By now, the crowd was staring at what was to them empty space. But they stopped asking for an explanation, apparently convinced there was someone there, even if they were unable to see anyone.
The room seemed to be closing in around Dolores and me. “This is silly,” she said, trying to regain her original demeanor. “You’re just trying to find a killer to make yourself feel better. I understand, dear. But you shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened to poor Arlice.”
“I don’t,” I said. “Not anymore. When it first happened, I thought she’d still be alive if I’d only kept my mouth shut about our séance that night. But you were going to kill her no matter what, weren’t you?”
McElone, still in the kitchen doorway to avoid any spookiness she couldn’t see, took a step inside, hand on her gun, but she didn’t make any effort to stop me. If I turned out to be wrong, I guessed, she could say she’d had nothing to do with it. If I was right, McElone could make an arrest and come off looking heroic. She’s not a stupid cop.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dolores said. “I barely even knew Arlice Crosby.”
“I’m thinking you knew her better than you’ll admit,” I countered. “I think you knew her very well indeed.”
“Does anybody know what the migraine she’s talking about?” Mistah Motion wanted to know. It was probably past time for him to be in the tanning booth. Besides, he hadn’t done an ab crunch in close to half an hour, and the blood tended to pool in his midsection when that was the case.
“Arlice Crosby had a sister who stood to inherit a very generous sum when she died,” I said. “But no matter how much searching was done, nobody could find her. Isn’t that right, Mr. Donovan?”
Donovan, who’d been eyeing McElone while inching toward the front door, stopped in his tracks and assumed the look of a raccoon caught in an SUV’s headlights—terrified and annoyed at the same time.
“We haven’t found Jane Smith, no,” he answered.
Linda Jane’s eyes widened, and she shook her head, but it didn’t look like she was denying anything—she was just startled to hear two-thirds of her name involved in the case.
“I stumbled across a tombstone in the High Valley Cemetery marked for Jane Smith,” I said, “but I suppose that’s a very common name. I think maybe I was wrong, and Jane Smith is right there with her ghost-finder stick on the table.”
But Scott broke in. “No, you were right, Alison,” it said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you before. Jane Smith did die a few years ago, but she’s here right now.” Scott McFarlane, now almost as visible as Paul and Maxie, pointed at Dolores, or in her general direction. I could see him, but Scott still couldn’t see me, or anyone else.
“She’s a ghost.” I said. “She’s not on the TV monitors.”
He nodded. “I could tell when she walked by me before,” he said. “I didn’t know who it was at the time, but I could feel her soul, the way I feel when I meet other people like me. And she’s got a cold one.” He looked positively unnerved.
I turned toward Dolores. “That explains a lot,” I said. Not a living soul, Donovan had said when I asked who he’d been working with.
“You’re not serious,” Linda Jane said. “There’s someone there?”
“Oh, it’s insane,” Dolores protested. “She’s acting on pure speculation.”
But she didn’t deny it.
“You mean you never saw her?” I asked Linda Jane.
“She’s been rooming with you all week.”
Linda Jane paled and tried to speak but came up short. She eventually shook her head; no, she had never seen Dolores Santiago.
“But you saw her, Detective,” I said to McElone. “She said she talked to you after Arlice died. Dolores Santiago.”
McElone’s face flattened out, and she shook her head. “I don’t know any Dolores Santiago,” she said. “I saw her name on the tour list, but everyone I asked said she never showed up.”
What?
My mind reeled. If McElone had never heard of Dolores, and everyone was asking whom I was talking to . . . was it possible?
“Paul,” I asked quietly. “Do they not see her?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “Think back. Has she ever interacted with anyone who doesn’t see us?”
I didn’t have time to think, but he was probably right—Dolores has been visible only to me, the ghosts, my mother and Melissa. But wait—what about . . .
“Mr. Donovan,” I said loud enough for it to be audible throughout the room, “have you ever seen your client?”
“Oh, don’t be absurd,” Dolores tried, but her voice was shaking. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Answer the question, Donovan,” McElone insisted.
“We communicated strictly through e-mail,” the lawyer said.
Bernice was snoring on the couch, too, but she’d probably wake up and comment on the way the lumpy cushion made her neck ache.
The snoring made me remember something. “So that sleepwalking bit was bogus, wasn’t it?” I asked Dolores. “Were you just trying to get the amulet?”
“It was mine!” she hissed. “It was from my family. When that old witch died, I should have gotten it.” The fact that she was already dead seemed somehow immaterial to Dolores.
“I don’t understand,” I said to her. If I could get her to admit to the crime through questioning her methods, it might be enough. “Why did you want Arlice dead so badly?”
Dolores’s expression hardened, and her nostrils seemed to flare. “She was so superior, with her money and her noble causes,” she hissed. “She couldn’t be bothered with her relations anymore after she married him.”
“What’s she saying?” Trent demanded. “We can’t hear or see anything there.”
“I’ll tell you later,” I answered.
I looked at McElone, who was fingering the handcuffs on her belt. But she had proven many times to be something of a skeptic, and I could only imagine she was wondering if any of this was real.
