Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  “Ally” he shouted. “How are you, sweetie?”

  I walked over as Sy stood up, which took longer than it used to and didn’t get him as far, a strange incongruity, and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek while Josh beamed in the corner. “I’m good, Mr. Kaplan,” I said. “You look terrific.”

  He waved a hand and in doing so, called me a liar. “I look like I should have died ten years ago,” he said. “And call me ‘Sy.’ You’re not nine years old anymore.”

  He might have been smaller, but he hadn’t changed. “I wasn’t kidding. You look good, Sy.”

  Sy made a “yeah, sure” face but let it go. “I heard you went for dinner with Josh last night,” he sort of half sang. “Something going on?” You have to love old people; they figure the regular rules of polite conversation don’t apply to them, and they’re right.

  “Give us a few more days to decide, would you?” Josh laughed from the corner.

  “Well, hurry up. There’s no telling how much time I have left.”

  “You’ll outlive all of us,” his grandson told him.

  “I hope not.”

  The banter was everything I remembered from my days here with Dad, and once again, it was strange not having him present when it was going on; it was like he’d gone next door to the deli to get me an orange juice or a bagel, and he’d be back in just a minute.

  But I hadn’t forgotten why I was there, and instead of my father, I had indeed found the grumpy ghost, who rose from the basement looking just as displeased and threatening as he had when I’d been here on Saturday. I swallowed my dread and tried to think of The Swine. It was working but not as well as usual.

  Sy excused himself to use the adjacent restroom at just about the same time a customer entered the store through the front door and Josh headed off to assist her.

  And that left me in the room with this disapproving, vaguely dangerous presence, as I’d planned. I spent a moment concentrating on my ex-husband in Malibu, no doubt sitting by a pool instead of freezing his butt off in an ancient Volvo, and then I looked up at the grumpy ghost and didn’t give him time to stare me down. I spoke quietly but firmly in his direction.

  “All right, you’ve gotten my attention. Now drop the silent act and tell me what this is all about.”

  If anything, the grumpy ghost stared at me more intently. But I stared back, put my hands on my hips and waited.

  Nothing. Okay. I could wait him out (well, until Sy and Josh came back, but why think about that now?). It took a while, but I finally got the grumpy ghost in my gaze and held him there, and eventually he cracked.

  “Your father did not die as you think he did,” he intoned, probably wishing his voice were echoey and spooky, like ghosts in the movies. So it was him!

  “Yeah, I got your messages. How did you find me?”

  His grumpy expression changed to one of condescending pity. “They do have a phone book here,” he said.

  Okay, so I was an idiot, but one with a mission, and somehow his comment made him less scary. “I’m here to tell you, I don’t appreciate your sneaking into my house and playing your little games,” I said. “If you have something to tell me, let’s hear it. But you don’t come back into my bedroom without an invitation. Is that clear?” I wasn’t as confident as I hoped I sounded, and I did indeed check that neither Sy nor Josh was anywhere near when I made that comment about being invited into my bedroom.

  “You needed to be told,” he said in the old monotone. The guy was out of a Vincent Price movie.

  “Yeah, but so far you haven’t actually told me anything. What do you mean, my father didn’t die the way I thought? How did he die?”

  “Badly,” the old gasbag let out.

  There was a familiar sound from the direction of the bathroom, then water running, indicating that Sy would be back in the room in a few moments.

  “I don’t have time for this, pal. Tell me straight up: Did you kill my father?”

  Sy opened the bathroom door, smoothing his hair with his left hand. Frankly, at ninety-one, it was amazing the man had hair to smooth, even if he had the receipt for it in a drawer at home. “Ally,” he breathed. “It’s been such a long time. There are days I still expect your father to come walking in, and then I remember.”

  “I know what you mean, Sy,” I said, and looked up for Grumpy.

  He was gone.

  I reminisced for about an hour with Sy and Josh, hoping the old ghost might come back, but to no avail. Today was turning out to be my day to make ghosts disappear. A trick that might come in handy with Maxie; I’d have to remember it.

