Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  “If the house isn’t under attack in a little while, we’ll go inside, sweetie,” I said.

  “What’ll happen to Maxie and Paul if a bomb goes off in there?” Mom asked.

  “They’re already dead,” I reminded her. “The proper question is: What happens to me if a bomb goes off. . . . Will you get off this bomb thing, already?”

  “I found a drop cloth,” Melissa said. “Can I use that as a blanket?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s full of paint and compound.”

  “But I’m cold!”

  “How’s the Dr. Spock costume coming, baby?” my mother said to distract Melissa.

  “Mr. Spock, Grandma,” she responded. “And it’s okay. I’ve got everything but the ears. Do you know how to make pointed ears, Grandma?”

  “Not really,” Mom admitted. “Alison, do you . . .”

  I shushed her when I saw something in the living room window. A light! “Somebody’s in there,” I whispered, as if the intruder would hear me if I spoke at a normal volume a hundred feet away.

  “I think we should go down and see who it is,” Mom said.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” I told her. “You are staying here with your granddaughter and letting me go take a look. If you don’t hear from me in ten minutes, call the police.” I was an idiot, but a brave idiot; you have to give yourself points for something like that.

  Mom didn’t argue with me, and Melissa, although she looked scared, did not protest about staying behind. I’d hoped at least one of them would try to talk me out of it. I opened the car door.

  Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Din . . .

  I’d forgotten the key was still in the ignition, and the car was reminding me to take it out before I locked the door. Thanks a ton, car. But there was no visible movement in the front window, so I closed the car door and started walking—very, very slowly—toward the house.

  Okay, I’ll admit it: One of the reasons I was walking so slowly was that I was hoping the light would leave the house entirely, it would turn out to have been a hallucination induced by pizza with cucumber on it and I’d be able to turn back and forget the whole thing.

  But it didn’t matter, because as I approached the house from the right side—so I’d be able to see through the dining room window—the light started zinging around inside. Just my luck; cucumber on pizza is probably even good for you.

  I don’t want to say I crept up to the window, but tiptoed sounds so wimpy. However I got there, I was on my toes, peering in my own dining room window, and wondering exactly what it was I’d do if I did discover someone trying to blow up my house.

  I pondered that for a minute or two and, having come up with no answer at all, decided to stumble ahead and see what happened. I didn’t want to go into the house unarmed, but the only tools available were the ones already in the house, and they weren’t doing me a ton of good just now.

  All I had on me was a three-inch putty knife, the kind I used to spread drywall compound on small holes or cracks. Well, it was better than nothing. A little better.

  I could have climbed in through the window (if I’d had a box to stand on), but there were certain issues of pride and dignity at stake: This was my house. Let the burglars come in through the windows. I’m walking through the front door.

  I unlocked the door and opened it as quietly as possible, but the sound from the hinges sounded to me like the Squeak That Ate Cleveland. Once inside, I decided against turning on the lights, not wanting to give the intruder(s) a better shot at me. I knew there wasn’t much in the house to trip over, and there was a little moonlight coming in through the window in the front room.

  It’s at a time like this that every creaky floorboard seeks out a foot to spread out under. There are advantages to houses that are less than a hundred years old, and one of them is the quiet floors and doors. I’d have to remember that the next time I weighed new construction versus quaint.

  I couldn’t have felt more conspicuous if I’d strapped on some cymbals, a bass drum and a kazoo and barreled across the living room as a one-woman band.

  But I had an advantage over the intruder—I knew where I’d left my toolbox. If I could reach it before he/she/they knew I was there, I could arm myself with a screwdriver, a hammer or maybe a heavy wrench.

  Hey, someone was in my house who hadn’t been invited. And I was getting good and tired of this game.

  I inched toward the toolbox, which I knew was just under the side window in the dining room, and I probably would have made it there, too. But then I heard a loud chorus of “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.”

  My ringtone. I’d forgotten to turn my cell phone off.

  I checked the incoming number—it was my mother. Which left me with a dilemma: Answer and give away my position, or don’t answer, have her think I’d been killed, and see Mom come charging down the hill.

  There wasn’t time to decide, however, because from behind me, a voice said, “Don’t move.” A man’s voice. An oddly familiar man’s voice. I was only a couple of feet from that great big wrench. . . .

  But then I felt a strange warm rush through my body, not unlike a breeze. And I thought this was an awfully odd time (and about ten years too soon) to start getting hot flashes. Until Paul’s voice, very quietly in my ear, whispered, “It’s okay. I’m here.” I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not. I considered telling him to get Maxie, who could at least pick up objects to throw.

  And then the overhead lights came on.

  Standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a hammer like a weapon, Tony stood as tense as a tiger and twice as unable to speak. He just seemed to breathe in and out and stare at me.

  “What are you doing here?” he finally managed.

  “Shouldn’t I be asking you that? This is my house.” The phone continued to ring. I opened it, said, “I’m okay, it’s just Tony,” and closed it. I looked at Tony again. “Would you please put that hammer down?” I asked.

  Paul hovered to one side, a hand on his hip, looking confused. Which made him as much like the rest of us as he’d ever be again.

