Night of the Living Deed
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
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
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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 Kerby and her lively entourage.”
—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
“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
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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.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / June 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey Cohen.
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To my brother,
Charlie,
the other writer in the family.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It would truly have been impossible for this book to exist without the incredibly talented and dedicated Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, the editor who took a wisp of an idea and helped it become an actual book, and then a much better book. My sincere thanks.
And none of that would have happened had it not been for my agent, Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, whose inexhaustible energy and belief in my work warm my heart and boggle my mind.
Special thanks to Luci Hansson Zahray, “The Poison Lady,” for figuring out what would be needed to dispose of three unlucky people.
Thank you to the generous authors who read this work in an earlier form and offered kind words, many of which you’ll find on these pages. The camaraderie of mystery authors is a powerful force, and one that I think is quite rare among people who could see one another as competition.
And finally, thanks to my family, my friends, those who will read this book and hopefully enjoy it. Encouragement is a powerful drug, and luckily, a legal one. It is greatly appreciated.
One
“I don’t get it, Mom. If this is our house, why are other people going to live here?” My daughter, Melissa, nine years old and already a prosecuting attorney, looked up from the baseboard near the window seat in the living room, which she was painting with a two-inch brush and a gallon can of generic semigloss white paint.
Never use the expensive stuff when you’re letting a fourth grader help with the painting.
“I’ve explained this to you before, Liss,” I told her without looking down from the wall. I was trying to locate a wooden stud, and the stud finder I was using was being, as is often the case with plaster walls, inconclusive. Using a battery-operated gizmo to find a stud and failing: I tried not to dwell on its metaphorical implications for my love life.
“Other people aren’t coming here to live,” I continued. “They’ll be coming here when they’re on vacation. We’re going to have a guesthouse, like a hotel. They’ll pay us to stay here, near the beach. But we’ve got to fix up the place first.”
“Mr. Barnes says these houses have history in them, and it’s wrong to make them modern.” Mr. Barnes was Melissa’s history teacher, and at the moment, he wasn’t helping.
“Mr. Barnes probably didn’t mean this house. Besides, we’re fixing it up the way it was meant to be. I mean, no one would want to live in the house the way it looks now, right?”
Our hulk of a turn-of-the-last-century Victorian house was not, by the standards of anyone whose age was in double digits, livable. Sure, the house had once been adorable, maybe even grand, but that was a long time ago. Now, the ancient plaster walls downstairs were peeling and, in some places, crumbling. There was a thick coat of white dust pretty much everywhere, and as far as I could tell, the heating system was devoid of, well, heat. The October chill was already starting to feel permanent in my bones.
However, it was clear that some work had been done by the previous owner, though by my decorating standards, he or she must have been demented. The living room walls had been painted bright bloodred, and the kitchen cabinets were hideous and hung so high Shaquille O’Neal would have a hard time reaching the cereal. Luckily, the upstairs walls had been patched and painted, the landscaping in the front of the house was quite lovely (although the vast backyard had been untouched), and the staircases (there were two) going upstairs had been refinished beautifully. It was a work in progress. Slow progress.
“I would live here,” Melissa said, and went back to painting. That settled it, in her view.
“You do live here,” I answered, not noting that there was no furniture, and that we were both sleeping on mattresses laid directly onto the floors of our respective so-called bedrooms and living out of suitcases. Why remind her of all the things we’d left in the house in Red Bank after the divorce? Melissa’s father, Steven (hereafter known as The Swine), hadn’t wanted the furniture, but he had wanted half the proceeds when I sold it all to help make the down payment on the house. The Swine.
Besides, now the house was a construction site, and any furniture would have been prone to disfigurement or worse while the work went on. As soon as the house was in shape, the new furniture I’d ordered (and, in some cases, collected from consignment stores) would be delivered.
I’d decided to open a guesthouse after my last job—bookkeeper at a lumberyard—hadn’t worked out. Mostly, it hadn’t worked out because my boss had a habit of forgetting his marriage vows when he walked over to my desk to discuss the company’s finances. Luckily, there had been multiple witnesses when he’d tried to put his hands in the back pockets of my jeans, so he didn’t press charges after I decked him. But I decided to sue, strictly on principle. And because the guy was a jerk.
We settled the case for an amount that had seemed like a lot of money, but once I’d done the math on paper, I realized it would last Melissa and me only about two years, and even then, only if we were very frugal in our lifestyle. The alimony from The Swine wasn’t much, and living in New Jersey, a state with some of the highest real-estate values—and property taxes—in the country, wasn’t going to be easy on “not much.”
So I’d decided the thing to do was to take the money and put it into something that could start me off in a business capable of sustaining us for years. And that was when I thought of a guesthouse.
