An Uninvited Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  He started to answer, “There’s no reason for you . . .”

  Suddenly the door we were standing in front of opened, and Dolores Santiago walked out. She’d let her hair down, and it fell almost to her waist, gray and thick. And she was wearing what I could only describe as a gown, but not one for a formal affair. She looked, for all intents and purposes, like she’d been summoned to the graveyard by her lover, Count Dracula.

  “Are you talking to one of the spirits?” she intoned.

  What the hell. “Yes, Dolores. I am. But he’s gone now,” I lied. “May I help you with something?”

  “You were talking about Arlice Crosby’s death last night, weren’t you?” she asked, as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “Yes. It’s such an awful thing.”

  Dolores nodded. “Yes. A terrible loss. And so unnecessary.”

  “I agree. It was . . . what?”

  “Unnecessary. She didn’t have to be here last night at all, and then the whole thing probably could have been avoided, I would say.”

  “What whole thing? Are you saying Mrs. Crosby wouldn’t have had a heart attack if she hadn’t come here last night?” The faraway look in Dolores’s eyes was having an effect on me—it was making me regret having eaten breakfast.

  “Arlice didn’t have a heart attack,” Dolores said. “She was murdered by a spirit wearing a red bandana.”

  Ten

  Dolores’s reasoning, of course, bordered on the incomprehensible. But from the babble, I managed to glean the following: Dolores had been monitoring a “level of spectral activity” in the room with the gizmo she’d had in her hand, and it showed the presence of two spirits (because that’s how many I’d told the crowd were there). I’m guessing she picked up this particular box of flashing lights at the dollar store, because it didn’t seem to serve any function other than to fuel Dolores’s fantasies.

  Okay, so there really were ghosts in the room, but call me a cynic, I was still convinced that thing would have found ghosts in any room on the planet.

  But there was a key difference in Dolores’s rant, and it was disquieting: Unlike Tony, or Melissa, or Jim, she did not mention anyone bumping or annoying Arlice to make her spin around just before she’d died. But Dolores alone, in a room crowded with people, had looked above the considerable commotion and noticed Scott’s red bandana floating in midair, and she assumed that the spirit had “decided to take Arlice home.” Of course, it was equally possible that the guests and the TV crew, having grown accustomed to seeing objects fly around here, just hadn’t considered the hovering bandana all that unusual.

  Paul leaned back, not exactly against the wall, but with a good vantage point. He liked to get a good look at “witnesses giving testimony,” as he described it. He believed in the power of the vibe—you could read a transcript of the person’s words and not really have the same experience as listening and watching when she spoke.

  He did not look pleased.

  “Ask her if she saw a weapon,” he suggested, and I passed the question along without mentioning it was from someone else hovering in the room.

  “Oh, the spirits don’t use weapons,” Dolores answered with a tone that indicated I might as well have dropped out of school in the third grade. “I’m sure one icy finger placed on her shoulder the right way would do the trick.”

  Paul rolled his eyes and made a face. “Icy finger,” he said. I know for a fact that Paul’s touch is more like a warm breeze. But we’re just good friends.

  “So you didn’t see a weapon,” I said, in an effort to be completely clear.

  “Didn’t you hear what I just said?” she asked.

  “Just wanted to make sure. You say you saw a red bandana floating in the air?” I said. “Couldn’t it have just been blown there?”

  “In that room? The air was as thick as cheese,” Dolores said. As thick as cheese? “Besides, things blown by the wind don’t just hover still in the air.”

  “So you didn’t see it move before Arlice died. Like it was stabbing . . . tapping an icy finger on her shoulder?”

  “No, I can’t say I saw it, but it stands to reason. I mean, a spirit that close to the woman at the moment she passed? That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Well, thank you for the information, Dolores. I assume you told this to Detective McElone last night?” I walked toward the staircase, hoping Paul would follow so we could discuss this further, but when I looked up, he truly had vanished. The coward.

  “I tried to, but the detective didn’t seem at all interested in the ways of the spirit world.” Dolores pouted.

  I was glad to hear it. But I would need to talk to the detective very soon, if only so she couldn’t later accuse me of withholding information in . . . a homicide?

  I called McElone’s office, but she wasn’t in, so I left a message that I assumed would not be returned anytime soon. McElone seemed, for reasons I couldn’t entirely explain, to consider me a nuisance. Me. Imagine.

  After the morning performance (today’s featured the downstairs lights going on and off, and spooky noises courtesy of an accordion I’d found in the basement), most of the guests headed toward town, and the Bikini Brigade headed for the beach. It was only sixty-two degrees, but those who seek fame and fortune must suffer a few goose bumps along the way, I guess.

  Before I’d gotten a chance to start straightening up, though, my cell phone rang, and the caller ID showed Phyllis Coates’s number at the Chronicle.

  I should have seen that coming.

  “Arlice Crosby died in your house last night, and you didn’t even call me?” she hollered when I picked up. “Didn’t I teach you anything about reporting?”

  “As a matter of fact, no, you didn’t. You taught me about throwing the paper onto the porch and not into the bushes.”

