Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  She gave me a significant look. “Viva Viagra,” she said.

  “You didn’t get the files,” Paul reminded me later.

  “The police took them. What did you want me to do?”

  I was expanding the space in one of the guest bedrooms by making one of the closets smaller (people staying for a week don’t need as much storage space as full-time residents), so I was wearing goggles and was, at the moment, mostly covered in dust, but I had framed out the new closet almost completely. I could hang the drywall now and fill in the nail holes with compound and taping later. It’s grueling, tedious work, but it’s not difficult, just time-consuming.

  “You saw Kerin Murphy taking something from Terry Wright’s desk that it’s a safe bet to say was not authorized,” he went on. The wheels in his head, although transparent, were always turning. “Tell me again what she did while she was there.”

  “She talked to somebody named Neil about a real estate deal, then she went into Terry’s desk and pulled out an address book or something, and then she hung up and called someone else and said something about the property on Seafront—this house.”

  “Are you sure?” Paul asked.

  “Have you looked outside recently? Everybody else on the block sold out to Adam Morris. This is the only house a real estate agent would have cared about.”

  Paul stood back—his right arm actually disappeared into the wall—and thought. “Are you sure it was an address book?” he asked.

  “It looked like one,” I said. “But no, I didn’t really get a close look.”

  “The first thing they teach you in detective school is not to make assumptions,” Paul told me. “Describe it to me.”

  “It was a black book with one of those plastic covers and a spiral binding,” I told him. “Not big enough for a file book. I thought it looked like an address book.”

  “Could it have been an appointment book? A calendar?” Paul had a way of asking questions like he already knew the answers.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because that’s the kind of thing that could be most damaging. If someone’s name is listed on a schedule to meet Terry Wright around the time she died, it could be important to get that item out of the office before the police arrived.”

  It took me a moment to absorb all that. “You think Kerin Murphy killed Terry?”

  “I think it’s more likely she was covering up for someone else, even if she didn’t know that was what she was doing. But we can’t rule her out as a suspect.”

  “Do you really think Kerin could get herself involved in a murder?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. I’ve only seen her once.”

  “What about Maxie? Did she know Kerin . . . before?”

  Paul shook his head. “I asked, and she said she didn’t.”

  “So, how do we find out what kind of book it was?” I asked Paul. I should’ve known, though, that Paul would have a plan, because he always did, and I rarely enjoyed hearing them.

  “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this one,” I said out loud as I tailed Kerin Murphy. My cell phone, open, rested on the passenger seat of the Volvo.

  I didn’t get an answer, and I didn’t expect one.

  Paul had made sure I’d called the house phone, which was finally working since Verizon had visited the week before, and then I answered it myself. I’d put it on speakerphone and then left, leaving my cell phone on and plugged into the charger in the Volvo.

  He couldn’t answer me (the ghosts’ voices didn’t make it through telephones), but he could hear what I said. I felt like I was talking to myself, which was only about the seventeenth weirdest thing I’d done today. And it was just two in the afternoon.

  “She’s not going to be home, you know,” I’d said to the phone. Paul’s plan—to trail Kerin Murphy and see where she took the book—seemed to have more holes than a Swiss cheese factory. “She probably dropped the stupid book off with someone last night.”

  Imaginary Paul in my head said, “She said she couldn’t do that. She said on the phone that she’d have to meet with the other person today.”

  I hate it when the imaginary people in my head are right.

  It’s very hard to follow someone in a small town, especially if they know you and your car. Paul had instructed me to stay at least two cars behind Kerin, but there weren’t always two cars available, so I did the best I could. I didn’t think she’d seen me, but then, this was my first such endeavor, and I had no idea how you made that determination.

  Twice I was tempted to pull over and pretend to park, but there were no parking meters—and therefore no parking—in this area of Harbor Haven. So on I drove, feeling more each second like I was driving a shocking pink Hummer with fireworks shooting out of its roof.