“So you didn’t approve of Jermaine Crosby?” I asked Dolores, just to keep her talking. “Is that why you and Arlice hadn’t spoken in such a long time?”
“After she married him, I never spoke to her again,” Dolores answered. Her body seemed just a little less substantial, as if the stress of the moment was distracting her from staying as solid as she’d been up to now.
“Are you getting this?” Trent asked Ed the director. Ed nodded.
“Half of it, anyway,” he said.
“Will we be able to use it?” Trent followed up. Ed shrugged.
Trent moved over from his perch on the windowsill where he had been watching his cast to speak directly to the area around which he’d seen me addressing Dolores (without getting himself into camera range, of course). “You’re saying you killed your sister after you were already dead? You injected her with insulin? How did you do that? Where did you get it?”
“Don’t push me, sonny,” she replied. “I’m not about to confess just to boost your ratings.” Trent looked confused, and he actually walked right past Dolores and through four more ghosts.
“Is there anybody there?” he asked.
“I know how you got the insulin,” I said to Dolores.
“There was enough in the house to do the job, once you heard Arlice was here. But where did you get all the extra vials we found later, that you left out as clues?”
Paul raised his index finger. “There’s a hospital not three miles from here,” he said. “And their security procedures don’t take into account people who can’t be seen and can move through walls.”
“Enough!” Dolores said. “You have nothing that proves I did any of what you’re saying! You’ve failed completely!”
I needed to regain control of the situation. “But you can’t be worried about the legal system at this point,” I said to Dolores, trying to avoid McElone’s eyes. “They can’t do anything to you. Why didn’t you just kil
l Arlice when you had the chance? Why send poor Scott after her? Did you think he’d scare her to death?”
“Who the migraine is Scott?” Rock Starr wanted to know. Even H-Bomb didn’t look at him.
Dolores shook her head sadly. “That was the plan,” she said. “A blind ghost—can you imagine the luck? I could tell him anything. Never spoke to him, so he couldn’t identify my voice. Couldn’t see me come and go to leave messages. Talked via a child’s toy. Told him I could get him to the next level of existence when the fact was, I was using him to get there myself.”
Scott’s eyebrows merged in the middle of his forehead.
“What does that mean?” I asked Dolores, trying desperately to motion McElone toward us, but she wouldn’t budge. “You were trying to ascend to some other type of afterlife?”
“Exactly. I knew I’d never get there if I killed my own sister, but if someone else did it, I figured I would be freed from the burden of her, the weight of her. I could leave this place and move on. But he just couldn’t do it himself. Swung the sword right over her head, the fool. I was livid when Donovan reported back to me.”
McElone walked over to Donovan, fingering her handcuffs. The attorney looked positively nauseated.
Scott’s mouth tightened. He put out a hand to balance himself, or to get a read on what was near him. And he moved gracefully, for a blind man who didn’t know his surroundings well, toward Dolores.
“Who’s the fool, lady?” he growled. “I did something I shouldn’t have done, but I did no harm. You murdered your own sister, so you’re never moving on!”
“It’s worth it,” Dolores told him with defiance in her eyes.
“I don’t get it,” I said, trying to defuse the situation.
“You couldn’t inherit anything from Arlice. Why were you in the will if you were dead?”
“That witch never knew I’d died,” Dolores answered.
“Always busy flitting around, giving to charity, helping the op-er-a, showing off her money. We hadn’t heard from her in thirty years. She didn’t take the time to visit our parents’ graves. She didn’t know I was lying there next to them because she never bothered to find out, and there wasn’t anyone to tell her.”
I looked at Donovan. “There was her lawyer,” I reminded Dolores.
Donovan moved very slowly toward the door, but McElone was already on her way there. “Don’t move, Mr. Donovan,” she called out from across the room. Swell. She was going to protect us from the lawyer and not from the killer.
Donovan froze.
“That’s right,” Dolores laughed. “Stop him. He was the one who was going to make money from Arlice’s estate. Looking for a sister who wasn’t alive. He knew it; I’d contacted him. Told him about the plan at that hotel. He agreed to take her to see pirate boy here.” She gestured toward Scott, who bit his bottom lip in anger. “E-mailed me after you found the evidence, and then he set you up with the cops. That was awfully nice of you, Alison, truly, making yourself seem so suspicious.”
I growled a little. “But that wouldn’t make money for you, Donovan. What was your cut?”
“He would ‘spend’ all sorts of money on an investigation, and bill it to the estate,” Dolores answered for him. “There were millions in it for him, weren’t there, Tommy?”
“It was all legal!” Donovan tried to shout as McElone loomed up behind him. “I didn’t do anything outside estate law. A woman e-mails me and says she’s Arlice Crosby’s dead sister. I’m supposed to believe that?”
“Oh, you believed it well enough,” Dolores said. She seemed to be enjoying herself now.
“Is there somebody there, or not?” H-Bomb demanded, probably just to get the attention of the cameraman assigned to her, whose lens had strayed toward me.
“What is she saying, Alison?” Linda Jane asked me.
I didn’t answer. “Where’d you get the insulin, Dolores?” I asked the ghost.
