Spouse on Haunted Hill

by E. J. Copperman

  Josh looked as proud of me as I’d ever seen. For some reason that didn’t make me happy. The last thing I needed was to be the object of competition between these two. Not that Josh had a chance of losing; it was the principle of the thing.

  Part of it was surely the look on Melissa’s face. She’s always had conflicted feelings about her father. When we divorced, Liss was little and simply sad, but now she had been talking to me about how living with just one parent almost all the time might have biased her feelings. That was a large part of the thinking behind her trip to visit Steven in L.A. He’d always tried to be the “fun parent,” which was natural, since I was the one making the rules about ninety-nine times out of a hundred. I hadn’t gotten a real read on whether that dynamic had changed in the days they’d just finished spending together.

  Right now she was studying Steven and not liking what she saw. When she looked back at me, I wasn’t sure whether that was admiration or disapproval I saw in her eyes.

  Teenagers, it should be noted, are scary people. Much scarier than ghosts.

  Steven’s mouth opened and closed a time or two. Okay, two. His eyes darted between Melissa and me as if we were playing an especially spirited match of Ping-Pong and he didn’t want to miss anything. Part of his success with people had always been the ability to make everyone believe he was on their side. That was undoubtedly what had gotten him into this current predicament. He was being judged by his daughter and found wanting. He knew it.

  “You want the truth?” he managed.

  “No, please lie to us all,” I answered, the anger in my voice palpable. “That’s always served you so well before.”

  That’s when the scary teenager turned on me. She didn’t say anything or even do much more than change her facial expression, but I saw it happen. I was being mean to her dad and she didn’t like it.

  “I deserved that,” The Swine said. “I have lied to you and I’ve lied to you a lot. But this time I’m trying to protect you, and you have to believe that. You don’t really want to know all that’s going on right now, Alison.”

  “That doesn’t help me,” I told him. “I can’t let you put us in any kind of trouble. And from what I’ve seen, that’s all there is surrounding this deal of yours.”

  “Just one shot to the head,” my father muttered. He backed off when he saw the look on his granddaughter’s face. “Sorry, peanut.” Silently he put the rolling pin back on the counter.

  “Let me tell you this,” my ex said. “I’m doing everything I can to keep any danger away from you and Melissa. If that includes moving out of this house until it all blows over, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” I knew I hadn’t said that, but it was still something of a shock to determine that the words had come from my daughter’s mouth. “We can help. There’s a lot all of us can do. Max—”

  “No,” Maxie said quickly. “Don’t say it.” Melissa stopped.

  “Maximally we prefer that you stay somewhere else while you’re dealing with this,” I said. “If there’s anything one of us can do to help, you can let me know.”

  “Mom,” Melissa protested.

  “She’s right,” my mother said. I wasn’t sure which one of us she meant.

  “No, Liss. Your dad has gotten into some real trouble, and you’re not a little kid anymore, so I can’t just pretend it isn’t there. But I can make sure that it doesn’t get to you, and that’s what I’m going to do.” I turned toward my ex-husband. “You’re going to have to move out tomorrow.”

  Steven looked like I’d hit him with the rolling pin. His eyes widened and his face, already pale, drained itself even more. His lips pursed. Then he nodded. “You’re right. I’ll pack up and leave in the morning.” Honestly, Joan Crawford on her best day had nothing on Steven in the melodrama department. It even took me a second to realize he didn’t have anything to pack up.

  “You can stay with me if you want.” It wasn’t the last voice in the room I expected to hear, but that would have been Oliver’s, so it was close.

  Josh Kaplan stood and gestured toward Steven. “I don’t have a second bedroom, but you can have the couch,” he continued. I tried to wrap my mind around what he was saying.

  “Really?” The Swine asked. And that was going to be it. The two significant men in my life were going to be roommates. A sitcom waiting to happen.

  “If you want,” Josh repeated.

  Steven looked at Josh with wonder, then at me. For permission, I guess, or something. I couldn’t do anything but shrug.

