The Hostess With the Ghostess

by E. J. Copperman

  He did, however, reach into the suit jacket he was wearing.

  Paul shouted, “Duck!” So I dove for the floor and lay facedown for a few seconds. Then I rolled over to see what was going on.

  “What in the name of—” Adrian looked positively lost for a response. She looked down at me. “You really are insane.”

  “She’s crazy,” Erika echoed. Erika didn’t have too many original thoughts, but she was happy to repeat those of other people.

  But then she and the guests got the spook show everyone except the Johnson family members had been expecting, and they seemed very pleased with it. The drapes on all the windows (there are six in the movie room, which makes it hard to darken the space for movies during the day) flapped wildly. The chandelier and two other light fixtures that included ceiling fans (which worried me) started to sway. The lights went out briefly, came back on, went out again, and then came on only in the front part of the room.

  Madame Lorraine turned around when her view of the blank wall was dimmed and shouted, “Hey!”

  The light generator I’d positioned on the floor came on, making green and blue dots of light circulate on the walls and ceiling, not to mention on the people in the room. Vanessa DiSica let out an “Ooh!” and her husband seemed fascinated with watching one particular dot’s journey. He craned his neck when it flew directly over his head and ended up circling around toward the other side of the room.

  One runner rug I have in the aisle between two rows of chairs partially rolled itself up and came to a rest halfway toward the front of the room.

  Melissa watched with some amusement as I raised myself up off the floor and stood facing Adrian again. I felt foolish, but Paul had rather emphatically told me to duck, you’ll recall.

  “What is this all about?” Braden Johnson demanded.

  “Didn’t you read the sign on the way into the house?” Mom asked him. “The place is haunted. And the ghosts don’t care for the way you’re treating my daughter.”

  “Oh, please,” said Madame Lorraine.

  “That’s not entirely true,” I said, looking at Adrian with what I hoped appeared to be defiance. “The fact is, they don’t care for the way your dead husband was treating me, and they’re handling the situation.”

  Sure enough, Keith Johnson had been contained. Paul was holding him by one arm and Everett the other, the three of them hovering two feet off the floor. Maxie, a satisfied look on her face, was wiping her long, sharp fingernails with a napkin from my snack bar area. I noticed a few scratches on Johnson’s right cheek. Who knew that was even possible?

  The guests, who had not seen any of the action on the part of the ghosts, applauded. They are such lovely people. I like my job a lot.

  “What are you talking about?” Adrian demanded. “Keith is dead.”

  “Yes, and you killed him. I’m guessing from the wet jeans outside the room that you got in there and sat on top of him until he drowned.”

  She gave me the one line that always proves a person is guilty. “You have no proof.”

  At Paul’s urging, even as he tried to quiet the angry Keith Johnson, I told her, “I will have the testimony of Hunter Evans, who will say you were having an affair with him because he wants to stay out of jail and he can get immunity by rolling over on you. Nobody saw you at the inn, at least nobody who will testify, but there was a wet pair of jeans found at the base of the window outside Keith’s room. You’re about the same size as Cassidy. The police didn’t find the jeans because Robin Witherspoon removed them thinking Erika had killed her father for Hunter Evans. But it was you. You were staying in the next room with Hunter Evans and had a whole bag packed, didn’t you? And if that’s not enough, I will get the confession of the victim himself, although that admittedly won’t be admissible in court.”

  “Never!” Keith shouted. “I won’t ever tell you that! She didn’t kill me! Cassidy killed me!”

  One thing you have to like about liars: they stick to their story no matter how stupid or disproven it might be.

  “What are you talking about?” Braden shouted. “You think you can get a confession from a dead man? Are you some fake boardwalk medium or something?”

  “Hey,” said Madame Lorraine, who had given up on the wall and walked over to watch the drama play out.

  “That’s nothing,” Adrian said with her usual air of superiority restored. “Cassidy’s trial will go on as it has been and she’ll be convicted. You have no evidence that can prove anybody but she killed Keith.”

  “See?” Johnson yelled. It was not terribly convincing.

