Spouse on Haunted Hill

by E. J. Copperman

  (In the interest of full disclosure: Maxie has been there more than once at crucial times for me. And she never, ever lets me forget it.)

  “You’re serious,” I said to McElone.

  “You bet.” I always appreciate when someone doesn’t say, “Serious as a heart attack,” because it takes me five minutes to stop monitoring my chest for unexplained pains after that and I lose the thread of the conversation. “You don’t want to have anything to do with it. Leave it to me.”

  “Is it all right if I ask you one question before I leave?” I said.

  McElone looked at me for a moment. “One question.”

  “Can you give me a ride home? Susannah just left with the car.”

  Eighteen

  “This is very encouraging.” Paul was hovering a little over the floor in the basement, stringing together the extension cords, surge suppression strips and electrical devices he had confiscated from my house and trying to keep all the cords straight.

  “I don’t see how,” I told him. “The lieutenant practically ordered me off any inquiries about Maurice DuBois’s murder. She wants me to just sit back and let her railroad Steven more efficiently.”

  Paul stroked his goatee, a sign he was thinking deeply. “I meant the electrical experiment,” he said, never taking his eyes off the pile of prongs and extenders. “But you must know Lieutenant McElone has no legal authority to keep you from asking questions and following leads.”

  I insinuated myself between Paul and the snaky objects of his undying affection. “Paul. It’s February. There isn’t going to be a thunderstorm for at least two months. You can obsess about your plans to electrify the basement and burn down my house then. I’m just trying to figure out how to tell the insurance company a ghost was trying to move to another plane of existence so they should pay for all the damages.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to your house,” he assured me. I was less than totally convinced, as even his tone was a little shaky. “But the message here is that we can still investigate the DuBois killing whether the lieutenant tells you to stop or not. Besides, you know her well enough to have confidence she would never jail your ex-husband if she did not have solid evidence he did the shooting, and we can be fairly sure he didn’t.”

  I was about to explain to the ghost how I knew The Swine much better than he did and considered it less than certain he hadn’t actually stepped over the last line of polite behavior, but the basement door opened and Melissa appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Are we having a strategy session?” she asked. “Nobody told me.”

  I hadn’t wanted to include her but figured I could deflect the blame. “Where’s Maxie?” I asked.

  “On the beach with Everett. They like to go out there and drive seagulls crazy.” Animals can sometimes sense the ghosts without seeing or hearing anything unusual. It leads to anxious behavior, which Maxie finds riotous.

  Speaking of animals, Lester the ghost dog floated down from where Liss was standing, and she followed him to the basement. Lester got there first and kept going, so his feet vanished in concrete by the time she made it down. Lester doesn’t care about perceptions but he does like to be around humans. I mentally thanked myself for taking my allergy medications this morning or Lester would make me sneeze like it was flu season. Which it was, but luckily we’d all been vaccinated. Those of us who were alive.

  “Well, we don’t have much to go on,” I said, since it seemed Melissa was going to be part of . . . whatever this was going to be, anyway. “There’s this cousin Richie I’ve never heard of before, but there’s also Lou Maroni and his posse, whom your father seemed to be upset about missing last night. If we could find them, I’ll bet we could find him.”

  “We’ve found him,” Melissa said. “We’ve found him more than once. He’ll answer me if I call him right now.”

  “Melissa is correct,” Paul said, wrapping extension cords on an old garden hose caddy. “There seems to be little advantage to searching for your ex-husband right now. He is accessible enough and the police no longer seem to be looking for him. Did the lieutenant explain why she let him leave after he was in custody?”

  I shook my head. “She wouldn’t answer any questions about that. I got the feeling she was not happy about letting Steven out but didn’t have any choice.”

  “This woman you met said Dad has a cousin Richie?” Melissa asked. “I’ve never heard about any relatives in New Jersey except Grandma and Grandpa Rendell.”

  “Neither have I,” I said. “And frankly that’s weirder. Liss, get in touch with your grandfather and ask him if there’s a cousin Richie we don’t know about.” I still wasn’t all that crazy about the idea of contacting Harry Rendell if I didn’t have to. Liss nodded and got out her phone. There was no point in texting Harry—he was a twentieth-century kind of guy who grudgingly owned a flip phone—so she dialed his number looking slightly on edge. The Rendells have never really cultivated much of a relationship with Melissa, although I always took that as Constance’s doing. Liss walked to the other side of the basement putting her finger to her ear.

  “Hello, Grandpa Harry?” My father was always “Grampa.” No distinction necessary, even years after he’d died. He still loved it.

  Melissa walked toward the window and Paul took the opportunity to link two of the extension cords together and roll them up on the hose caddy. I had a quick flash of what it would have looked like to a guest if someone had wandered down at this moment. You get that sometimes, picturing the hose caddy loading cords onto itself with no visible help. My house is an interesting place to live. But for Paul, it isn’t an interesting place to be dead, hence the electricity experiment.

  I tried not to take it personally.

  “What I don’t understand,” Paul said without diverting his attention from his task, “is why the lieutenant seems to be concentrating her investigation on your ex-husband but did not hold him even for twenty-four hours for questioning when she had the opportunity.”

