I took off my rubber gloves and Mom handed me the package. I regarded it carefully—it was very light and, as far as I could tell, not ticking. But there was, of course, no return address on the package.
There wasn’t any postage on it, either. It had been hand delivered to her mailbox.
I took a box cutter from the side pocket on my tool belt and slowly cut the tape on one side of the box. Then I raised the flap on the paper wrapping and looked inside. The box was from a local jeweler, Mason Gems.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Mom asked hopefully. “The teacher?”
I gave her a snide look and tore the rest of the paper off. The box did not appear to be new; it was worn at the corners and the embossed Mason on the top flap was almost invisible. I shook it a little, and nothing happened.
The only thing left to do was open it.
The box contained a small, velvet-covered ring case, which probably got Mom’s heart pounding. She hadn’t ever approved of The Swine, and was now letting that hang over me without so much as an “I told you so.” The woman was much more devious than most people would ever imagine.
I opened the ring box. Inside was nothing more than a small piece of paper, about the size of a Post-it note. I unfolded it.
Printed in a nondescript font were the words, “We’ll be in touch.”
But the real message was clear: “We know where your mother lives.”
I must have paled in a hurry, because Mom grabbed my forearm and said, “Ally, are you all right?”
Maxie, now in a teal jumpsuit, had not been able to see the message on the paper. “Ally!” she shouted. “Oh, that’s great! This day keeps getting better and better!”
Mom looked at my face, and hers took on a stern expression. “Alison, you tell me right now what’s going on.”
And then she pivoted, pointed at Maxie and said, “And you mind your manners.”
Twenty-eight
It took a few minutes of hysteria before I could get the yelling under control. But eventually, I calmed down. It just took some adjusting.
“So, how long have you been able to see . . .” I pointed at Maxie. “Her?” I asked my mother, trying very hard to breathe normally and failing.
“Just her, or all the ghosts?” Mom’s innocent expression was so perfect that Dakota Fanning herself would’ve been proud.
Maxie’s hand went to her mouth. She was laughing.
“All the ghosts?” I repeated, because coming up with words of my very own seemed as difficult as . . . something really difficult. See what I mean?
“Yes,” Mom answered. “I’ve seen the poor dears for as long as I can remember. I still talk to your aunt Cecilia every now and again.” My father’s sister had died in the back of a 1964 Corvair ten years before I was born. She had not, according to family folklore, been wearing a seat belt. Or underwear. “She’s still just eighteen years old, can you believe it?”
“You . . . Why? How?” One-syllable words were becoming my specialty.
“Well, I don’t know,” my mother said. “I suppose it’s just an inborn talent, you know, like being able to roll your tongue into a circle.” And she did just that, to show what she meant. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Maxie trying, too. She couldn’t do it. Mom looked at me. “You mean you can only see the two here?” she asked.
My head was starting to hurt again. I was having bucket flashbacks. “They’re the only ones I’ve seen,” I confirmed.
“So far,” Maxie interjected. Thanks, Maxie.
“Don’t feel bad, Alison,” Mom said. “I’m sure you’ll see more. There aren’t that many of the poor dears around the Jersey Shore. I’m told there are more in places like Chicago, but those are mostly gangsters.”
“But you never told me,” I said. I was already sitting on the floor, but lying down was starting to look like a really good option. Maxie hovered about halfway between the floor and ceiling. Mom had the lawn chair. That Barcalounger was starting to sound even more attractive.
Mom closed her eyes and raised her eyebrows in an expression that said, “What do you want from me?” “When you were a little girl, I looked for signs that you could see them, too,” she said. “But you couldn’t, so I didn’t want to scare you. And after you got older, well, there didn’t seem to be a point to letting you know. Why make you feel bad?”
“You’ve been here before,” I said. “You’ve stood in this very room, when Maxie and Paul were here, and you didn’t so much as blink.”