  “You get the money from Keith’s will, almost all of it, right?” I said. “You killed your husband, and now you get his partner who’ll own his whole business, the inheritance from Keith, and the money from Cassidy, who’ll be in jail and prohibited by law from profiting from her crime even though she didn’t kill Keith. Nice plan, Adrian.”

  “I did nothing of the sort,” Adrian said. “You are fabricating the whole scenario.” I’ll bet she didn’t talk that way when her husband was a lineman for Public Service Electric and Gas.

  “How about this,” I shot back as Braden took a menacing step forward and stopped when Josh moved toward him. “Robin Witherspoon saw you walking out of Keith’s room before Cassidy got there, and you were only wearing a long men’s shirt.” Now that was a complete and total lie, but it was a calculated one.

  And it got the response I had hoped for. “That’s impossible,” Adrian said. “I was never in that hallway. I walked out through the patio doors and into Hunter’s room.” Then she realized what she had said and stopped immobile in her tracks.

  “Game, set, and match,” Mom said, beaming. She looked at me. “You’re so smart.”

  “It won’t be admissible,” Richard warned from his corner. “It will be hearsay. She’d have to confess to the police, and she won’t.”

  “Because she didn’t do it!” Keith was inexplicably tied to the falsehood that the woman he loved hadn’t actually murdered him when he undoubtedly knew for a fact that she did. Love isn’t just blind; sometimes it’s also stupid.

  I reached into my pocket and took out the voice recorder, which I hadn’t planned on using until the lights had gone out. “The police and the county prosecutor will definitely be interested in hearing this,” I said.

  “They won’t get the chance.” The voice came from the direction of the hallway. I counted up the people in the room and couldn’t think of anyone else who might have walked in, and if there had been the sound of a car driving up to the back door, I hadn’t noticed it.

  So I was more than a little disappointed when Cassidy Van Doren walked into the movie room. And I was even more unhappy when I saw she was carrying a gun.

  “They come here,” I said quietly to myself. “They all come here. How do they find me?”

  Chapter 33

  “Give me that recorder,” Cassidy said as she approached me.

  Josh, trying to stand between us, was dangerously positioned in the path of that pistol. I tried to push him out of the way, but he would not be moved.

  “My mom just proved that you didn’t kill your stepfather,” Melissa said to Cassidy. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand perfectly. Just give me the recorder, and this will be over.” I didn’t care for the sound of that.

  Paul threw up his hands in a gesture of realization. “There was only one person both Keith Johnson and Cassidy Van Doren loved enough to protect,” he said. “Cassidy is willingly taking the blame for Keith’s murder so she can keep her mother out of jail.”

  “I’ll find something to hit her with,” Maxie said, but I shook my head negatively. The last time she’d helped me like that I’d almost gotten shot and spent the night in the hospital. The ceiling in my den had been damaged to the tune of thousands of dollars my insurance company didn’t see as covered by their policy. They have some prejudice against gunshot wounds to the ceiling.

  “This is
one crazy show,” Eduardo DiSica told his wife. “She really did save the best for last.”

  “You can’t have the recorder,” I said to Cassidy. “It’s evidence in your trial. And it points to your mother killing your stepfather and your attorney.”

  Cassidy actually stopped moving for a moment and blinked twice. It became evident she was trying to remember. “The Harrison guy?” she asked.

  Richard looked pained.

  “I did not kill a lawyer,” Adrian said.

  I wasn’t going to mention the gun in Cassidy’s hand because, frankly, I feel it’s better not to draw attention to such things. If Cassidy was just brandishing it as, say, a cute accessory to her outfit, who was I to question her taste? But the way she was pointing it at Josh (who wasn’t giving her a clear shot at me) indicated this was not a fashion choice.

  “The recorder,” Cassidy said. “Now.” She held out her left hand, which was not pointing a gun in my direction.

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “Why would you want to destroy evidence against the woman who shot your stepfather and set you up for it?”

  “None of your business,” Cassidy said. She wasn’t much of an ad-libber.

