“Princess Jasmine is real!” she insisted, and crossed her arms with great conviction.
“You’re right, my mistake,” I agreed. “But the ghost stories are just . . .”
And that was when Maxie appeared out of the floor, reached for “Captain Kirk’s” communicator (made out of a painted-over McDonald’s apple pie box) and made it “fly” across the room. She looked at me, sneered, and stuck out her tongue.
The little girl in the Kirk outfit yelled, “Hey—!” But then she stopped and realized what had happened, and her mouth dropped open.
“A ghost,” said the Uhura girl.
“No, no,” I told them. “This is just a big, drafty house, and sometimes the wind . . .”
“All the windows and doors are closed,” Kerin said. Her smile was just a little evil. “There’s no draft in here.” I decided there and then to destroy her.
But Maxie wasn’t finished getting her revenge. She pushed the hanging overhead light in the living room and made it sway. Then she made the communicator hover in front of Captain Kirk until the little girl understood she could take it back. And Maxie topped it off by picking up Melissa and carrying her down the stairs, then placing her gently on the floor. Melissa looked up and nodded at her.
“Thanks, Maxie,” she said.
Maxie looked in my direction. “No problem, Melissa,” she said. “I’ll always be your friend.”
“You can see them!” Wendy said to Liss. “You know their names!”
“I told you,” Melissa said, very matter-of-factly.
Kerin stared at me. “There really is no explanation, is there?” she said in a cold, calculated tone.
I can’t justify it. Maybe the pressures of the past few weeks just exploded out of me all at once. Maybe it was the imminent threat that I’d be deprived of my life in six hours or less. Maybe it was the scared expression on the faces of those mothers and the delighted ones on the faces of their children.
“Sure there is,” I said loudly. “Yes, there really are ghosts in this house. Melissa and I can see them. We can talk to them. Why can’t you?”
“Oh, there are not,” one of the other moms protested. “You’re just playing a Halloween trick on us.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. Suddenly, I felt like there was nothing left to lose—let the guesthouse idea go down the tubes. Let the rest of the town think I was insane or a “Wiccan Gone Wild.” Let the fourth grade think my daughter was weird. “They’re real ghosts. Real dead people, still existing in this house, and they can never leave. Go ahead, tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! The place is haunted, I tell you, haunted!”
Paul, attracted by the noise, floated into the front hallway and looked at the amassed children and parents, aghast. “What are you doing, Alison?” he asked.
“I’m telling the truth!” I shouted, and then I pointed at the mothers, who stood stock-still and widened their eyes to the size of Oreo cookies. “They all need to know, in case their kids want to play here! There are ghosts here, and they’re not the least bit dangerous!”
Maxie picked up the little girl dressed as Lieutenant Sulu and swirled her around the room, something the girl (I think her name was Soyong) could not possibly have enjoyed more. She squealed with delight and clapped her hands when put back down.
Her mother, thankfully, was not present, but Kerin grabbed “Sulu” by the shoulders protectively, once she was back on solid ground.
“Any questions?” I asked.
The girls applauded mightily, and I noticed Melissa among the most arduous clappers. One of the mothers backed out the door.
As the kids each grabbed a mini Crunch bar and the remaining mom stood absolutely motionless, I pulled Kerin to one side. “I know you’re sleeping with Adam Morris,” I said. Mentally, I thanked Bianca for my newfound power: Kerin’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “If you don’t want that information in the hands of someone who’ll use it”—why use Jeannie’s name?—“you’ll skip SafeOWeen and watch my daughter like a hawk door-to-door all evening, is that clear? Don’t say anything, just walk away.”
Kerin just walked away. Quivering.
Chattering with excitement, the girls headed out to an evening of sugar-fueled avarice. The mothers huddled together on the way out, and I knew that there was no chance I’d ever be elected PTSO president in my lifetime. If I had one.
