The Hostess With the Ghostess

by E. J. Copperman

  Maxie looked worried at the mention of her notebook computer, tapped it on her horizontal midriff, and relaxed again.

  I saw Josh walk in and stand directly underneath my father without knowing it. He looked over at me and smiled but saw I was working and didn’t come over. He didn’t want to be a distraction.

  “On that note, Alison is right,” Paul said. At least that. “The only thing we can tie to Erika Johnson is stealing the hotel iron. We don’t know that she did anything else involved in these cases.”

  “We don’t know it was Erika either,” I insisted, mostly because I was right and he was wrong. “Tom wasn’t sure.”

  Melissa couldn’t really disengage from cooking, which had become a passion of hers, so she walked out to the deck and joined Josh and Dad there. She was carefully watching the meat on the grill and picked up a brush to put more barbecue sauce onto it. My mother, who had been uncharacteristically quiet during this discussion, excused herself and followed her granddaughter out. I could see where this party was going.

  “Maybe I should set up on the picnic table,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “Young lady, this discussion takes precedence over your dinner plans.” Richard’s voice wasn’t much different from Paul’s, perhaps a little deeper, and I wasn’t looking at him, but the message and the grumpy tone were enough. But at least he thought I was young. I made a mental note to annoy him whenever possible. “We are trying to prevent a woman from harm.”

  “We’re trying to determine who killed Keith Barent Johnson and then who murdered you,” Paul corrected his brother, but gently. “Aside from the alleged attack on the road the other night, there is no indication that anyone is trying to harm Cassidy Van Doren.”

  “Alleged attack?” Richard probably wished he had a bushy mustache at that moment so he could make it move around to show his frustration and annoyance. “Are you suggesting that Cassidy was lying?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.” Paul was almost completely transparent, and he wasn’t even in the path of a sunbeam. “I would like to hear more from Lieutenant McElone.”

  “This is absurd,” Richard said. I’m sure he thought most things were absurd. He liked thinking things were absurd. This was weird, I’ll grant you, but it wasn’t absurd.

  “I’ll give her a call in the morning,” I promised Paul, ignoring his brother just to get under his skin, despite his not having any. “But right now I’m setting up for a dinner alfresco and then our spooktacular last show for the guests before they take off tomorrow.” I gave Paul and Maxie a glance at the reminder. Paul looked dutiful, and Maxie rolled her eyes. They’d done this a few times before.

  I started collecting the outdoor dinner supplies I keep in a basket for easy transportation to the deck. This would be our first dinner out there this year, so I had to remember where I kept everything. But pretty soon I had plates, napkins, utensils, cups, and various condiments ready to go. I got a vinyl tablecloth from a side drawer and examined it. Wrinkles and folds never hurt anybody. On a tablecloth.

  But Richard went on throughout, complaining about our focusing on the wrong things and the general lack of progress he saw in our investigation. When I’d heard enough, I turned toward him, picnic basket in hand. “If you’re so concerned about our coming to a conclusion, why aren’t you and Maxie working on those files so you can remember who you were closing in on when someone took an iron to the back of your head?”

  I heard a sharp intake of . . . something . . . from Paul to my right. But Richard did not react angrily and did not simply vanish into thin air as I’d sort of expected he would. He did the last thing I would have anticipated, in fact.

  He apologized. To me.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I have been neglecting the one area in which I can legitimately contribute to this investigation.” He looked over at Maxie. “Would you mind?”

  Maxie, who had been floating on her back, looked down at him. “Now?” she asked.

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  Maxie tilted her head a little in a whatever kind of gesture. “I don’t have to be anyplace,” she said. She tapped her laptop again and gestured toward Richard, and the two of them floated upward and out of the room.

  I turned toward Paul. “I’m going outside,” I said. “Want to come?”

