An Uninvited Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  “Who’s right about what?” I thought I was about to get a quotation from the wit and wisdom of Amelia Bedelia.

  “Lieutenant McElone. She’s right about you looking for the wrong thing.”

  Well, that was a stumper. “What do you mean? What should I be looking for?”

  Melissa picked up her little messenger bag and slung it over her shoulder as we headed for the door. “If I were you, I’d be looking for a bunch of little plastic letters with magnets,” she said.

  “Little plastic letters?” That struck a chord, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of why.

  We walked to the Volvo and got in. Liss looked at me. “Don’t you remember? Scott said that whoever wanted him to scare Mrs. Crosby talked to him with little plastic letters from a kid’s set, and that they stuck to a board with magnets, and there kept being more and more. So, whoever has the letters is the person who wanted her to be scared, and probably wanted her to be dead.”

  I started the car up. “You know, you’ve got something there. But why would the person”—I didn’t want to use the word murderer with my ten-year-old; call me old-fashioned—“still have the letters? Why not get rid of them?”

  “They weren’t expecting Mrs. Crosby to come to our house the night she died—it was a surprise,” Melissa reminded me. “Besides, they’re just toy letters. They’re not evidence or anything. The police don’t know about them. And the person is probably pretty sure you don’t know about them either. But if you find them, you’ll know who to be watching.”

  I stole a glance at my daughter, just to make sure she was the same girl I’d had to tuck into bed the night she’d first seen All Dogs Go to Heaven because “it was so sad.” Well, they say kids grow up fast these days. “Are you sure they didn’t leave the letters at the house Scott was staying in?” I asked.

  “No. Scott said the letters were gone the day after ‘the trick,’ remember?”

  I nodded. “So, wherever the letters are, if they’re still around, that’s where the person behind the first attack brought them.”

  “That’s right,” Melissa said, proud of her pupil. “Find the letters, and you find the killer.”

  “I didn’t even think you were listening to the conversation I was having with the detective,” I said. “You were reading a book.”

  “I was multitasking,” Melissa answered.

  “You’re so smart.”

  “You sound like Grandma.”

  It only took a minute to stop at the High Valley Cemetery, since it was between the Dunkin’ Donuts and the house. And I told Melissa to stay in the car, so she got out and walked with me.

  It wasn’t a large graveyard, but it was full of the history of Harbor Haven. The elite of the town, dating back to the eighteen hundreds, were still in residence here.

  So, in a very new grave, was Arlice Crosby.

  “Why do you want to see her grave?” Melissa asked.

  “It’s a way of showing respect,” I told her. I didn’t tell her I still felt a little responsible for what had happened to Arlice. Okay, more than a little. “The funeral was yesterday, and all the important people in the town came. I didn’t, because I didn’t think I’d fit in. So I’m coming now. It’s the way we remember someone we liked who isn’t here anymore.”

  We found the Crosby family plot, with the largest stone, a tiny version of the Washington Monument, devoted to Jeremiah Crosby, who had died seventy-eight years before I was born. Next to him was his wife Henrietta, who had outlived her husband by only a year. Various children and grandchildren were included in the plot.

  The freshly dug one, just to the right of the one with a small, dignified stone reading, “Jermaine Crosby, 1929–1980,” was for Arlice. I stood there for a moment, mentally apologized to her for what had happened and asked her to drop by sometime and let us know who had killed her. Then I remembered a Jewish tradition of putting a stone on the gravestone to show that someone had been by, and did so. I knew Arlice wasn’t Jewish, but I’d forgotten to bring flowers.

  Melissa looked thoughtful throughout, but didn’t say anything. I’m sure she had at least thirty questions, but she kept them to herself.

  Finally, I heaved out a long breath, took her hand, and said, “Let’s go.” And we turned to walk back out to the Volvo.

  As I walked toward the gate, though, I noticed a large stone in a plot about a hundred yards from Arlice’s that bore the name “SMITH.” Eight people were interred there, with dates ranging from the late eighteen hundreds to only three years earlier.

