“I was just about to get to that,” I said. “Melissa and I—”
There was a knock on the back door, and through the glass I could see a teenager holding two pizza boxes. I grabbed my wallet out of my tote bag, hanging on the back of my chair, and opened the door.
“Harbor Pizza,” the kid said. No kidding. I thought he was delivering very flat bowling balls in white boxes. “You the garlic or the pepperoni?”
“Garlic,” I said. “And by the way, it doesn’t do anything to ward off vampires.” I looked at Paul. “Does it?” He shrugged.
The kid handed me our pizza and I gave him enough money to cover the food, the tip and a little extra for putting up with that joke. Then I came back inside as he walked away with the second box.
“What about my present?” Maxie shouted.
“Oh, just a second,” I said, and then halfway from the back door to the table I stopped. “Just a . . .”
“What’s the matter?” My mother.
“Why’d he bring two pizzas?” I asked. “We only ordered one. Why’d he bring two?”
“He had a garlic and a pepperoni, and he didn’t know which one was ours,” Melissa said. “Can we have some now? I’m hungry.”
“He shouldn’t have had two,” I insisted. “Unless . . .” I put the pizza down on the table, and Melissa immediately dove on it before someone could tell her not to. I walked back to the door and looked.
The pizza delivery boy’s car was still there.
“Of course,” I said.
“Of course what?” Mom asked.
“Stay here,” I told her, opening the door. “Paul, want to come along?”
“What about my present?” Maxie demanded.
I walked out without answering. Sure enough, about a hundred yards away, I saw the kid from Harbor Pizza exiting one of the Down the Shore trailers. He walked back to his car and drove away.
“What’s going on?” Paul asked.
“The whole crew and the cast are on the beach,” I said. “But somebody ordered a pizza from—”
“Tiffney’s trailer,” Paul said, completing my sentence for me.
“Exactly.” There was no need to hurry, but I started to run toward the trailer, feeling like I’d better get there before Tiffney vanished. Again.
Once there, I knocked on the door. And sure enough, there was no answer. Tiffney was following her instructions to the letter. Well, almost.
“Come on, Tiffney, I know you’re in there,” I said loudly. “Let’s talk.”
“I’m not here,” Tiffney shouted from inside. “We can’t talk.”
That thing about not being the sharpest tool in the shed? Tiffney would need considerable honing to reach that status.
“You are there,” I said. “You just told me you’re not there. That means you’re there.”
The door opened, and there stood Tiffney, a little tomato sauce on her cheek, dressed in a pair of cutoff shorts and a Down the Shore T-shirt that had been washed many, many times.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“Good question,” Paul said, but of course she couldn’t hear him.
We went inside, where I also found the female camera operator sitting at the “kitchen” table, eating pizza. Tiffney offered me a slice, but I declined. I wanted to keep this brief, what with a birthday party for a ghost going on in my kitchen.
“Let me see if I can guess,” I said. “Once H-Bomb started complaining about you getting too big a role on the show, Trent decided to give her what she wanted, but to do it in a way that would make you a bigger star. Or that’s what he told you, right?”
“Yeah.” Tiffney chewed on her pizza (“I’m really hungry; do you mind?”). “He said if I disappeared, everybody would be looking for me, and the fans would go crazy wanting me back. But since the show doesn’t air for another couple months, we had to keep it real quiet. So Trent didn’t tell the police.”
“And he tried to hire me to find you, because he figured there’d be no danger you’d get found before he wanted to bring you back. Who else knows about this?”
Tiffney’s eyes looked up and to the right; this indicated she was thinking. “Everybody else in the cast except H-Bomb,” she said, meaning just the two guys. “Trent figured it would be better if she really thought I was gone.”
“I came along to film Tiff when she wasn’t in the trailer,” the camerawoman, whose name turned out to be Sandy, added. “I got her out on the beach, walking around, looking lost.”
“Was that where you were when the CSI team was searching the trailers?” I asked.
“I guess so,” Sandy answered. “I never saw them doing that, so we must have been out filming.”
“But not when she gave a homeless guy named Darryl her credit card as a humanitarian gesture.”
Sandy giggled. “Actually, that was me. Trent didn’t want Tiff out there with those guys, so I put on a blonde wig and worked a little magic with my figure. Those makeup people can do anything.”
“With the fan protests getting louder online, the pressure was on H-Bomb,” I thought out loud.
“Yeah,” Tiffney confirmed. “Trent wanted her not to know where I was.”
“Even more fun if Tiffney were a suspect,” I said so Paul could hear. “Because then the search for you, Tiffney, would be more intense, and the audience would know you were innocent. It builds drama. So Trent helped you put together that”—(inwardly, I shuddered a bit)—“mannequin to make it look like H-Bomb was threatening you just as you disappeared. Wasn’t that it?” I asked Tiffney.
“I guess,” Tiffney said. We were reaching her limits in the area of human interaction.
“So what was that side trip to Sea Bright all about?” I asked. “How come Trent decided to make me drive all the way down there when he knew you were here in your trailer—you have been all this time, haven’t you?”
Tiffney nodded. “I slept and ate here most of the time. Nobody would look for me here once you found Bonnie.” She pointed at the mannequin, which was in a corner near the bathroom. “That’s what we call it.”
“And the trip to Sea Bright?” I reminded her.
“Trent figured we could throw everybody off, so he made Sandy give my credit card to this disgusting drunk on the beach, and then Trent got me a new black AmEx card for me.” Tiffney actually pulled out the card and showed it to me. I pretended to be impressed.
“So, in the middle of all that was going on, I drove to Sea Bright and back and talked to that guy for no reason,” I said to Paul.
“Welcome to the detective business,” he said. “You have to assume everybody’s lying to you.”
