I thought about asking Ned, but it would have been odd to get a guy you’ve only been out with twice involved in such a conversation, and besides, he’d probably want to come stay in the house with us, if only to experience its historical legacy up close for a longer period of time. It’s disconcerting to date a man more interested in your house’s architecture than your own.
Only Melissa agreed we should stay in the house, on the flimsy reasoning that “Maxie and Paul won’t let anything happen to us.” Melissa seemed somewhat oblivious to the fact that our two roommates were deceased, but I welcomed her agreement with my decision. We stayed.
The next afternoon, Maxie took off for points unknown (but obviously nearby—maybe the attic), and Paul watched me put finishing touches on the paint job in the kitchen.
“Were you a good private investigator?” I asked Paul as he watched from the stove (where he was seated).
“I only had my license for about six months before . . . this happened,” he replied after a moment. “I never really got a chance to find out.”
“So that’s why you’re so intent on finding out who did this,” I speculated out loud.
Paul smiled his enigmatic smile, the one that made him look like a more muscular Clive Owen. “Well, that’s part of it,” he answered. “But the fact is, getting killed is sort of a large offense. It tends to bring out the vengeful side of a guy.”
I nodded. “McElone seemed to think I should know why she let me go right after she arrested me. You’re the detective. What’s your theory?”
He seemed to be grateful for the change of subject. “Think about it, Alison,” he said. “What was going on when she arrested you?”
I stopped detailing and stood on the ladder, thinking. “Mayor Bridget Bostero—whom I’ve decided is an idiot, by the way—and the Prestons had invited themselves in for a tour, and they were trying to humiliate me by spending most of their time looking at the great big hole in my hallway wall.”
“And that’s when the doorbell rang?”
I nodded. “Yes. I was trying to figure out what was so fascinating about the break in the plaster when McElone showed up and carted me off.”
“So,” Paul said, leading me as any good teacher would, “when you opened the door, what did Detective McElone see?”
“Me, standing there with a smear of something on my forehead, and a group of people mocking my one failure amid a sea of jobs done well.”
Paul grinned with one half of his mouth and shook his head. “You have some serious self-esteem issues, you know that? Think of it from the detective’s point of view. What did she expect to see when the door opened?”
“Me, I guess.”
“And what did she see instead?”
I pursed my lips. “Me, with everyone else behind me, looking into a hole in the wall.”
“Good. Now, I was there too, so I have my own perspective. But I’ll ask you what you saw. From that first second when you opened the door until she said you were under arrest, did Detective McElone’s expression change?”
Her expression? “I don’t know. It was forever ago.”
“It was yesterday.”
“Fine. Yeah, I guess her expression changed. She looked mad.”
“And that’s when she decided to arrest you.”
“You don’t think she came here to do that?” I asked.
“It’s not what I think; it’s what you saw,” Paul said. He could be annoying that way.
I stopped, more to make a show of thinking than to think. But dammit, it worked. “She saw the mayor and the Prestons behind me. And she didn’t expect to see them. So she arrested me on the spot. Why?”
“Why do you think?” Paul was smiling in the way a good teacher smiles at a pupil who’s figuring out multiplication for the first time. I felt like an idiot.
“She wanted to get me out of the house. She wanted to get me away from them.” That was the only way it made sense, but it didn’t make sense. Why would Detective McElone care if Mayor Bostero and the Prestons were in the house? Why not just tell me whatever she wanted to tell me and leave? “Do you think she considers them, or at least one of them, suspects in your killing?” I asked Paul.
He grinned. “By George,” he said with an exaggerated British accent. “I think she’s got it.” He picked a spoon up off the table and put it in his mouth, pretending it was a pipe.
I went back to painting, but I’ll admit I was pleased at the compliment. “You’re doing much better at picking things up,” I said, referring to the spoon.
“Thank you, but Maxie is still miles ahead of me.”
“Yeah, but at least you’re nicer to me than she is,” I said.
Paul shook his head. “Maxie’s jealous of you. You have everything she wanted. And I can tell you from experience: Being dead is a very difficult thing to adjust to. I think we’re both still adjusting.”
I got back up on the ladder to reach behind the sink. “What do you mean, I have everything she wanted?”
“Well, the house of course, but mostly Melissa.”
I turned my head too quickly, and almost made a mark on the wall where I didn’t want one. I caught myself just in time. “Maxie wants Melissa?”
“That’s not what I mean. I think she always wanted to have a child, thought she’d have had plenty of time for that, and look what happened. And she does truly adore your daughter,” Paul said.
“So, great. If the killer gets me, we can all haunt the house together and raise Liss like the dead parents every child wishes for.”
“We need to mobilize about that,” Paul said. “You only have two days left.”
“The warning said three.”
“That was yesterday.” A ray of sunshine, this ghost.
“Swell. What are we going to do?” I had been trying hard not to think about my deadline, and the way that word sounded so much more literal than it ever had before.
“Well, the good thing about having a time limit is we can assume nothing will happen today or tomorrow. So first thing, Maxie and I need to step up the search for this Washington document. We can move about more easily and look into places you can’t. If all else fails, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have the actual item in your possession when the time comes.” Paul was in full private investigator mode now.
