An Uninvited Ghost
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
TOMB WITH A VIEW
More praise for Night of the Living Deed
“If you love classic caper comedies, as I do, you’ll have a real affinity for the tart-tongued Alison Kirby and her lively entourage. From nine-year-old daughter, Melissa, to the delightfully stubborn pair of ghosts, Maxie and Paul, this well-written cozy offers a terrific read.”
—Claudia Bishop, author of the Hemlock Falls Mysteries
“Two restless ghosts, one creaky old guesthouse, a single mother and her nine-year-old daughter, a whole mess of cracked plaster, murder and mayhem . . . all add up to one fun, spirited mystery. In Night of the Living Deed, E. J. Copperman brings together all the elements of a great, ghostly tale within a well-plotted mystery.”
—Juliet Blackwell, author of the Witchcraft Mysteries
“Night of the Living Deed could be the world’s first screwball mystery. You’ll die laughing and then come back a very happy ghost.”
—Chris Grabenstein, Anthony and Agatha
award–winning author
“A bright and lively romp through haunted-house repair! Engaging plot and fun characters, even the dead ones—I look forward to more from house-fixer-upper Alison and her ghostly private detective pal.”
—Sarah Graves,
author of the Home Repair is Homicide Mysteries
“A couple of demanding ghosts, a quick-witted heroine, a creaky old house and a delightful cast of characters make Night of the Living Deed a must-read for cozy fans. What a fun and enjoyable story!”
—Leann Sweeney, author of the Cats in Trouble Mysteries
“Who knew joint compound and drywall could be so appealing? . . . E. J. Copperman begins a wonderful new series by crafting a laugh-out-loud fast-paced and charming tale that will keep you turning pages and guessing until the very end.”
—Kate Carlisle, New York Times bestselling
author of the Bibliophile Mysteries
“Fans of Charlaine Harris and Sarah Graves will relish this original, laugh-laden paranormal mystery featuring reluctant ghost whisperer Alison Kerby, a Topper for the twenty-first century. Meticulously crafted, Night of the Living Deed is a sparkling first entry in a promising new series.”
—Julia Spencer-Fleming, Anthony and Agatha award–winning
author of One Was a Soldier
“Witty, charming and magical describe the entertaining first Haunted Guesthouse Mystery . . . An enjoyable paranormal amateur-sleuth tale.”
—Genre Go Round Reviews
“A fast-paced, enjoyable mystery with a wisecracking, but no-nonsense, sensible heroine . . . Readers can expect good fun from start to finish, a great cast of characters and new friends to help Alison adjust to her new life. Its good to have friends—even if they’re ghosts.”
—The Mystery Reader
“Will keep you flipping the pages faster and faster. A wonderful, detailed first in a new series ghostly story that will keep you surprised, and smiling.”
—The Romance Readers Connection
Berkley Prime Crime titles by E. J. Copperman
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED
AN UNINVITED GHOST
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
AN UNINVITED GHOST
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / April 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Cohen.
All rights reserved.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-47761-8
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To Eve, Josh and Copper. You figure it out.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Writing books about ghosts, I have found, is a liberating experience. You can make up pretty much any rules you want that best serve the story. Some of those rules you may later regret, but they’re yours, and you have to live with them or figure out a plausible way to break them. I have no complaints.
I do, however, have a great deal of gratitude, because there’s no such thing as a one-person show in publishing. Yeah, the author starts from scratch and creates something, but it would be a pretty sorry something if it were left alone from that point.
So thank you, as ever, to Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, the invaluable, compassionate, constantly right editor of the Haunted Guesthouse and other series. And a special shout-out to Faith Black, who took on this book and about six trillion others in addition to her own work when Shannon had the temerity to give birth to an adorable son. I shudder to think what this book would have been like without both of you.
Also, thanks to Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency and Josh Getzler of Russell and Volkening, both of whom tirelessly championed my work throug
hout this process.