  “Well, I meant to.” Phyllis’s voice was already returning to its normal decibel level. “Still. You didn’t think to call me? After all my help yesterday?”

  “You put out a weekly. There’s still plenty of time to talk about it. But I don’t want my name in the paper. I’m on deep background.” This was not the kind of publicity I wanted for the guesthouse. Keeping the whole ghost angle under wraps was tough enough around this town—there had already been plenty of talk about the “haunted guesthouse,” and now I was going to be known for holding a séance where a prominent citizen of the town dropped dead? This was not turning out to be the kind of opening week I’d hoped for.

  “Fine,” Phyllis said. “We’ll meet in an underground parking garage wearing trench coats. Alison, you’re the owner of a business where someone died. What did you expect—that nobody would notice?”

  “I guess I didn’t think it through. What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me what you saw, first of all,” she said.

  “Not much,” I admitted. “I was running the show, you know, playing up the haunted house angle because people like that, apparently.” Phyllis has never acknowledged the idea of ghosts in my house; at least, she’s never said whether she believes the stories she’s heard or not. I find that extremely reassuring, since Phyllis is not about to judge me as crazy anytime soon. I think it’s her journalism training—Phyllis doesn’t care about the rumors until she can prove the facts.

  “So why does that mean you didn’t see anything?” she asked.

  “Well, I was busy looking at one of the other guests, who was asking a question just when Arlice collapsed. So in the moments before she fell, I wasn’t looking at her.”

  “Interesting.” I could pretty much hear Phyllis licking her pencil and frowning. She’s an old-school newspaperwoman who doesn’t so much interview you as lets you talk and writes down what you say. So she didn’t ask another question right away, and as she might have expected, I filled the silence on my own.

  “She hadn’t said anything about feeling ill beforehand,” I continued. “Arlice and I had a very nice conversation just before we went inside, and she gave me a silver amulet on a chai
n.” My index finger reflexively went to the amulet, still around my neck. I’d decided to keep wearing it as a memorial to Arlice.

  Phyllis jumped on that. “You came into my office yesterday asking about Arlice Crosby as if you’d never met her,” she said.

  “I hadn’t,” I told her.

  “Yet by last night she was giving you what must have been a reasonably expensive gift?”

  I defended myself. “We hit it off, I guess, when I went to visit her. I liked her, and she seemed to enjoy my company. She was very excited about coming to the séance last night, and I guess that was her way of being nice to the hostess.”

  “What else? You’re holding back.” Phyllis is a terrific reader of voices.

  “Look, this is off the record, or I simply won’t say it. Agreed?”

  Her tone indicated she didn’t care for the conditions, but she didn’t have a choice. “Agreed,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “Since last night, a few different people who were there when Arlice fell have given me different stories about someone doing something to her just at that moment. And each of the stories had someone else bothering her just as she collapsed.” I detailed the claims Melissa and Jim and Tony had made (naming no names, of course), and left out Dolores’s story entirely, since I didn’t want to start implicating a ghost while talking to Phyllis.

  “That’s weird,” Phyllis said. I could hear the pencil scratching against her paper.

  “I said it was off the record,” I warned her.

  “I’m taking notes. I’m not going to quote you, and I’m not going to use it unless someone else corroborates, okay? Don’t tell me my business.”

  “It’s just . . . it’s one thing to have a heart attack. I didn’t have any control over Arlice’s health. But if someone I have in my house did something to make her ill like that, that’s another story. That’s something I could have prevented if I’d have seen it coming.”

  “How could you have seen that coming?” Phyllis asked.

  “I don’t know. But it’s under my roof, and that means it’s my responsibility.”

  “Uh-huh.” Again, the silence, but this time I wasn’t playing. After a while, Phyllis asked, “Any other reason to think it was anything but natural causes?”

  “I guarantee you’ve already talked to the police and to the medical examiner’s office,” I said. Phyllis rather famously has a “friend” at the ME’s office, and I don’t like to think about how they worked out their arrangement. “So you tell me—is there any reason to think it was anything but natural causes?”

  “Hey, who’s asking the questions here?”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “You’ve heard something, haven’t you?” I asked.

  “I haven’t heard back from Detective McElone yet,” she admitted, “but I did talk to my friend, and he says Arlice didn’t die of a heart attack.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “No. She died after falling into a diabetic coma. Her insulin level was way too high.”

  “Well, how does that happen? Did she inject too much before she came over?” I hadn’t seen anything like that happening, and quite frankly, had forgotten until now that Arlice was diabetic.

  “No, you don’t understand. The amount of insulin in her system, to kill her that fast, would have had to have been about fifty times the normal dosage.” Phyllis let me have a moment for that to sink in.

  “So Arlice overdosed? Accidentally?”

  “Standing there in a room with a group of people waiting for ghosts? No, Alison. Think again. All the stories about someone bumping into Arlice and causing her to turn around. As if something stung. As if she were getting a shot.”

  “Somebody killed her.”

  Eleven

  Detective McElone called back a half hour later and very curtly requested (or more specifically, ordered) my presence in her office immediately. And she also made a point of telling me to “bring that TV guy with you.”

