Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kitty said. “I told her I loved her all the time. She knew it.” That wasn’t the impression Maxie had given me, but okay. Kitty’s voice caught for a moment. “The thing is, I not only loved her, I liked her, too. So I miss her that much more.”

  I wanted to tell Maxie about my visit with her mother, but she didn’t make herself visible when I returned to the house. After debriefing me, Paul retreated to whatever Neverland he inhabited during what I’d come to think of as his off-hours, so I was in the middle of retiling the downstairs bathroom when Mayor Bridget Bostero brought David and Madeline Preston by “to see the lovely job you’ve been doing on their old house.”

  “We had just come by to see Bridget on a social visit, and she suggested we take a look,” Madeline told me. “She said we’d be impressed.” I would have been flattered, except I knew that Mayor Bostero had never set foot in the house as long as I’d owned it.

  “Well, thank you,” I said in what I’m sure was an unconvincing tone. “I didn’t realize you’d been monitoring my progress, Mayor Bostero.” I invited them inside, and they stood awkwardly in the foyer.

  Bridget Bostero tossed her hair back to achieve a wind-swept effect (once a beautician, always a beautician). “I’m interested in every new business that comes to Harbor Haven, Alison,” she said. “I’m sure I mentioned that when we had our lunch together.” My goodness—was Bridget trying to impress the Prestons with how well she knew me?

  I wiped my brow. Tiling isn’t incredibly hard, but you can still work up a sweat in a confined space with only a tiny window for ventilation. I think some grout might have been wiped onto my forehead from my index finger. “Well, I’m glad for the distraction and the compliment,” I said. I thought that was quite diplomatic, if I have to say so myself.

  “You’re tiling,” David Preston said, no doubt noticing the smudge. “Are you doing the upstairs baths or the downstairs?”

  “Downstairs, today,” I answered. “The upstairs ones are already done, if you’d like to see.” I didn’t mention the additional one I’d added, which I’d finally farmed out to Tony’s crew, because I wanted to see the Prestons’ reaction when they saw it.

  “Yeah,” David said. The man’s wit knew no bounds.

  I took them upstairs and showed off the work I’d done. Even though I didn’t think for one second that they were actually here to see the fruits of my labor—though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what they were here to see—I was proud of what I’d accomplished, and more than a little vain about showing it off.

  The past few weeks had been devoted to the renovations I’d needed to make, but now, things were coming together. The new thermostat on the boiler had done the trick, and the heating system was now working. The new doors were on the kitchen cabinets, which were up on the walls. Painting, sanding and otherwise repairing of the walls had been achieved (with one notable exception). All I had left to do was refinish the floor in the dining room, and then the furniture could be delivered, various window treatments hung and area rugs put down, and I’d be able to take pictures of the house to put into a brochure and use for online advertising. People would be planning their next summer vacations soon, many before Thanksgiving. I was just about going to be ready.

  In the new powder room, which I’d just finished painting that morning, the first reaction came from Bridget Bostero.

  “This wasn’t here before, was it?” she asked.

  Wait a minute—how would she know that if she hasn’t been here before?

  “No,” David Preston jumped in before I could. “We had a larger bedroom here.”

  “It’s all within the code,” I assured the mayor. “I’ve got the building permits.”

  She assured me showing her the paperwork wasn’t necessary, but the look in her eye indicated she’d check the minute she got back to Town Hall, and I silently thanked the gods that I’d hired Tony’s crew, because I probably wouldn’t have bothered with permits but, being professionals, they had.

  Madeline was consistently overpraising my work, which led me to believe (especially given how tightly her jaw clenched as she spoke) that she hated everything I’d done to the fond memories she had of her home, and was plotting my demise even as she smiled at me.

  I did notice, however, that all three of them were peeking into corners and examining walls that had seen no repairs at all, aside from fresh coats of paint. But it wasn’t until we got back downstairs and into the main hallway that I started to suspect what might have been the catalyst for this uninvited visit.