  Tony stared at me, then looked at the hammer, then turned back to stare at me. He shook his head and we both started laughing.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I asked him when we both had exhausted ourselves and sat on the floor. “Why are you here, and how come you had the lights turned off?”

  “I had the new plaster mold to try on the wall,” Tony explained, and pointed toward the hallway where the hole in the wall seemed just as large as ever. “We were just going to bring it in.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I asked, and then I realized. “Come on out, Jeannie,” I called.

  The basement door opened, but instead of my best friend, Ned Barnes walked in. “Who’s Jeannie?” he asked. He looked over at Tony. “The lights worked fine, no sparks,” he said.

  I stood up and Tony followed suit. “So, tell me again how come the lights were out?” I asked him. I noticed Paul, above the fireplace in the living room about fifteen feet away. He was watching Ned with what appeared to be concern—or distrust—on his face. “I don’t feel very secure,” I said in Paul’s direction.

  Tony shook his head. “I know you’re squeamish about electricity, so I figured I’d check your service. I was surprised you had circuit breakers, and not fuses, in a house this old. We tripped a circuit breaker to see how the service rebooted.”

  “I had the electrical service replaced two weeks ago,” I told Tony, “the same time the super-sized water heater was installed, so it’s a brand-new . . . Hang on, what the hell are we talking about? Why are you two here together?”

  “I was driving by and thought I’d get the rest of my house tour, and I found Tony outside,” Ned told me.

  I looked over at Paul without saying anything to confirm. Paul shrugged a shoulder.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Where did either of you park? I’d have recognized Tony’s truck, and
Ned, I never forget a car I hit.”

  “We both parked around back,” Tony explained, shaking his head to emphasize how obvious that should have been to me. “It’s easier to unload the truck backed up against the kitchen door than to walk a heavy piece of plaster up the front stairs.”

  Oh.

  “From the outside, it looked like there were burglars,” I said, looking meaningfully at Paul. “Someone would have seen something.”

  Paul scowled. “It’s dark for ghosts, too,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you to leave a light on at night.”

  I exhaled audibly. “All right, where’s this slab of plaster I’ve been hearing so much about?”

  “In the truck,” Tony answered. “I’ll get it.”

  “We’ll get it,” Ned chimed in. “I’ll bet it’s heavy.”

  “All right, boys,” I told them. “Everybody gets to show off his muscles. Let’s go.”

  We started toward the kitchen door with Ned and Tony (mostly Tony) leading the way. But behind me, quietly, I heard Paul gasp. “Alison!”

  I stopped and turned back, and I saw what had made Paul stare. I gasped, too.

  On the near kitchen wall, directly across from the back door, was a one-dollar bill. And written on it in thick black marker was: “YOU HAVE THREE DAYS.”

  The dollar was affixed to the wall with a very sharp-looking knife. Which had been plunged right through the middle of George Washington’s face.

  Thirty-six

  “Yep, that looks like a definite threat to me.” Detective Anita McElone, who apparently handled every police call in Harbor Haven, studied the dollar-bill manifesto with what appeared to be a combination of interest and admiration on her face. “Somebody stuck that to your wall real hard, too. Very strong, I’d say, someone who could do real damage.” McElone had a point, and so did the knife that cleaved the message to my wall.

  “Don’t try to make me feel better, Detective,” I said. “Give it to me straight.”

  I’d called the police after consulting with Tony and Ned, who had given up on retrieving the plaster patch when they heard my yelps, and somewhat one-sidedly with Paul and Maxie. But after letting Mom and Melissa back into the house, it was decided that the police had to be alerted.

  For the record, I was outvoted six (two dead) to one.

  I hadn’t felt it was worth calling the police because I found the message was clear: Somebody wanted that George Washington deed in three days, or I was going to suffer the same fate as the previous residents of my house. Otherwise, why stick a dollar bill to my wall with a nasty message?

  Maxie and Paul were both watching, Maxie half exposed through the overhead cabinets I’d only recently reinstalled, and Paul pretending to sit on a radiator across the room, never taking his eyes off Detective McElone.

  “You sure this isn’t just someone trying to get the early inside track on that ‘first dollar you earned here’ sweep-stakes?” she asked me.

  “You’re a riot, Detective,” I said. “Are you taking this act on the road?”

  “I was just trying to lighten the mood,” McElone said.

  “Like when you arrested me just for the sport of leaving me on the road by myself?”

  McElone, surprised, gave me a sharp look,. “You haven’t figured that one out?” she asked. “Wow, you really aren’t that bright after all, are you?”

  Paul leaned forward.

  “No,” I told the detective. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  McElone shook her head. “I think you can get it on your own,” she said. “Now, this one.” She pointed to the impaled dollar bill. “This one is a little trickier. You have three days for what?”

  “Apparently, I have three days to find a deed that George Washington signed for this property in the seventeen hundreds and, presumably, to give it to whoever stabbed my wall,” I told her. “You hadn’t figured that one out? I guess you’re really not all that bright, are you?”