  I felt especially lucky when Kerin, who had left her house with a briefcase that might or might not have contained the item in question, pulled into a lot next to Oceanside Park. I waited until she was out of her car and walking away before I parked the Volvo in a space as far from Kerin’s as I could get.

  I had a sudden rush of anxiety when a police car drove by, but then I reminded myself that I wasn’t actually doing anything illegal. Still, feeling like I might need to make a quick getaway, I stayed in the car and left the engine running. I observed Kerin walking into the park and toward the playground. She wasn’t carrying her briefcase.

  But in her hand was the book.

  I watched as Kerin sat down on a bench near the playground equipment, all of which had been carefully selected and designed so as not to be at all dangerous (and therefore not at all fun). The only other occupants of the area were a toddler in a little pink jacket—all the bigger kids were in school or preschool—and her mother, who was so devoted to her daughter that she didn’t even look in Kerin’s direction. I watched as Kerin waited for ten interminable minutes.

  Finally, from three blocks away on the other side of the park, another woman walked over. She was blonde and slim, but from this distance I couldn’t make out her face. I relayed all this to Paul, whose imaginary voice chided me for not taking the binoculars like he’d told me to, mostly because the only ones I owned were from Melissa’s toy chest, a remnant of her Spy Kids period.

  The two women didn’t stay together long, however; in fact, Kerin stood up and walked away almost as soon as the woman sat down on the bench. She seemed in a hurry to get back to her car.

  But she left the appointment book on the bench, and the blonde woman picked it up.

  I was trying very hard to decide whether to follow Kerin or the blonde, and had decided Paul would want me to follow the blonde because she had the book, so I didn’t notice that Kerin had headed, not for her car, but for mine. I almost jumped through the roof when she appeared in my window.

  “Alison!” she enthused. “Are you ready for next Thursday?”

  What the hell was she talking about? “Next Thursday?” I stammered.

  “Halloween!” Oh yeah.

  It occurred to me that Kerin, whose boss had been dead for only about a day (and who had obviously had some shady goings-on, um, going on), had bigger things than trick-or-treating to worry about, but then, her bringing up the subject reminded me that, no, I hadn’t gotten Melissa’s costume together. The woman was like a giant Jiminy Cricket.

  “Almost,” I lied. The blonde had gotten up and walked back the way she came. Another thirty seconds and I’d have no chance to catch her. “I was just on my way, Kerin. Nice seeing . . .”

  “Wait a second,” Kerin said. She gestured toward my passenger’s side door. “Let’s talk.”

  What excuse could I use? Sick child? Nah, she’d find out I was lying. Sick mother? I didn’t want to send bad luck Mom’s way, and besides, she’d have to be really sick to require my presence, and if that were true, what the heck was I doing at Oceanside Park?

  “Sure,” I said, and unlocked the passenger side door. It didn’t matter; the blonde woman was gone by now, any
way.

  Kerin sat down opposite me and smiled amiably. “So,” she said. “Why were you hiding in the real estate office the night of Terry’s death?”

  Whoa! Didn’t see that coming!

  “I have no idea what you’re—” I began.

  “Alison.” The smile faded just a bit, then quickly returned. To anyone watching, it would look like we were chatting pleasantly about Halloween costumes. “Let’s not play games. I know you were there. Your file was open on the desk when I got there. The police took you in for questioning. Don’t you think I heard about it?”

  “Okay, I was there,” I admitted. “But I was just looking through the file on my house. I didn’t see anyone else, and I didn’t even know Terry was there until after you left.”

  For a second—and just for a second—Kerin’s eyes widened. “You saw me there?”

  I guessed, I wasn’t supposed to say that. “Um . . . yeah, just for a minute.”

  “Did you say anything about me to the police?” Her face was positively vibrating with urgency. No, really. If you’ve never seen a vibrating face, you’ll have to trust me on this.