  “You’ll have to overlook the one thing I haven’t been able to fix yet,” I said. We reached the wall with the large, now perfectly rectangular hole in the wall, where inside studs were exposed and plaster was still flaking just a little more every day.

  You’d have thought I was unveiling the Mona Lisa. The three visitors flocked around the hole in the wall and stared at it, seemingly mesmerized by its incredible allure.

  It was, I have to admit, a little spooky. Especially when Paul emerged through the wall behind me and asked, “What’s all this, then?”

  I started just a little, and David Preston looked at me. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Just not happy about everybody looking at my most glaring failure,” I answered.

  “I don’t think it’s a failure,” Bridget offered. “It gives the room character.” I was quickly confirming my initial impression that Mayor Bostero was an idiot.

  Madeline Preston’s head was almost all the way inside the hole. “My goodness,” she said, her voice muffled. “How will you fix this one, dear?”

  For a second, I thought she was asking her husband, and that was strange enough. It was even more discomfiting when I realized she was addressing me. “We’re working on a few ideas,” I said. “Maybe a patch.”

  “A patch?” David asked. “What’s the point of a patch? This is plaster. And the wall is curved. It’ll never patch right.” A great wit and an eternal optimist. All the good ones truly are taken.

  “He’s right, dear,” Madeline said to me, again initiating an uncomfortable level of affection. “We had problems with these walls for years. You should save yourself the trouble and take them all down.”

  Take my walls down? All of them? Was she on drugs?

  I didn’t get a chance to ponder that further, or to inform my “guests” that I had no intention of doing anything so destructive, because there was knocking at the front door. Seemed my location was more popular than I realized—good news for my business plan.

  Detective Anita McElone stood on my doorstep, straight and tall as always, looking just a little like Wonder Woman in less flamboyant clothing.

  McElone looked at me, then at the group behind me, then back at me, and said in a loud, clear voice, “Alison Kerby, you are under arrest for the murder of Teresa L. Wright. You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  I didn’t listen to the rest of my rights, since the hand-cuffing and being walked to the police car at the curb distracted me. But I did see to it that the door was locked after McElone ushered the mayor and the Prestons out.

  Thirty-five

  If you’ve never sat handcuffed in the backseat of a police detective’s car, let me tell you, you haven’t missed a thing. Combining the view of the back of McElone’s head and the weight of the handcuffs (metal ones—she hadn’t used those plastic zip strips that seem to be all the rage on COPS—but at least they were in front of me and not behind my back), the trip had all the allure of . . . well, a ride to jail.

  “This is ridiculous,” I told McElone, who didn’t answer. “What led you to this wacko conclusion?”

  Again, no response. She didn’t even turn her head.

  “You can hear me, right?” I asked. You never can be sure. But the detective made not a sound, and didn’t even seem to be watching me in the rearview mirror. How did she know I wasn’t going to open the door and flee?

  “Look, Det
ective,” I said. “Maybe we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m just a single mom trying to make a living. I realize I’ve said some snarky things to you, and maybe I was out of line. But this is really going way over the top, don’t you think?”

  Nothing.

  Fine, be that way. Here I’m trying to reach out and be a human being, and she doesn’t want to know about it. Reach out a hand to some people, and all they do is cut you off at the wrist.

  “You know, I was just trying to be friendly, Detective. But if you’re too cold and robotic to see where I’m coming from, then fine, arrest me. I didn’t kill anybody; I’m trying to stay out of the killer’s way myself. And as a public employee, someone whose salary we taxpayers subsidize without complaint, you should realize . . .”

  McElone sighed loudly, and pulled over to the side of the road. She stopped the car.

  “What the hell is this all about?” I asked.

  She got up, opened the car door and got out of the car. Then she reached over and opened the door in the back, the one on the driver’s side.

  The one where I was sitting.

  “Hey, look, if that taxpayer crack was insulting, you have to remember I’m under a certain amount of stress here.”

