“Didn’t they give you medicine, Grampa?” Of course I questioned my decision to let Melissa in on the conversation. But I believe that children are stronger than we think and that they can handle things as long as they’re told the truth. That was the excuse I was using today.
“You asked the doctor for something that would put you out of your misery,” I said, in an effort to word it delicately that ended up not being so delicate.
Mom bit her lip, but she didn’t cry. “It must have been awful for you,” she said.
Dad closed his eyes and nodded. “He didn’t want to; he held out for what seemed like a very long time.” He opened his eyes and looked at me to make his point. “But he really is a compassionate man, and he couldn’t bear to see how I was suffering. He waited until the nurse’s shift was changing and put something in my IV drip. And the next thing I knew, I was…like this.”
“And that’s why you haven’t come here or talked to us in five years?” I asked, incredulous. “But you came to see Mom once a week, on Tuesdays. If you could do that…”
“I couldn’t see you,” Dad said, his voice quivering. “A husband is different from a father, baby girl. Believe me I wanted to all the time. But I thought…well, I broke my promise to you. I looked you right in the eye and promised you I’d fight until the end. Besides, just because you didn’t see me doesn’t mean I wasn’t here. I was with you sometimes when Melissa was at school, before you met your two friends there.” He gestured toward Paul and Maxie, who were uncharacteristically silent. “And sometimes I’d sneak in and see you, Lissie, when you were sleeping or from a distance. I couldn’t really stay away from you.
“It wasn’t until Dr. Wells was here, like us”—he gestured to Paul and Maxie—“and he was saying you needed to know, and if I didn’t come clean, he’d tell you himself, although he insisted it wasn’t his place to do that. But I couldn’t get the courage together to do it until that Laurentz guy told us your lives were in danger. Then I had no choice,” Dad said. “But if you can’t forgive me for being so weak at the end, I’ll understand.” He looked at me. “You don’t ever have to see me again, Alison.”
It was very hard to fight back tears, and Dad was right—I was angry at him. But not for the reason he thought I was. “The only thing I won’t forgive,” I told him, “is that you didn’t give us the chance. I understand how much pain you had, and I don’t blame you a bit for asking Dr. Wells for help. I didn’t ever want you to suffer like that.” I made serious eye contact with my father, something I’d wished for desperately over the past five years. “But you assumed we’d never want to see you, when that was the one thing we wanted most of all. Don’t you dare ever go away again, Daddy.”
I don’t think there was a dry eye in the kitchen, among those of us who still have tear ducts, anyway. The others weren’t faring much better.
“I won’t, baby girl. I promise.”
Josh Kaplan called a little while later to see how I was dealing with the snow. I shoveled out the front porch and the walk (with a little help from some “invisible” shovelers) and left the rest for Murray to do the next day.
“It’s clear enough for you to come over if you want to,” I said.
Josh sounded his usual amiable self, but there was a hesitation I hadn’t expected. “I don’t think so, Alison,” he said.
I knew I shouldn’t have involved him in all this, ushering a guy I’d just gotten involved with into this crazy life with my family, my guests and my criminal investigations (he didn’t even know about the ghosts!) so soon. Another huge miscalculation. “I understand,” I said. And I did. I didn’t like it, but I understood.
Josh chuckled. “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just exhausted from shoveling two and a half feet of snow from in front of my house and the store. I’ll be happy to come by tomorrow, and maybe we can do a patch on that plaster wall that self-destructed in your house.”
“You know how to show a girl a good time,” I told him.
“Mr. Smooth,” he said. “That’s me.”
Phyllis Coates loved the story of the naked senior arrests, the contraband Viagra and, by extension, the murder of Lawrence Laurentz for ratting out people when he hadn’t done so at all. She did some digging, however, and said the police investigation into Frances Walters had turned up a stash of illegal prescription drugs and enough “medicinal marijuana” to have kept her in jail for some years even if she hadn’t killed Lawrence.
“Her son the pharmacist was the supplier, but Frances was the dealer,” Phyllis reported. “And when she thought Laurentz ratted her out, she went crazy.”
“She was crazy long before that,” I said. “You weren’t standing there with the gun pointed at you.”
“Well, a gun wasn’t her weapon of choice. She went to Lawrence’s house that night straight from a Peter Pan rehearsal, and Jerry asked her to take the fishing rod home with her because he had no room in his car. She went to see Lawrence, found out Penny was there, and decided she had a patsy to hang it on. She’d practiced with the rod and reel, so it wasn’t hard. Problem was the cops questioned Penny and let her go, so there was no obvious suspect. Frances just kept her head down.”
“And almost got away with it,” I said.
Phyllis’s call came just after Nan and Morgan Henderson heard the Garden State Parkway was once again open to traffic and had decided to head home. But Morgan had one last question: “We never found out who left those messages for you all over the house.”
