Spouse on Haunted Hill

by E. J. Copperman

  “I have a problem.” It was hardly worth noting that The Swine always had a problem. That was why the child support checks were late, when he managed to send them at all. That was why it hadn’t been, until now, a “good time” for Melissa to come visit him in sunnier climes. Steven saying he had a problem was like LeBron James mentioning that he was taller than some.

  “Fine, you can have a room at the guesthouse,” I relented. “But only for a couple of nights. I have a new group of guests coming in a few days.” That was an outright lie, but fight fire with fire, I always say.

  “That’s not it.” Steven held my left biceps to slow me down, which considering that I was barely walking at this point, meant I had to stop. “I mean, yes, I want the room, but I figured I could get that. I have a real problem.”

  “And a charming way to convince me I should help.” I shook his hand off my arm and started after my daughter, who was conversing openly with the invisible woman over her head. “What’s the problem?”

  “Some people want to kill me.”

  I kept walking. “Again?” I asked.

  Two

  The drive home was slow and, from Steven’s end, quiet. Melissa and Steven did not have a lot of details to share about their week together—they’d gone to Disneyland (of course) and the Chinese Theater (even more of course) and gotten their picture taken under the Hollywood sign. I would have to consult with Maxie, who had “mad computer skills,” she said, about Photoshopping The Swine out of that one.

  Maxie was sitting with her head out of the car, which made it look as if she were feeling the breeze despite the fact that she couldn’t. So she did not contribute much except when she decided to drop down and see if anyone was saying anything she would consider interesting. We were, apparently, not doing that very much.

  I had not mentioned Steven’s comment at the airport to Maxie, since I’d had no time alone with her and didn’t want to alarm Melissa over what I was sure would not be a serious issue. Steven was always getting involved in somewhat sketchy business deals, confident in his ability to talk his way out of trouble, and about seventy percent of the time he was able to do just that.

  It was the other thirty percent that offered him some challenges, and probably would have ended up contributing to our divorce if Bobbi (or Bitsy, or something) hadn’t gotten in the way first. I was really young when we got married. That’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation.

  “So, what’s Dad’s house like, Liss?” I asked when the slick roadway on the Garden State Parkway eased to the point that I could stop leaning forward, coaxing the Volvo’s ancient defroster to make the highway visible.

  “Um . . .” Liss wasn’t often at a loss for words. “We didn’t exactly stay at Dad’s house.”

  “I’m having some renovations done,” The Swine jumped in. “We had a suite at a hotel for the time Melissa was there, because nothing is too good for my girl.”

  I couldn’t actually turn my head at the moment, but I could picture Liss rolling her eyes at that one. Her father could snow her (if you’ll pardon the expression), but he had to work harder than that.

  “A hotel?” None of the texts or phone calls had mentioned that.

  “It was really nice,” Liss told me. “One night we got room service and all they brought was a soft pretzel.”

  “Uh-huh.” I didn’t care much for the way this particular vacation was sounding. We didn’t talk again for a while.

  The truth was, what had fallen on New Jersey that day was hardly a significant snowfall. But it was the third one in a week and we were running out of places to put the stuff. I know some people see snow and think of lovely evenings spent watching it pile up. You never hear rhapsodic tales of shoveling and driving in snow on a dark night.

  Still, this was not a huge threat and the drive, while requiring attention, was anything but dangerous. People tend to stay off the roads when there’s weather in February, so I didn’t run into any real traffic and we were back at the guesthouse in Harbor Haven about an hour after we’d gotten into the car at the airport, pretty much the time it would take on a clear night in May, which was something I was dreaming about tonight.

  Melissa had just the one bag and Steven had no luggage at all, so there was not a huge procession getting into the house. It was just after seven and two of my guests, Mel and Anne Kaminsky, were still out at dinner. I don’t serve food at the guesthouse unless there’s a serious emergency because I am among the worst cooks on the planet, and besides, I have an agreement with a few of the local restaurateurs—I send them customers and get a percentage of the check back—so I recommend local eateries and the guests are usually happy to go there.