I knelt down by Melissa before she turned. “You look wonderful, sweetie,” I told her, and she gave me a hug. I made sure she took her cell phone with her, and told her to call in at half-hour intervals. I also reminded her of the eight-thirty curfew, and told her that under the circumstances, it was even more unbreakable than it would have been otherwise.
Melissa didn’t argue. She was gone far too soon for my liking.
After all, it might have been a last hug.
Forty-seven
Tony got back to the house with Indian food just as the sun was setting, but I wasn’t eating. Nothing had happened, and while I should have thought that was a good thing, it just made me feel that a bad end to the evening was coming closer and closer.
Occasionally, we’d get some business from trick-or-treaters, and the ones Melissa’s age (and some younger) seemed to crane their necks to get a good look inside the house. Obviously, the story of the earlier part of the evening was getting around town. Some of the kids even forgot to ask for candy.
One of them yelled, “Hey, ghosts!” when he came in, but was not rewarded with a reaction. But once he turned his head, his friends could see the plastic pumpkin holding the candy fly around the room. When they shouted, he turned back, and the pumpkin was back on the chair by the door.
Odd.
Mom called at about seven-thirty, saying she wasn’t a bit worried, but wouldn’t be coming tonight because she had “business to take care of.” I was going to ask, but what would have been the point?
Melissa remembered to call after the first half hour, and I waited fifteen minutes after the second to call her. She was fine. I was . . . I’m not sure what I was. Nervous? Annoyed? Frustrated?
Just before eight, the doorbell rang again, and I reached for the latest bag, this one holding tiny 3 Musketeers bars (let other people’s mothers worry about cavities). But I didn’t need them, because it was Ned Barnes who showed up at the door, and he was carrying ingestible items from Dunkin’ Donuts.
What was weird was that when I opened the door to let him in, there were maybe twenty kids, ranging from eight to sixteen or so, standing a few yards from the house.
Just staring.
They weren’t coming to ask for candy. They weren’t playing tricks. No toilet paper or eggs were visible.
They were just staring. I hustled Ned into the house and shut the door quickly.
“I have coffee and I have Munchkins and muffins,” he announced. “Let’s get this party started!”
Everybody in the house, dead and alive, looked at him as if he were truly crazy.
“All right, I was trying,” Ned said. “I hoped I could distract you.” I gestured for him to join us at the collapsible picnic table I’d been using as a tool table until this afternoon. He sat down opposite Tony, and Paul, hovering toward the ceiling behind him, seemed to scrutinize him especially carefully.
We ate—well, they ate—silently for a while. I put food on my plate, and moved it around with a fork for a while. Nobody ate anything Ned had brought. Including Ned.
“Have you heard . . . Has there been . . . ?” Ned couldn’t decide how to start.
“No contact yet,” I said. “No phone call, no e-mail. I’ve been checking.” I pointed to the laptop sitting on a radiator across the room.
“How about . . . ?” His eyes lit up.
“No, we haven’t found the deed.” I scowled.
“You won’t let us look in the most likely spot,” Paul said. Of course, no one here but me heard him, and I didn’t feel it necessary to relay that message.
But for some reason, that did
it. I dropped my fork, which wasn’t doing me much good anyway, and stood up. Everyone in the room stared at me with a different brand of concern on each face.
“I’ve had it,” I said. “I don’t believe anyone’s coming after me. No one can actually expect that I’ve found something that no one else has been able to locate for more than a hundred years. Killing me just for not finding it won’t do anyone any good. It would just expose what’s been done before. So I’m calling it quits. I’m not worrying about it anymore. There’s nothing anyone can do that can scare me now.” I started to reach for a doughnut, just to be brazen.
And just as Ned stood up and moved toward me, my phone began to ring.
“You’ve had your time,” the muffled voice from before hissed. “You need to bring the deed to McArver Cemetery now.”
“I don’t have it,” I said with as challenging a tone as I could muster. “I never found it. I don’t have a clue where it could be. So move on to your next scam, my friend. You’ll get nothing out of me.”