  “I’d like that,” The Swine said.

  “Okay. I’ll take you there tonight after dinner.”

  That was something of a disappointment, as I’d sort of thought Josh might want to spend the night at the guesthouse. But there was my hard-line stand to consider. We all had to make sacrifices.

  Steven nodded, looked like his eyes were misting up, and left the kitchen without another word.

  It was Jeannie who broke the long silence that followed. She looked down at Oliver, who had gotten up and was playing with a toy car on the floor. She didn’t see Lester the puppy, who was trying desperately to sniff the chicken Ollie had left behind. Then Jeannie looked at her daughter, who had fallen blissfully asleep in Tony’s lap. Liss pretended not to be looking at me by checking her phone.

  “Well, that was weird,” Jeannie said.

  Melissa got up, glared at me and ran out of the kitchen, presumably to go find her father. Her expression indicated I shouldn’t talk to her again, perhaps until after she received a master’s degree. In something.

  Maybe it had been a Ping-Pong match after all.

  Seven

  “Melissa, you have to talk to me sooner or later,” I said, pacing back and forth. “I’m your mother and we’ve always been able to talk to each other. What’s different now?”

  “That was good,” Paul said, looking down from the ceiling. “Until you asked that question at the end. You’re opening the door for her to tell you exactly what you did wrong, and then she’ll get angry again.”

  “I dunno.” Maxie was watching intently, a green visor over her eyebrows, the Maxie version of serious. “She’s just mad at you. Maybe you should let that go for a while and see if it wears off.”

  Maxie, who considers herself Melissa’s closest confidante (when it is in fact her friend Wendy), likes to be the good cop when I have to play bad. Since Maxie never has to be the bad cop, that gives her a lot of opportunities. I wasn’t buying this one.

  “Rehearsing is stupid,” I said, flopping down on my bed. “I’m talking to my daughter, not to a grand jury. I shouldn’t have to worry this much about a simple conversation.”

  I closed my eyes to avoid seeing the ghosts, but I could still hear Maxie. “Well, you kicked her dad out of the house. She’s not going to be too happy with you. Maybe that’s the new normal.”

  Mom and Dad had left an hour earlier, citing Mom’s night vision but really because things had gotten uncomfortable in my house. Tony and Jeannie had packed up their children not long after, Jeannie offering to call later and “help you through this,” no doubt with her vast experience raising a teenager through a divorce.

  Steven and Josh had left together. That seems weird even to say, but it was true. Josh had tried to explain his rationale when the two of us were (as far as he knew) alone in the kitchen: “I figured I could keep an eye on him and make sure anything he said to you was true. Besides, you wanted him out of the house and I agreed with you. Seemed the easiest thing to do.”

  I held him close to me for a moment. “I lived with Steven a long time,” I told him. “It’s not as simple as you might think it is.”

  Josh laughed lightly. “The circumstances are going to be a little different this time.”

  “I would hope so.” I liked the feel of his arms around me and he was just
enough taller than me that I could duck down and fit my head under his chin if I bent a little. It sounds painful, but it actually feels nice.

  “I think we should leave,” Paul told Maxie.

  “Yeah. I’m getting a little nauseated myself.” They vanished, Maxie through the ceiling and Paul, the floor. Two vastly different spirits stuck existing in the same space.

  “You sure you don’t mind having him there?” I asked Josh for only the fifth time.

  “Of course I mind, but it’s a better plan than having him stay here, and I’ll know if someone comes looking for him. That would mean they have someone watching your house.” A cheerful thought.

  We agreed that I’d call him if Overcoat showed up again and that Josh would call if anyone came to his apartment for business with Steven. And then I let go of him, although that was not my strongest impulse.

  But Melissa was not convinced and she was not impressed with the possible danger to her if her father and his massive debt to Lou Maroni remained living under our roof. On one of the few moments she spoke to me before dumbwaitering up to her room, she said, “The ghosts can look out for us. They’ve done it before.”

