Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  “There’s one other thing,” I said. “Frances made another comment last night.”

  “You’re grasping at straws,” Paul suggested.

  “What?” Morgan asked. He really hadn’t heard me.

  I spoke a little louder but didn’t shout; apparently it only irritated Morgan when people did that. “Last night. Frances said she guessed Lawrence’s apartment didn’t have a working toaster anymore.”

  Morgan shrugged. “She’s probably right. Didn’t the cops say there was no toaster in the kitchen, but there were crumbs? The killer took the toaster after the sparks stopped flying and Laurentz was dead. So what?”

  “So,” I said, playing my trump card, “I never told Frances—or any of the other suspects—about the chances that Lawrence was electrocuted by a toaster in his bathtub. I just said that there were suspicions his death wasn’t from an arrhythmia.”

  Morgan and Paul had similar responses. They stopped, tilted their heads to the side and did a few half-nods. It was interesting, like watching two very large, odd bobblehead dolls.

  “You might have something there.” Paul spoke first.

  “Maybe,” Morgan chimed in a second later. “Still not enough to go to a prosecutor with, but something.”

  “So you agree it was Frances,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “What’s her motive?”

  “Lawrence snitched on the troupe for being naked in public and on her and Jerry Rasmussen for the illegal Viagra business,” I said, having anticipated the question. “They hadn’t gotten charged, but it had been close, and she was either terrified of going to jail or just mad enough to get revenge.”

  Morgan puffed out his lips, thinking. “You don’t have any evidence,” he said. “You just have guesses.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I said. The fact was I hadn’t slept much after coming to this conclusion. “It’s something about the way her mouth tightens when she talks about Lawrence, even when she says nice stuff. It’s like she wants to bite her tongue.”

  “Again, not much to tell the judge,” Morgan pointed out.

  “No. But I know it, and that makes me feel better about Jerry coming to my mother’s for brunch today, because I think Frances is the killer.”

  “They’ll probably cancel that because of the snow anyway, won’t they?” Morgan asked.

  I shrugged. “Mom will cook up a storm whether Jerry shows up or not.”

  Melissa came down a few minutes later. I’d snuck into her room and turned off her alarm clock once I’d seen the wall of snow outside, but she always set her cell phone alarm, too, and I’d forgotten to get to that. Liss was so thrilled with the idea of a snow day (or two, as it looked at the moment) that she was happy not to have missed too much by sleeping in.

  I decided I’d start my new life—the one where I cook for my daughter and maybe occasionally guests—this morning, and got a box of Bisquick out of the cabinet to start making pancakes. I didn’t let anyone see that I had to read the ingredients from the side of the box. Who knew there were eggs in pancakes?

  By the time my cell phone buzzed indicating a text, I was more than ready for the interruption. Maxie had been offering cooking tips, and I was gullible enough that Paul had to tell me she was “kidding” when she suggested adding Tabasco. I pulled the phone from my pocket and was surprised to see a text from Mom. I’d planned to at least let her sleep until nine before I called to see how she was holding up with the snow.

  Naturally, when I opened the phone and read the text, just as Melissa wandered into the kitchen, it was indecipherable.

  It read: “frncs n jrr r hr fr brnch wnn sy hll.”

  Luckily, this time I had my daughter nearby, and simply handed her the phone to translate. “Easy,” Melissa said. “It says, ‘Frances and Jerry are here for brunch. Wanna say hello?”

  Frances and Jerry!

  I grabbed the phone from Melissa’s hand as she asked what was wrong. I ignored her and immediately called Mom.

  “Hello, Alison,” she said when she answered. “Isn’t this snow something? Our power went out a little while ago—I think the snow brought down a wire—and when Jerry came for brunch, Frances had decided to come along. Isn’t that nice?”

  I didn’t feel better about Jerry coming over anymore.

  “How did they get there?” I asked. “The snow must be up to their waists.”

  “Please, Alison,” my mother scoffed. “This is an active adult community. They had cross-country skis.”