  It wasn’t like he had a choice; I was already making my way to the deck. If Paul wanted to continue our discussion and what I’m sure he thought was a conference of strategy, he’d just have to follow me. Of course, I don’t think the location mattered at all to him, so he just maneuvered his way outside and made it there before I did, not having to worry about things like doors or carrying a large, overstuffed picnic basket. Luckily Mom saw me coming and opened the French door for me. I put everything out on the table and went over to kiss my husband hello.

  “That was what I was waiting for,” Josh said. “I’m going to clean up. Be right back.” He walked to the French doors.

  “You didn’t want to clean up before I kissed you?” But he was gone already.

  “We’re eating outside?” Mom asked. She already had figured out that’s what was happening. This was more in the area of you didn’t tell me we were eating outside, but I let it go.

  “It’s a nice night,” I said.

  “You should spray for mosquitoes.”

  “The dry clothing on Erika Johnson is important,” Paul said. “If she did drown her father, she should have been splashed repeatedly with water, assuming he resisted.”

  “Way to bring down the deck, Paul,” I said.

  “Assuming he resisted?” Melissa asked. “You think he just got down in the water and let her drown him?”

  Paul considered. “I don’t believe Mr. Johnson committed suicide by drowning himself in the bathtub,” he admitted. “The autopsy report Maxie found suggested there were signs of pressure on his shoulders and his chest.”

  “And Richard thinks that lets out Cassidy because she’s such a sweet girl, she wouldn’t have the strength to hold Keith down,” I reminded him. “His judgment is a little skewed.”

  “Perhaps, but Tom Zink chose Erika’s photograph, not Cassidy’s,” Paul said.

  “I’ve seen Cassidy and I’ve seen Erika,” I said. “Frankly, I don’t think either one of them could have held Johnson down without a well-stuffed bowling bag. Is it possible he was drunk or drugged?”

  “Autopsy report says no,” Melissa said, checking the temperature on a meat thermometer my mother bought her last Grandparents Day. My mother believes the point of being honored as a grandmother is to give the grandchild a gift. Who are we to argue? “I know one of his children said he was drinking, but the report says the blood alcohol level was only slightly above normal. So who’s stronger than those two, or do you think they acted together?”

  Paul and I exchanged a glance; we hadn’t thought of that before. “I did not get the impression those two women were close enough to plan and execute such a crime,” he said. “I kind of thought they weren’t as close as some stepsisters might be.”

  “What Paul’s trying to say is that Erika and Cassidy hate each other,” I translated from the Polite.

  “And what about the wet jeans?” Melissa said. “They could be the reason Erika was in dry clothing when she was seen. She could have changed in Mr. Evans’s room if she was in there with him.” Paul and I avoided looking at Melissa or each other for a moment.

  “I’m still looking for a motive,” I said. “If Johnson was moving his money out of personal accounts, away from his own children and toward Cassidy, why would Cassidy want him dead? Why would he do that, anyway, given that he and Cassidy didn’t get along at all?”

  From under the deck, the ghost of Keith Johnson rose suddenly, and everyone jumped back a little. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist woman about fifty look at us, her glance drawn by the sudden movement. She must have seen us leaping away from nothing. She walked by a little bit faster.

  “Kei
th,” I said when I regained my breath.

  “Who are you?” my father demanded. He and Mom hadn’t seen Keith before, and Dad is, well, a little protective of his daughter and granddaughter. Just a tad. Like a mother grizzly defending her cubs.

  I found myself making strange, awkward introductions. “Dad, this is Mr. Johnson. You’ve heard us talking about him. Mr. Johnson, these are my parents, Jack and Loretta Kerby.”

  “You the guy who drowned in the bathtub?” Dad asked Keith. Dad cuts right to the chase.

  “I’ve told you what I know.” Johnson was looking straight at me and didn’t acknowledge my parents. You don’t do that in my house. “Cassidy murdered me. There is no reason for you to continue investigating my death because that is what happened. Now please stop doing whatever you’re doing and move on.”