“What should I be doing?” Hey, he was the professional. More than me, anyway.
“Redouble your efforts. Detective work is about perseverance. Start with Phyllis; see if she knows anything new. And get back on the trail of that book Kerin Murphy took from Terry Wright’s office.”
I got down off the ladder and stood in the center of the room. The room was truly looking wonderful—understated, homey without being hokey, and subtle without being invisible. “I hate it when Maxie’s right,” I said.
From under the floor, without the sign of a physical presence, came the last voice I wanted to hear at that moment. “The feeling’s mutual,” Maxie said.
Thirty-eight
Phyllis Coates had her New Balance shoes up on her desk when I walked in for a cup of coffee and an exchange of information. Since I had no information Phyllis hadn’t heard, the exchange was somewhat one-sided.
Melissa, now insistent on being at every meeting with Phyllis (the two had bonded over hot chocolate), listened to what I said, even the part about the dollar knifed to my wall, without comment. But she had a pencil behind her ear, like Phyllis, and was examining the way the editor sat back in her chair.
Phyllis’s “friend” at the medical examiner’s office had called again, apparently. “They reexamined the tissue samples they took at the time, and I hear the coroner is going to issue a report on the two ‘suicides’ tomorrow. They figured out how the poison was administered.”
“Really!” Paul would be transparent with envy when he found out I’d hear first. “How did they do it?”
“Judging by the contents of their stomachs and the way the poison—the acetone—had circulated throu
gh their systems, the best guess is it had been taken in a glass or two of red wine each. Probably about forty-five minutes to an hour before they died.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. But Melissa is quicker than I am. “So whoever did it was probably at Café Linguine when Paul and Maxie went there after the planning board meeting,” she said.
“You get the blue ribbon, kid,” Phyllis said. “So the killer has to be someone who was at the restaurant, and probably at the meeting before that, too.”
Melissa beamed at the compliment. She sipped her hot chocolate (which, unlike Phyllis’s, was not spiked with rum) and grinned.
“Phyllis,” I said carefully, “Mayor Bostero owns part of Café Linguine. She even might have been at the bar or in the kitchen that night.”
“I know, honey,” Phyllis said. “But the interviews the cops had with the bartender and the waitstaff didn’t mention her doing anything except sitting at the table with the planning board and ordering shrimp.”
“I’m going to have to tell Paul,” I said to myself.
“What was that?” Phyllis asked, confused.
I caught myself. “I said, ‘If that don’t beat all,’ ” I told her.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
I tore Melissa away after three cups of cocoa and as many trips to the bathroom and, thanking Phyllis, headed out on our most serious errand of the day. Halloween House of Horrors, a specialty store that had set up shop temporarily on Route 35, was packed to the gills, which wasn’t surprising, seeing as how Halloween was all of a day and a half away. Melissa, in an uncharacteristically fatalistic mood, was dragging her feet next to me, and not crazy about taking my hand.
“People will see us,” she whined. “I’m not a baby.”
“You’re my baby,” I told her, which I’m sure was exactly what she wanted to hear. “And I’m not letting you get swept up in a human tide and taken from me forever.”
“I have a cell phone,” she pointed out in her best “my mom’s an idiot” voice. Honestly, it was a miracle I could dress myself without her help in the morning, I was so stupid.
“I’m holding your hand. Deal with it.”
Melissa put on a grump face and said nothing, but didn’t try to yank her hand out of mine, which I counted as a minor victory. Our mission for the day: Find a pair of pointed ears, preferably not already attached to another person. If my daughter wanted to be a blue-shirted, bowl-hair-cutted, eyebrow-raising (she wanted me to shave them halfway to make them more pointed, but that wasn’t going to happen) male Vulcan for Halloween, so it would be. Everything was in place but those freakin’ ears.
The sales desk was packed seven deep, so asking for help from someone behind the counter was a lost cause. And since there was no large sign with red twenty-two-inch letters reading “Pointed Ears,” I’d have to do some investigative work on my own. If only Paul were here.
“Why don’t you want to be a ghost for Halloween?” I asked my daughter. “That’s easy.”
She looked at me with pity. “Ghosts look just like everybody else,” she said. Oh yeah, I’d forgotten. She was actually friends with ghosts. The whole sheet-over-the-head thing would probably be considered a form of discrimination, or an unbearable stereotype, to my fair-minded daughter.
We hadn’t walked very far down the aisle (which seemed to be filled with fake bloody body parts, and try saying that three times fast) when I heard a voice from behind me. “Alison! Alison Kerby!”
I turned, and there stood Kerin Murphy. I looked down at Melissa, who was considering a rubber hand with a rubber knife through it and rubber blood gushing from the rubber wound. It was charming, and only seventeen ninety-five. Obviously, my daughter wasn’t going to be much help.
Kerin was wearing the most casual of high-end clothes, not exactly a jogging suit but something that clearly could be used during exercise, yet had cost as much as my television. She had no doubt just arrived on her way home from the fitness center at Buckingham Palace.
“Kerin!” I said. “So you were late thinking about Halloween too, huh?” At least I could wallow in the idea that someone else was as negligent a parent as I was.