  “It is her business,” Mom said. My mother chooses the oddest times to stick up for me. “She’s supposed to find out who killed everybody, and you didn’t kill your stepfather. Why do you want everybody to think you did?”

  “She did!” Keith Johnson cried, but he seemingly couldn’t move with the ghosts holding him in place, and we’d all heard that before, so nobody paid any attention to him.

  “Because that’s how it works,” Cassidy said.

  Somehow that made sense. This was a plan; it had been decided upon in advance. In addition to not having given her the voice recorder, I also hadn’t turned it off, so it was for the record that I said, “So that’s it. You’re protecting your mother by going to jail for the rest of your life for a murder you didn’t commit?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cassidy answered. “I was going anyway.”

  “Going?” Josh repeated. “To jail? Why?”

  “Because she’s the one who killed Richard,” Paul said. “She was protecting her mother then too. I’m willing to bet—”

  “Hang on.” Maxie flew through the ceiling and returned a few seconds later in the trench coat. Her laptop came out when the coat vanished, and the guests applauded the effect. Adrian, Braden, and Erika looked puzzled. Cassidy wasn’t watching; she was fixed directly on Josh and me. “Sure enough.”

  She turned the laptop toward us so we could see the screen. And there, in a grainy but certainly visible hotel security video frame, was Cassidy Van Doren in a blonde wig being escorted into a hotel room by a short, ordinary man shot from behind whom I could only assume was Tom Zink. “That’s her,” Maxie said, just in case we hadn’t caught the resemblance.

  “Cassie,” Braden, who hadn’t heard Maxie speak, breathed. He didn’t sound shocked that his stepsister had killed her attorney or that a laptop computer had just floated into the room. He sounded appalled that Cassidy had been careless enough to get caught.

  “That whole scene on the highway coming here was just to throw us off,” I said, thinking aloud. “You never were sideswiped by an SUV, were you? You drove your own car down a ravine and broke two of your ribs . . . for what?” And then it hit me. Paul looked at me funny. I looked back at Cassidy. “You really were blackmailing your stepfather, weren’t you?”

  Cassidy did not so much as move a facial muscle. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I told you!” Keith Johnson shouted. The one time he’d told me the truth and I hadn’t believed him.

  I advanced a hair on Cassidy, who I remembered was still holding a gun and demanding my voice recorder. Maybe advancing was a bad move. “You knew about his shady business dealings.”

  “Wait, what?” Johnson said.

  “You knew your stepfather was taking money from clients to keep your mother in luxury and not paying them back. You knew he was running a pyramid scheme he could never sustain. And when you confronted him with it, he agreed to funnel money to you to keep you quiet. So how did the feds find out?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Cassidy was stuck in one mode.

  “It had nothing to do with her,” Keith said bitterly. “I paid her all that money and they found out anyway.” He looked askance at Adrian. “I think it was Hunter’s wife who talked.”

  “That’s not all of it,” Paul said. “Cassidy stole the iron from Thomas Zink’s room and then went to Richard’s and . . .” His voice trailed off when he looked at his brother.

  Richard’s eyes were wide when he wasn’t blinking uncontrollably. His mouth hung open. Sounds were coming out of it, but they weren’t coherent. He looked directly at Cassidy.

  “Oh, Richard,” Paul said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It can’t be,” Richard said quietly.

  “That’s enough,” Cassidy barked. “Give me the voice recorder.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked, trying to step out of Josh’s protection so I could at least face my attacker. “Shoot me?”

  “That’s what the gun is for.” Cassidy definitely had a mean streak. I was feeling a little sweat on the back of my neck.

  “There are eight other people in this room who’ll see you do it,” I reminded her. “Not to mention your mother and your stepbrother and stepsister. How will you deal with that?”

  Cassidy didn’t miss a beat. “I guess I’ll have to shoot all of them too,” she said. “Except my mom and my stepbrother.”

  “Ooh,” said Penny Desmond. She didn’t sound the least bit worried despite Cassidy’s pronouncement that she was going to shoot everyone in the room. And Erika didn’t seem to notice that she had been included in that group. She didn’t react at all.