  Sy had some great stories about Dad; I actually turned on my recorder to preserve them. One, which involved a particularly difficult wallpaper customer who insisted on hanging the paper horizontally, was especially precious, very Dad, and something I’d have to tell Mom about when I got the chance.

  When it got to be about lunchtime, I mentioned something about having guests in my house, invited Josh to drop by for dinner around six (Sy, twinkling, said he’d make sure Josh was out of the store “in plenty of time to spiff up”), then wrapped myself back up in my costume from Dr. Zhivago and headed across the street to the Volvo.

  The royal blue Hyundai was still there, but there was no driver sitting in it. So I climbed into my Swedish Model T and turned the key as fast as I could, hoping the heater might have remembered that “heat” was part of its name while I was in the store.

  Luckily, I had not yet put the car into gear when I heard the voice in the seat behind me.

  “So, what are you doing about my employment situation?” Tyra Carter demanded.

  I spun, shouting, and felt my heart leap up into my throat. It’s not pleasant.

  “What the hell are you doing back there?” I yelled. “How did you get into my car?”

  “You left the back door unlocked and the wind was cold,” Tyra said, shaking her head. “What did you want me to do, freeze to death?”

  I caught my breath and tried very hard not to audibly hyperventilate. It’s so embarrassing to pass out when your life is being threatened. Or something. Was my life being threatened?

  “I wanted you not to follow me here,” I said in the best indignant voice I could muster. “If you’re so cold, why not stay in your own car?”

  “I didn’t know you were going to be in there for an hour,” she answered. “How long does it take to buy some paint?” The fact that I hadn’t been carrying anything when I left the store seemed to have been lost on her. Tyra was imposing, but she was no genius.

  “What do you want?” I asked Tyra.

  “What I said—I want to know what you’re doing about my employment situation. I need to get back at the Basie. This tire thing isn’t paying enough to cover my rent.”

  The thing about adrenaline is that it isn’t specifically purposed. If the stuff starts flowing through your veins because you’re terrified (let’s say, for example, that an unusually large woman who supposedly used to be a violent man was discovered in the backseat of your car when you weren’t expecting her) and it transpires that maybe you don’t need to be terrified, the adrenaline doesn’t simply say, “Oh well, false alarm,” and vanish from your system. It stays, and your brain decides what to do with it. In this case, my brain shifted from terrified to angry faster than I could shift from park into drive.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I demanded. I’ll admit, it wasn’t my most original or well-purposed question; has anyone ever answered in the affirmative to that one? “What makes you think you can jump into my car and tell me to find you a job? Besides, you told me not to call Penny about your job! When did I become your employment service?”

  “When you talked to Penny Fields about me and stopped me from getting my job back,” Tyra explained, as if the answer were so obvious it was a waste of her time to even address it.

  It should be noted that it is, if not impossible, extremely difficult to grind your teeth into a fine powder in a few short se
conds. I can tell you that from personal experience. “I didn’t talk to Penny,” I reiterated, impressed that I could talk with my jaw clenched like that. It was possible I had a future in ventriloquism. “That didn’t happen. I never mentioned your name to Penny. Penny mentioned your name to me. Why is it difficult for you to understand that?” If I mentioned now that I actually had asked Penny to give Tyra her job back (since Penny clearly had not made an offer), Tyra would find a way to blame me for that, too. I decided not to bring it up.

  Tyra’s eyebrows lowered. So did her voice, to near-Tyrone levels. “Are you calling me stupid?” she asked.

  Once again, adrenaline is not a thoughtful hormone. “Are you calling me a liar?” I shot back.

  She rolled her eyes. “Penny Fields fired me because of your pal Larry. Now he’s dead and she won’t hire me back. What should I think?”

  That sounded disturbingly like motive to me, but there was something strange about it. “That doesn’t make any sense, but okay. Let’s say Larry Laurentz snitched on you to Penny. Why would she listen to him?”