  That grave, the most recent one, had a small, simple headstone, too. And it was for a woman of sixty-one years.

  Her name was Jane.

  Twenty-five

  “Jane Smith is a very common name,” Paul said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be Arlice Crosby’s sister.”

  I couldn’t talk to him at the moment, but I nodded, acknowledging that the coincidence was pretty, you know, coincidental. But I fixed my gaze on him and very quietly dared him to dispel my suspicion.

  “You want the same color?” Bobby asked.

  “I want what’s cheapest,” I told him.

  Bobby was a friend of Tony’s who ostensibly knew something about fixing pool tables. Tony had brought him over to give me an estimate on mine.

  “Do you think it’s doable?” I asked him, hoping that Paul, currently in a sitting position in midair, would pick up on the question.

  “They’re all doable,” Bobby said. He had a gut big enough to have its own nickname, but he seemed like a nice man. Tony didn’t deal with jerks when he could help it. “The question is whether it’s doable at a price that makes it worth doing, and that I don’t know yet.” He started punching keys on a BlackBerry he pulled off a holster on his belt, presumably to check on the cost of materials.

  “There are too many threads to this case,” Paul said. “I just don’t know which way to go with it. It’s almost like we have too many clues. The amulet Arlice gave you. The insulin vials. The plastic magnet spelling letters. Now McElone considers Tiffney a legitimate suspect just because she seems to have fled or vanished right after Arlice died, but I can’t even begin to think of a motive she’d have. Tiffney doesn’t get any money from Arlice’s estate. And I don’t know whether we should be looking for Arlice’s missing sister, or if that sister is already dead.”

  “It’s going to come to two-eighty for the felt itself, which will come custom cut to fit perfectly,” Bobby said after his BlackBerry told him the price.

  “It’s too much,” I said to Paul. Bobby scratched his head.

  “I can get the price down a little bit, but we haven’t even discussed labor yet,” he said.

  “I agree,” Paul told me. “It’s almost like someone is planting clues, trying to lead us in a specific direction. It’s making me rethink the theory in which Linda Jane is the only suspect.”

  “What are our options?” I asked both men.

  Bobby, since he didn’t know anyone else was in the room besides Tony, answered first. “Well, I can get a slightly lower-quality felt for about two hundred, but I still have to charge you for my time and labor. Now since you’re a friend of Tony’s, you get the family discount, so all in all, let’s say three hundred for the whole job.”

  I pretended to think it over in order to give Paul time to answer. The truth was, three hundred dollars was considerably less than I had expected to pay to fix the pool table, and I was going to charge Jim and Warren half of that because they had, in fact, caused the damage.

  “There’s the possibility that Jim or Warren had some motive to want Arlice dead we haven’t considered yet,” Paul said, picking up his cue (not the pool kind, the other kind). “There’s also the possibility that Dolores has some strange religious belief that might have led her to do Arlice in. Or, Tiffney could simply be a wild psychopath who’s interested in killing simply as an art form and will do random violence to anyone she decides is worthy of it.”

  �
�Okay, I’ll take it down to two-fifty,” Bobby said, I guessed because he thought my pause was a sign of reluctance. “But honestly, I’m not making a dime on the project.”

  “Alison,” Tony said, “it’s a fair price. It’s better than a fair price.” I rolled my eyes toward Paul’s location so that Bobby couldn’t see and Tony could. “Oh,” Tony said, nodding. He turned toward Bobby. “Just give her a minute.”

  Bobby, looking positively incredulous that anyone would need to take this long to consider such a great deal, looked at Tony, then shrugged and took a beer out of a cooler I kept nearby. He sat down and opened it.

  “This is not exactly what I wanted to hear,” I told Paul as quietly as possible. I took out my cell phone and pretended to dial a number, and Paul swooped down a little to be closer to me, so he could hear the whisper. “Should I send Melissa to Wendy’s after school?”