  “I don’t really see that working out for you,” I told the woman with the pistol. “They’ll figure out it was you.”

  “She’s going to jail anyway,” Adrian countered. “So she’ll go to jail more. What’s the difference?”

  I regarded the widow Johnson for a moment. “I don’t get it. How come everybody’s so crazy about her? She’s really not likable at all.”

  “How dare you,” Keith Johnson said.

  “For the love of . . . she killed you!” Maxie yelled at him as she put the laptop on a side table.

  Keith, for once, shut up.

  Greg Lewis and Abby Lesniak were sitting on the sofa, snuggled against each other. They didn’t seem to have noticed anything that was going on.

  “She’s my mother,” Cassidy said. “And I’m not going to let her spend the rest of her life in prison.”

  That made even less sense than the murderers I’ve gotten used to over the years, which is a sentence most people will never say. Sometimes I envy most people.

  “So when Richard was closing in on Adrian as the woman who killed Keith Johnson, you decided—or did your mother ask you—to steal a hotel iron and murder him?” I was confronting Cassidy directly. “Couldn’t you just fire the lawyer?”

  “It just can’t be,” Richard repeated to no one in particular.

  “My stepfather wouldn’t allow that,” Cassidy said. “He’d left instructions to hire that guy if there was any trouble. He thought it would be about the money that was getting bounced around, but it turned out to be him getting drowned by his own wife in a bathtub.”

  “Why was Mr. Johnson funneling money to you?” Melissa asked Cassidy. “I didn’t think he liked you very much.”

  “I don’t,” Keith Johnson said. Nobody paid attention to that either.

  “Blackmail,” I guessed. “Cassidy wanted to get Keith out of her mother’s life and knew something about him or his business. She tried to use it for leverage, and Keith, assuming everyone had a price, just sent money her way. But it didn’t work.”

  “Stupid girl,” Keith said.

  “Enough of this,” C
assidy said. She pointed the barrel of the gun at Josh. “Get out of the way.”

  “No,” my husband said, but I was already trying to push in front of him. I’d spent too long looking for a good man and had gone through a Swine to get to him. The last thing I’d do—perhaps literally—was let him get shot.

  “I need that voice recorder,” Cassidy said louder.

  “And the laptop,” Vanessa DiSica said, pointing. “That’s what had your picture on it.”

  Cassidy turned. “What?” she asked.

  Josh moved quickly toward her, but Cassidy was just as fast at pivoting and training the pistol on him again. “Don’t.” Josh stopped after taking one step.

  “If you’re going to jail and you’re sure you’ll get caught, why bother to shoot anyone here?” My daughter, sensible budding teenager that she is, was trying to reason with the homicidal maniac; it was almost cute. “Just confess to the murders and go to jail. You didn’t have to kill anyone else.”

  “Because there’s always the chance of being acquitted, a mistrial, or multiple appeals,” Richard said quietly. “No sense in confessing and being sentenced when she could stay out of jail for years, if not decades.”

  “Look, Everett’s holding this guy’s arms, but somebody should be able to clobber the girl with the gun,” Maxie said. “None of the other nut jobs have a weapon.”

  “I’m still holding him too,” Paul noted.

  “I’ll look for something,” Dad told them. “I might have a bigger pipe wrench in the basement.” He was through the floor before I could tell him he already had a wrench and that I’d moved the bigger pipe wrench into the kitchen to do a repair under the sink.

  That seemed to leave things to Everett, who looked at Maxie. “I might be able to hold her for a moment, but I don’t know that I can keep a grip that long,” he said.

  “Don’t hold her; hit her!” his wife told him.

  But Cassidy and her family, of course, heard none of this. She sneered at Melissa—which is a punishable offense in my judicial code all by itself—and shook her head seemingly in wonder at the ridiculous suggestion that had been made. “Everyone here heard what was said about my mother,” she told Liss. “They’ll testify to it, and she will be charged.”