  “Boy, you are a really lousy detective, aren’t you?” Tyra asked, I assumed rhetorically. “Because you always listen first to the guy you’re sleeping with.”

  Right. And…whoa! “What? Penny Fields and Lawrence Laurentz were…”

  “Now you got it,” she said. “So what are you going to do to get my job back?”

  “Wait. No. You have to tell me—”

  “I don’t have to tell you nothing, lady.” I didn’t like the tone in Tyra’s voice. It was too Tyrone.

  There was a knock on my window, and once again I spun with a great amount of panic. Who else was chasing after me today?

  Josh Kaplan was standing next to the car in his jeans and sweatshirt, arms wrapped around himself in an charmingly futile attempt to keep warm. I lowered the window. “Is everything okay, Alison?” he asked, looking more at Tyra than at me.

  Catching my breath was becoming a hobby. “Sure,” I managed. “Tyra was just…”

  “Leaving,” she said, and stepped out of the car, letting even more subzero air into it. Not that I was complaining; anything that got her out of my backseat was a resounding success in my book. She looked Josh up and down. “You provide a lot of service to your customers,” she said.

  “This one’s special,” Josh told her. He looked at me, making his point. “What time am I picking you up for Peter Pan tonight?” he asked.

  Oops.

  Tyra’s eyes registered the information. “So I’ll see you at the show tonight,” she said, looking directly at me with something in mind other than adding my name to her Christmas card list.

  “You’ll be there? At the show tonight?” Josh asked Tyra.

  “Of course,” she said. “I do the special effects. And there are a lot in this one.” She turned toward me, so Josh couldn’t see her face, and glared into my eyes. “So we’ll talk later,” she said. Then she turned and walked back to her Hyundai, which probably had a working heater and would have been a better venue for this conversation.

  Josh leaned over into my window a little to talk more privately as Tyra drove away. “Better to let her get a head start,” he said. “Now what was that all about?”

  “It’s a long story, and you’re freezing,” I told him. “I’ll explain it all when you come for dinner tonight. Just not in front of my mother or daughter, okay? I don’t want them to worry.”

  “I’m starting to think I should worry.”

  He was just figuring that out now? “Go back inside with your grandfather and sell paint,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

  Josh looked like he was going to say something, then decided against it. He leaned into the window and kissed me quite casually, just a good-bye thing, which was sort of interesting. “I’ll see you later,” he said. “It’s cold outside. Couldn’t you tell?”

  “Hadn’t noticed,” I said.

  He ran back across the street and into the store, and I got my GPS out from the glove compartment. I knew how to get to Whispering Lakes, but I wasn’t going to see Mom, and those places are so similar that it’s best to get your directions clear. Better to give the little box time to line up its satellites.

  I had a ghost to track down.

  On the drive to Manalapan, I tried to sort out the facts as I knew them: Lawrence Laurentz, amateur theater buff and colossal irritant, had died about six months earlier, a death the medical examiner of Monmouth County had determined to be from natural causes. Except that Lawrence, whose real name was Melvin Brookman, was convinced that he’d been murdered by way of an electric toaster thrown into his bath.

  It was true that Lawrence had annoyed a great many people: Penny Fields, his boss, had all but said he was a snitch and a pariah among the staff at his job. Although according to Tyra, a former fellow employee who was formerly a fellow, Penny was sleeping with Lawrence. Tyra believed Lawrence had gotten her fired. She had also belonged to a community theater group with Lawrence, as had Frances Walters, who didn’t have a grudge with him (except maybe that he’d informed on the group to the cops and gotten them all hauled in for public nudity) but had been ostracized a bit by her colleagues for bringing such a pain in the butt into the troupe. The group’s director, Jerry Rasmussen, admitted he didn’t like Lawrence, had thought he was a bad actor and a poor sport and had seen to it that Lawrence was drummed out of the group.

