a call to Murray Feldner, who picked up on the first ring as if he’d been waiting by the phone. “Murray,” was all he said. Clearly, a man of action.

  “Murray, it’s Alison Kerby.” My Bluetooth made it sound like I was driving through a car wash in a convertible with the top down.

  “Hi, Alison,” Murray replied. “Do you need something? Is there gonna be snow tonight?”

  “No. It’s about the bill you sent me.” The car in front of me was doing its best to break the record for slowest miles per hour in the passing lane. Pennsylvania plates. It figured.

  “What about it? Did I add it up wrong?” Murray had not, if I recalled correctly, been an honors student in math. Or anything else, except maybe gym.

  “Sort of,” I told him. “You charged me for plowing my driveway and my walk.”

  This did not seem to make an impression on him. “Uh-huh.”

  Subtlety wasn’t going to be a really powerful tool in this conversation. “It didn’t snow Tuesday night, Murray. There was nothing to plow.”

  “What? What about a cow?” Clearly, the Bluetooth was working just as well on the other end. Terrific. And the slow car in front of me actually got slower.

  “Not cow, Murray. Plow. There was nothing to plow.”

  “When?”

  “Wednesday!” I considered passing on the right, which is not technically kosher, but there was a truck with Oklahoma plates there, big enough to be carrying all of New Jersey back home, and I was boxed in. I flashed my lights at the Pennsylvania car. It slowed down more.

  “I came over to your house on Wednesday, Alison. Remember?” Great. Now Murray thought I was the one who hadn’t been an honors student. Which, technically, I hadn’t, but that wasn’t the point. “Your daughter called me the night before. I have it right here in my book.”

  “I know you were there, Murray. But you didn’t do anything; there was no snow. How can you charge me for plowing when there was no snow?”

  Murray sounded honestly confused. “You wanted me to plow even though there was nothing on the ground?” he asked. “That would’ve damaged my plow, Alison.”

  “I know! I was the one who told you that!” I honked my horn, but I’m not sure what message I was sending at that point.

  “Well, then, what did you want me to do?” Murray said.

  “Exactly what you did,” I answered. “You did everything right. Except then you sent me a bill for it, and that’s the part I have a problem with.” The Oklahoma truck had now passed me on the right, so I switched lanes to try to pass the Pennsylvanian.

  And the second I moved, it picked up speed like a jackrabbit and disappeared ahead of me. Four more cars passed me on the left while I was stuck between Tom Joad and his load of whatever it is Oklahomans need imported.

  “I’m in business, Alison. I always send a bill when I do work for somebody.”

  I wondered if this conversation was taking place in some alternate universe where what Murray said made sense and I simply needed to adjust. “You didn’t do any work for me, Murray. You came to my house, didn’t do anything and left. How can you charge me two hundred dollars for that?”

  Once there was finally room in the left lane, I switched back. And a guy in a blue Honda Civic immediately started tailgating me. Now I was the car going too slowly in the passing lane. This was the kind of week I was having. And it was only Sunday.

  But at least I seemed to be making some headway with Murray. “Ooooooh,” he said. “I see where you’re going. Okay, I can fix that.”

  “Great. I knew I could count on you, Murray.” I sped up to the New Jersey speed limit, and so did the Honda tailgating me. On my right, once again, the truck from where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.

  “I’ll cut it back to a hundred and fifty and send you a new bill,” Murray said. “Thanks for calling, Alison.” He hung up.

  “Great. I…what?” But he was gone.

  The only plus was that I was ready to pull off the highway. Of course, so was the truck from Oklahoma.

  When I finally reached Janine’s house, Melissa said good-bye to her friends as though they would be separated for years and not just until school began the next morning. Hugs were tight, tears were choked back and promises to call were made that, unlike similar ones in the adult world, would be kept.

  Then she got into the car and switched conversational gears with the ease of an Indy 500 driver coasting down a suburban street. “What’s new on the case?” she asked. “Have we found out anything about the ME’s report?”

  It was at that moment I decided I wanted my ten-year-old daughter—not my partner in detection—back. “Stop,” I said. “Tell me about the party.”

  Melissa looked at me oddly but clearly decided to humor her mother, who was going senile before her very eyes. “Janine got an iPad for her birthday!” she began, and that was just scratching the surface. Apparently Kate, Janine’s mother, was a closet heiress—the showering of gifts Melissa described would have set me back six months on my mortgage.

  “That’s some haul,” I told her when she took a breath, no doubt anticipating her chance to describe more presents.

  “Well, Janine’s kind of sad,” she answered. “Her grandpa died a few weeks ago.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” I said, thinking that expensive gifts probably weren’t the best option when dealing with grief—but then again, they’re fun to get. “Want me to go and see if he’s hanging around her house?”