I’d always wanted to own and run a guesthouse here in Harbor Haven, the town where I’d grown up. I liked the idea of people coming in and out, of helping them enjoy the area I loved so much, and of restoring and maintaining one of the majestic beach houses that all too often faced a wrecking ball these days. Developers are everywhere on the Jersey Shore, even in rough economic times. History was being wiped out in favor of expensive vacation condos, and I hoped I could save at least one beauty from extinction. Now, knee deep in it and feeling like I had taken on too much, I was still loving it.
The New Jersey Shore (“down the shore,” to us locals), contrary to the popular notion of the state, is absolutely gorgeous, and a wildly attractive vacation destination. Harbor Haven had not yet been discovered by teenagers and families with young children, which meant there were no thrill rides, no hideous souvenir shops and no boardwalk here. (All things I had sorely lamented as a teenager, but whose absences I now considered serious advantages.) The only thing I really missed was the saltwater taffy, but you could get that in nearby Point Pleasant.
In other words, the only tourists who came to Harbor Haven were quiet and wealthy. The perfect place to open a guesthouse . . . assuming I could get the shambles around me to look like a palace in the next few weeks. My real estate agent, Terry Wright, had told me people often booked their next summer vacations right after the previous season ended, especially in November and December. If I wanted to get color brochures and Internet advertising going before people started making their summer vacation plans—and I did—I’d really need to get cracking.
I hadn’t put down a drop cloth where Melissa was working because I was going to paint the rest of the wall after I’d made my repairs, and the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room was among the first things I’d decided to remove when I first saw the house. Giving Melissa woodwork to paint was going to be little help in the long term, but mostly it was a good way to keep her busy.
I went back to concentrating on the wall. If it were a modern wall, I could knock a hole in the drywall and look inside, then patch it back up, and by the time I was finished painting, nobody would ever know anything had happened. But not in this house. These walls were the original plaster, which afforded them a smooth, gorgeous effect (among many other features) I was planning to exploit for a higher per-night price. But repairing plaster is not easy, much more an art than a science, and the only people who really knew how to do it had died out at about the same time that drywall became popular. If I breached the wall by more than a small crack, I’d end up having to replace the whole wall, and that would be bad.
So, I steeled myself and let my father’s voice ring in my head. “Alison,” he’d say, “you know perfectly well that no contractor is going to care as much about doing it right as you will. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and just get it done.” Dad had taught me everything he knew about home improvement, which was a lot. Not exactly a general contractor but more of a handyman, he’d spent decades learning about what makes houses—especially old ones—work, and he’d taught me what he knew “so you’ll never have to rely on some man to do it.” He was never as proud as when I’d worked at HouseCenter and was teaching some guy how to install a lock or regrout a bathtub.
It hurt a little to think of Dad; it had been four years since he’d died, but you don’t stop missing someone you love—you just stop obsessing about it. When their memory comes flooding back, it still has the power to wound.
“Is this good, Mom?” Melissa roused me from my flash of depression to show me the completed baseboard. As I’d expected, there was a good slick coat of paint on about the first four inches of carpet away from the wall, and another one about four inches up above the molding (impressive, considering that it indicated multiple brush widths), but the baseboard itself was indeed freshly painted, and Melissa had done a nice, careful job for a nine-year-old.
“Very good, Liss,” I answered. I took a few steps over to examine the work more closely. “You have the touch.”
She be
amed. Melissa is always looking for approval, and usually deserves it. “Would you do me a favor and go get the ball-peen hammer from the kitchen?” I asked her. I didn’t really need the hammer, but if I’d reached over and carefully removed the two brush hairs from the baseboard while Melissa was in the room, she’d have seen it as a failure and been upset.
“Sure.” She got up and ran into the kitchen. Nine-year-olds never walk; they either run like they’re being chased or shuffle like they’re being dragged. There is no modulated speed.
As I reached over to pull off the first brush hair, which luckily had fallen only partially on the wall (so I might leave no finger marks), I heard something heavy fall to the floor behind me. But Melissa was in the kitchen, in the other direction entirely.
I turned, but there was nothing disturbed. Well, old houses creak. Hopefully, this particular noise was not caused by something that would require skills beyond what I knew how to fix.
The first brush hair was easy, but the second one, now that I was under time pressure, would be more difficult. But I had tweezers in my shirt pocket (always be prepared), and lifted the hair gently even as Melissa called from the kitchen.
“I can’t reach the hammer!”
Now, it didn’t matter a bit whether I got the hammer, but that was odd, so I stood up and walked toward the kitchen.
“What do you mean, you can’t . . .”
I stopped short in the doorway. Melissa was standing in the center of the (mostly) empty kitchen, cabinet doors removed and countertops missing from their spots. That was normal in our current state of repair, so it didn’t bother me in the least.
But what did worry me was that every drawer in my roll-up toolbox was open, and every tool appeared to have been flung around the room. One backsaw was hanging precariously from a nail near the ceiling. Hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches and sockets pretty much covered every surface. If it’s possible for a construction site to look especially messy, that was what I was staring at now. That bothered me.