  The one remaining guest, Yoko Takamine, was in the library when we arrived. Reading the latest Lee Child thriller, she was engrossed in the book and barely looked up when Melissa’s suitcase rolled by followed by her mother and father, who were making a point of not discussing anything at the moment. The ghost floating over our heads was not Yoko’s concern. I didn’t see my other resident spirit, Paul Harrison, which was odd. Paul was bound to the property and usually showed up the second the door opened.

  Liss took the stairs up to the second floor and then rolled her bag into the dumbwaiter/elevator that went up to her attic room. Maxie ascended the easy way through the ceiling as my daughter, saying she’d be down for dinner, pulled her way up to what she surely considered sanctuary. The level of tension always rises when The Swine and I are in the same room. We don’t have to say or do anything; you can just feel it. I regret that Melissa has to deal with that, but we don’t see Steven often, so it has never seemed like a huge issue. Now he was following me around the guesthouse, where he’d only been once before. He kept looking around at each room as if he were trying to decide whether he wanted to buy the place, but I knew he was storing away information he could use for . . . something. The man was insidious.

  The best thing to do was ignore him, but to do so in ways that would get him annoyed. I was a pro at that. I began by calling Josh and letting him know we’d made it home safely. I made a point of telling him that Steven was in town and would be staying in the guesthouse for a day or two at the most. That last part I mentioned while my ex looked on so he’d know the accommodations were not a permanent solution to his problem.

  “You want me to come over and beat him up or anything?” Josh asked.

  I laughed. “I’d be much more adept at it. I have all the anger. You’d just be doing it out of loyalty.”

  “It’s more than that. I hate the way that guy has treated you and Melissa.”

  Josh and I had known each other for a long time. A really long time. Since we were kids, playing in his grandfather’s paint store. Now Josh owned the store and we’d been seeing each other for about two years. At one point six months before, we had discussed his moving into the guesthouse, but it wasn’t practical to his store in Asbury Park, where he had to be extremely early in the morning, when the painters arrived for their daily supplies. And I, clearly, couldn’t move in with him, since my business was sort of predicated on the idea that I’d be in the house when people were staying here.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I assured him. “I can definitely handle myself.”

  “Yeah, but it’s more fun if I do it.”

  “You’ll be here for dinner tomorrow?” I asked. I looked at Steven then, too, just to make sure he knew this was a regular thing.

  “Unless there’s more snow. Maybe even if there is. I haven’t talked to you enough lately, and I miss it.” Josh belonged in the Boyfriend Hall of Fame. I said I’d see him the next night, gave my ex a dismissive nod and went upstairs.

  I walked into my bedroom to take out my earrings and change clothes. I only got to do the former because my ex-husband didn’t take a closed door for an answer and barged his way in.

  “Hey!” I snapped at him. “We haven’t
been married for years. You don’t get to come in here.” All he’d gotten to see were my naked earlobes, but it was the principle of the thing.

  “I need to tell you about my situation,” The Swine said in what he considered to be an urgent yet subdued voice. It actually sounded like he was whispering to the back of the room at Madison Square Garden.

  “Let me save you the time,” I told him as I saw Paul push his face through the wall to look in. Paul was polite, but when he heard me shout he might have thought something was wrong. I gave him a quick look to indicate he should come in, and he did, looking baffled. He’d met—okay, seen—The Swine before and held the opinion that he was, you know, a swine. “I’ve seen this before. You got into a shady business deal with somebody, you lost their money, they are mad as all hell and threatening you and so you need to get out of your house and hide in a hotel. And by the way, that’s a swell time to invite our thirteen-year-old daughter out to spend a week with you. Are you even aware you’re a father, Steven?”

  Paul immediately started stroking his goatee. He was in private investigator mode.

