The Thrill of the Haunt

by E. J. Copperman

  Clearly, that meant I wasn’t being fair to Josh. But I realized as I thought about it that my stomach was clenching, and I’d have to take the time to think about that later when I was alone.

  As if you could ever be alone in this house.

  “It’s not like I haven’t been here before,” Tony said to me. “I’ve been in this room a hundred times.”

  “I’m telling you, I’ve got it!” Maxie insisted to me, but again, I did not respond. And I started getting annoyed; it’s not as if this was the first time I’d played it straight in front of Josh, let alone the “civilian” guests.

  “I know,” I told Tony. “But you haven’t seen it since I painted the paneling and cleared stuff out. Tell me what you think about the space. What’s the best thing to do with it?”

  “Home theater!” Maxie yelled. “It’s perfect. A few couches, a big-screen TV at that end.” She pointed. “Then you put in fill speakers and a kick-ass Blu-ray player, and you could have movie nights!”

  That wasn’t even close to the experience I wanted to offer my guests. I was trafficking in a quiet, relaxing experience at the beach, not a Die Hard film festival with extra oomph to the explosions. Besides, all that equipment sounded expensive. I shook my head slightly, and Maxie looked positively stupefied.

  “No?” she said, drawing the two letters out to a few hundred (mostly o’s). “Why not?”

  “Well,” said Josh, having heard none of this, “what are you hoping you can offer to the people who stay here?” A perfect softball question that could enable me to talk directly to Maxie without giving myself away; the man was a gem.

  “I want it to be a place for relaxation and quiet,” I stressed, maybe a little too vehemently, because Tony and Josh both gave me odd looks. “I’m looking for something that can give the guests a place to go to take it easy and enjoy the time away from their normal lives of noise and constant demands.” Okay, so that might have been aimed a little too squarely at Maxie.

  She made a sputtering sound, shook her head like she was dealing with a crazy person and swept herself up through the ceiling. Dad looked at her, then at me, and said, “I thought it was a good idea.”

  “In that case,” Tony said, walking in a large circle around the room, “I think you’re going about it the wrong way.”

  What else was I doing wrong? “How so?” I managed to get out.

  “Because it’s redundant. The rest of the house is quiet and relaxing. You’ve got a library where people can sit quietly. The den is homey and a refuge from the outside world, and the beach is pretty much right outside the French doors there. What you had in this room was for fun, like with the pool table. It was recreation.”

  “But nobody was using it,” I pointed out. “The only people who ever played pool in here were Mom and Melissa.”

  “Your mother can really break a rack,” Dad interjected, still looking up to see if Maxie was coming back. I love the man dearly.

  Tony nodded. “Maybe something a little different. A movie room? A place where the guests can get together and socialize a little?”

  Josh pointed at Tony. “That’s really good,” he said. Great. Now I had a grand total of no allies.

  I shook my head. “Not what I’m looking for. Besides, there are seven windows in this room. Getting it dark enough for a movie would be pretty near impossible, especially during the summer when it doesn’t get dark until after nine.”

  “Room-darkening shades,” Tony said. “Use paint remover and stain the walls back to a darker wood tone.”

  “You could use that karaoke machine you have in here, too, and host events on the nights you’re not doing ‘ghost’ things,” Josh suggested. “It’s like a common room.”

  There was just no point. “If you two aren’t going to take this seriously, I’ll have to figure it out on my own,” I said, and headed back to the kitchen, taking in their incredulous stares as I went.

  Men.

  Back in the kitchen, I gave Jeannie (I still wasn’t sure I wanted to talk to Tony or Josh) a rundown on what I’d done so far on my PI cases. There’s nothing that generates conversation more than a good murder and an alleged marital indiscretion, so my latest cases were excellent icebreakers. Jeannie has a sharp strategic mind and can be very helpful in thinking deviously, something at which I’m just a novice.

  “So you followed this guy to the Monmouth Mall,” Jeannie recapped, “and he went to Nathan’s. Doesn’t really seem to justify hiring a detective to tail him, does it?”

