The Thrill of the Haunt

by E. J. Copperman

She was being intentionally obtuse. “Nice try,” I said. “What you’re telling me is that the Harbor Haven Police Department has no idea how someone stabbed a man forty-seven times in a gas station restroom and then got out with the door locked from the inside?”

  “Maybe it was a very drawn-out suicide,” McElone said, but she couldn’t even make it sound like she believed what she was saying.

  “Then I’ll ask again: What happened to the knife? If he killed himself, where did the knife go? You didn’t find it in the room. If he didn’t kill himself, how did the killer get out while leaving the door locked?”

  “We’re looking into the possibility Houdini did it,” McElone said.

  I wasn’t having a great detecting day, and besides, I was frustrated on about eighteen different levels. “Come on, Lieutenant,” I said. “How about we both stop wasting our time and try to cooperate with each other? Is there something I can do that could help you?” I caught myself quickly enough to add, “Besides leave?”

  “That was going to be my first choice,” she admitted.

  “What do you say? Can I do something for you? Something related to the investigation?” A thought struck me. “Helen Boffice has four million dollars from her first husband,” I offered.

  “We know.”

  Damn. “Okay, what else can I do?”

  McElone’s office is really a cubicle; there are no permanent walls, no door and no privacy. So it shook me a little when she stood up to look over the partitions and make sure no one was listening, then sat down and leaned over her desk, gesturing for me to do the same.

  Her voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. “Are you still in on the whole ghosty thing?” she asked. “Can you really talk to dead people?”

  There was something completely wrong about those words coming from McElone’s mouth. The idea that the person who most disdained the idea of ghosts, who was creeped out by my house, who rolled her eyes whenever I showed up, would be asking me about being the ghost lady, was disturbing on more levels than I could identify in the moment. “It’s possible,” I managed. “What do you need?”

  “Can you get in touch with Everett and ask who killed him?” she rasped. Then she put her head back and laughed, unable to hold in her merriment any longer.

  Truly, the woman had a future in stand-up comedy. At least, in her own estimation. “When I see him,” I mumbled. Okay, so it didn’t make me feel that much better, but it was something.

  It took McElone quite some time to get herself back under control, and even after the hilarity had subsided, she still bubbled over with a few more “What you can do to help” and one “Ask Everett who killed him,” which set her into another brief giggle fit. It was like the Bizarro World McElone had taken over, and I had to wait until the sober real one could get back across the border into reality.

  “You’re a serious wit,” I told her. “I’m just barely hiding my hysterics.”

  “I am damn funny,” she agreed. “No, you can’t help me. But I’ll tell you what. Just for giving me such a good laugh, I’ll give you something for free.” The fact that she’d never given me anything for money came to mind, but if she was feeling generous, this was not the time to be snarky.

  “What’s that?” I said, trying to sound neutral.

  “You know Everett used to spend most of his time outside the Stud Muffin,” McElone said. That wasn’t exactly heart-stopping news, so I nodded and waited for more. “But lately, he’d been spending more time at the Fuel Pit.”

  “I know; Marv told me. So what?” I asked.

  “There’s a little colony of homeless that camp not far from there, so I went down to talk to a few of them after Everett died. Most of them scatter when they see a uniform, but I went in civilian clothes and brought sandwiches, so a couple were willing to talk to me.”

  Touching story though this was, I was finding my patience wearing thin. Forget that I’d had no idea there even were more homeless people than Everett in Harbor Haven; she wasn’t getting the satisfaction of a reaction out of me. “You’re a wonderful Samaritan, Lieutenant. If you’d like me to contribute to the homeless sandwich fund, I’ll be happy to make a donation. But what has this got to do with anything?”

  “If you’re going to be that way . . .” She started straightening the absolutely nothing out of place on her desk. (It was like McElone’s cubicle had seen Phyllis’s office and used it as a negative role model.) I think she might have rearranged a paper clip by one millimeter. It was excruciating.

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I’m having a really bad week.”

  “Good thing it’s Friday,” she said.

  “Thank goodness,” I agreed. “So please, can you tell me what you found out when you fed the people at the Fuel Pit?”

  “No, but maybe you’d like to go down yourself and talk to a woman named Cathy. She knew Everett pretty well, and she has a theory about what happened to him.”

  “What’s Cathy’s theory?” I asked.

  “She wouldn’t tell me.” McElone regarded me, daring me to respond. I didn’t. “She wouldn’t even talk to me—a couple of the others told me she was Everett’s pal, and others said there was no such person as Cathy. So you’re going to go over there and charm your way into her heart,” she added.

  “You want me to go talk to a woman named Cathy who’s homeless, who might not exist, but if she does, she could be either mentally ill or addicted to something . . .”

  “Don’t stereotype,” McElone warned.