  “Yes, but it’s safer to keep the danger away rather than try to control it here.”

  “You’re just doing this because you’re mad at Dad,” my daughter spat out. “It’s not fair and you’re going to get him killed!” Teenagers are the best in the world at ramping up the drama. She turned on a dime and ran up the stairs. We hadn’t spoken since.

  So I was practicing for an imaginary conversation I was hoping to have with my own daughter. Lying on my bed with my eyes closed, I thought it seemed so much easier to simply stay where I was and sleep until she had to leave for college.

  “Come on, get up,” Maxie said. “Melissa has to go to bed soon. If you want to have this fight with her, you need to do it now.”

  “It’s not a fight,” Paul corrected her. “It’s going to be a healthy conversation.” Paul is British but grew up in Canada. Strong emotion doesn’t run with his people.

  Maxie, I had to admit, was right. If I wanted to clear the air with Liss, I should do it tonight and not let this fester. I stood up. “Don’t follow me,” I told the ghosts.

  I heard Maxie make a disappointed noise, but they did not seem to move when I left the room and headed for the pull-down stairs I could climb to Liss’s attic room.

  But I didn’t make it that far. The phone in my pocket vibrated, and thinking it might be a conciliatory text from my daughter, I grabbed at it. But the message was coming from someone considerably more disturbing. It was from Detective Lieutenant Anita McElone of the Harbor Haven Police Department, and it read “I’m on your front porch.” McElone, although she has come to accept there are ghosts in my house and having been told repeatedly that they are not scary, does not care to come inside unless she has to.

  I wasn’t crazy about hearing from the police . . . ever, really, but this time of night it was more disturbing. It wasn’t something that could wait until morning. Did something happen to Steven? To Josh, because he was with Steven? (That would unquestionably have been worse. In case you’re seeing this, Josh.)

  I rushed down the stairs, passing Yoko on the way. Luckily she didn’t seem to have anything to ask me about, but at the speed I was traveling it was hard to tell. I loved having guests, but Josh was my boyfriend and Steven was . . . Melissa’s father. That’s right. So they had to take priority at the moment.

  Of course, I could have just texted McElone (if you have problems with your hearing, you would pronounce it “macaroni”) and told her to come inside, but she would have argued and I didn’t have time. I opened the front door and looked out for her.

  McElone is nothing if not reliable. She was standing (despite the very inviting glider I installed almost immediately after closing on the house), fingers intertwined behind her, just to the left of the door. She looked like she was waiting for someone to give her the at-ease command.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. Some people would have started with “hello.” I was cutting the niceties to get to the point. That might have had something to do with the fact that it was ten degrees outside.

  “We had a call from Hanrahan’s,” she said. McElone doesn’t believe in niceties either. Hanrahan’s is one of the slightly rowdier pubs in Harbor Haven. Of course in Harbor Haven a rowdy pub is one where a game of darts can get a little heated. “They found the body of a man in the alley next to the bar.”

  My voice didn’t sound smooth when I spoke. In fact, it sounded like I’d just swallowed a handful of sand. “Whose body?” I asked. Let it be Steven, not Josh. Sorry, Liss, but your father is a Swine and Josh so isn’t.

  The hands came from behind McElone’s back, and they were holding a small notebook. She opened it and looked at a page. “A guy named Maurice DuBois,” she said. “Address in Santa Monica, California.”

  Maurice. Overcoat.

  McElone looked up from the notebook and seemed to be looking for a reaction. The one she got from me was probably relief. “You ever hear of this guy?” she asked.

  “Me?” That wasn’t an answer, mostly because it wasn’t meant to be. “Why?”

  McElone’s gaze did not waver. “Mostly because we consulted with the Santa Monica PD, and they say this DuBois guy might have had dealings with a Steven Rendell.” She did not pause for a reaction that time. “Is your husband in town?”

  I blinked. “Ex-husband,” I said.