  “It was just one lunch hour,” I said. “Maybe he’ll do something dirty and disgusting tomorrow.” Mom gave Melissa a look, but there was no reaction from my daughter. I believe that not talking down to children makes them expect people to tell them things straight and encourages them to be straight with people in return. So far, Melissa is bearing me out; she is the very epitome of honesty and doesn’t tolerate anything less in others.

  “It’s okay, Grandma,” she told Mom. “I know about sex and everything.”

  Mom’s head vibrated a little, but she didn’t say anything. Dad, hovering near the stove, let out an involuntary laugh. And that got Mom to chuckle, too. “You’re such a good mother,” she said to me.

  “So you think he’s cheating on his wife?” I asked Jeannie, as if there’d been no side exchange.

  She waved a hand. “Of course. If the wife has noticed something, you can bet your money the guy’s got something on the side. Men are so easy to read.”

  “Good to know,” Tony said through a bite of lasagna. “This is delicious, Loretta.”

  “All I saw was a guy buying a hot dog,” I insisted to Jeannie.

  “So keep watching,” she said lightly.

  “Exactly,” Paul added to those of us who could hear him. He’d wandered into the kitchen when we started discussing the investigations. Ghosts are quiet travelers, and frankly, it gets a little creepy when you realize they’re already in the room. “You can’t give up on the stakeout after one attempt. You should be back there tomorrow.”

  I nodded slightly. “What about Everett?” I asked the room at large.

  “Follow the money,” Dad suggested. “Even if there isn’t any. A guy doesn’t get knifed just for entertainment.”

  “I dunno,” Melissa said after she’d finished chewing a bit of lasagna. “Everett didn’t have a house or a place to stay. He always wore the same clothes. He didn’t have a car or anything. I don’t think anybody killed him for his money.”

  Dad pointed to his temple and then to Melissa. “That’s a smart girl.” Liss smiled.

  “Well, nobody said they did, but you’re right, Melissa. I’d look for the ex-wife,” Jeannie said. “People get awful mad at each other in a divorce.” She looked at me and said, “Sorry.” I waved a hand to assure her I wasn’t at all offended.

  “It was years ago,” I said. “We’re fine now.” Well, that was a little fiction for Melissa’s sake, but mostly The Swine and I are fine, as long as he stays three thousand miles away.

  “We had a homeless man outside the store for months,” Josh said. “He just used to sit there on a cardboard box he’d flattened out. Didn’t write anything on it or ask for money. He just sat. The most defeated guy I’ve ever seen. Sy and I tried to help, called Social Services, offered him hot meals and stuff like that. It was really hard to watch during the winter, but we only got him to come inside the store to warm himself a few times. Then one especially cold day I went out to insist he come in, and the poor guy was gone. We never saw him again; I never even found out his name. He wouldn’t tell me. It was just . . . I realize he might have had a substance-abuse problem or a mental illness or something, but what I remember more than anything else is how completely without hope that poor guy was.” He shook his head a little.

  The story clearly touched Mom. “Eat something, Joshua,” she urged.

  “So, what are you saying?” I asked. “That if Everett felt the same way as the homeless man in front of the paint st
ore, he didn’t have any hope either?”

  “I don’t know,” Josh answered. “I never met this Everett guy, and it’s not like all people living on the street are the same; there are some I never would have invited into the store. But I think after a while living like that, it just doesn’t seem possible that your life can get any better, and that’s a terrible thing to think.”

  “I’m not sure I get it,” Melissa said, and for once, I felt a little regret about letting her in on the adult conversation. “Do you think Everett killed himself?”

  There was a little pang in my heart as my daughter seemed to be feeling Everett’s mental anguish for herself. “Oh, honey,” I began.

  Josh, ever trying to come to my rescue, jumped in. “I don’t really know, Liss,” he said. “I’m just saying he might have given up on himself, and maybe he decided he wasn’t strong enough to go on.”