  “I could do it myself if I knew where he was,” Liss pointed out. “If he’s a ghost now, that is.” Not everyone who passes away goes through that stage, we’d discovered.

  It had never occurred to me before. “Liss, how many of your friends know you can see ghosts?” Melissa’s ability had become evident to some classmates right after we’d moved into the guesthouse, but Liss had some new friends now, and I didn’t know how much of a reputation she’d developed. It could be a potential problem, if a bunch of fifth-graders started telling their parents how my daughter can communicate with the deceased. It’s an icebreaker at PTA meetings, surely, but eventually the conversation would turn awkward.

  “Just Wendy,” Melissa said. “And she won’t tell anybody. She likes it being a secret with
me and her.” Wendy was trustworthy, I knew, and her mother and father were easygoing. Not so easygoing that they’d understand talking to ghosts, probably, but it made me feel better, anyway.

  “Janine said her grandpa knew Grampa,” Liss added.

  It was a major effort not to slam on the brakes. “What? He knew my father?” It was possible she was referring to The Swine’s father, who was still alive and disapproving of me somewhere in Atlanta, I thought. We didn’t hear from him much. Why get in touch with your own granddaughter, after all?

  “Yeah,” Liss answered casually. “She said he was Grampa’s doctor. Does that make sense?”

  “Possibly. He had lots of doctors, especially in the last few months,” I thought out loud. “What kind of doctor was he?”

  Melissa shrugged. “I don’t know. A doctor.” Kids think all doctors are the same and can treat anything. That’s because even when they’re ten, nobody stops them from watching House.

  We were getting near the house. “What’s Janine’s last name?” I asked.

  “Markowitz,” she answered. “Did Grampa have a Dr. Markowitz?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ll ask your grandmother,” I told her. “I don’t remember a Dr. Markowitz.”

  “How about Wells?” Liss said. “Her real name is Janine Wells-Markowitz, but she doesn’t really use the part from her mom.”

  It took me a second to remember the name. Dr. Wells. My father’s oncologist.

  The one who was actually in his hospital room when he died.

  Twenty-one

  “You have a very specific problem,” Tony Mandorisi said. “I don’t think you realize how difficult this is.”

  Jeannie, Tony and Oliver had been waiting for us when Melissa and I arrived at the guesthouse. Jeannie claimed to have texted me that they were coming over, but my phone had helpfully delivered the text ten minutes after their arrival. Liss went upstairs to do homework she should have done before the sleepover.

  While unpacking her child, Jeannie told me she had, as I’d asked, gotten in touch with the widow of Barney Lester, the New Old Thespian who had died a while before Lawrence. Mary Lester confirmed that Barney had died of heart failure (like Lawrence) after a long illness and two heart attacks. Unlike Lawrence, he did not die in a bathtub, and there didn’t seem to be anything suspicious about it.

  Tony knocked on the doorjamb of my library, lightly, with a hammer, not hard enough to make a mark, but enough to make a sound. The sound was solid, and did not indicate anything resembling space beyond the jamb.

  “Hear that?” he said. Before I could answer, he added, “That means this side is a double stud. You can see that from the positioning of the electrical outlet here in the hall and the other one inside the library, too.”

  Jeannie was sitting in the den bouncing Oliver on her lap, within shouting distance but a little out of Tony’s line of sight. I could see all three of them, as well as Maxie’s lower half through the ceiling (she probably had the laptop resting on the floor in one of the upstairs bedrooms) and Paul, who was tapping his foot impatiently on the air, anxious to hear my investigative report and not Tony’s evaluation of my library doorway. But since that was the price Tony had agreed to pay for my convincing Jeannie to help out in the Laurentz investigation, Paul had to endure it.

  I sighed. “It’s a load-bearing wall.” The wall framing the library door was one that actually helped hold up the rest of the house. Which would restrict the amount of construction we could do (or more specifically, that Tony could do) on the doorway without incurring huge expenses compensating for the lack of support. It wasn’t impossible to change—you could put a steel beam across the top of the wall from one end to the other—but that would cost thousands of dollars and be a huge construction project. I was not prepared to authorize that kind of work. “What about on the other side of the door?” I asked Tony.

  He shook his head. “The other side is too close to the linen closet.” He knocked on the wall with his knuckles this time, just for show. “We couldn’t open it up more than an inch or two, and anyway, it wouldn’t really do what you want it to, which is shed more light in that room and create the illusion of more space inside.”

  Paul rolled his eyes and spread his hands. “Can’t this wait?” he asked me. “We have pressing business.”