Mom pursed her lips. “Well, of course not. I’ve had a lifetime of practicing just acting natural when anyone else was around. When Melissa first told me what she was seeing, she didn’t really understand it, but we agreed it was best not to say anything to you. You know how you are when things are just a little off, Ally. But now you’ve gotten the ability, too! I knew you could do it—you’re so smart!” She beamed in Maxie’s direction. “Isn’t she amazing?” my mother asked.
“That’s not the word I’d use,” Maxie answered, hovering up out of my arm’s reach.
But I was just now comprehending what Mom had just told me. “Melissa!” I said. “You knew Melissa could see ghosts, and you didn’t say anything to me?”
Mom looked a little contrite, like a little girl who’d been caught in a white lie. “Well, now, Melissa and I ran into a lovely Civil War veteran when Melissa was just a tiny girl, and I realized she’d inherited the gift. But we both knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m her mother!”
“And if she’d told you then that she could see and talk to ghosts . . .”
I admitted it: “I’d have taken her to a team of therapists.”
“And if I’d told you I could, too?”
“I’d have taken me to a team of therapists.”
“Exactly,” Mom agreed, gleeful at my brilliance in picking up her meaning. “So Melissa came to me, and I told her I could see them, too, and what a special thing it could be for us. I thought it had skipped a generation—you know, my mother couldn’t see spirits sitting right next to her on the subway—but now you’ve developed the ability, too. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“It only happened because your close buddy here dropped a bucket of compound on my head,” I told Mom.
Mom took on a stern expression. “Was that you, Maxine? That was very wrong of you, you know. You could have hurt Alison very seriously.”
Maxie, to my amazement, dropped her head in what appeared to be genuine remorse. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kerby,” she intoned.
But Mom had bigger fish to fry. She turned to face me. “Now, you tell me exactly what’s going on and why someone is sending you strange notes in ring cases to my house.”
So I told her everything—how Paul had asked me to find out who killed him and Maxie (“My goodness!” was my mother’s reaction); why I’d agreed to do so after getting the first threatening e-mail (“Oh, no!”); how I’d broken into Terry Wright’s office and found her body (“Alison, didn’t I bring you up better than that?”); and why I suspected Adam Morris might be involved (“Son of a bitch.”). You don’t mess with my mother’s daughter and expect Loretta to remain ladylike.
“So you think this is someone’s way of threatening you through me?” Mom asked when I’d concluded.
“That’s right.”
Mom smiled a tight, malicious smile. “They don’t know who they’re dealing with, do they?” she said.
I looked at my mother with a different kind of respect than I’d ever had for her before—a fearful kind. “No, ma’am,” I said.
She rubbed her hands together. No, seriously. “We need to mobilize,” she said. “Alison, where is the other ghost—the young man—right now?”
I looked at Maxie. “I’ll find out,” she said, and vanished into the kitchen wall. I was awed at Mom’s ability to command obedience from the otherwise uncontrollable.
Once Maxie vanished, Mom’s tone turned confidential. “She’s a nice girl, but you can�
��t depend on her,” she told me, gesturing in Maxie’s previous direction. “But the young man, he’s very dependable. And I was wondering why you never answered when he spoke to you; it makes sense now. If only you’d known him when he was alive.”
I decided to redirect the conversation before it got even weirder. “The thing we have to do above all else,” I told Mom, “is to make sure Melissa is always safe.”
“You bet,” she answered. And her look told me she’d already thought of that.
Maxie appeared through the floor, dragging Paul behind her. “He was in the basement,” she dutifully reported to Mom.
“I’m tired of looking at the other rooms,” he said. “Hello, Mrs. Kerby. You know, you really should have said something to us before.”
“That would have been impolite to Alison. Paul, is it? Well, listen up,” Mom said. “You’ve gotten my Alison into a very difficult situation, so you bear some responsibility here. You’re going to be in charge of security.”