  “But you think he could have killed himself,” Melissa said, apparently letting it sink in. Then she looked at Josh and shook her head. “With a tiny little knife? In a gas station men’s room? I don’t think so.”

  Josh looked at her and blinked a couple of times without speaking. It was my mother who finally broke the silence.

  “She’s a genius,” she said. “There’s apple pie for dessert. I didn’t make it, but it’s still good.”

  Eleven

  “I can’t believe you talked me into this,” Maxie said.

  We were sitting outside the Fuel Pit in my Volvo. Okay, I was sitting in the Volvo. Maxie was lying down—her favorite pose—with her legs extending into the engine block, not that she seemed to even notice. Which made sense, in a weird way.

  “I didn’t talk you into it,” I reminded her. “Paul and Melissa talked you into it. I just watched.”

  “And grinned the whole time,” the ghost noted.

  That part was true. But how many times had Maxie conspicuously enjoyed my discomfort when Paul had “persuaded” me to take on an investigation I found scary or inconvenient? Taking a little pleasure at seeing the worm turn was hardly an actionable offense. Particularly when the aggrieved party was, you know, deceased.

  Paul had been adamant about getting pictures of the room in which Everett Sandheim had died. It made sense from Paul’s investigator point of view; he couldn’t go to the scene of the crime, so seeing it from a number of angles would be especially helpful for him in determining whether there were any clues the police had left behind or overlooked. But I got Maxie’s point—it wasn’t the kind of place I’d want to enter either.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said, mostly sincerely.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” Maxie said without acknowledging the apology. “I don’t see why it has to be me.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” I told her. We were parked across the street from the Fuel Pit, watching the door to the men’s room. Marv Winderbrook, who owned the station, was in the enclosure/convenience store near the gas pumps. There were no cars at the pumps. Marv appeared to be napping behind the counter. “You won’t be seen. I would be. It’d be a lot harder to explain what I was doing in there.”

  “I still don’t see why,” Maxie insisted. She offered no rationale. “Why don’t you just ask the gas station guy if you can go in and take pictures?”

  “What if he says no?” I countered.

  Maxie was silent.

  “Come on. The sooner you go in and look around and take a couple of pictures, the sooner you can come out and it’ll be over,” I told her. I held out my camera. “Put this in your pocket.”

  She gave me the same look Melissa does when she wants to prove me wrong. “I don’t have any pockets,” she said. It was true; neither the black T-shirt (with the legend “More Than You Think”) nor the running shorts she was wearing had pockets.

  “You can have pockets anytime you want, and you know it,” I countered. “Move.”

  “Suppose there’s somebody in there,” she said with what appeared to be a shudder.

  “We’ve been watching the door for fifteen minutes,” I said. “If there’s someone in there, he’s got bigger problems than you.”

  “Ugh!” Maxie said, but suddenly she was wearing a New York Jets warm-up jacket, snatched the camera out of my hand and stuck it in her pocket. “You owe me!” she said and was out of the car and moving across the street before I could answer her. She stole a look back at me and stuck out her tongue, but I decided to let that go because I had no alternative.

  I listened to the radio while I waited. There were very few cars going by and fewer pedestrians, so no one was going to question why a woman in a dilapidated Volvo was sitting across the street from a gas station listening to Marvin Gaye.

  The wait gave me time to mull over my relationship with Josh. We’d been seeing each other—if you didn’t count impromptu playdates at the paint store when we were tweens—for about four months now. That’s not an insignificant amount of time. And I had never had a reason to think Josh was anything but a caring, intelligent, funny guy who seemed to like me quite a bit. You don’t find those all that often, especially when you’re a single mother. Would I be risking losing it all by telling him the truth? I felt like it was somehow holding us back that I couldn’t tell him about Paul and Maxie—and Dad for that matter—but I didn’t know how to impart the information about them without making myself sound like a first-class lunatic. Yes, he’d heard the whispers around town about me being the ghost lady, and he knew all about the Senior Plus tours, but I’d let him assume that I was using those things as marketing to further my guesthouse’s business. Which, technically, I was.