  Paul floated forward. The ghosts can affect each other physically, and he might have been thinking of trying to restrain Johnson. Judging from the way his T-shirt fit, Paul, for his college professor demeanor, clearly spent a decent amount of time in the gym when he was alive. Not as much as Everett, but Everett is an extreme case.

  But Johnson saw the movement. “Stay back,” he said. “I went away the last time and I’ll go away again. You can’t stop me.”

  “Mr. Johnson, why do you insist Cassidy was the one who drowned you?” Melissa is a very logical girl, which gets her into all sorts of trouble when dealing with humans, alive or not so much. People are rarely as sensible as my daughter. “All the physical evidence that’s been found indicates she couldn’t have done it.”

  “You’re dealing with things you don’t understand, little girl,” Keith said. Condescending to Melissa is a capital offense in the guesthouse.

  “Watch who you call ‘little girl,’ buddy,” my mother said. “And never assume she doesn’t understand.”

  You see what I mean.

  “On top of everything else, Melissa is right,” Paul told the offending ghost. “Every fact we know about your murder indicates Cassidy did not hold you down and drown you. What is your motivation for lying?” The word lying was significant. Paul very rarely confronts someone with such a bald-faced insult. In Paul’s world that was the equivalent of spitting in Johnson’s face. Paul is unerringly polite to the point of error.

  But Johnson was not taking the bait; he remained on his talking points. “I want you to stop trying to prove it was someone else. Cassidy killed me, and she has been charged with it. Let her be convicted and face her punishment. That would do me justice.” Then rather than dramatically evaporate before our eyes, he simply lowered himself through the floor and was gone. Paul might have been able to grab him before he was completely away, but he didn’t even move toward Johnson. Clearly we weren’t going to get any new information from the victim in this crime, and that was frustrating. All I could think was that finally we had contacted a ghost who knew exactly what happened to him, and he lied to us about it.

  It was enough to make me want to give up investigating entirely, but then, so is just waking up in the morning. But what he’d said had a strangely familiar ring to it.

  “Could he be right?” Dad asked. “Could Cassidy be the one who killed him?”

  Paul considered it. He trusts my father and will accept advice from anyone he believes is intelligent, even if he likes to pretend afterward that it was his idea in the first place. Paul is not without ego and prides himself mostly on being a detective.

  “Until we have conclusive evidence, we have to assume anything is possible,” he said after a moment. “But given everything we know about the crime, it seems extremely unlikely.”

  “Maybe we’re approaching this the wrong way,” Liss said, taking the brisket off the grill and placing it on a platter to “rest.” I didn’t see why my dinner should be peppier than I am, but I don’t question my daughter’s culinary knowledge.

  “Approaching what?” Josh, in clean clothes and clearly showered, walked through the French doors and onto the deck. “Did I miss something important?”

  Mom told him what had happened, and my husband listened carefully. They say men don’t listen. They clearly don’t know the right men.

  “So this guy’s saying he was drowned by his stepdaughter.” Josh had clearly already known this part, but he was summarizing. “But Paul says that’s probably not true.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” Mom told him.

  Josh turned toward Melissa. “When I came out, you were saying this was the wrong way to approach the problem,” he said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. What did you mean?”

  Liss was removing potatoes I hadn’t seen before from the grill. She put them on the side counter and started to slice them. “Something Paul said before just sort of hit me,” she said. “He asked Mr. Johnson what his motivation for lying was.”

  “It was an attempt to anger him into making a rash statement,” Paul said. “I don’t usually speak like that.”

  Melissa, who has in her life heard most of the choice rude words, looked at him with a small smile, but she shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t understand it. Why would he lie about that? This is about his murder. What reason would he have to not want us to find out who did that?”

  Josh looked at me, then at Liss, and he seemed surprised. “There’s only one explanation,” he said. “He’s covering up for the real killer.”

  Everybody Josh could see and the ones he couldn’t all stared at him for a moment. “But that’s the person who killed him,” I said. “Wouldn’t he want that person to be found and punished?”