  Not long after he was, the troupe was raided during an overly reverent performance of Hair and a number of its members arrested, all because of an anonymous tip, presumably from Lawrence. The only ones held overnight, though, were Frances and Jerry, on suspicion that they were running some sort of illegal Viagra ring. No charges had been filed, but it seemed odd that the cops had dropped it so quickly.

  And now Lawrence had banished himself from Mom’s house and I was probably no longer officially (although with a dead client, that’s always a little fuzzy) hired to investigate his death. So why was I still investigating?

  The truth was, I felt bad for the guy. Yeah, Lawrence was a pompous blowhard and possibly a tattletale, but underneath it you could see the kid who’d always been picked last for the team, the man who was just hoping to find his niche all his life and who never did. Someone had to be his champion. And that left…me. If that’s not a reason to feel sorry for the old guy, I can’t imagine one.

  So now I was on my way to the scene of his death because I was fairly sure I’d find him there. Where else did he have to go?

  His town home was on the other side of the complex from Mom’s. The GPS got into a funny mood for a minute, insisting I had “reached my destination” when I was actually at the community’s clubhouse (they all have clubhouses) but found its bearings and eventually deposited me at the address Mom had given me. A quick check of the mailboxes showed that the name “Laurentz” had been painted over but not entirely obliterated. This was definitely the place.

  Lawrence’s unit was the usual brick front, small deck in the back with French doors leading into the kitchen. The house wasn’t really any different from a few thousand others in this community alone, and surely hundreds of thousands elsewhere, though it was a different model from Mom’s, an “up and down” town home, meaning it had an upstairs unlike Mom’s single-level, better for those who have difficulty with stairs (not that Mom does, but she likes having everything on one floor).

  Having worked for some months in the door and lock department of a home improvement store, I know a little bit more about picking a lock than, let’s say, almost everybody. It would have been easy for me to get into the house as Nan and Morgan did, by calling the real estate agent showing Lawrence’s home. But I didn’t want to disrupt her working day on a sham (I certainly wasn’t interested in buying this or any other place while I was still paying the guesthouse’s mortgage). And I really didn’t relish the idea of trying to locate Lawrence’s ghost while hiding my intentions, and what would have seemed like my insanity, from an unsuspecting
stranger. Not to mention it would take longer.

  Still, I didn’t want to attract attention if my skills were a little rusty, so I walked around to the back—which was a real eye-opener, literally, with the frigid wind blowing in my face—and went to work on the lock to the French doors, the same way Penny Fields said she’d entered the night Lawrence died, which was probably a lie.

  It took me about ten minutes to gain entry using a tiny screwdriver made to fix eyeglass frames, mostly because it’s hard to pick a lock when you’re wearing mittens and are being stubborn about taking them off. Once I finally admitted defeat and removed them, the lock picking itself took only a minute or two. But my fingers got really cold. Life is full of trade-offs.

  There was no reason for this to feel eerie, but it did. There was nothing especially different or noteworthy about the place—it was clean and neat, having been more or less “staged” by a real estate agent, no doubt—with the matching white appliances, faux-granite countertop and laminate flooring that was supposed to look like ceramic tile. Whatever water damage might have been visible on the ceiling after Lawrence’s demise had been repaired.

  But it was creeping me out, and I couldn’t explain why.

  For one thing, it was quiet. “Maybe too quiet,” they’d say in the movies. There’s a feeling you get when you’re in someone else’s home in their absence—when a relative is on vacation, perhaps, and asks you to water their plants—that casts a strange pall over the place, and that’s part of what I was feeling in this case.

  The town homes were really row houses; they were attached in groups of three. Lawrence’s was a corner unit, so he had only shared a wall on one side, but it still meant that I had to be wary of calling too loudly for him; I’d noticed a car in a spot designated for neighbors and so assumed someone was home next door. They’d know the unit adjacent to theirs was supposed to be empty, and I’d end up explaining my purely honorable intentions to the Manalapan police, no doubt while my mother, who would have been strolling by in the Antarctic-style weather on a whim, watched in horror.