  “Floor it!” Suddenly, Maxie was back in the passenger seat, looking positively terrified and shrieking at the top of what had once been her lungs. “Get me out of here!”

  I put the Volvo in gear immediately and pulled out onto the street. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Was someone in there?”

  “No!” she yelled. “Keep going!”

  “Did you see something? Was there a ghost in the men’s room?”

  No longer hyperventilating, Maxie looked at me with what appeared to be pity for my deplorable stupidity. “Do you think I’m afraid of ghosts?” she asked, her voice easily an octave lower.

  “Well then, what? What are we speeding away from?” I turned a corner so the gas station would be out of view, even in the mirrors.

  “It was disgusting!” she wailed. “Men are pigs!”

  My heart slowed down to the same rate it beats when I exercise, and I brought the car to the speed limit and left it there. “We’re peeling away and burning rubber because it wasn’t nice in the gas station men’s room?” I asked.

  Maxie looked at me sheepishly. “It was really bad,” she said in a small voice.

  “Honestly,” I said. “A grown woman. Sort of.”

  “What does that crack mean?”

  I ignored her and started driving up Shore Drive toward Route 35. “Did you see anything helpful in there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I took pictures. Paul can decide if they’re helpful.” Calmer now, Maxie stretched her feet down like Fred Flintstone and put her hands behind her neck like she was relaxing. “Don’t I get a thank-you?”

  “Absolutely. Thank you for acting like a six-year-old.”

  She sat up and pouted. “For going in there all by myself, something you didn’t want to do.”

  “You’re right, actually. Thank you.”

  “Hey, this isn’t the way home,” Maxie said as we got on the highway. “Where are we going?”

  “To follow a guy who’s supposed to be cheating on his wife,” I answered.

  “Now that’s more my style!” She was suddenly wearing sunglasses and a trench coat. Maxie seems to have a vision of the world formed by watching old Warner Brothers cartoons.

  “Keep the camera ready,” I told her.

  We made it from the Fuel Pit to Dave Boffice’s office in about twenty minutes, then sat and watched the building, which was
doing remarkably little. Maxie asked what kind of snacks I’d brought, which was an odd question on her part, considering she couldn’t eat them, and I told her I hadn’t brought any, which wasn’t odd at all, considering I shouldn’t. She wanted to blast the radio, and I reminded her that we were attempting not to draw attention to ourselves, a concept she seemed to find difficult to process.

  I checked my wristwatch and then looked up. “There he is,” I said, relieved for an excuse to end this inane conversation. I’d kept the car running, despite being down to a quarter tank of gas because I didn’t want the sound of it starting up to attract attention. The fact that Dave was fifty feet away and unlikely to have heard it hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Let’s roll,” Maxie said.

  “Nobody says that.” That I knew of.

  Much as I had the day before, but with a more talkative passenger in the car, I followed Dave Boffice for a number of miles before he decided to stop. It was clear that Dave was not heading for the Monmouth Mall this time; the route went east rather than south, and the drive was much shorter, only a little over five minutes.

  Dave stopped in front of a little house in Fair Haven that had suffered storm damage. We had passed a number of Colonials and some newer McMansions, none of which were as cozy-looking as this less expensive one. But this one had blue tarps on the roof, indicating work being done, and the stump of what must have once been a very impressive tree in front. I backed the car into a driveway three doors down, with no sign of an inhabitant at the home. If someone were to open the front door, however, I figured I’d be able to pull out in a hurry.

  “This must be it,” Maxie said. “The girlfriend’s house.”

  I looked through the file I had on the back seat. “Not according to the information Helen gave me,” I told her. “Joyce Kinsler lives in Eatontown.”

  “Ooh,” Maxie said. “Maybe he’s got two!”

  “Will you take it easy?” I went through some more forms and the notes I’d made on Joyce’s interview.