  Without uttering a word, McElone, her face a portrait of irritation, reached for me. I gasped.

  Especially when she unlocked my handcuffs and motioned me out of the car.

  Rubbing my wrists (more because I had seen it in the movies than out of any actual discomfort), I stayed in my seat and stammered, “Um, Detective, I don’t want to seem rude or anything, but you have a good twenty pounds on me, and you’re probably trained in, you know, martial arts or subduing perpetrators and things like that. I’m not really interested in fighting you. . . .”

  “Oh for goodness’s sake, get out of the car,” McElone said.

  So I got out of the car.

  “You got a cell phone?” she asked.

  Baffled, I nodded that I did.

  “Do you have someone you can call for a ride?” McElone continued.

  What sort of trick was this? “My mother,” I offered. Always lead with a mother when you’re going for sympathy. “Why?”

  “Because I’m leaving you here. Call your mother and get a ride. Go anywhere but back to that house, okay? Don’t go home for at least a few hours.”

  I narrowed my eyes in the honest belief that I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing or hearing what I was hearing. I would have narrowed my ears, too, but there are limits to being human. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “I’m releasing you. We have insufficient evidence. Go away. Get your daughter from school. Take her out for a pizza. But don’t go back to your house for a while. Tomorrow would be even better.” McElone closed the car door behind me and turned toward the front.

  “What are you talking about?” I repeated. “A minute and a half ago I was Public Enemy Number One and now you’re dropping me off on the side of the road? How do you know I’m not a sociopathic killer planning her next strike even as we speak?”

  “Let me get this straight,” McElone responded. “You want to be arrested?” She had a point. “Get yourself a ride and get out of here.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why do I need a reason?” she asked, settling into the front seat of her unmarked police car. “I’m the police. Scram.” And she started the car up and drove away onto Oceanedge Avenue.

  So I called Mom. “How’d you like to take your daughter and granddaughter out for a pizza?” I asked.

  “As long as there’s no hot peppers,” she answered. “You know how they give me heartburn.”

  I had time before Mom showed up, so I also called Phyllis, who had been asking when she could send a photographer for a feature she wanted to write about the guesthouse. I fudged and told her it would be a while longer before I could get the place into proper shape. I got the feeling Phyllis wasn’t so much interested in a feature as she was in getting background on me in case I turned up as another victim. But she was too classy to say so.

  While I had her on the phone, I also asked her if she’d ever heard this rumor about a George Washington deed, because Phyllis, being a good editor, knows everything that ever happened in Harbor Haven. “Oh, that old story,” Phyllis said. Naturally. “That one’s been going around this town pretty much since Washington left. I don’t know if there’s any truth to it, but if there is, you could be in line for a lot of money.”

  “If I live to see it. Tell me, how much of the legend is true?”

  “Nobody knows; that’s why it’s a legend,” Phyllis answered. “As far as I know, nobody’s laid eyes on the document for at least a century.”

  “Did Madeline and Dave Preston know the story?” I asked.

  Phyllis snorted her amusement. “Everybody’s heard that one, kid,” she said. “But I don’t remember them ever taking much interest, tearing the house apart or anything. They were too busy with the nine kids.”

  I felt it was unnecessary to tell her I had a team of ghosts examining every square inch of the place even as we spoke.

  “Did you know anybody who was especially interested in the story? Someone who’d ask around about it? Anything like that?” Maybe that would point toward someone desperate enough to kill two people over a two-hundred-year-old piece of paper.

  “As a matter of fact, there was someone,” Phyllis said after a minute. “He was very interested in the rumors, but it was before you bought the place.”

  Finally, a clue! Paul would be thrilled. “Who?” I asked.

  “The history teacher, Ned Barnes,” she answered. “Do you know him?”

  “A little bit,” I said.

  “So she arrested you, drove you two and a half miles, then let you go?” Mom’s brow was furrowed. She was thinking hard.