  “I don’t think so,” he answered. “I seriously doubt any of the Down the Shore cast are bright enough to plan this kind of crime. I think the other possibilities are much more plausible, which means you and Melissa aren’t in any danger at the moment. But we have to focus on which avenue to pursue. And the fact is, Lieutenant McElone is probably investigating all of them except one.”

  “The spelling letters the killer used to communicate with Scott,” I guessed.

  “That’s right. There’s no way she could know about those,” Paul answered. “I’ll see if I can get Scott back here to talk about it.”

  “I left him watching over Tom Donovan,” I told him. “He’s probably still there.”

  From the other side of the room, I heard Bobby ask in a stage whisper, “Does she know her cell phone isn’t turned on?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Tony answered.

  “I’ll check,” Paul said. “But I don’t know how much he’ll be able to tell you. As far as he knows, the letters simply vanished the day after Arlice Crosby died.”

  “I know. But he never really knew how the person got in and left him messages. He never really knew why the messages started to begin with. He never really knew what they were promising. No disrespect to Scott, but I think this situation requires a pair of eyes that are still functioning.”

  “So what can he tell you?” Paul asked, but his smile indicated he already knew the answer to the question.

  “How to get to the house he’s been staying in,” I said.

  Bobby stood up and put the empty beer bottle into one of the bins I have for recycling in every common room. “I don’t want to rush you, Alison, but . . .” he said.

  “I’ll take it,” I told him. “When can you start?”

  Scott McFarlane, being a ghost, could zip along at a pretty decent clip, not having to worry about things like physical laws and where his feet were touching. And he knew how to get back to the house in which he’d been staying pretty much from anywhere on earth, once he could find his bearings. So we worked out a system by which he would wear the red bandana so I could track him, and I would follow behind in the Volvo. The only thing I reminded Scott of before we left was that the town’s speed limit on non-highways was twenty-five miles per hour, and he should curtail himself if he didn’t hear the Volvo behind him.

  I also mentioned that going through trees, buildings or other structures not actually on a road might be a no-no. He had to stick to roads and sidewalks.

  It didn’t take long to find his home in Avon after only a couple of Scott’s excursions into wooded areas when I’d had to honk my horn and warn him back. He stopped in front of a small cottage, one of the older vacation homes that had probably never been winterized. I couldn’t tell if he was pointing, but he was certainly trying to get me to notice. Without being able to see more than a bandana, it was difficult to gauge his mood. So why did I think he was showing off his home proudly? Was it something I’d projected onto myself, since I was constantly trying to get people to notice the little touches I’d made to my house?

  “He’s pointing and nodding his head with a smile. I think he’s really proud of the place, and wants you to notice,” Mom said.

  Oh, did I forget to mention that my mother came along? Well, neither Paul nor Maxie could leave the guesthouse grounds, and I wasn’t bringing Melissa on any more investigation jobs (she was back at the house, with Tony as the official sitter of record), so Mom got the nod. Sometimes it’s difficult when only certain people you know can see ghosts, especially when one of them isn’t you.

  “Okay, let’s go see,” I said.

  The house was small and had obviously been abandoned some years before, or perhaps had been bought up in some land development plan that never came to fruition. The front lawn was wildly overgrown, the two steps up to the porch were missing and the windows showed signs of having been boarded up at some point, but were now just broken.

  “Do you think he knows what it looks like now?” I asked Mom.

  “Of course not. I don’t think he knows what anything looks like anymore. It’s been more than eighty years since he saw anything. Be pleasant, Alison. Smile.”

  We got out of the car and walked up the walk, stepping over the occasional branch or root and avoiding cracked pavement. “It’s lovely,” I said to Scott. “It’s a very cozy little home.”

  The bandana bobbed for a while, and Scott said, “I’m very happy you’re impressed. Please come inside.” We graciously accepted, seeing as how that was the point of the whole visit to begin with. I helped Mom up onto the porch, after testing it for my weight, and then pushed open the front door, which didn’t require a lot of persuasion to open.