  Now, I had no reason to think that Mom was in any immediate danger. Even if Frances had been the one who killed Lawrence, she was not aware I knew that. And I hadn’t seen any evidence that Jerry was involved, despite his rather menacing move toward me at the show the night before.

  On the other hand, I was scared to pieces for my mother, but I knew if I said something straight out to her about it, she’d react badly and Frances, then, would know.

  And I couldn’t get to Mom to help.

  “Mom, listen. Don’t react to what I’m going to say.”

  “Don’t react?” she said out loud. “What do you mean, don’t react?”

  This wasn’t going well. “I’m saying, after I tell you what I’m going to tell you, say nothing. No. Say, ‘That’s nice, dear.’ Can you do that?”

  “That’s nice, dear.”

  Paul floated down toward me. He looked concerned.

  “No, Mom. I wasn’t…Okay, listen. I’m going to say one more thing. And after that thing, I want you to say, ‘Okay, Alison.’ Don’t say it now. Here’s the thing I want to tell you: I think Frances might have had something to do with…”

  Suddenly there was that silence you get when the other end of a cell phone call has been disrupted. It was as if Mom had driven into a tunnel. I stared at the phone. I don’t know why people do that. It’s not like the phone is responsible for what just happened; it’s just that you can’t see the other person, and you have to stare at something.

  And I still couldn’t say anything upsetting in front of Melissa. But she was no fool and had sat down and put her hand to her mouth based strictly on my tone of voice.

  “What is it, Alison?” Morgan asked. “Is your Mom all right?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “She’s fine. The connection just gave out.” I looked toward Paul. He was glowering with concern. Even Maxie looked worried; she adores Mom. “Can you excuse me for just one second?” I asked Nan and Morgan.

  They nodded. Neither said anything. I looked at Melissa; she appeared to be holding back tears.

  I wasn’t fooling anybody.

  I spent much of the next hour on the phone. After trying to reach Mom six more times, my next call was to Lieutenant McElone, who would surely have forgiven my trespass under the circumstances, but I got put straight through to her voice mail. I left a message. Then I called the Manalapan police, under Morgan’s tutelage, to ask for a “status check” on a senior citizen. The dispatcher who took the call wrote down all the information but mentioned something about there being thirty inches of snow on the ground and suggested it might be awhile before they managed to get out to the complex, which also probably had not been plowed just yet.

  Saying that I knew a murderer was in the house with my mother would probably have been construed as hysteria, leading to someone being sent to my house instead of Mom’s, so I refrained from making that statement. Again, as per Morgan’s instructions.

  Nan and Morgan began trying to get in touch with some of his statewide connections to see if there was some reason Mom’s cell phone wouldn’t be answering other than the one I was trying not to think about. But the state police had been mobilized to deal with the unexpected blizzard, and his friends were hard to reach. I told the Hendersons I was going upstairs to think, but Melissa and I both knew why we were heading to her room. We never questioned it, never said a word; we just both got into the dumbwaiter and pulled our way up.

  Paul and Maxie were already waiting w
hen we got there. Paul was pacing in thin air and Maxie, galvanized by anger when someone she cared about was in danger, flew about the room like she’d had too much Ritalin and helium at the same time.

  “We don’t know it was Frances,” Paul reminded me.

  “Yes, we do. And Jerry may be in on it.”

  “If it’s either of them, whoever it is has no reason to cause your mother any harm and won’t do anything with the other one there, anyway,” Paul insisted

  “Do you think…” Melissa was trying hard to come up with an alternative way to ask her question. “Is Grandma all right?”

  “I don’t know yet, Liss, but we’re going to find out.” I looked up at Paul. “I’ve got to get out there. I don’t care about the snow.”

  He shook his head. “You’ll never make it. The highways are closed. There’s no safe way to…” He stopped. And looked up at Maxie.

  “What?” I asked.

  Paul chewed on his lower lip a moment, then nodded, as if he’d won an argument with himself. “If you can’t make it through the snow, maybe you can get there over the snow,” he said.

  Clearly, he was ranting. “I don’t own a pair of skis or snowshoes, Paul,” I told him gently. “I live at the beach.”