Paul looked as if he’d been hit in the face unexpectedly—his eyes bulged and his lips retreated into his mouth. “Security?” he asked.
Maxie cocked an eyebrow. “He didn’t do such a hot job for me,” she said.
“Nonetheless, he has the experience and he has the time to devise strategy,” Mom went on, savoring her role as company commander. “Maxine . . .”
I did my best to giggle. “Maxine,” I said.
Maxie glared.
“Maxine,” Mom went on, choosing to ignore my juvenile disposition, “you’re going to be watching Melissa when Alison can’t be here. But also . . .”
“Wait a second!” I protested. “I’m the mother here—that’s my daughter you’re talking about. I’ll decide who watches her. And it’s not going to be Maxine!”
“Don’t be petty, Alison,” my mother admonished.
“I’m not being petty,” I said, dropping my tone to a normal conversational level. “Suppose there’s an emergency. What’s Maxie going to do? She can’t call nine-one-one.”
Mom put a finger to her lips. “That’s a good point,” she said.
Maxie’s eyebrows dropped to a V shape “Cell phone,” she said, and held out her hand. I didn’t move, but Mom handed over her own ancient model.
Maxie opened it, and mimed pushing buttons. “Nineone-one,” she said.
“Yeah, and what are you going to do when they answer?” I said. “Even if the police dispatcher has the gift, they’ll hear nothing.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Maxie said. “They send someone out whether they hear you or not.”
Paul, envious, shook his head. “You handle objects so easily,” he said to Maxie. “I’m still trying to pick up coins.”
“What else do I have to do?” Maxie said pointedly. “You’re always working on our ‘case.’ ”
“Very well, then,” said Mom, getting us back on task. “So Maxine will be watching Melissa when necessary. But she’ll also be doing research.”
Maxie looked like something suddenly smelled bad. “Research?”
Mom nodded. “Yes. We need to know about the ownership of this house since it was built, not just from before you, Maxine. It would be good if we knew when Adam Morris began buying up properties around here, to the day. And that would be available to anyone with access to the Internet.” Mom grinned. “Seeing as you’re so good at pushing buttons already.”
“I always did bad on research projects at school,” Maxie protested.
“Here’s your chance to improve,” Mom said, in a modified version of an adage I’d heard from her all my life: “Keep expanding your horizons, and you’ll do well.”
“What’s the point of improving?” Maxie whimpered. “I’m dead.”
“Oh sure, you can complain about the bad break you’ve gotten, or you can rise above it,” my mother told her. “You can moan and groan about your circumstances, or you can find new ways to be useful and happy. So you’re going to contribute, Maxine, and do you know why?”
“Because you’ll drive her crazy until she does,” I offered, ever the pupil with her hand raised high.
“Exactly,” Mom said.
“Okay,” Maxie agreed with a certain tone of inevitability.
Paul smiled and looked in Mom’s direction. “But security—and by that I assume you mean concentrating on keeping Alison and Melissa safe from whoever is behind our deaths—isn’t all I’m good for, Mrs. Kerby,” he said. “I’ve been directing the investigation through Alison, giving her assignments and overseeing her progress.”
“And how’s that been going so far?” Mom asked.
“Actually, fairly well. We don’t know how the puzzle fits together yet, but we have a good number of pieces now.”
“I don’t know . . .” Mom said.
“Mom,” I started. “I appreciate your taking charge, but let’s keep in mind that this is my problem and Paul is helping me solve it. Paul knows his business. Don’t go crazy being General MacArthur here.”
Mom smiled broadly. “You’re so smart,” she said.
Twenty-nine
“Why didn’t you tell me that Grandma could see Paul and Maxie, too?” I asked Melissa as she tied her left sneaker the next morning. Ned Barnes was taking the class on a field trip to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park (actually the site of Edison’s lab), yes on a Sunday, and we needed to be out the door. Ten minutes ago.