  The inside wasn’t a vast improvement on the outside, I’m sorry to report. It’s not that the house was a shambles; it was just empty and obviously long neglected. It was dusty, and there was water damage from the broken windows and the undoubtedly ragged roof. There was only the living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen on the first floor, and they were each, in a similar way, sad.

  “It’s very nice, Scott,” I told him. “Now, where did you find the messages?”

  The bandana started moving very rapidly through the front hall (really part of the living room where the staircase landed) into the center of the living room. Mom and I followed, and I tried very hard not to think about any stray wildlife that might have made the place their home in the years since people stopped living here and Scott started calling the place his own.

  There was a closet off the living room, and the bandana stopped in front of it. “I initially found the letters and some other toys for little kids in the closet,” he reported. Scott must have opened the closet, because the door came swinging open, and inside there were, as reported, a few old toys. There was a stick horse that looked like Aristotle had ridden it, a wooden jigsaw puzzle (with eight pieces, six of which were still there) of George Washington—which brought up unpleasant memories of another search I’d had to do a few months before—and a Chutes and Ladders game that had probably been played seventeen thousand times, judging by the look of the box.

  There were no letters, either plastic or wooden. “The letters vanished right after the scene at the hotel,” Scott told us.

  “Where did the messages appear when the letters were here? Where did he find them?” I asked.

  “Don’t talk about Scott like he’s not here,” Mom scolded. She turned toward the bandana. “She’s not really trying to be rude.”

  “No problem; I didn’t take any offense,” the bandana said.

  “Oh, good. Now Scott, where—” But the bandana was already on the move. In a back corner of the room, near the one completely intact window, was a small easel made of molded plastic. On it was a chalkboard with a shelf at the bottom that was meant to hold chalk and erasers.

  “I just bumped into this one day, and it hadn’t been there the day before. The messages would appear on this chalkboard, sometimes as often as four times a week, sometimes as little as once a week,” Scott said. “At the beginning they were very simple sentences, and then the person
who wrote them must have brought more letters, because the messages got more elaborate. The letters had magnets on the back that would stick to the chalkboard, and I could read them with my hands, and then answer in the same way.”

  “Did you ever stay all night and listen for the messenger?” I asked.

  “I did, and even though I didn’t hear anything at all, there was a new message in the morning. I asked how it was being done, but never got a response.”

  “Well, since they were essentially setting up you and Arlice, it makes sense that you wouldn’t get an answer,” I told Scott. “Tell me, after the letters vanished, did you look through the house for them?”

  “I looked all around in this room and the bedroom,” he answered. “There’s not much in the kitchen anymore. Someone took out most of the cabinets before I got here. I couldn’t find them anywhere.”

  “What about upstairs?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been upstairs,” Scott responded.

  Mom and I looked at each other a moment. I’m afraid we might have betrayed a little too much, but Scott didn’t say anything. He couldn’t see the look, after all, but he could certainly hear the silence.

  “How long have you been here?” Mom asked him.

  “About sixteen years.”

  “And you’ve never been upstairs?”

  The bandana bobbed. “I only need one bedroom. Sometimes, not even that many.”

  “Did you tell whoever was sending you the messages that you never went upstairs?” I asked.

  Scott took a long time to respond. “Now that you bring it up, I think I did mention that once.”

  I was getting that feeling in my stomach again, the one I’d had just before I opened Tiffney’s closet in the trailer. “Okay,” I said. “I guess we have to go upstairs.”

  “Why?” Scott asked.

  Mom and I crept up the stairs, Mom because her knees aren’t what they used to be, and me because my stomach wasn’t ever really strong. Scott levitated up directly through the ceiling, but of course he had no idea where to look, and couldn’t see where he was looking. We heard things being knocked over as we ascended, which made me hurry just a little bit more.