  Paul’s tight smile was one-sided. “No. I’m saying maybe you can travel over the snow. By air.” And he looked at Maxie again. “Do you think you could?” he asked her.

  Maxie stopped bouncing off the walls—literally—and sized me up. She shrugged. “I don’t see why not,” she said. She turned to me. “Let’s go.”

  Their plan was starting to dawn on me, and it was not the kind of dawn one generally welcomes in. “You’re not suggesting that Maxie carry me all the way to Mom’s, in the…by the…”

  “Out the window,” Maxie said. “Let’s go.”

  “Are you nuts?” I asked. “How do you even know you could—” Before I could get out “lift me,” Maxie had scooped me up and I was coming into close proximity with the ceiling. She helpfully stopped a few inches short of full-on collision.

  “Any questions?” she asked. “Let’s go. Your mom’s in trouble.”

  This was sounding disturbingly realistic. “People will see us,” I said. “They’ll see me, anyway. How could I explain flying all over Monmouth County?”

  Maxie planted me back on the floor and changed her clothing in a blink, like always. Except now she was wearing a huge trench coat, much too large for her, and she wrapped it around me. “Can you see your mom, Melissa?” she asked.

  “Just her shoes and the top of her head,” I heard my daughter say. It’s amazing how little you can see and hear when engulfed by a trench coat. “Scrunch down, Mom.” I did. “Yeah, that’s better. It’s just her feet now.”

  “We can handle it,” Maxie said. “Let’s go.”

  “Will you stop with the ‘let’s go’?” I demanded. “Nothing happens to you if you drop me. I have to think about this.”

  “I don’t,” Liss said. “I’ll go.” She started reaching for her snow boots.

  I disentangled myself from the trench coat and faced her. “You most certainly will not,” I said firmly. “I’m not letting you fly anyplace. Besides, what are you going to do when you get there?”

  “Save Grandma,” my daughter insisted.

  “You’re staying here. Man your cell phone.” I looked at Maxie. “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s go.”

  Thirty

  Tuesday

  “This was not in the forecast at all,” I told Morgan Henderson the next morning at seven.

  “I heard the governor’s declared a state of emergency,” Morgan said. “All the major highways are closed. I’m afraid we’re going to be here with you at least another day.”

  I’d risen that morning to a wall of snow accumulated up and over my front porch—which meant it was more than covering the four steps up and then some—and nobody in sight of my front windows was even attempting to shovel out from under yet.

  Not even Murray, who wasn’t answering my calls.

  Morgan and I were the only ones awake in the house. You can’t really count the ghosts, who were loitering about the room, Paul more attentively than Maxie. In fact, Maxie was playing a harmonica, which she concealed from Morgan by wearing gloves on her hands, which had the same effect as if she’d kept it in her pocket. She could be really clever when she wanted to irritate me, which was about ninety percent of the time.

  It was working like a charm.

  “I’m happy to have you,” I told Morgan, “but I’m sorry to keep you here after you meant to leave.”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Now. Tell me what you figured out about Frances Walters.” I’d told him about my revelation in the middle of the night.

  I’d been waiting to tell him and Paul, but Maxie’s tooting on the harmonica was making a racket that drove me nuts and was inaudible to Morgan. I glanced at Paul, who said, “Maxie, please.”

  She took that to mean she should play louder. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to annoy her, but she was clearly taking her revenge.

  I turned toward Morgan so he could read my lips if necessary (although his hearing aids appeared to be working perfectly) and did my best to ignore the cacophony from above while Paul tried unsuccessfully to wrest the harmonica from Maxie’s hands. “It’s simple,” I said. “It was one thing that she said to me when we first met.”

  I let that sink in. Maxie stopped playing the harmonica to ask Paul, “Which one is Frances Walters?” He refused to answer her but took the opportunity to yank the harmonica from her and put it in the pocket of his jeans.

  “When I first went to interview Frances, she made a remark that didn’t seem like a big deal. She said it was a shame that Lawrence had died upstairs in his bathroom like that.”