  “No,” I lied, since in fact I had told Detective McElone about Kerin. Why hadn’t the police talked to Kerin yet?

  The smile became wider, but not warmer. “Listen to me, Alison. We can help each other. If you don’t tell anyone you saw me there, I won’t tell anyone you were there, either. And we can both breathe easier. How does that sound?”

  It was a lot of work to keep my eyes from spinning in their sockets. “Um . . . sounds good. Yes. Let’s do that,” I said.

  Kerin opened the door. “I’m so glad we had this chance to talk,” she said.

  And then she left. And Paul had heard the whole thing through my cell phone, which had been lying on the floor at her feet the whole time.

  Twenty-five

  Paul had indeed overheard my conversation with Kerin earlier today, and reamed me out royally for not having brought binoculars or shaking Kerin fast enough to follow the young blonde woman. But he’d agreed with me that our list of suspects (now including Kerin Murphy, Adam Morris, possibly the Prestons and everyone on the planning board) was expanding. That didn’t make me feel better.

  I had therefore decided to instead concentrate on having a nice evening out with a very attractive man and, for once, I could actually do that.

  “So I hear you have ghosts in your house.” Ned Barnes, dimple, tousled hair and all, sat across the table and studied my expression with mischief in his eyes.

  “I beg your pardon?” I sputtered.

  “Ghosts. It’s the talk of the school.”

  Ned had been frustrated in his desire to see my house. His Acura had, ironically, broken down (not the fault of our minor fender bender), and I’d had to pick him up in the Volvo. So he had complained, but good-naturedly.

  We’d chosen the restaurant—a Greek place imaginatively named the Parthenon—because it was located a few towns over in Point Pleasant and decidedly not in Harbor Haven. Ned was a teacher in the local elementary school and I . . . well, I appeared to be the talk of the town. Or at least the fourth grade.

  “I can explain that,” I told Ned.

  Ned waved a hand. “Not at all necessary,” he said. “Nineyear-old girls say all sorts of interesting things. Melissa’s moving into a new house and her dad’s not around. She’s probably trying to spice things up a bit. I think it’s very creative, actually.”

  “I’m glad you understand.” Dodged that bullet!

  Ned smiled. “She told a few of her friends this ghost story, and they told a few and, well, now it’s . . .”

  “The talk of the school? Let’s make a rule: While we’re out on a date—this is a date, isn’t it?”

  Ned nodded emphatically—oh yes, this was a date, all right.

  “When we’re out on a date, no talk about Melissa. It’s like shop talk for you, and a little un-romantic for me, frankly.”

  He smiled. “You’re absolutely right, Alison. So tell me about you. You grew up in this area?”

  I nodded. “I grew up in Harbor Haven, spent a couple of years at two different colleges, dropped out, worked at HouseCenter, got married, moved up to Bayonne with my husband, had . . .”

  “Don’t say her name,” he teased. “It’s a rule.”

  “Right. So we moved back down here, first to a little house in Red Bank. My ex paid for Melissa to go to school in Harbor Haven because I knew the schools were good.”

  Ned tilted his head. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. But then The Swi . . . Steven and I decided to divorce, and I remembered that I hadn’t always wanted to work at HouseCenter or in a lumberyard. I wanted to open a guesthouse in Harbor Haven. So I started looking for the right house, and we ended up . . . well, you know where we live now.”

  “I think it’ll make a great guesthouse,” Ned said after the waiter took our order for souvlaki and pastitsio. “I’d still love to come by and see it.”

  “I’d love to show you around,” I heard myself say. Boy, he seemed eager. I mean, I’m not bad-looking by any means, but I don’t usually inspire men to pursue me quite so fervently.

  “As long as the ghosts don’t object,” he said with a twinkle—yes, an actual twinkle!—in his eye.

  “So tell me about yourself,” I said, shifting gears with the ease of a twelve-year-old tractor-trailer with rusted gears.

  “I don’t have a very interesting story,” Ned told me. “I grew up in Seattle.”