“Don’t roll it up or damage it,” the voice went on, not acknowledging that I’d spoken. “Bring it in exactly the state you found it.”
“I didn’t find it. You’re operating on a mistaken assumption. You’re being an idiot.”
Paul’s face animated. He’d caught something. I put the cell phone on speaker so he—and everyone else—could hear.
“I’m not tearing my house apart anymore,” I told the voice, just to keep it talking so Paul could hear more. “I’ve done enough damage. I need this house.”
The voice went on without a direct reply. “It’s not raining, so there’s no need for plastic sheeting, but protect the document from the wind. No damage must come to it, or you will be extremely sorry.”
“What are you going to do, poison me through the phone?” I asked. “I’m not coming.”
“You are,” the voice said, still without enough inflection to determine the gender of the speaker. “And you’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“I had until midnight. It’s only eight-fifteen.” I don’t know why, but I figured that any disagreement I could muster was worthwhile at this point. After all this anonymous wiseass had put me through, the least I could do was be an irritant.
“Yes, and wasn’t your daughter supposed to be back by eight-thirty?”
My blood temperature dropped 20 degrees. “Who are you?” I croaked.
“She looks very cute in her Star Trek costume,” the voice said. “But I wouldn’t have done the ears with Silly Putty; it wilts. There are latex options that would offer better results. Get the deed to me in thirty minutes, Alison. McArver Cemetery. Come alone. Don’t dare call the police, and don’t be late.” And the phone disconnected.
Forty-eight
The first thing I did was call Detective McElone (what am I, an idiot?), who assured me she’d be discreet in staking out the cemetery, but would have plenty of backup. Paul said that it didn’t matter that the voice had told me not to call the cops; it was the smart move to make.
The second thing I did was call Melissa’s cell phone, and got no answer. Trying to control my trembling, I dialed Kerin Murphy’s cell phone number, which I’d insisted upon before she took my daughter so much as down the driveway: It, too, went straight to voice mail. I resolved to murder Kerin as soon as possible, but first, I decided to go into the basement and get the sledgehammer.
Tony, Ned and Jeannie did the same. There were enough hammers to go around. “Every wall,” I said. “No exceptions until we find it.”
“There are too many walls,” Tony said. “We don’t have time.”
“Get anything that’ll make a hole,” I instructed. Then I ran to the front door and opened it wide.
“Who wants to help the ghosts trash the house?” I yelled.
At least a half dozen kids made war whoops and joined in. Each was issued an implement of destruction and put to work.
It doesn’t take long to make a hole in a plaster wall when you don’t care how much damage you’re doing. Each time, we’d get just enough open to shine a flashlight inside. We worked in teams: As soon as a ghost and a light could fit inside, the wall was tested. Paul and Maxie were relatively discreet—it was easy to be in that crowd—and if Jeannie or Ned noticed things flying around or questions being asked to the ceiling, they just accepted it and moved on.
By the time we were done decimating the first floor, I had only twenty minutes left, and we had no deed of any kind, signed by any official of any municipality in any era. I had to leave in ten minutes to ensure an on-time arrival, and we had the whole second floor to do.
The thundering hordes went upstairs and I took in the damage we’d done. There would be no repairs now; I’d just have to take down the walls, all of them, and put up wallboard. It would take weeks, it wouldn’t look as good, and it would make my house that much less competitive in the accommodations market.
I couldn’t have cared less.
I heard the pounding on the walls from upstairs, and I hefted my sledgehammer to get upstairs and help. And then for some reason I looked across the living room and saw it, each wall demolished between studs, in a way I’d never seen it before.
The window seat. With the pressed-metal-pattern grill. Could it be?
What the hell. I had to find that deed.
I got to the window seat as quickly as I could while dragging a five-pound sledgehammer, raised it, then remembered there was a perfectly workable hinge on the top. I opened the window seat.
Nothing.
But reaching in, it seemed the bottom panel of the seat was too high. There was room underneath. A false bottom.
