“The only actual desk desk is in Liss’s room,” I said to Paul.
He nodded and started rising toward the ceiling. “Hang on,” I said. “That’s my daughter’s room. Only I get to go up there when she’s not around. So I’ll check. And if Richard is there, that’s what I’m going to tell him.” Paul offered no protest.
There’s a dumbwaiter/elevator to Melissa’s attic bedroom that Jeannie’s husband, Tony, installed when I decided to convert the space for my daughter. But the ceiling in the hallway beneath that room still has the pulldown stairs I used when it was just an attic. I reached for the handle, pulled down the stairs, and unlocked the hinge on the panel to get inside.
Richard wasn’t there either. I found that comforting and oddly irritating. Was this ghost playing hide-and-seek with us? I climbed back down the stairs, folded them back up, and reported my lack of progress to Paul.
He looked thoughtful, and then his eyes brightened as much as they can. “Richard is my brother,” he said.
“No kidding. I have a cousin named Roberto. What’s your point?”
“Some of the thought patterns are the same. It’s genetic. We have personalities that aren’t identical, but the basis is roughly similar.” He continued this babble as he sunk into the floor.
“Where are you going?” I asked just before his mouth reached the carpet.
“The basement.”
Of course Richard was there when I arrived a minute later, panting a little from running down two flights of stairs. The basement had always been Paul’s place to do his best thinking and to get away from the chaos my house can become. I should have thought to look for his brother there first.
Richard was using a huge stereo speaker from the good old days as a rest for Maxie’s laptop computer, and the two ghost brothers were already involved in conversation when I got there.
“I believe that is something I had said when I arrived,” Richard was saying. “I was killed because I was getting too close to discovering who had actually murdered Keith Johnson.”
“You didn’t say that,” I said when I’d caught my breath. “You said that you were working on the case and then somebody killed you. I’d remember if you’d mentioned being close to making a breakthrough that might have led to your own murder.”
“Whether you said it before or not, you’re saying it now,” Paul pointed out. He’s all about getting things back on topic as long as it’s about the case. Ask him about anything else and he’ll look slightly pained, like you’re trying to divulge deeply buried emotional baggage. Is that a mixed metaphor? You can bury baggage, although the manufacturers don’t recommend it. “What had you found, and who was the murderer you had discovered?”
Richard held up a finger like a professor about to reveal an especially interesting law of physics. Assuming there is such a thing. “Well, I hadn’t discovered the actual murderer yet, but I was very close. Looking at these files just reminded me of the process.”
“Show me,” his brother said.
“Well, hang on. As a defense attorney, my job was not to solve the crime. My job was to prove that the accused, Cassidy Van Doren, had not committed it. So that had been the thrust of my research the whole time. But in researching the physical facts of the murder, it had become clear, as I’m certain I did tell you before”—he gave me a telling glance, but I chose not to respond—“that Cassidy could not have lifted her stepfather into the tub nor held him down long enough under the water to drown him.”
“Surely not,” Paul said. “But that does not lead to another possible killer.”
“It does when you realize that if Cassidy didn’t drown Keith, and he was still drowned, someone else might have done it,” Richard said. Surely he had missed his calling in life when he’d turned his back on the lucrative line of telling people obvious things. “So I focused on discovering exactly who could have had the strength to perform these tasks, particularly among those who might have had access to his room in the bed-and-breakfast.”
“Was it common knowledge that Keith was taking a long weekend in Cranbury?” Paul asked Richard.
“Well, he wasn’t hiding it as far as I can tell,” Richard said. “I’m not sure he went around telling everyone he knew, but it wasn’t an illicit affair with anyone. He was just taking a break at a rustic inn called the Cranbury Bog.”
That was so adorable, I wanted to adopt it. But Haunted Guesthouse had never really been my first choice for my own place. When I was planning it, I was calling it the Sea Breeze in my mind. That went out the window when I got hit with a bucket of wallboard compound.