  “Why don’t I come inside and look?” the lieutenant suggested. “It’s pretty cold out here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “You’re the one who’s afraid to come inside,” I said. I opened the door and held it for her. “After you. But you won’t find Steven here.”

  Even as we were walking inside, Paul’s head stuck out through the door, which was abrupt enough to make me start just a little. McElone looked at me. “Ghosty thing?” she asked. The lieutenant looked a trifle worried. It was going to take a long time for her to be comfortable with the dead people in my house. I shook my head.

  “Just the shock of what you said,” I lied.

  Paul, meanwhile, followed us into the house, where it was thankfully warmer. “Why is the lieutenant here?” he asked. He sounded excited. There’s nothing Paul likes as much as a fresh mystery to investigate. “Is it something about the man from this morning?”

  I didn’t react—I try not to when McElone is around—but it seemed strange that Paul would leap to that conclusion.

  “So you say this Maurice DuBois was found dead outside Hanrahan’s,” I told the lieutenant, as if she didn’t know that. “How did he die?”

  “Not from old age,” she said. “He had two bullet wounds, one in the leg, from behind, probably to stop him from running. Then one in the head. Execution-style, as they say.”

  And here I thought Overcoat was the guy I should have been afraid of. “Like a mob hit? On a guy from Santa Monica? That seems so impolite.”

  McElone shrugged. She walked through the front room, looking from side to side, no doubt trying to determine if my ex was somehow concealed within the plaster walls or behind the painting of the old (before Superstorm Sandy) Point Pleasant Boardwalk I’d bought from an artist named Dominick Finnelle at a fund-raising sale for the middle school’s theater club. “Don’t want to jump to conclusions,” McElone said.

  I followed her into the den as Paul marveled at the idea of a murder related to Steven’s business difficulties. “It’s especially perplexing that he traveled all the way here from California,” he mused. “The victim couldn’t have known very many people in the area.”

  I know Paul; his mind was racing faster than . . . some NASCAR guy. (What do I know about NASCAR?)

  McElone spent some time looking around the den, which was empty but for Mel Kaminsky, sitting in one of the easy chairs, just staring o
ut the glass doors at the beach. People like to do that, especially when it’s this cold out, but Mel still looked stunned. I gathered whatever conversation he’d had with Anne had not gone well, for him at least.

  “Did you ever meet Maurice DuBois?” McElone asked. She turned after having perused the room and headed for the kitchen.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. I mean, I met a guy named Maurice. But really, doesn’t that happen at least a couple of times a week? “Why should I know him?”

  “Like I said, he had some business dealings with your hus—ex-husband.”

  We glanced into the kitchen, which was empty of people. McElone still gave it a long view, like it was possible Steven was there but had become transparent. Which wasn’t the case, assuming he was still alive.

  “Wow,” Paul said. As usual, he was one step ahead of me.

  Wait. If Maurice had been shot, and Steven was with Josh . . .

  “Steven is at Josh’s apartment,” I told the lieutenant. “You need to give them protection.”

  McElone turned to look at me. “What did you say?”

  “I know you heard me. I’ll give you the address. Steven went to stay there because I told him he couldn’t be here. Now please, make sure nobody is going after them, okay?”

  The lieutenant pulled a cell phone out of her pocket and pushed a button. “This is McElone,” she said after a moment. “I need a cruiser at an address in Asbury Park in connection with the homicide at Hanrahan’s. I’m putting someone on to give you the address.” She extended the phone to me. “Go ahead.”

  I took the phone and said Josh’s address into it, spelling the street name. A male voice came through and said the cruiser would be on its way as soon as he could contact the APPD, which I assumed meant Asbury Park Police Department. The voice, which never identified itself, instructed me to give the phone back to McElone and I did without question.

  “Get back to me when they report in,” she said, and without a good-bye she disconnected the call and put the phone back in her pocket. Then she looked at me again. “Why didn’t you tell me your ex was here before?” she asked.