  When we had finished finding out who poisoned Paul and Maxie, Paul had approached me with a proposition: He wanted to keep doing some investigations because he seriously had nothing but time on his hands and considered the mental puzzle necessary to his sanity. But he had a problem—he was dead. He couldn’t leave my property and he couldn’t interview people about cases, because if they were alive they wouldn’t see or hear him (unless they were as wonderfully gifted as me, and that, if you’re not from New Jersey, is what we call Sarcasm). So he wanted me to be his “legs in the field” for investigations, something I did not want to do. I had a business to run, and investigations tend to deal with angry people, the very type I like to avoid.

  But then I had a problem: I was just opening my guesthouse and needed a steady stream of clients to keep the place running. A business called Senior Plus Tours, which features vacations with “value added” qualities—in my case, staying in a “haunted house”—had offered me a contract for a number of guests per month that could definitely help me along.

  I needed Paul and Maxie to do ghost things so the guests would feel satisfied with their vacations. Paul made it clear: He’d talk Maxie into doing two “spook shows” a day if I’d agree to get a private investigator’s license and help him with the occasional case, which he promised would not be dangerous.

  Since then I’d had a number of deadly weapons aimed or in general pointed at me, but Senior Plus had held up its end of the bargain. That is, they had done so until very recently. The number of guests had tailed off, mostly because it was indeed winter in New Jersey, but this was worse than previous winters had been. I got the feeling the company was running out of seniors who wanted to stay in a spook house and might be reconsidering renewing its contract when it came due this coming autumn. So I had about ten months to pick things up.

  “Of course I’m aware I’m her father,” The Swine answered. “That’s why I wouldn’t let her stay in my house where it might be dangerous. Nobody knew I was in a hotel.”

  “Except you had to put the stay on a credit card because you don’t have any money, so they probably traced you, right?” I countered. “I’ve seen this bit before, Steven. You should have canceled Liss’s trip and you know it.”

  The Swine shook his head. “It happened too fast. All this hit the fan the day before she was flying out; I didn’t have time.” He sat down on the bed, saw the look I gave him and stood up again. He could be oily, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “Okay, let’s have it. Who’s ticked off at you this time and why are you so scared you had to fly all the way to New Jersey to get away from them?” That was mostly for Paul’s benefit and he nodded to me in thanks.

  “I got into a deal with this guy Lou Maroni.”

  “Huh. I didn’t know they had guys named Lou Maroni in L.A.,” I said. “I thought they didn’t get any farther west than Trenton.”

  “You gonna be a pain in the butt or are you going to help me?” my ex asked.

  “I’ll aim for both, but given the choice I’ll settle for just being a pain in the butt.” Divorces are rarely as amicable as the participants would like you to believe. “So, how’d you get Lou mad at you?”

  Steven, even in the rather tight confines of the room—I made most of the larger bedrooms guest accommodations—found a way to turn away from me so I couldn’t see his expression. Paul, having no such difficulties, simply flew through me (it feels like a warm breeze when he makes contact, where Maxie is more of a cool one) and took up a position where he could view The Swine unobstructed.

  “The original deal was simple,” Steven said. “We were providing seed money for a start-up that was going to be huge. Bigger than huge. Planetary.”

  “Spare me the sales pitch. I’m not investing. My ex is late with the child support.” I looked at Paul’s face; he smiled. Good. That meant Steven had not.

  “You never believed in me, Ally.”

  “Maybe it was the lying that cut into my confidence.”

  Paul sighed—it wasn’t breathing exactly but it had the same effect—and shook his head slightly. “This is not a time to rehash your divorce, Alison,” he reminded me. “We are taking information from a client.”

  I must have turned my head suddenly at that remark, because Steven narrowed his eyes. “What?” he asked.

  “Go on. Lou. The planetary-sized deal. And how it went completely wrong. Start from there.”

  Paul nodded approvingly.

  “The idea was this company was going to put out software called SafT that would make your personal data absolutely unhackable.” The Swine was back in salesman mode. “No chance anyone would ever be able to see anything you’d done online.”