She looked up quickly, worried at being caught and wondering what the punishment was going to be. Salad for lunch every day? Extra leaf raking in the admittedly huge backyard? Or something really awful, like a week without her iPod?
“You’re not in trouble,” I assured her. “I just want to know why, after it was clear I could see Paul and Maxie, you didn’t mention to me that your grandmother and you have been talking to deceased strangers behind my back for years.”
Melissa went back to tying her sneaker. “I was four or five before I could figure out what was going on.”
“And you never told me?” I said. Yes, I was going to inflict guilt if possible. I’m a mother. It’s not so much part of the job as a perk.
“I tried,” she answered. “Remember when I told you there was a man who lived in my bedroom closet in the old house?”
“Well, yeah, but all kids think . . .”
“His name was Albert Henderson, and he was a forklift operator for twenty years before his no-good wife ran off with the dentist down the block and Albert drank himself to death.”
I considered that. “I thought you had a vivid imagination.”
Melissa sent a look my way that spoke encyclopedias. “I was five,” she said.
I shut up. For a moment. “Well, what about Grandma? Just recently? You knew I could see the ghosts, and you knew she could see the ghosts, but you didn’t say anything. How about that?”
“Didn’t you teach me that keeping a secret was a sacred trust?”
“Yeah, except when you told half the fourth grade we had ghosts in our house. Now everybody thinks I’m weird.”
She stood up. “Everybody already thought you were weird, Mom,” my daughter told me. “Marlee Murphy’s mom told her to stay away from our house, and I didn’t even invite her here.” Kerin Murphy strikes again.
We got into the station wagon and I pulled out of the driveway. “The thing is, Liss, I’m going to be trying to get people to come stay at our house starting next spring. And it’s going to be bad for business if they think scary ghosts are living there, even if they can’t see them.”
“But Maxie and Paul aren’t scary ghosts.” Sometimes, Melissa doesn’t converse so much as point out how you’re wrong. It’s her father’s genes that make her do that.
“The people renting rooms don’t know that,” I said.
“Maybe you should tell them.”
I drove toward her school in silence for a while. It’s demoralizing to be constantly shown up by a nine-year-old.
Finally I said, “So, what are you going to be fo
r Halloween?” We were only five days away, counting today.
“We’re all going together: Me, Wendy, Clarice, Ron and Marlee.”
“Marlee Murphy? I thought you didn’t like her.”
“I don’t, but Clarice does. So I think our costumes are going to be a theme thing.”
Melissa and her friends had been talking about going trick-or-treating as a group, and now they were going to be dressing as various characters in a story. “Harry Potter?” I guessed.
“I think Star Trek.”
“Are you Uhura?”
“Spock.” It figured.
“What do you need for the costume?” I asked.
Melissa put on a show of thinking about it, although I was sure she had it all worked out in her head. “A blue t-shirt, black pants, black hair dye . . .”
“You’re not dying your hair. I’ll find a wig.”
She rolled her eyes in my direction. “Black sneakers and pointy ears.”
“It’s all easy except the ears,” I said. “That’s going to take a little thought. I’ll see what I can come up with. Maybe construction paper or felt.”
“I was thinking we could get some fake ears at the Halloween store,” Melissa said, ending all debate.
When we finally reached the John F. Kennedy Elementary School, I felt lucky to have survived the trip with a shred of self-esteem intact. Melissa got out of the car without giving me a kiss like she would have at home (can’t be seen by the peers, you know) and hefted her little backpack onto her little shoulders. Having kids makes you want to cry at odd moments. But I’m a champ at controlling it.
“Bye, Mom.” And she was off. I wondered if she’d be that nonchalant when it was time to leave for college. Probably. But I’d be bawling my eyes out.
“You’re picturing her leaving for college.” Ned Barnes was leaning in my driver’s side window. “I know the look.”
“Busted,” I said. “But she was a baby only ten minutes ago.”
Night of the Living Deed Page 16