  “Knock it off,” I told him, quietly enough so Tony couldn’t hear. I tilted my head to the left toward the game room and muttered, “Meet me in my office.” Paul followed me to the game room, where I filled him in on the interviews and what Melissa had told me about Janine’s grandfather. He pursed his lips at that one.

  “Why is this doctor significant?” he asked. “You’ve said before that your father had a team of physicians involved in his case.”

  It was a good question. There had been something bothering me since Liss had mentioned Dr. Wells, not long after Mom had said he’d passed away. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I went on as if I’d had a workable theory. I’d have preferred to go on as if I’d had seventeen million dollars, but one does what one can.

  “My mother mentioned him to me a couple of days ago, or I wouldn’t have thought it was important, either,” I admitted. “But think about it: He died at just about the exact moment my father went underground. That’s an awfully big coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Haven’t you told me never to trust really big coincidences?” I pressed on. “Don’t you always say that there’s got to be a reason behind them, that things aren’t that random the great majority of the time?” My mind was sifting the possibilities: So Dr. Wells died. That was too bad, but it wasn’t like we were friends. So Melissa’s friend was his granddaughter. That was also a little sad, but again, not really close. What was nagging at me?

  Paul sort of nodded the way guys do when you’re proving a point they don’t care for—shoulders up, mouth horizontal, eyebrow tilted. “Sure, but—”

  “All this time we’ve been looking for something to investigate that would get me closer to my father, haven’t we? What makes you think this isn’t it?”

  Paul waited a moment and watched my face. “Oh, is it my turn to get a word in edgewise?” he asked.

  “A whole sentence, if you talk fast enough.” I spread my hands to give him the floor, which he was not touching at all. It was a symbolic gesture.

  “It’s possible you’re right. There could be some connection to Dr. Wells’s death and your father’s…disappearance. But I would caution you against getting your hopes up too high.”

  Well, of course he didn’t want me to assume that Dr. Wells’s death would lead me on an unobstructed path to Dad, but there was something in his voice that said there was more to it than that. “You think there is no connection?” I asked.

  Paul shook his head. “You know how it works, Alison. I don’t think one way or the other about things until I have some facts to apply to the question. What I’m saying is that you’re focusing too much on the goal and not enough on the process. What’s the motive? What about this doctor would force your father into hiding or seclusion or captivity? I asked this question about Lawrence Laurentz, and we still don’t have an answer. I’ll ask it about your father: What does he have to lose?”

  It was an excellent question. And one for which I had no answer.

  “But what about the message on the mirror? Maybe Dr. Wells knows something about the way my father really died. Maybe he’s the one who left the messages.” I wondered if there was any way Dr. Wells, living or dead, could know where I lived now; I hadn’t seen him in five years, long before I’d bought 123 Seafront. By contrast, grasping at straws would have been decisive action.

  “Let’s take a step back,” Paul said. “We don’t know who left those messages or if they contain any truth at all. We both suspect it was a ghost, but Morgan could be correct in his assumption that it was someone wearing gloves.”

  “Someone who got in or out of the house, unseen, t
wice?” I countered. “Including into my locked bedroom and bathroom? No, I’m sure it was a ghost. The hard part will be explaining it to Morgan once we figure it out.”

  “We still have no proof,” Paul insisted.

  “What about Lawrence, then?” I asked as a way of avoiding the fact that he had a point. “Do you believe Penny’s story about the way she discovered his body?”

  Paul frowned. “Again, we have no facts other than the witness’s own statement, which is suspect. I’m more interested in what the officer told you this morning. Officer Warrell told you that Frances and Jerry were suspected of distributing illegal Viagra, and that was why they were held overnight. But so far there has been no indication there were any charges filed against them other than the ones for public lewdness that all the New Old Thespians faced.”

  I giggled. “Lewdness,” I repeated. It was the word more than the thought.

  He looked at me disapprovingly, and I did my best to straighten my face into a serious expression. “When Morgan and Nan return, you might want to see if he can trace any further investigation of those charges or determine why they were not pursued.”

  On cue, there was the sound of the front door opening and people trundling into the guesthouse. Even back here, the rush of cold wind could be felt until the door was closed again.

  But it wasn’t Nan and Morgan at the door. From the den I heard Jeannie call, “Hi, Mrs. Kerby,” and Melissa swooped in from somewhere to yell, “Grandma!”

  I’d asked my mother to come watch Melissa tonight while I went out with Josh Kaplan. Whom she’d been thrilled to hear I was going out with, despite the fact that she’d never actually been to Madison Paint and didn’t remember his name. The only problem was Mom had arrived four hours early.

  Paul and I walked (well, I walked and Paul did whatever it is he does) into the den. Mom was removing a scarf with the Midas Muffler logo on it (mufflers, get it?) and a pair of gloves with the fingers cut off, like she was going to try to crack a safe.