Without time to be dainty, I smacked the base of the window seat with the hammer, and it buckled. And when I cleared the debris away, sure enough, there it was.
A heavy wooden box.
“Paul!” I screamed. Maxie appeared first, before I’d even gotten the whole name out of my mouth. She’d looked absolutely stricken when it appeared Melissa was in danger, and now she was practically vibrating.
“Where?” she shouted, and I pointed at the window seat. She swooped in, and came out holding the box.
Paul showed up seconds behind her, and I could hear footsteps on the staircase behind me. Ned, seeing a wooden box floating in the air by itself, made a strange sound in his throat. There were still screams and pounding from the kids upstairs.
“Open it,” Paul said.
I grabbed the box out of Maxie’s hands and put it on the floor. It certainly looked old enough—it was ornate and carved, with a symbol of an eagle on the top—and it was fairly heavy, but mostly from the weight of the box itself. Ned covered the distance across the room in perhaps a second, and was breathing heavily when he reached my side. He reached for the box.
“We don’t have time to be in awe now,” I said. “This is Melissa’s life.”
I opened the lid just enough to know we’d found what we’d been looking for. I nodded at Paul.
“Get on the Ghosternet,” I told him. “See if anybody has seen Melissa, and if she’s okay.”
“Get on the what?” Ned asked.
Jeannie showed up behind him. “Humor her,” she said. “She thinks Casper the Friendly Ghost lives here.”
Ned didn’t say anything, and seemed to be deciding whether to stare at me or Jeannie. He settled on me.
“I’ll get Maxie to text to Tony on Jeannie’s phone if there’s news,” Paul answered.
“How are you going to get . . .”
Paul pointed to Jeannie’s cell phone. “She leaves it lying around,” he said.
“I’ll drive,” Tony said.
“I can . . .” Ned began.
“Stay here,” I told him. “Get them to stop tearing my house up. And if you don’t hear from me in an hour . . .”
“I will,” he said.
I stood up. As I rushed for the door with Tony leading the way, Paul shouted my name, and I turned.
“I know who it
is,” he said.
“I can back you up,” Tony said.
We were a minute or two away from the cemetery, and not a word had been spoken since we’d gotten into the truck. I’d been examining the deed, a document not quite so grand as the Declaration of Independence, but a hell of a lot fancier than a real estate contract looks today. It would have been easy to get lost in the beauty of the document, but I was, let’s say preoccupied, so just the sound of his voice made me jump a little. I caught my breath and said, “What do you mean, back me up?”
“I can be behind you. Be ready in case they try something. I have the gun with me.”
That didn’t make me feel even a little safer. “The voice said to come alone,” I reminded him. “I’m not taking any chances on this.”
“You called the cops.”
“Yeah, because they’re the cops. If one of the bad guys sees you loitering around a cemetery with no clear purpose, they’ll know I brought you, and Melissa’s life could be in danger. For that matter, if a police sniper sees you, your life will be in danger. Thanks, Tony, but no.”
“They won’t know I’m with you,” he persisted. “I can be a trick-or-treater.”
I would have laughed if my stomach hadn’t been in knots. “Dressed as a contractor in his mid-thirties?” I asked.
“I have a drop cloth in the back. I can put it over my head and be a ghost.”
“You’d be a ghost with paint spots all over it. Who goes out on Halloween as a Jackson Pollock ghost? Tony, thanks, really. But no. Drop me off and stick around so you can come if I call you, but otherwise, stay in the truck, okay?”
He nodded, and that was it.
Just before we got to the center of town, a text message came in from Jeannie’s phone, reading, “No news.” Melissa hadn’t been spotted by any ghosts.
Tony dropped me off a block from McArver Cemetery, a relatively small plot in the middle of town, behind an Episcopal church. The burial ground had been used as far back as the eighteen hundreds, and no one had been interred here in more than fifty years.
Night of the Living Deed Page 26