  Strangely, McElone did not accept that as an answer, so I told her about Ned’s research into the Washington deed and why it now seemed someone thought I had it, or that I could get it, and that it was in some way rightfully theirs.

  She didn’t interrupt me once during this recitation, but when it was over, the detective looked me over and said, “I should bring you in on suspicion of possession.”

  “But I don’t have the deed.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the deed. That’s the shakiest reasoning I’ve ever heard.”

  She took another photograph of the object stuck so nastily to my freshly painted wall, and then reached up with her gloved hand and pulled it out carefully, trying very hard not to exert too much force on the knife handle. Once out of the wall, the whole objet d’art was dropped into a plastic evidence bag.

  “What do you think?” I asked her.

  “I think you’re hiding something,” McElone said. “But I can’t figure out what.”

  I glanced at the ghosts, but said, “What do you think about the knife in my wall?”

  “I’d take the timetable seriously, at least,” she answered after a moment’s reflection. “Someone is clearly upset with you over something and wants to make sure you’re aware of it.”

  “I’m aware of it,” I assured her.

  “I have no doubt. I’m not a hundred percent sure I believe that whole cockamamie story about George Washington, though.”

  “The knife was put through a one-dollar bill,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, because usually when you’re doing something like that, you like to use a fifty,” McElone retorted. “They hold up so much better under the magic marker.”

  “You don’t think it’s significant that the knife was put right through Washington’s face?”

  She made an eh face and said, “Not when the treasury prints over sixteen million of those suckers every single day. Now, for the time being, I wonder if there isn’t someplace you can find to stay for the next three days.”

  “Why? That’s the second time you’ve told me to stay out of my own house.”

  “Yeah, and look how well you listened the first time.” I’d been hoping she wouldn’t bring that up. “Isn’t it enough that someone is threatening you?”

  Paul shook his head no.

  “The threat doesn’t say they’re coming to get me in the house,” I reasoned lamely. “They could come after me at my mother’s, or at my friends’, or when I’m picking Melissa up from school.” Then I remembered a detail I’d forgotten to tell Paul, and figured McElone might as well hear it, too. “By the way, Mayor Bostero said something strange when she was here. She made a comment about the upstairs powder room.”

  “She didn’t like the wallpaper?” McElone asked. “Hardly criminal.”

  “It would be criminal to put wallpaper up there,” Maxie muttered.

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “She commented on how it wasn’t there earlier, but she’s never been inside here before. How could she know that?”

  “Just because she hasn’t been here since you owned the house doesn’t mean that she’s never been here at all,” McElone answered. “She could have visited when Malone or the Prestons owned the place, or she could have come over to look at it with the Realtor, Terry Wright. You’re reaching.” But Paul looked impressed, and stroked his jawline in thought, while Maxie shook her head to indicate that the mayor hadn’t come over when she’d owned the place.

  “Even if she dropped by to visit her pals the Prestons, would she have gone up to their bedroom?” I asked.

  “I still think you should leave for a few days,” McElone went on, ignoring me. “I want to put an officer in here to act as bait, and I can’t do that if you’re here.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said, echoing what Paul was telling me. “There’s no point in having someone here if the bad guys are trailing me somewhere else.”

  “All right, I’ll say it,” McElone grunted, looking more embarrassed than annoyed. “This house creeps me out
.”

  I felt my lips withdraw into my mouth, and I bit down on them. I think I was trying to suppress a laugh, but it’s also possible I was just stunned. “What?” I finally croaked out.

  “You heard me,” the detective said. “I get a weird vibe off of this place, and I’ve heard stories around town about ghosts.”

  Involuntarily, I turned my head to look at Paul. Maxie, who had turned on her side and was floating like Cleopatra on a barge, spat out a laugh, and I think McElone shuddered when it happened. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  “Hear what?” I felt like such a jerk, but what was I going to do—introduce everyone around? Oh, and here are my two friends: They’re dead, and you can’t see them. That would have gone over big.

  “I thought I heard a laugh, from far away,” McElone said. Her eyes looked around the room, as if she were waiting for skeletons to stampede her or for the walls to start dripping blood.

  “Must be somebody’s television,” I attempted.

  McElone shook her head. “Not that laugh,” she said.

  “Okay, so let me get this straight—you’re creeped out by the house, so I should stay away?”

  Anita McElone grimaced and looked away. “Fine,” she said. “Don’t leave. But I’m not coming here again unless your body is found and they need me to say, ‘I told you so,’ as they cart you away.”

  Maxie reached her hand out and the lapel on McElone’s jacket flapped. All the color drained from the detective’s face and she inhaled quickly.

  “You can reach me at the station,” she said, and was out the door before I could reply.

  I turned toward Maxie and put my hands on my hips.

  “Oh, like you wouldn’t have done it if you could,” Maxie said.

  She had me there.

  Thirty-seven

  Once again, my team of “experts” felt that I should high-tail it out of the house and go hide somewhere. Tony and Jeannie offered their home, but I declined. My mother suggested Melissa and I stay with her for the duration, but I wasn’t about to stop work on the house now, and staying with Mom would only make me suicidal, which would defeat the original purpose.