  “My apologies. So you want me to go and ask this woman, who wouldn’t tell you something about what happened to Everett, what happened to Everett? And you think she’s going to tell me?” I had, in my life, had better ideas.

  “You said you wanted to help,” McElone reminded me.

  Twenty-two

  “I’ll give you this,” Mom said. “You don’t go to the same old place for lunch every time. Which is just as well, since there’s no food here.”

  “Take it easy,” I told her. “Once I do this, we’ll find lunch, okay?”

  “I wasn’t complaining.”

  I had called Marv, who informed me he’d gone ahead and replaced the windowpane himself (“it was no biggie”), so now Mom and I were standing at the edge of a parking lot, about a half block behind the Fuel Pit. The lot backed onto a crusty, uncared-for dune that, if you walked for ten minutes, would eventually lead to the beach. There was a partial shelter built, maybe by FEMA after the storm, that could comfortably contain maybe seven people.

  And gathered around it were perhaps twenty homeless people of both sexes and various ages, the youngest around thirty and the elder statesman, a rather redolent fellow named Irv, claiming to be in his late seventies. He looked more like he’d been one of the first passengers off Noah’s ark.

  “I don’t know no Cathy, but there’s someone in the ladies,” he said, pointing in the general direction of some brush at the top of the dune. “What do you want with this Cathy?”

  I had to choose my words carefully; they’d already been visited once by the police about Everett, and they hadn’t told Detective McElone anything. “We’re not a tourist attraction,” a man named Will had said to us when we’d first arrived. “Go to the beach, if you can find it. Look past the knocked-down houses.”

  “I hear that Cathy knew a man named Everett Sandheim,” I said. Irv started to look annoyed, but I didn’t give him time to voice his irritation. “I knew Everett, and I’d like to talk to her about him just a little. I don’t know if you heard, but Everett’s gone now.”

  “Everybody knows that,” Irv sputtered. But he was distracted. He pointed. “Maybe that’s Cathy,” he said. He pointed at a tree and walked away.

  After a moment, a woman emerged from the trees. The first time I saw Cathy Genna, I thought she might be a ghost. She was so pale and thin that she might have looked transparent in the right light, and the way the sun hit her at midday, there wasn’t a great deal of difference visually between Cathy
and the woman floating next to her. Except that that woman was dressed for a day out in 1898, and Cathy’s feet were on the sand.

  “Wow,” Mom said.

  That was unquestionably the right word; it was clear that Cathy had once been very beautiful indeed. Back when she still had a full head of hair and a full set of teeth. And when the clothes she was wearing were something other than what had obviously come out of a Dumpster, or several Dumpsters. Cathy was in her mid-to-late forties and had a glazed look in her eyes, as if she were looking at something that wasn’t there, or wasn’t visible to the rest of us.

  I knew the feeling.

  I approached her cautiously, but smiling (which felt phony). Mom hung back, not because she was afraid but because she doesn’t like to invade people’s personal space. She’s too polite. I don’t have that problem.

  “Everett?” Cathy asked.

  “Everett Sandheim,” I said. “I’m Alison Kerby, and this is my . . . friend Loretta.”

  Mom chuckled. “Friend,” she said. “I’m her mother.” She held out a hand, but Cathy didn’t take it.

  “Yes,” Cathy answered, as if that meant anything.

  I had to stumble on. “Um, I sort of knew Everett, that is, we both sort of knew Everett, and now that he’s gone, well . . .” My voice just trailed off. I think my mouth might have kept moving out of sheer momentum. I had nothing left that could be reasonably thought of as conversation.

  Fortunately, that is not a condition that has ever afflicted Mom. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to Everett,” she said. “The police say you knew him. Did you?”

  Cathy looked at Mom, then at me, through slits for eyes. “You’re not cops?” she challenged.

  Mom laughed and shook her head. “Do I look like a cop?” she asked.

  Mom is in her sixties and does not look like a cop, so Cathy laughed, too. “No,” she admitted. “So who are you?”

  I was now just a spectator and Mom was the star, so I let her run with it. “We’re just people from town. We saw Everett around; we tried to help him out when we could. But when we heard what happened to him, we thought it wasn’t right that nobody was trying to find out who killed him. So we figured we’d try.”

  “Everett was your homeless guy,” Cathy said. “There’s all of us here, but Everett was the only one everybody saw.”

  “Until the cops told us about this place, we never knew you were here,” I admitted, just to remind everyone that I was there. “I’m sorry about that.”

  Cathy waved a hand in indifference. “That’s the way we want it,” she said. “I don’t need people coming and bringing me soup. I just want them to leave me alone.”

  “What about Everett?” Mom said.

  “I knew Everett,” Cathy said, looking away. “I knew him better than anybody else around here. He liked me, so he told me stuff.”