  I was busy texting The Swine: “Who’s this Cousin Richie I never heard of before?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said to Paul. “I think now that she knows Lou Maroni and his large entourage are in town, she’d be busy looking for them. Seems to me they’re the most logical suspects. They knew DuBois better than The Swine did.”

  Almost immediately, a responding text: “Who have you been talking to?”

  I could practically hear the accusatory, tense tone of voice. The dilemma then became: Should I reassure or irritate? It wasn’t much of a dilemma. “That doesn’t answer the question. Who’s Cousin Richie?”

  “Perhaps the lieutenant is allowing your ex-husband to roam freely so he can lead her to the more likely suspects,” Paul suggested.

  The Swine texted, “That’s not funny, Alison.” Which didn’t bother me at all.

  “It wasn’t intended to be. Cousin Richie. Who?”

  Melissa ended her call and walked back over to us. “Grandpa Harry never heard of a cousin named Richie,” she said.

  “Did he wish you a happy birthday?” It had been two weeks previous.

  “It didn’t come up.” Her grandparents hadn’t gotten in touch, then. I thought they’d sent a card.

  “Don’t let it bother you, honey,” I said. “It’s how they are.”

  Liss shrugged.

  “Did your grandfather tell you anything useful?” I asked.

  “He said Dad was there yesterday, but everybody was acting funny. He did say Dad had a meeting with a guy in the garage.” She knew exactly what she was saying and looked at Paul and me for reaction.

  “In the garage? In this weather?” I asked.

  “Is it cold out?” Paul was brought up in Canada and no longer had an operating nervous system, so it was hard to tell whether he thought he was being amusing.

  “Yeah. I pumped Grandp
a Harry for some information on the man Dad was meeting and he said he was kind of stocky and wore a hat the whole time. Not a knitted hat, like a hat men wear in old movies.”

  Lou Maroni was not someone you’d describe as “stocky.” He wasn’t large at all, in any direction, and relied on his henchmen (for lack of a better term) for the muscle, I was guessing. “Could it be one of the men who came here with Maroni?” I asked.

  Liss made a face that indicated she didn’t think so. “They all seemed to be in, like, a uniform, and none of them had hats,” she said. “Besides, they weren’t, you know, fat. They were more like bodybuilder guys.”

  “So there’s someone else involved,” Paul said, stroking the goatee. This time he was clearly engaged. Not like Josh and I were engaged. You know, engaged in the discussion.

  This whole getting-married thing was going to take some getting used to.

  “You think it’s someone new?” I asked Paul.

  “We don’t have enough facts to make a determination,” he said. He always says that. It gets annoying, but he’s a nice guy, so I give him some slack. “But based on the people we’ve seen so far, that is certainly one way to interpret the information Melissa just brought us.”

  “There is no Cousin Richie.” It had taken The Swine long enough to answer. “Who told you there was?” Ball in my court.

  “If there’s no such person it doesn’t matter.” Fight annoying with annoying, I always say.

  I looked up at Paul. “How do we find out who this person is?” I asked.

  Paul actually looked away from his amazing creation. Whatever it was. “I think it’s time for us to ask Maxie to do what she does best,” he said.

  * * *

  The thing about Maxie is that she really hates being asked to do something when she’d rather do anything else, and she’d always rather do anything else. But as we had discovered since this thrill ride began, Maxie has a real talent for Internet research. And the one surefire way to convince her to work on a case is to appeal to her ego, which is the size of Montana, only bigger.

  “You know you’re the only one who can get this right,” Melissa was telling her. The other surefire way to get Maxie to do something is to have Liss be the one to ask. She adores my daughter and will pretty much cave in to any request she gets that comes from that direction. “We’re trying to keep my dad out of jail for maybe the rest of his life.” With most people that would be overkill. When talking to Maxie it was understatement.

  We had adjourned to the library. Yoko and Ann were out doing some souvenir shopping, something considerably more challenging on the Jersey Shore in February than in July. Mel was in his room, probably staring out the window and looking stunned. It had become his routine, and I didn’t blame him. Ann’s quick turnaround and inconsistent (in my eyes) behavior must have been awfully confusing.

  “We were going to go down to the miniature golf course,” Maxie said. “We like to move the balls around while people are putting.” She held out a hand and Everett Sandheim, her ghost boyfriend, took it.

  “It’s February. There’s nobody there,” Everett pointed out. He’s a steadying influence on Maxie with his military background. It’s interesting because I had first known him as a homeless man with some mental illness, but he had reverted to an earlier time in his life after he became a ghost. “Besides, we are more useful here. You should do what you can to help, and so should I.” Having settled that—and it seemed to work, since Maxie will usually follow Everett’s lead—he turned toward me. “What can I do, Ghost Lady?” The name is a long story.

  Actually it was a helpful question. “The thing is, my ex-husband is going to come here soon,” I said. “We’re going to have a brief conversation, after which he’ll storm out of here in a huff. I want you to get into his car when he leaves so you can tell me where he went and who he met with later today. Would that be okay?”