“So who would have known he was there?” Paul asked. “Did his wife go there with him?”
“No. Adrian was at the house in Upper Saddle River. They were having new appliances installed in the kitchen, which was one of the reasons Keith wanted to be away, but his wife felt she needed to be there to supervise. Adrian is very good at supervising.”
If she were half as good at supervising as Richard’s wife, Miriam, was at being imperious, they could start a business where Miriam intimidated the contractors into dropping their rates and Adrian Johnson stood over them every step of the way through the job. Believe it or not, I think there might be a market for such a thing.
“Who was there, then?”
“Well, clearly Cassidy, since she was found with the body.” Richard seemed to be teaching a class in which Paul and I were not the brightest students. Which was a pity, seeing as how no one else was here. “But I think Keith’s business partner, Hunter Evans, had taken a room in the inn as well. The innkeeper, Robin Witherspoon, would know if he had any visitors while he was there. I was just looking into that when this happened to me.”
Paul’s eyes narrowed; that last part had sent off an alarm in his head. “Who in your firm, or anywhere else, knew your thinking on this case, Richard? Who knew what you were working on exactly?”
Richard’s head seemed to back up on his neck a little as he straightened in his faux sitting position. “Paul, if you are suggesting that anyone in my firm might have been trying to send Cassidy to jail and murdered me to accomplish that, I will have to protest on their behalf. I have found no proof of that being true, and I have looked.”
Before Paul could be cowed by his older brother, I jumped in. “Protest all you want,” I told Richard. “Who knew what you were working on?” I think Paul gave me a glance of appreciation, but I didn’t want to telegraph it to Richard by making eye contact.
Richard looked at Paul, who had asked the original question. “My assistant, Tracy Cheswick. The first chair on the case, Leonard Krantz. I imagine there are a few others in the Woodbridge office who saw some of my memos, although no one but those two were on my e-mail list.”
I looked at Paul. “That’s a lot of people.”
He nodded. “And if Richard is right about Cassidy’s life being in danger, we don’t have a great deal of time. Perhaps the first thing to do is to contact her and ask to meet.”
Again with meeting the potential murderess. Under the circumstances I supposed it was the thing to do. “It’ll be outdoors, and you’ll be there with me, Paul,” I said. “And we’re not doing it before tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Paul hates delays in a case.
“We have a spook show in twenty minutes, and then I have to pick up Melissa from school; it’s my day. And I do intend to be here and not at Cassidy Van Doren’s place when my husband gets home tonight.”
Paul put up a hand as if to stop traffic. “Fine. But call today so we can set something up for tomorrow.”
“Do you have Cassidy’s cell phone number?” I asked Richard.
He pointed toward the screen on Maxie’s laptop, which I decided was going to be returned to Maxie for the rest of the day right after the spook show. “Good.” I looked at Paul. “You can text her and ask her for the meeting.” When Paul couldn’t leave the grounds and I had to go do detective stuff, I bought him a cheap cell phone so he could text
me. He can’t be heard on a phone, but he can push buttons.
“Me? Shouldn’t it be you? You’re the one she’ll be able to see.”
“I don’t want her having my cell phone number,” I said. “I don’t care if she has yours, and neither do you.” Then a thought struck me. “You don’t have your phone on you, do you, Richard?”
“I’m afraid not. I imagine it was confiscated with the rest of my effects.”
“Shame. That would have gotten a rise out of her.”
But Paul was still protesting being pressed into service. “Alison, you can call on my phone. There is no reason to do this via text message.”
I headed for the stairs out of the basement. “My house, my rules,” I told Paul.
I didn’t look back for his reaction.
Chapter 13
“I really didn’t know what to expect when I got your text.” Cassidy Van Doren, who looked to be about five years younger than I am, which put her in her early thirties, sat on a bench in front of Voorhees Hall on the Voorhees Mall (for rhyming purposes, no doubt) on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick. I was opposite her, close enough to keep our conversation private but not so close that Cassidy could pull a stiletto out of her purse and stab me if she felt like it. I felt it was a reasonable compromise. “I mean, I didn’t recognize the number, and there you were talking about Richard Harrison.”