  I found Trent in the kitchen, trying to talk to his breakout star, H-Bomb, who appeared to be having some sort of meltdown, pulling at her hair and actually stamping her foot when I arrived.

  “I won’t do it!” she screamed at the harried-looking producer (sorry, executive producer), her black roots screaming for attention while the blonde hair hanging down in her face created a sort of bead-curtain effect in front of her eyes. “There’s no way you can make me!”

  “Be reasonable,” Trent attempted, as if that phrase had ever resulted in reasonable behavior from anyone to whom it was spoken. “We’re in our second day of shooting, and we’re already behind schedule. All I’m suggesting is . . .”

  “I know what you’re suggesting,” H-Bomb shot back. “You’re suggesting I let that skank Tiffney overshadow me on this show, and I’m not going to let you do it. That’s my spot, and I’m doing it!”

  With that, she turned on her heel and walked out through the back door to her trailer, giving Trent a poisonous look.

  “Hard day at the office?” I asked.

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said smiling, but the smile held no joy. “What can I do for you?”

  I informed him of Detective McElone’s summoning of the two of us to her office, and Trent wiped his brow, although I didn’t see any sweat there. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll meet you outside,” he said. “I have to talk to Ed.” And without waiting for a response, he walked out to the den, where I heard him calling for the director.

  Having been effectively dismissed, I went out the back door and into the Volvo, which had had a rough winter and was now happy the warm weather was back. It started up fairly easily, and I sat and listened to a Carole King CD while I waited for Trent.

  He showed up ten—not five—minutes later, got into my car and started rubbing his temples with his thumb and middle finger. Then he composed himself and put on his professional smile as I drove down the driveway.

  “You like the oldies, huh?” he said, pointing to the CD player as if I didn’t know where the music had been coming from.

  “I like women who have a point of view,” I said. “Too many of the ones singing now have a point of view that begins and ends with their wardrobe.”

  “You don’t think women can be stylish and intelligent?” Trent asked.

  “Depends. Which one is H-Bomb?”

  “Touché.”

  Carole was especially insistent that I get up every morning with a smile on my face and show the world all the love in my heart, so I turned the music off. “What was she complaining about before?” I asked.

  He chuckled, again with more annoyance than amusement. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” He didn’t wait for me to protest. “She’s concerned because she doesn’t have to work on the boardwalk at the ring toss game tonight.”

  I was driving, so doing a double take seemed too reckless to consider. “How’s that?” I asked instead.

  “Exactly. See, we set the cast up with jobs on the boardwalk, the idea being that we get to see how they respond to responsibility and a structured schedule.”

  “Which they had when they were in high school, like, fifteen minutes ago.”

  Trent looked truly amused this time. “You’d be surprised. There’s not one of them under the age of twenty-four. H-Bomb is almost thirty.”

  “You’re kidding. And their idea of a job is working a fixed water-gun race at the boardwalk in Wildwood?”

  “No, their idea of a job is being a great big TV star, which is why each of them signed on for the show. They think if they act outrageous enough, it’ll be their ticket to acting, or modeling, or designing their own fragrance, or something like that.”

  We were about halfway to police headquarters, and I was in no rush to see McElone’s scowling face, so I was observing the local speed laws and keeping the Volvo under twenty-five miles per hour, which probably was a source of relief for my engine. “And if they act like complete and total jerks on national television
, that’s going to get them a career?” I asked.

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “So why is Helen so upset about not working the game tonight?” That part didn’t seem to fit in. Wouldn’t she want to avoid work and concentrate on wearing as little as possible in front of the boys?

  “Ooh, careful—don’t let her ever hear you call her anything but H-Bomb,” Trent warned. “If you think that little tiff we had was something . . . Anyway. It’s not that she wanted so badly to be working the game tonight. It’s that I changed the schedule and gave her spot to Tiffney. H-Bomb thinks that means I’m favoring Tiff over her and that I’m going to give Tiff the better segments to shoot, and she’ll end up being shoved to the side.”

  “So, no H-Bomb fragrance.”

  “Exactly. Can’t have that.” Trent closed his eyes and leaned back.

  “So why do you put up with her? Why not tell her to take a walk?”

  He didn’t open his eyes to answer. “She tested the highest in last season’s focus groups. Everybody hated her. She’s my star.”

  “The one everybody hated is your star?”

  “Welcome to my world,” Trent said.

  “So why don’t you quit?”

  He sat up and opened his eyes wide. “What? And give up show business?”

  By the time we got to the police station, I’d heard as much about “reality” television as I’d ever want to. More, actually, since I didn’t want to know anything about it. But Trent no longer seemed like a shallow, uncaring slick-talker. He actually showed signs of intelligence and wit. I’d have to be very careful with him or I might find myself becoming attracted to a TV producer who was going to be here for all of three weeks. Not a great idea for a single mom. I’d gone out on exactly three dates since divorcing The Swine. I did not want to find myself mooning over a visiting TV producer who probably had no romantic interest in me anyway.

  McElone looked impatient even as we arrived and treated us as though we were late for some very formal appointment she’d confirmed with us weeks before. The truth of the matter was that it had taken us almost twenty minutes to show up in her office.