  “Perfect for cheating husbands everywhere,” I pointed out. He ignored that.

  “A real boon to anyone concerned with identity theft,” Steven went on. “Could be bought by Google or Apple, and the guy’s a billionaire.”

  “I’m still not an investor, Steven. What happened? How come Lou’s got his goons on your tail?”

  Maxie chose that moment to drop down out of the attic. “Melissa wants to know if you’re ordering in or if she has to cook,” she reported. Because, as I’ve pointed out, I am a terrible cook, Melissa, my mother or a combination of both often makes dinner at my house. Then Maxie caught sight of The Swine again. “What’s he doing in this room?”

  Because Steven believes the ghosts are a genius marketing tool I made up to get more guests, I do not interact with them when he’s around. I am constantly thinking of an imaginary custody hearing in which his high-powered attorney (as if he could afford even a public defender) tries to question my sanity by noting the front of my home and business bears a sign reading “Haunted Guesthouse.” So I did not directly answer Maxie.

  Paul, unencumbered by the need to appear sane and freed of having The Swine aware of his presence (there are some advantages to being dead after all), looked at Maxie and said, “I’m betting takeout.”

  I nodded a touch and Maxie rose into the ceiling again.

  “What happened was that the project was doing really well,” The Swine said. It was his defensive tone. I could have written what was coming weeks ahead of his arrival, but I let him say it because, well, it warmed my heart a little to hear him embarrassed. “But some of the investors got a little . . . antsy . . . and decided they wanted to get their capital back.”

  “Imagine. People getting cold feet after giving you their money.”

  The Swine blinked but did not take the bait. Paul, however, should have been wearing a Deerstalker cap and cape, he was concentrating so intently.

  “Investors, especially inexperienced ones, will often get nervous when a deal is taking slightly longer than they might have anticipated to get off the ground.” He had decided to face me d
irectly, a mistake on his part, since I knew what every expression meant and which ones were lying. Most of them were lying.

  “Your pal Lou was not an experienced investor?” I asked.

  “Not in this kind of opportunity, no. His area is more in importing/exporting.”

  I could tell Steven wanted me to ask what Lou imported and exported. I could imagine, so I did not.

  “It’s an easy fix, then,” I suggested, knowing no such thing ever existed in The Swine’s universe. “Give the man back his money and he’ll stop sending people after you.”

  My ex turned away again. This was going to be the tricky part. For him. “It doesn’t really work like that, Alison. You see . . .”

  “You don’t have the money, do you, Steven?” I would like to point out that I could have let him twist in the wind indefinitely, as he never would have gotten to the point. But I was getting hungry and was sure Melissa was on the phone ordering our dinner even now.

  “Not exactly, no.”

  He turned, and I got the naughty-little-boy-wanting-forgiveness look. It had worked on me once. Then it hadn’t, ever again.

  “So you’d taken the Kickstarter money and probably begun yet another can’t-miss project and you didn’t have the cash on hand, is that it? You know, a lot of people would call that a Ponzi scheme. Like the ones who work for the FBI.”

  The Swine had the nerve to look insulted. “It’s not like that, Ally.”

  I had the nerve to look annoyed.

  “Okay, sorry. It’s not like that, Alison.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Okay, then. What’s it like?”

  He raised a hand, index finger pointed toward the ceiling as if he were about to make a major point. He even opened his mouth to speak. Then he stopped and his face seemed to sag a little. “Okay. That’s what it’s like. I wasn’t trying to steal their money, Alison, you have to believe me. I just had some expenses and—”

  “And you were going to put all the money back as soon as you got it from your other business venture, right?” To be fair, The Swine had been a legitimate stockbroker when we were married, but after he’d left the Wall Street area for Blonde Central, he had not found the same success in the financial services business. Hence the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul (not the Paul in the room) business tactics. Hence the late alimony and child support payments, when there were payments at all. Hence the need to put his whole life on credit cards issued by banks foolish enough to think they would be repaid.