  Josh raised an eyebrow. “Apparently not,” he said. “For some reason—maybe he thinks he deserved it—he’s trying to draw attention away from whoever killed him and shift it onto his stepdaughter, who he wants to see get blamed for it. I don’t know why, but that’s the only way this whole story makes any sense at all.”

  He sat down in the deck chair next to me and looked over at Melissa, who was tossing the grilled potatoes into a salad she was making. “Something smells good,” he said.

  Everyone else was still digesting, but not the food. We were considering everything Josh had said.

  “It is the only reasonable explanation,” Paul said finally.

  “Keith really did resent Cassidy, from what Richard told us,” Mom added. “I guess he’s so mad at her, he’s willing to let his real killer just go free.”

  “That’s the part that doesn’t add up for me,” I said, holding up a hand with the palm out. “Cassidy most likely didn’t kill Keith Johnson. But the person who did is getting a free pass with his blessing. Why does a man do that?”

  Josh, who probably didn’t realize the roll he was on here, did a little shrug that indicated that was obvious. “He must really have loved the person who killed him,” he said.

  Melissa was in the process of slicing the brisket. This makes Mom nervous because she still thinks Liss is eight years old and should stay away from sharp knives. I know for a fact that my daughter is thirteen and considerably more adept with such implements than I am, so I actually ask her to cut things up when she’s cooking to save me making a hacking mess of it. Josh defers to Melissa because he believes her to be a cooking savant.

  But her activity only seemed to make her mind work sharper. Like the knife, I guess. “So if Josh is right, there’s someone who was able to kill Mr. Johnson, and Mr. Johnson must have loved that person so much, he would let them get away with it. Who would that be?”

  Every face in the room lit up, but no one said anything immediately because Maxie and Richard phased through the kitchen wall at a higher velocity than usual. Maxie shed her trench coat, and her laptop predictably appeared, clutched tightly to her midsection. Neither she nor Richard so much landed as stopped short of the deck and hovered.

  And I realized who, like Johnson, had insisted that I should stop investigating his death.

  “We’ve got it!” Maxie shouted as they approached. “Richard figured out who killed Ke
ith Johnson!”

  “Adrian!” Everyone on the deck yelled it. All at the same time. If we’d all said “Yo!” first, it would have sounded like a sing-along screening of Rocky.

  Richard’s face stiffened in surprise. Maxie just looked completely disappointed.

  “How’d you know?” she asked.

  Chapter 29

  Paul looked dissatisfied. “Where is our evidence?” he asked.

  I was busy setting up the movie room in my house for the last spook show of my guests’ week and was not in a mood for rehashing what had already been, you know, hashed. I was hanging black bunting (I used to use Halloween decorations, but this was more reusable than crepe paper) over the windows. I would have hung some over the top of the large flat-screen TV I have over the mantelpiece, but I’m queasy about touching that thing for fear it’ll fall off. The fact that it’s attached to the wall with bolts directly into the studs and that I did that myself has no bearing on my emotions.

  “You heard what Richard said,” I reminded Paul. “The money from Keith Johnson’s private accounts was being funneled to Cassidy, but based on his reading of the legal documents, Richard thinks that money was meant only to see to Adrian’s needs as she aged or for any purchases Adrian wanted to make. It must have been part of the same deal where Keith wrote that letter about having Richard consult on any case if there were criminal charges against anyone in his family. We thought he meant Cassidy. Turns out it was probably Adrian. Keith was concerned that he wouldn’t always be around to keep his wife in the lifestyle to which she’d worked so hard to become accustomed, and a trust fund is more tax exempt than an inheritance. Cassidy had a trust fund. Adrian just had what was in his will.” The hooks for the bunting were now permanent, making the decoration process easier and faster. Give me a few years and I’ll figure out whatever you want figured out, as long as it’s not difficult. “He’d made that provision clear in legal papers connected to his will that Richard found when he was working on Cassidy’s defense. He knew Adrian was mad enough to kill him, and he still didn’t want her caught. The provision wasn’t for Cassidy; it was for his wife.”