For helping me realize how to shout above the noise of the crowd, thanks to Lorraine Bartlett, Lorna Barrett, L.I. Bartlett (all of whom are a wonderful person), Leann Sweeney, Wendy Watson, MJ Maffini, anyone I’m forgetting at CozyPromo, the incandescent Rosemary Harris, Chris Grabenstein, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Kate Carlisle, Claudia Bishop, Juliet Blackwell and all the terrific authors I’m leaving out because I have an awful memory.
Special thanks to Linda Ellerbee for letting me use her real name. At ’em, Linda Jane!
But mostly, thanks to Jessica, Josh, Evie and the rest of my family, for not blinking once when I mention having to get back to the thousand words a day.
No cats were harmed in the writing or publication of this book.
Prologue
Five minutes into this ridiculous escapade, and already Scott McFarlane thought it was a bad idea. Waiting around in an almost completely empty room for someone he’d never met seemed a waste of time, but the second part, the thing for which he’d been “hired,” was considerably more idiotic.
He hadn’t been in this house before today and didn’t have his bearings, so it was probably a stroke of good luck that he wasn’t required to move around a lot. Still, he wasn’t comfortable without a strong sense of the geography of the place, and there was little he could do unaccompanied to improve that situation.
Not to mention that just standing around here was a bore.
Scott had limited his contact with people for a very long time; he was distrustful of most and had very few friends on whom he could still rely. His acceptance of this “job” today was a way to try to reconnect with humanity, in a typically backhanded and halfhearted fashion.
The idea that he was planning to do so by scaring the hell out of an old lady brought him only minimal amusement.
He had no way of telling what time it was; the sunlight coming through the windows to his right was insufficient to gauge. He didn’t even know in which direction the window was facing.
Scott had touched virtually every object left in the room, but there wasn’t much. The chair on which he was supposed to be discovered when the door opened was an ancient rocker, splintered in some places and unvarnished in others. There was a wooden mantel over a fireplace, but it was bare and cared for equally badly.
Maybe it would be better to simply forget the whole thing. The bargain he’d struck was at best questionable and at worst ridiculous. He’d be amazed if his contact could actually deliver on the payment they’d agreed upon, and the odd manner of communication was enough to scream “charlatan” about its user.
But if there really was a chance . . .
Too late to back out now, anyway. Scott heard the scrape of the front door—a huge one—in the entrance hall, the next room over. The sound lasted a long time, indicating the door was being opened slowly, like the creaky door that had opened during each episode of Lights Out on the radio in the nineteen forties. He remembered hearing that program back when he was in his own house. At first, it had sounded so real he’d been terrified, but after he’d gotten used to it, he’d realized how completely phony the acting and the dialogue had been. It had become laughable.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, probably the old woman he’d been told about, called from the front hallway. “Is anyone here?”
“There’s no one here, Arlice,” another voice, lower (possibly male) and barely audible, answered. “Let’s go.”
Time to go to work, Scott figured. He wasn’t interested in sitting on the rocker, so he walked to it and moved it, very slowly, back and forth. The resulting sound was ominous enough, and loud enough, to be heard in the next room.
“Hello?”
Scott knew well enough not to answer; even if the old woman could hear him, it would spoil the gag. But he did want to simulate the sound of boots stomping on the floor and chains rattling, so he did as he’d rehearsed and slid two five-pound ankle weights across the floor, lifting them a little, dragging and then dropping them. For the chain sound, he found the bag of coins he’d been left and shook it rhythmically.
It had the desired effect: Scott heard the old woman’s footsteps, slow and labored, heading toward the door of the room in which he was waiting. There were no footsteps from whomever that other voice belonged to, so he assumed only she would enter the room. He readied his props and ran through the motions again in his head.
Grab the drapes to make them billow, then reach for the handle directly above your right thigh, pull it out, wave the fake sword over your head a few times, step on the floor pad to create the noise, and then one swipe with the plastic sword and you’re done, out the window and back home.
He was situated only a few feet from the window, so reaching the drapes when the library door opened was going to be easy. And sure enough, the door did open slowly, and the old woman’s voice, unusually robust and excited, called out.
“Is anyone there?” she asked again. “It’s so dark, I can’t see a thing.” She sounded about as threatening as a butterfly, but a job was a job.