“Oh no.” Kerin waved a hand at that notion. She dropped no hint that we’d both been in the room with Terry Wright’s corpse. “I’m here dropping off my oldest. Syndee is working here part-time as part of a work-study program at the middle school.” No doubt Syndee was also volunteering at a homeless shelter on weekends and staying up nights knitting nuclear bomb shields for the Middle East. “What about you?”
“We’re just putting the finishing touches on a costume we’re donating to a shelter for gifted children,” I said. Melissa’s face shot up toward mine with an absolutely appalled expression on it. “Then we’re going to Staples to pick up an appointment book.” Melissa knew better than to say anything, but her face was asking if I’d lost my mind.
“Well, maybe I can get Syndee to help you,” Kerin offered. She didn’t so much as blink.
“Oh no, we’re just fine.”
Melissa started scanning the crowd, no doubt looking for a better mother she could adopt.
“Good,” Kerin said, and for a golden moment, I thought she was going to walk away, but she stopped and spoke to me in a confidential tone. “Oh, by the way, Alison,” she hissed. “I know your secret.”
It occurred to me to say that I knew hers, too, but I played it safe. “Really? You’d better not tell me, or it won’t be a secret anymore.”
“I know about the ghosts,” Kerin went on, oblivious to my incredibly witty remark.
I froze. Maybe she meant something other than what I thought. “Ghosts?” I said.
“Sure. The girls have been talking about it for weeks. I hear you have two ghosts living in your house.” Kerin smiled the most annoying smile I’d seen since The Swine had taken the highway to the Golden State.
I reflexively looked down at Melissa, who was suddenly very interested in studying her shoes.
“Girls like to tell stories,” I said, staring at my daughter. “You know how it is.”
“Of course,” Kerin said. Then she looked down at Melissa and said, “Did you make up the ghosts, sweetie?” When I was Melissa’s age, I would have decked someone who talked like that to me, but my daughter is much more evolved, and doesn’t have the same reach with her left.
“No,” Melissa said, staring straight into Kerin’s eyes. “Maxie and Paul are real.”
Nice covering, Liss.
“That’s so adorable!” Kerin gushed. “I wish Marlee had such a vivid imagination.”
“It’s not imagination,” Melissa countered, voice as calm as a mid-May breeze. “They died in our house, and now they can’t leave. They’re my friends.”
Kerin’s smile faded a little bit. “But you have some real friends, don’t you, sweetie?”
“Her name’s Melissa,” I reminded Kerin. “And yes, she has living, breathing friends as well.” What the hell, I thought. My business was doomed from the start, anyway. I might as well shovel dirt on its grave. Seemed appropriate, somehow.
“As well?” Kerin was quick enough to pick up on that.
“Yes. In addition to Paul and Maxie, the ghosts, Melissa also likes to play with living people. So on Thursday, we’ll be skipping the SafeOWeen to have some real fun. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to find some pointed ears.”
We walked off, and Melissa actually reached out and took my hand.
Thirty-nine
The ears were sold out.
After another two stores with no luck, I followed Maxie’s suggestion (to my irritation) and we ended up buying some Silly Putty at a Toys “R” Us in the hopes that we could figure out a way to attach it to Melissa’s actual ears and fashion it into the proper configuration. That was the plan, anyway.
But I wasn’t thinking about it yet because Halloween was still two nights away. At the moment, I was thinking about how Ned Barnes was a very charming man who was looking at me
with a good deal of warmth, a real asset in the late-October chill as we strolled down the boardwalk in Point Pleasant, one town over from Harbor Haven.
“Whose idea was this, anyway?” I asked him, snuggling into my very alluring puffy down vest. Could I dress to entice a guy, or what?
“Yours,” Ned answered. “I had suggested a movie. In a nice warm theater.”
“Fine. Lord your sanity over me.” It was hard to remind myself that Phyllis had mentioned Ned being interested in the Washington deed long before I bought the house.
Before Ned and I left, Paul had informed me that the “very thorough” search he and Maxie (mostly Paul) had made of the house had turned up no documents emblazoned with George Washington’s John Hancock. “It’s entirely possible the whole story is just a myth,” he’d said.
“But then you and Maxie . . .” I hadn’t thought before speaking.
“Yes. If we’re right about the killer being after the deed, we’d have died for nothing.” Paul’s face had been so unspeakably sad and angry that I’d left him alone, mostly because he’d asked me to do so.
Now, on the boardwalk, Ned grinned at me, which was altogether unfair, and shook his head. “I’ll never claim to be the sanest guy in the room,” he said. “I gave up copper mining to teach history to nine-year-olds.”
“Yeah, who wouldn’t pine for the romantic life of the copper miner?”
He put his arm around me, ostensibly because I looked cold, and I didn’t do anything to dissuade him of that notion. Yet while I was reasonably warm in my down vest, I noticed that Ned himself wore nothing but a thin blue denim jacket, which would have set off his eyes if we hadn’t been mostly in the dark.
“I’ve decided not to let you out of my sight until Friday,” Ned told me. “This deadline you’ve been given is not something to take lightly.”
Night of the Living Deed Page 21