  We’d ended up at Dinner in a Pizza, a Harbor Haven pizzeria with what it considered a “novel” gimmick: Each pie was modeled around a traditional multicourse dinner. We’d gotten the chicken-salad-bread combo, which isn’t as odd as you’d think, but couldn’t hold a candle to good old pepperoni, in at least this one diner’s humble opinion. “I can’t explain it,” I told Mom.

  Melissa had been listening carefully, but hadn’t said much, which I attributed to confusion over having cucumber slices and chicken on an otherwise normal slice of pizza. But she started chewing on her bottom lip—something she calls “scratching” it—a sure sign that she was thinking deeply.

  “Aren’t police officers supposed to protect people?” she asked. It’s so cute what they teach fourth graders.

  “Well, yes,” I answered. “That is part of the job. But sometimes when an officer is trying a little too hard . . .”

  “How was Detective McElone protecting you by arresting you?” Melissa asked.

  “Well, she wasn’t,” I said. “If she thought I was a criminal, then she’d be protecting other people by arresting me.”

  Mom swallowed a bite of her slice (having removed the cucumbers and carrots, which she said “don’t happen in nature on a pizza”) and broke in. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think maybe Melissa’s right: The detective was trying to protect you.”

  “By putting me in handcuffs and shoving me into the back of a police car?” I asked. “Since when are you on her side?”

  Mom pointed at me with the business end of her pizza slice. “She wanted you out of that house for a few hours. Suppose she thought something dangerous was going to happen there—like a bomb.”

  It took keeping every muscle in my face perfectly still not to roll my eyes. “A bomb?” I asked, my voice dropping to James Earl Jones territory.

  “A bomb,” Mom repeated. “Or maybe someone coming to search the house for this George Washington thing. Suppose she believes the killer is planning a return visit, and she wants to stake out the scene of the crime.”

  “You have been watching way too much CSI,” I told my mother. “Stake out the scene of the crime? Who
are you, David Caruso? McElone doesn’t like me, and she wants me to be guilty of something, but she must have gotten cold feet and realized she doesn’t have enough evidence to hold me, so she let me go.”

  “Then why did she tell you to stay away from the house?” Melissa asked. I was being double-teamed by my mother and daughter. We middle-generation children always have it the worst.

  “If she was trying to protect us so much, how come she arrested me but not the Prestons or the mayor?” I asked. “Wouldn’t they be in just as much danger at the house?”

  Melissa chewed thoughtfully, which isn’t easy for a nine-year-old. “Well, didn’t you say they left the same time as you?” she asked.

  “That’s it,” I told my mother and my daughter. “The two of you are splitting the bill. And I’m having dessert.”

  “I don’t have any money,” Melissa protested. “I’m a kid.”

  “Don’t worry,” her grandmother told her. “Your mom’s just joking.” She was wrong, of course, but it made Melissa feel better.

  “We don’t need to stake out our own house,” I said to Mom. “Paul and Maxie are already in there. They’ll tell us anything that goes on.”

  And yet, here we all were, sitting in the Volvo wagon (Mom considered her 2006 Dodge Viper “too sporty” to be a stakeout vehicle). We were parked on the hill overlooking my colossal investment that would soon be surrounded by luxury condos and gain a reputation as the house where the crazy ghost-seeing lady lived with her equally insane daughter. It was possible I didn’t have the right attitude for the guesthouse business.

  “But if the crooks run out past the sidewalk, they won’t be able to chase them,” Mom said. “We’re here as backup.”

  Melissa nestled in the backseat. “I’m getting cold,” she said. “Can’t we turn the heat on?”

  “If we turn the engine on, we’ll be tipping off the bad guys,” Mom said. “Don’t you have a blanket or something back there?”

  “I dunno. I’ll look in the way back.” Melissa turned around and started rummaging through the controlled chaos that is the cargo area of my station wagon. “I have to get up for school tomorrow, you know.”