“I wanted to be sure you understood that I’m not trying to ask you for money or anything untoward,” I said. I immediately regretted the use of the word untoward, but it was out there and nothing could be done about it. “I’m looking into Mr. Harrison’s murder, and naturally your case has been mentioned.”
“I didn’t kill my stepfather,” Cassidy volunteered.
“For the purposes of our investigation, it doesn’t matter whether or not she killed her stepfather,” Paul said. Did I not mention that Paul was hovering between us, half in/half on the bench?
I felt it best not to convey his message of total indifference to the nightmare her life had undoubtedly become one way or the other. “I understand,” I told her. “But because Mr. Harrison was working on your case at the time, it’s possible that the two murders were somehow related. Do you have any idea what might have happened to Richard Harrison?”
Cassidy stared at me for a moment. “He was hit in the head with an iron,” she said.
“An iron!” Paul shouted, then put his hand over his mouth, more I think because he was showing some amusement at the way his own brother had died and not because he was afraid the other ghosts in the area, who looked to date back to the 1600s, would take notice, laugh, and point at him.
“An iron?” I said somewhat less explosively. “Someone hit Richard with an iron? Like, the kind to smooth out your blouse and not to play golf, right?”
“Yeah, the iron from the hotel room. You didn’t know that? Didn’t the police tell you?”
I hadn’t actually consulted the New Brunswick police or the Middlesex county prosecutor’s investigators yet. “I just started investigating yesterday,” I said. It was a poor excuse, and I knew it, but the battles over who was using which laptop had raged on well into the evening the night before, the final result being that not much of anything got investigated. Richard had literally not known what hit him, so it was something Maxie would have to research. Well, now I knew.
“Well, that’s what happened. He was in the Heldrich Hotel, right over on Livingston Avenue, and somebody got into his room, took the iron they give you in the closet in case you have to all of a sudden press your pants, and clocked him with it in the back of the head.” Cassidy was so matter of fact about it, I wondered whether Miriam Harrison really had any reason to be at all jealous of her. When Richard was alive.
“Ask her about Richard,” Paul said, like I hadn’t already been doing that. “What their relationship was like.” I had to wonder whether his interest was professional or familial.
“Had you gotten to know Mr. Harrison well?” I asked.
“He was working on my case a lot,” Cassidy said. She sat back on the bench but didn’t seem at all relaxed. She watched the students walking by, even a month after the most recent class of seniors had graduated. Rutgers slows down in the summer, but it never stops. “So we spent some hours together. He asked me about my stepfather and how we got along, you know. Then about the night . . . it happened.”
“How did you get along?” I said.
“We didn’t,” Cassidy answered. “Keith married my mom less than a year after my father died. I couldn’t talk to her about it because she was so in love with him, or thought she was, but I felt like it was too soon, you know? She couldn’t have processed all that about my dad and then just pushed it aside for this new guy so fast.”
I was actually asking about how Cassidy had gotten along with Richard, but this was another interesting way to go. “So Keith knew you disapproved of the marriage. Was there a problem financially?” It had seemed like money was being funneled out of Keith’s trust funds for his children and into Cassidy’s, and I thought this was a tactful way to broach that subject.
Cassidy, apparently, disagreed. “I didn’t know he was putting money in my trust accounts!” she snapped. “I never check those things; I didn’t expect anything from him. I didn’t find out about that until he was dead! And even if I did know, I had no reason to kill him, did I, if he kept giving me all this money?”
“I’m not trying to prove you killed him,” I assured her. “I’m not investigating Keith Johnson’s death at all.”
“Yes, we are,” Paul said. Ignoring him was getting to be my hobby.
“Then why did you ask about that?” Cassidy demanded.