  Morgan’s eyes narrowed. “Well, that is how he died. I’m trying to follow you.”

  Paul snapped his fingers, which made a sound only I could hear. Yeah, it’s weird. “Of course!” he said.

  “Of course what?” Maxie demanded. “And give me back my harmonica.” Paul turned away from her.

  I had to explain to Morgan. “She said ‘upstairs’ in his bathroom. But last night at the show, when I asked Frances if she’d ever been to Larry’s place, she said she’d never been there and didn’t even know where it was located in the complex. One side, where Mom and Frances live, has units that are all one floor. The other side, where Lawrence had his place, is all town houses with two stories. They’re a little less expensive in communities like that because a lot of people don’t want to have to climb stairs.”

  Morgan nodded slowly. “So if Frances didn’t know where Lawrence’s house was, she would assume it was like hers and wouldn’t know he was upstairs when he died, because she wouldn’t have known he had an upstairs.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “I see what you’re saying,” Morgan acknowledged. “But in the police business, that’s what we call ‘really skimpy stuff we know that won’t hold up in court.’”

  “Frances was also one of only three people who knew how to operate the special effects apparatus that could have been used to drop the toaster into Lawrence’s tub,” I said, eschewing the impulse to add “ha!” to my sentence.

  “It’s a fishing rod,” Morgan said. “Millions of people know how to use them.”

  Probably best I’d left the “ha!” off, I realized now. I thought of the “bird” Lawrence said he’d seen in his last living second that could have been the prop Wendy and Peter attached to the fishing line, but that didn’t eliminate Tyra or Jerry from the mix, either.

  “There’s one other thing,” I said. “Frances made another comment last night.”

  “You’re grasping at straws,” Paul suggested.

  “What?” Morgan asked. He really hadn’t heard me.

  I spoke a little louder but didn’t shout; apparently it only irritated Morgan when people did that. “Last night. Frances said she guessed Lawrence’s
apartment didn’t have a working toaster anymore.”

  Morgan shrugged. “She’s probably right. Didn’t the cops say there was no toaster in the kitchen, but there were crumbs? The killer took the toaster after the sparks stopped flying and Laurentz was dead. So what?”

  “So,” I said, playing my trump card, “I never told Frances—or any of the other suspects—about the chances that Lawrence was electrocuted by a toaster in his bathtub. I just said that there were suspicions his death wasn’t from an arrhythmia.”

  Morgan and Paul had similar responses. They stopped, tilted their heads to the side and did a few half-nods. It was interesting, like watching two very large, odd bobblehead dolls.

  “You might have something there.” Paul spoke first.

  “Maybe,” Morgan chimed in a second later. “Still not enough to go to a prosecutor with, but something.”

  “So you agree it was Frances,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “What’s her motive?”

  “Lawrence snitched on the troupe for being naked in public and on her and Jerry Rasmussen for the illegal Viagra business,” I said, having anticipated the question. “They hadn’t gotten charged, but it had been close, and she was either terrified of going to jail or just mad enough to get revenge.”

  Morgan puffed out his lips, thinking. “You don’t have any evidence,” he said. “You just have guesses.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I said. The fact was I hadn’t slept much after coming to this conclusion. “It’s something about the way her mouth tightens when she talks about Lawrence, even when she says nice stuff. It’s like she wants to bite her tongue.”

  “Again, not much to tell the judge,” Morgan pointed out.

  “No. But I know it, and that makes me feel better about Jerry coming to my mother’s for brunch today, because I think Frances is the killer.”

  “They’ll probably cancel that because of the snow anyway, won’t they?” Morgan asked.

  I shrugged. “Mom will cook up a storm whether Jerry shows up or not.”

  Melissa came down a few minutes later. I’d snuck into her room and turned off her alarm clock once I’d seen the wall of snow outside, but she always set her cell phone alarm, too, and I’d forgotten to get to that. Liss was so thrilled with the idea of a snow day (or two, as it looked at the moment) that she was happy not to have missed too much by sleeping in.