“How long is he keeping you cooped up in here?” I asked Tiffney.
“Oh, it’s not that bad. I get to go out for filming with Sandy, and at night sometimes when nobody’s around, as long as I stay in disguise and don’t get, like, migraine-faced and make a lot of noise. And Trent says I’ll be back on the show in a couple of days.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. He’s going to find you himself.”
Tiffney looked at me like I’d said she had just gotten accepted to Yale. “Of course not! Trent’s not on the show. He’s deciding now whether Mistah Motion or Rock Starr gets to find me.”
Reality television.
I promised a number of times not to give away Tiffney’s secret and then begged off, saying I had to get back to my daughter (who had probably by now eaten both our shares of pizza).
When I left the trailer through the door—as Paul took the less conventional route through the wall—Trent was standing just outside, his car parked next to one of the other trailers. The rest of the crew was still off somewhere shooting more dramatic footage of drinking and flirting.
“So,” he said, grinning. “You figured it out.”
“Yeah.” I glanced at Paul, standing by with his arms folded, daring me to stand up for myself and my “profession.” “You said yourself you could talk that girl into anything
. I should have picked up on that. But I still guess I wasn’t as bad an investigator as you expected.”
“On the contrary, you were exactly what I expected,” Trent answered. “I knew you’d find Tiff if you looked for her. But I also figured you wouldn’t ever take the case, because you were involved with the murder and because we put that scary mannequin in the trailer for you to find. So I felt pretty safe.”
I sneered at him. Well, I think I sneered. If you haven’t practiced it in the mirror—and I hadn’t—you can never be sure. “And our little excursion to Sea Bright?” I asked Trent.
“I couldn’t look like I wasn’t doing anything to find her,” he explained.
“And the cops never showed up there because you never called them, right?”
Trent didn’t make eye contact. “Something like that. Lieutenant McElone heard about it through you, I guess, so I told her I thought Tiff had gone home in a huff.”
“Uh-huh. Here’s the deal, Trent.” I was making this up as I went along, but it felt like the right direction. “I want to be paid for finding Tiffney.”
He raised an eyebrow mockingly. “But you never took the case,” he said.
“I went with you to Sea Bright. So I was part of the investigative team. And I found her. So you can pay me a fee, or you can let me call my friend Phyllis, who writes for some Internet news sites, and tell her everything I know about your stunt. Her story would probably get picked up nationally long before your show gets to air.” Why not? I could always use the money, and my alternative in dealing with this situation was to punch Trent hard in the stomach, which probably wouldn’t have done me much good overall.
Trent looked surprised, but we negotiated a price that seemed outlandishly high to me and probably a bargain to him. I walked away without punching him, which was also mutually beneficial.
Though it would have felt great.
Back inside, Paul was telling Mom and Melissa he’d finally heard from the spirit of Arlice Crosby, who was just getting used to her new state of being. “She had no idea what happened when she died,” Paul said. “She wouldn’t have been any help in the investigation at all. But she seems very much at peace.”
I regaled the gathering with the Tale of Tiffney until Maxie could contain herself no more. “Where’s my present ?” she demanded.
Melissa and I exchanged a glance. “Okay. Here’s what we’re thinking. I still need the extra bedroom for guests.”
“You’re taking the attic from me? That’s my present?” Maxie looked appalled. Which was part of the plan.
“Well, yes. But in a way I think you’ll like. Like I said, we need the extra income from more guests. So I am going to be renovating the attic as living space.”
“You really suck at giving presents,” Maxie said, then quickly added: “Sorry, Mom.”
Kitty waved a hand when Melissa told her what Maxie had said; it was irrelevant to her.
“If you’ll let me finish,” I said. “See, Melissa is getting bigger, and if I learned anything from the past week or so, it’s that I’m not crazy about having her living right among all the guests all the time. So I’m thinking we’ll move her into the new attic bedroom and have her current room for guests. It’s a little bigger and has its own bathroom, so I can charge more, and you’ll have company up in the . . .”
But Maxie had stopped listening after move her into the new attic bedroom. “Melissa’s going to be my roommate?” she almost whispered.
Oops. I thought she’d like the idea. “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way, but . . .”
“That’s great!” Maxie swooped down and gave Liss a hug. “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather share a room with,” she said.
Melissa grinned. I wondered how she’d feel when she was fifteen and Maxie still thought of her as a roommate, but for now, it was the perfect solution for all parties concerned. I’d talk to Tony about construction plans tomorrow.
We talked and laughed for quite a while. I managed to snag one slice of pizza away from my mother and my daughter, and then I pulled an ice-cream cake out of the freezer, and we lit a candle and sang “Happy Birthday” a couple of times.
Maxie even managed to blow out the candle. And she was clearly delighted by the entire night.
“What do you think, Maxie?” I asked her. “Can ghosts eat ice-cream cake?”
She floated down from the ceiling and landed on the unoccupied kitchen chair. “I have no idea,” she said. “Let’s find out.”
SIXTH IN THE PEPPER MARTIN MYSTERIES FROM
CASEY DANIELS
TOMB WITH A VIEW
Cemeteries come alive for amateur sleuth and reluctant medium Pepper Martin.
Cleveland’s Garden View Cemetery is hosting a James A. Garfield commemoration. For Pepper Martin, this means that she’ll surely be hearing from the dead president himself. And when she’s assigned to help plan the event with know-it-all volunteer and Garfield fanatic Marjorie Klinker, she’ll wish Marjorie were dead . . . too bad someone beats Pepper to it.
penguin.com
M793T1010
Berkley Prime Crime titles by E. J. Copperman
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED
AN UNINVITED GHOST
An Uninvited Ghost Page 27