“I was rooming with the nurse, thanks to you,” she answered. “No reason to let her know I was there, so I could watch and listen. I knew there was another diabetic in the house. I could have planned ahead if I’d known Arlice was coming to the séance. I was just hoping to track her down when I came for the tour. I’d heard there were ghosts here, and maybe there was one who was more . . . efficient than pirate boy here. But this was even better—Arlice, right in the room with me, and not even realizing it after all those years! But there was no time—I had to get it fast. So I went to my room, where the nurse had a stock of insulin and a small rubber plunger.”
“An aspirator,” I clarified, for some reason.
“Yes, there was one missing from my kit,” Linda Jane said. “How did you know?”
“Then I went into the other room and took some insulin from the woman in the bed. She didn’t seem to notice,” Dolores said. Her smile was getting more disturbing by the second.
“Mrs. Jones was the other diabetic,” I thought aloud.
“How did you know that?” Linda Jane asked.
“Dolores just told me.” I looked back toward the ghost. “How’d you get to be Dolores, anyway?”
She waved a hand. “Who’d want to be Jane Smith when you could be”—she pulled herself to full height and raised her head to an aristocratic pose—“Dolores Santiago?”
I decided not to pass that on to Linda Jane Smith. “And what about—” I started to ask.
“Enough!” Dolores shouted. “I don’t have to answer your questions!”
“Lieutenant McElone,” I called. “We have a confessed murderer here. Wouldn’t you like to arrest her?”
“You got any suggestions of how?” McElone answered. “I can’t cuff air.”
“You see?” Dolores gloated. “I’m beyond all reproach. I gave that witch what she deserved, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” She actually laughed, just like in the movies, but a little scarier.
“Maybe I can’t,” I told her. “But you killed someone. You killed someone I liked. I’m not the kind of person who stands by and lets that happen.” I looked at Melissa. She was watching me closely, like she always does when there’s a problem. She talks a good game, but at ten, she’s still watching her mom to figure out how to act.
“She got justice. And like I said, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I glanced at Paul, then Maxie. “And like I said, maybe I’m not able to do something, but I know people who can.” I nodded at Paul, and he reciprocated. He gestured toward Maxie.
And they started closing in on Dolores.
Her expression of triumph and defiance quickly evaporated as the two house ghosts reached for her. And when she saw the biker guy following Maxie, and a few of the other spirits joining in, she gasped.
Then she vanished.
“Damn!” Maxie yelled. “I was all set to break her nose.”
“What just happened?” McElone called. She hadn’t put handcuffs on Donovan, but was holding his arm, and it looked like she was holding it tightly.
“She got away,” I explained. “What should I do?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Paul was looking contemplative, and he closed his eyes. “I don’t think she’s gone far,” he said in an unusual, dreamy voice. He seemed to be taking the room’s spectral temperature.
“Maybe she’s gone for good,” Mom attempted.
“Will someone please tell me what happened?” Jim shouted from the other side of the room. “I’m stone cold sober, and it’s scaring me!”
But of all the people in the room, the least likely one said the most crucial thing. “How come that black thing is floating around in the air?” H-Bomb asked.
Sure enough, Dolores’s black “ghost finder,” the revamped surge suppressor, was still suspended by itself, as if held up by invisible wires. Trent gestured to Ed, who said something into his headset, and one of the camera operators spun to capture it.
The black box, red lights still flashing randomly, held its position f
or a moment, just long enough for Paul, who was about ten feet from it, to turn and head in its direction. Then it moved.
The back-end panel opened, and a small, very effective-looking knife appeared from within. A hideous disembodied cackle of laughter began and started to grow louder. Then the box dropped to the floor, and the knife stayed in the air and started to move very quickly.
Toward me.
Melissa gasped behind me. The scene seemed to go into slow motion. But it didn’t give me more time to react, and before I could do anything, I realized the knife was going to make it to my chest. I couldn’t move fast enough to stop it.
But somehow, Scott did. I don’t know how he got there, but he stood in front of me faster than I could blink. And he raised his arm, approximating from sound or movement where Dolores might be, and he swung with all he had. This time, his aim was accurate.
There was a crack in the air. The knife fell to the floor. I recalled, vaguely, how to breathe.
“Did I get her?” Scott asked. “I hit something.”
“I think you did,” I answered. “You saved my life.”
I almost jumped when I felt something encircling my waist, but that turned out to be Melissa’s arms, and I never have a problem with a hug from my daughter. She wasn’t crying, but she was working very hard at not crying, I could tell.
“Look,” Maxie said. She pointed at the floor.
Dolores, motionless, had reappeared on the floor of the den, and was starting to moan. She moved a little, just as she regained what passed for consciousness, and her hand went to her jaw. She looked up and saw a gang of at least twenty ghosts standing around her.
Her first impulse was to reach for the knife, but a high-heeled, black-booted foot was already on the blade. “I don’t think so,” Maxie said.
Biker guy reached down and pulled Dolores to her feet. He held her blouse by the back of the neck. “What can we do with her?” he asked.
Before this had a chance to get ugly, I called out again. “Lieutenant!”
McElone looked over. No doubt she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “Now what?” she asked.
An Uninvited Ghost Page 25