  “Right away, that’s interesting to a Jersey girl,” I said.

  “Well, for me, it was cold and rainy,” he answered. “And I got out of there as quickly as I could, when I was eighteen.”

  “You escaped to the tropical climate of New Jersey?”

  Our waiter appeared at that moment with our appetizers, which consisted mostly of breaded and baked cheese, and olives (because it was a Greek restaurant and you have to have olives).

  “New Jersey wasn’t my initial destination,” Ned told me when the coast was once again clear. “Actually, it was Peru.”

  “Peru!” Heads turned at other tables. Oops.

  “Yes, you might have heard of it. It’s in South America. Go south and make a right at Brazil.”

  I pursed my lips to indicate that his drollness had found its mark. “Okay,” I practically whispered. “But why Peru?”

  “I was fascinated with the history of the Incas, and I wanted to see it for myself. But I spent all my money getting there, and didn’t have a nuevo sol or a college degree to my name. So I picked up work in construction and in a copper mine.”

  “It’s a good thing you don’t have an interesting story,” I told him.

  Ned mimicked my “droll” face. “Long story short, I got lonely for America, and American history, so I saved up my wages and found my way back here.”

  “To Harbor Haven?”

  “Eventually. First I went to college and got degrees in history and education, and then I taught up in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a while. But when the history teacher job opened up in Harbor Haven, I jumped at it.”

  “Why?”

  “For an American history nut like me, there are few better places,” Ned said. “The Revolutionary War is all over New Jersey, and that’s my favorite period to explore. So I’m very, very happy to be here.”

  Another period of silence accompanied the arrival of our dinners, which I for one was already far too stuffed to consider. I took a few bites to be polite—okay, I ate half of it, but it was really delicious.

  “I wasn’t aware the shore areas had much in the way of Revolutionary history,” I said. “I thought it was all further north and west, in Morristown and in Trenton where Washington crossed the Delaware.” Sure, I know a little New Jersey history. But not that much—I was an English major at Drew and a business major at Monmouth University before I dropped out altogether.

  “Not at all,” Ned told me through bites of his lamb. “There
was a constant watch on the shore, even if just to try to spot ships heading for the ports of New York or Newark. And Washington himself spent a lot of time on the shore. He actually loved it here.”

  “Big George was a shore bunny?”

  Ned laughed, and was even suave enough that he managed not to have souvlaki come out his nose. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but yes. Washington became very enamored of the Jersey Shore, and apparently had his eye on some property here.”

  “Here?”

  “Well, in Harbor Haven, although that wasn’t the name of the town then.” Ned nodded. “But in the summer of 1778, Washington spent a good deal of time attacking the British in Freehold, not far from here.”

  “I know where Freehold is, Ned. Bruce Springsteen is from Freehold. It’s the closest thing New Jersey has to Mecca.”

  “Well, during that time, the story goes that Washington found exactly the parcel of land he was looking for in what became Harbor Haven.”

  “No kidding! Which parcel was it?”

  “Yours,” Ned said.

  Twenty-six

  Ned didn’t know much more than that, but promised to “research it with a friend of mine at Princeton.” We hadn’t discussed anyone else more than two hundred years old again that evening, and over Ned’s protests, I drove him home after dinner rather than back to my house.

  I told him I did that because I was tired, but the fact was, I was hoping that postponing the tour would force us to have another date, and the strategy worked—he asked me out again for Tuesday night. Then I dropped him off and, dammit, he didn’t insist I come inside his place, either.

  Nothing’s perfect.

  “This is beginning to make sense.” Paul spoke very slowly the next afternoon. He was kneeling—hovering, really—next to the radiator cover in the dining room, while I finished detailing the paint on the molding around the ceiling. I’d been reserving the ladder-related activities for whenever Maxie wasn’t around, and I knew she and Melissa were upstairs watching episodes of Gilmore Girls on Hulu.