Scott pulled on the drapes and moved them back and forth with his hand. The woman seemed less frightened than fascinated. She called out, “There’s someone there, isn’t there? Can you speak to me?”
Scott reached for the handle of the toy sword, which had been tied to his waist with a sash made out of an old scarf. It felt a little heavier than when he’d practiced before, and the handle was colder. It didn’t feel like plastic, but then the toys these days were so realistic, it could have been anything.
The old woman still didn’t scream. Maybe he didn’t seem fierce enough. So he stepped on the pad, which he knew was wired to a sound system concealed somewhere in the walls. A weird, echo-driven cry of utter despair filled the room.
But the old woman still seemed less frightened than concerned. “Oh, my,” she said. “Is something wrong? Where are you?”
This plan certainly wasn’t going to work; Scott wasn’t going to receive his compensation, and the whole thing had been for naught. But, he thought, there was no point in going this far without giving her the whole show.
He swung the sword over his head three times, marveling at how real it felt and sounded. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn there was a real metal blade on the thing.
“Now stop that,” the old woman scolded. “You could hurt someone.”
Time for the last move, and then Scott could leave. He pointed the tip of the sword, as best as he could tell, in the old woman’s direction.
“Me?” she asked. “What about me?”
Then all Scott had to do was pretend to threaten her with the sword. He’d aim for what should have been her throat, the plastic sword would make a thud when it struck, the old woman would be frightened—or not—and then he could leave. Might as well play it for what it was worth.
He put extra effort into the swing toward the old woman, knowing the rubberized plastic of the blade couldn’t hurt her no matter how hard he swung. And he let loose with a whoop and let the blade fly.
Then, the oddest thing.
The old woman stopped talking, and he heard a body—no doubt hers—hit the floor.
Scott didn’t stop to find out what had gone wrong. He headed straight through the outside wall and flew away as quickly as he could.
One
“Ghosts!” My daughter, Melissa, just turned ten, came running down the stairs from her bedroom. “There are ghosts in the house!” she screamed. She ran through the front room and into the kitchen, where she hit the back door and tore into the enormous backyard.
Behind her, objects—a wax apple, a real banana, an old hat, a lace handkerchief, and a picture frame (hey—that was mine!)—flew around in the space behind her, held up by unseen hands, manipulated in ways that betrayed intelligent thought (except that picture frame, which I wanted back) rather than some wind-based phenomenon.
Eerie laughter (admittedly attributable to hidden speakers and recordings Melissa and I had
made one night) filled the front room of my guesthouse in the New Jersey Shore town of Harbor Haven. Guests, almost all of them senior citizens, stood and watched amazed as the objects flew in a perfect circle, then began to juggle, then flew all the way up the stairs and into Melissa’s bedroom, where the door slammed shut.
I checked my watch. Four o’clock already?
The guests stood transfixed, watching the spectacle. When it was over, they applauded mightily.
Perhaps I should explain.
After I divorced Melissa’s father, to whom we will refer as The Swine, I bought this huge Victorian in the town where I grew up. Upon moving in (and after a series of circumstances that left me with a concussion), I discovered two ghosts who were, as they put it, “trapped” in the house and on its grounds, since they had died here.
It’s a long story (told elsewhere), but two things happened when it was over:
1. A man named Edmund Rance, who represented a company offering “unique” vacation experiences to a senior clientele, offered me steady bookings throughout the Jersey Shore season (roughly April 1 to October 31), but only if ghosts made themselves evident at least twice a day.
2. Paul Harrison, the budding private investigator who had been working a case for the house’s previous owner, Maxie Malone, when they’d both become . . . well, ghosts, asked me to get a private detective’s license, so we could work on the occasional case together.
These two events meshed nicely, since I needed Paul and Maxie’s cooperation to fulfill Rance’s requirements and to make my guesthouse work, and Paul needed me to participate in the odd detective case. Neither Paul nor Maxie is able to leave my property, so Paul requires eyes and ears out “in the world,” as he puts it, and that’s where I come in.