“I was actually asking how you got along with Richard Harrison, not your stepfather.” I thought Paul would be pleased we were getting back to dishing the dirt on his brother. This was a side of him I’d never seen before.
“Richard?” Cassidy said. “We got along fine. He was a good lawyer.” She looked a little puzzled by the question. “You’re not trying to say I was the one with the iron, are you?”
“No, not at all,” I said, although I wasn’t ruling out any possibilities out at this point. “I just wondered if your relationship had been anything more than professional.”
Cassidy looked as if I’d suggested she might decide to sprout flippers and become a penguin. She didn’t burst out in laughter, but the thought definitely crossed her mind. “Richard?” she said. “Richard Harrison? No! What made you think that?”
It was probably bad form to tell her that Richard had mentioned his feelings for her postmortem, so after glancing very briefly at Paul, I said, “It’s sort of a standard question. People who are being defended often have some strong emotional ties to the person defending them.” Yeah, it was a dodge, but it was at least an intelligent-sounding dodge.
“Look,” Cassidy said, “I had no interest in my lawyer other than being a lawyer. Richard was a lot older than me, and besides, I’m pretty sure he was married. Didn’t you look that up either?”
I hadn’t had to because I’d spoken to Richard’s wife the day before, but again, this wasn’t the time for such explanations. “He was definitely married,” I said, getting back a little of my own. “That’s not always the roadblock we might want it to be.” Ask my ex-husband. Accent on the ex.
“Well, it is for me,” Cassidy said. “Anyway, there’s not much I can tell you about Richard. I wasn’t there when it happened, you know.”
That was true. Probably. “Tell me about the night your stepfather died. How did you happen to find him there?”
Cassidy had told this story so many times by now that she didn’t even hesitate to ask why that was any of my business. “I was going to talk to him without my mom there. I knew how irrational she could be about Keith, and I figured now that he was away from her, I could talk straight to him. Tell him I didn’t like the way he treated her.”
That rang a bell in my head. “Was Kei
th abusive to your mother?” I asked.
Cassidy didn’t look at me. She seemed to be mesmerized by the sight of two Rutgers students walking arm over shoulder near Scott Hall, the incongruously bland structure in this grove of more historical-looking academic buildings. “He didn’t hit her or anything, if that’s what you mean. But nothing she ever did was good and nothing she ever said was smart. He’d go out of his way to make fun of her when other people were around. He treated her like a stray cat he’d adopted—no, not even that nice. Like a cat someone had forced him into taking care of that he didn’t even want. That’s how he treated my mom.”
“And your mother didn’t see it that way?” Paul didn’t need to prompt me to ask that one.
“No.” Cassidy watched as the young couple walked into Scott Hall and out of sight. “She thought that man walked on water. You know, we didn’t have much money when my father was alive. He worked for PSE&G on the line, and he did okay, but he didn’t rake in money. When Mom met Keith and he could buy her all these nice things, I think she got seduced by the money, you know? She thought he absolutely adored her because he bought her bracelets.”
“How is she handling Keith’s death?” That one Paul did tell me to ask.
Cassidy shook her head. “She won’t talk to me. She believes what the cops told her. She thinks I killed him because I didn’t like him.” She finally turned to face me, and there was a tear falling from her right eye. “I mean, seriously, Ms. Kerby. If you killed everybody you didn’t like, how many people would already be dead?”
Some of my best friends were dead before I met them, but I saw Cassidy’s point. “So you went to the Cranbury Bog to talk to Keith. How did you end up finding him in the bathtub?”
“I’d called him ahead of time and told him I was coming. I didn’t want to just show up, you know? So I already knew his room number before I got to the inn. I didn’t see anybody at the desk in front, so I went up to his room. I knocked, but the door was already a little open, so I figured Keith was letting me in. But he wasn’t in the room. I looked around a little. The water wasn’t running in the bathroom so I almost didn’t go in. But I heard a drip in there, and I just sort of followed it. And there he was.”
The Hostess With the Ghostess Page 10