  Everett probably wanted to salute. His military training was strong in this version of him, but Maxie had taught him that he was no longer actually in the service. So instead he nodded briskly and said, “I’m happy to help.”

  Maxie, staring out the window at the snow-covered beach, sighed. “Okay,” she said. “What do you need me to do?”

  This was Paul’s realm, so he took charge, pacing about a foot and a half off the floor. “First, we need to know as much about Lou Maroni and Maurice DuBois as possible. Business dealings, associates—that’s especially important—and personal details.”

  Maxie had produced a pad and pencil and was wearing her favorite green visor, which she thinks makes her look businesslike when in fact it makes her look like the world’s strangest pit boss. “What kind of personal details?” she asked with a certain wariness.

  “Marriages, children, family ties,” Paul ticked off. “Anything that might indicate a pattern. Unusual hobbies. Things like that.”

  Maxie scribbled in her book, although I was certain she probably had absorbed what Paul said and was already planning her work. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Look into a type of computer software called SafT. It’s a start-up that’s supposed to—”

  “It protects your personal data, passwords and all that,” Maxie said. “I was there.”

  “No, you weren’t,” I said. Maxie had come in only to ask about dinner and then left.

  “I can hear way better than you think I can.” That was a terrifying thought. “What do you want to know about it?” Maxie asked Paul.

  “The Internet is full of chatter on such innovations,” the goateed ghost answered. “See what you can pick up. Whether the program was actually considered viable. What its current stage of development might be. If there are serious competitors. Anything that would make it more or less valuable a property.”

  “Gotcha.” Maxie pretended to be chewing gum and “shot” at Paul with her finger. For some reason, when she’s working, Maxie seems to think she’s a brassy gal in a nineteen forties Warner Brothers movie. Paul says if that works for her we should just indulge the fantasy, so I said nothing, although my mind was racing with possibilities. I stored them for another occasion.

  “That’s it for now,” Paul said, giving Maxie her marching orders. “Get back to us with results as soon as you can.”

  Maxie was already gone (probably into Melissa’s room, which is her first choice for work, followed by my roof), but Everett hung back awaiting his assignment tailing The Swine.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Steven barreled into the house less than ten minutes later, frenetic energy driving his movements and the cold New Jersey wind—something he’d successfully avoided the past five winters—adding to the already enhanced redness in his face.

  “What are you doing?” he said by way of greeting. Our daughter, sitting in an easy chair and in plain view of her father, did not so much as merit a quick hello. She noticed that and it registered on her face.

  “I’m sitting in a room with our daughter trying to figure out how to keep you out of jail for the rest of your life,” I answered, unsuccessfully trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. “What are you doing?”

  The Swine stopped his peripatetic advance. He looked directly at Melissa, remembered who she was and put on Smile #53, the paternal one that was meant to melt his little girl’s heart. I could tell with a quick glance that it wasn’t working.

  “I’m sorry, Lissie,” Steven said. “I should have said hi when I came in. I’m not mad at you.” He even managed not to emphasize the word you, so as to better indicate his displeasure with me. Melissa’s gaze didn’t waver.

  “Don’t call me ‘Lissie,’ remember?” she said. “I’m not six anymore.”

  “Very good, Melissa,” Paul said. “Keep him on the defensive.”

  Liss looked a little annoyed at that; she was ticked off at her father, not plotting strategies, but she didn’t look at Paul or Everett.
She took out her phone. It is the current thirteen-year-old way to avoid adults.

  “Of course not. I’m sorry. Melissa, your mom and I need to have a conversation right now. Would you mind?” He gestured toward the door.

  “Yes, I would,” she answered. That was my daughter. “I’m involved in the investigation Mom is doing and I need to be included in any conversations that have some importance involving that.” She looked over at me, and I picked up the ball and ran with it.

  “She’s right,” I told my ex-husband. “Melissa is a valuable partner in the work I do and she deserves to be included. So, what were you saying?” I did not bat my eyelids. Much.

  To his credit—and it pains me to say that—Steven managed to regroup. He took a breath, nodded (probably to himself) and looked first at me and then at Liss. “Okay, you’re right. You two are trying to help me and I need to respect that. Sometimes I forget.” Like, for example, always except when we were standing right in front of him. Sometimes then, too.

  “All right, then,” I said. “You were fuming about something. Let’s have it.”

  Everett, with his military training, was not relaxed. Everett was never relaxed, but his manner was not intense. He stood—floated—toward the back door, watching for signals that might give him information he could share later. But he’d never met The Swine before and couldn’t know what to expect like Liss and I did.

  Steven’s eyes didn’t make it to slits, but they had ambitions. “You spoke to . . . someone about my situation and I’d like to know who,” he said. He was trying to get that smooth tone back in his voice, but he was too angry at my having found out something he didn’t want me to know. I’d had that experience before, so I knew how he was going to handle it.

  “And I’d like to know who Cousin Richie is and why I’ve never heard of him before. So since you want to know something from me and I want to know something from you, I have a compromise to propose.” Melissa was watching me closely and I wanted to make sure I played this right. It couldn’t just be about beating The Swine at a game; it had to include some amount of actual progress in clearing him of the Maurice DuBois murder.