“Frances confessed to leaving them,” I lied. “She knew Mom well enough to make insinuations about my father’s death. Thought she could scare me off or distract me.”
“But you didn’t know who to be scared away from,” Morgan noted, shaking his head. “And that business card of your father’s?” he asked.
“We’ll never know how she got hold of that,” I told him. We would never know, because it hadn’t happened. It’s a way of looking at things.
“It’s a crazy world,” Morgan said. He had no idea.
He and Nan packed their bags into the car and we all hugged at the door. They promised to come back again sometime. I told them the next stay would be on the house, but Nan wouldn’t hear of it.
I had called Jeannie with the news of Frances’s arrest and the story (minus supernatural elements) of how it happened. She said she was happy the case was closed but that she wouldn’t be able to join my firm on a full-time basis, which I found comforting, since I’d never asked her to. Jeannie said she was thinking about returning to work as soon as she could find suitable day care for Oliver (as if). “It’s important he learn to separate from his mother before preschool,” she explained.
Phyllis was clearly taking notes. “Yeah, how did you get out of that whole situation, anyway?” she asked, bringing me back to this conversation. I could hear the pencil scraping on some old receipt on her desk. A good reporter is never off-duty. “The cops weren’t clear on how Frances was subdued, just that she was already tied up and groggy when they arrived.”
“What did Frances say happened?”
Phyllis barked a laugh. “She claims the rope tied itself around her.” We shared a chuckle over that. “So what really went down?”
“Jerry Rasmussen risked his own life to save me and Mom,” I told her. “The man’s a hero.”
“Uh-huh.” Phyllis, somehow, did not sound convinced, but that version would appear in the Chronicle the following week, complete with information on the arrest of Frances’s son Philip the pharmacist (read: supplier of illicit prescriptions) and the announcement that Jerry was considering writing an opera based on the saga called Laurentz in Water.
“What about Penny Fields?” I asked Phyllis.
“She’s in the clear. Always was. Talking about moving to an active adult community herself, though,” she answered. “Says she’s lonely.”
“Frances’s house should be available soon,” I pointed out. Then Lawrence could come visit.
�
��And what about Tyra?” Phyllis asked me.
“Back at the Basie,” I said. “I think she got fired from the tire job, something about mouthing off to a customer who wanted to know why they don’t make white walls anymore.”
Phyllis said she was glad everything had worked out and apologized for not having gotten that clip file about Dad together for me yet.
I told her there was no rush.
Lawrence himself couldn’t stop thanking me via text on Mom’s phone once she got a ride (in Murray’s truck, as he’d come to plow late and deliver an exorbitant bill, which I paid immediately) home for the evening. We’d tried to get her to stay, but she looked at Dad, Melissa and me and said we needed some time together.
I told Lawrence repeatedly that I’d just been doing my job and that he had, in fact, helped save my life, but he didn’t take that for an answer and promised to haunt Mom’s house whenever she would have him. Dad, of course, felt that Lawrence should send a note and ask permission before showing up.
“What if she’s in the bathtub or something?” he asked me late that night after Melissa had gone to bed and the other ghosts were elsewhere, giving us time. Dad was floating high above the floor of the hallway, widening the hole he’d made in the plaster above the library door.
“I think Larry is going to stay away from all bathtubs for a very long time,” I told him. I pointed at the rectangle he was creating in my wall. “You know, you could have come up with something less cryptic than ‘stop go up.’”
Dad shrugged. “It made sense. You wanted to widen the door. You couldn’t. But you can get more brightness in the room with a window here. You needed to stop what you were doing and go up. Take out a piece of the wall above the door, bring in more light.”
“You’re a master,” I told him.
“You’re my daughter. You’re supposed to think so.”
I watched him smoothing the edge of the plaster he’d sanded down. “In this case, I happen to be right,” I said.
Dad looked at the hole he’d made, which would eventually house a stained-glass panel made from light colors, which I’d found in the basement of the guesthouse when I’d first moved in. Tony had said he’d install the panel for me and offered to make the sturdy brace to hold it, but Dad was already at work.
“Do me a favor, baby girl,” he said. “Go get me a two-foot level, would you? I need to make sure this is right.”
“Sure.” I knew just where that was in my tool room in the basement. I went down the stairs quickly, headed straight for the level, found it hanging on a pegboard and rushed back up the stairs. I stopped at the basement door and took a moment to ponder. A drop of anxiety hit me just as I opened the door.
But when I swung it open, Dad was still there, hanging up in the air, smoothing the joists he’d cut to get ready for the four-by-four brace he’d put in sometime later in the week. I smiled.
“Don’t just stand there,” he said. “Let’s see that level.” So I handed it up to him.
We stayed up talking until very late in the night.
Chance of a Ghost Page 54