  “Stuff?” I had found my voice. Cathy appraised me, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “What kind of stuff?”

  Cathy recovered from her moment of unease and looked me right in the eye. “He said he saw ghosts,” she said. “Ha! Ghosts.”

  I nodded. “What did he say he saw?” I asked Cathy.

  “Okay, I was wrong,” she answered, scratching at her neck with chipped fingernails. “He didn’t say he saw ghosts.”

  That didn’t help. “He didn’t?”

  “No. He said he heard ghosts. That’s different, right?” Cathy nodded once to emphasize her point.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “That’s different. But it was ghosts? More than one?”

  “Oh, yeah. Everett said there were two ghosts, a guy and a girl. I’m hoping they were married or something; that’d be good.” Cathy looked around, keeping an eye on the area, always vigilant. That was the impression I got, anyway.

  “What did the ghosts say to Everett?” I asked.

  “What?” Cathy seemed easily distracted, as if her attention span didn’t necessarily reach to the end of a sentence.

  “The ghosts,” I reminded her. “What did they say to Everett?”

  “You believe in ghosts?” Cathy asked.

  I didn’t know which way to play it with Cathy, but I figured it was best to play along with her to get better information. And anyway, there was what Mom always said about telling the truth. “Yes, I believe in ghosts,” I told her. Mom nodded once, to indicate that she also knew about ghosts and also that I was brilliant for saying so. She can do that with one nod.

  Cathy searched my eyes, which I took as a good sign; she didn’t seem to like eye contact. “Yes. You do, don’t you?” She busied herself for a minute by kicking something in the sand that turned out to be an empty plastic water bottle. She pulled it up and put it in a worn canvas supermarket bag she had strung around her shoulder like a purse. “Ghosts. Funny things. Tell you the damnedest stuff.”

  “What did they tell Everett?” I reiterated.

  “Told him someone was gonna die,” Cathy said. “They didn’t mention it was gonna be him. Damn unfair of those ghosts, if you ask me.”

  I absorbed what she’d said for a moment. “The ghosts told Everett someone was going to die?”

  Cathy thought for a long moment. “It was maybe two weeks ago. Told me he’d been hearing ghosts talking. I said I had lots of friends who hear voices, and he said no, this wasn’t voices, this was ghosts, and he knew because he recognized one of the voices, and it was somebody who was dead.”

  “He knew one of the ghosts he was hearing?” I asked, once again confirming a point she’d made. “Did he say who it was?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cathy said. But she didn’t say anything else, choosing instead to sit down heavily on the sand and start searching through the grocery bag.

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “His son,” Cathy said, her head almost inside the canvas bag. “He said he was hearing the voice of his dead son. Now imagine that.” She pulled a feathered hat from the bag and admired it. “I thought I’d lost this; what do you know?”

  • • •

  “His son!” Paul was on the verge of giddiness with the latest information. “What can that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him, “but if you can raise Randy Sandheim on the Ghosternet, it might really speed up this investigation.”

  Paul nodded briskly; that had been his thought as well. “I’ll do that in a minute. It’s fascinating, though. But this Cathy said he heard two ghosts?”

  “Yes, but she didn’t say if he knew the other one, a woman.”

  We were meeting in Melissa’s room, which I don’t like to do when she’s not there, but now that Tom and Libby were downstairs, they were likely to hear echoes of me talking to “myself” in the kitchen or the game room with no one else present in the house and no competing noise to cover us. Paul had been anxious to hear the news, and Maxie had been working on digging up more about Helen Boffice’s millions.

  Maxie was trying very hard to look, as Paul would say, like a helpful operative. Dressed conservatively (for her) in a pair of skintight jeans and a black T-shirt bearing the words “Available for Weddings and Bar Mitzvahs,” she hovered near the ceiling, holding the notebook computer on her lap, legs straight out in front of her as if she were sitting up in bed.

  “Helen’s money is interesting,” she reported.

  “Interesting?” I asked. “How is money interesting?”

  “Because she’s had it for eight years, since her husband died, and she’s been married to Dave for six. There’s no indication she ever spent any of her inheritance at all. Until four months ago.” Maxie suddenly “grew” a green visor on her forehead and a pair of glasses that I guarantee did nothing to improve her vision.

  I tried to move around behind her to see what was on her screen, but Maxie was too high up. I like to think she wasn’t intentionally keeping me away, but she does love the spotlight and adores being told she’s done good work.

  Paul rose up to look, though. “Really!” he said, exactly the
reaction Maxie would want. “What happened four months ago?”

  “That’s what’s interesting,” she told him. “She’s been deleting—”

  “Withdrawing,” Paul corrected.

  “Fine, withdrawing big chunks of money, almost once a week, but in cash, so there’s no way to know where it’s going.” Maxie looked at me. “So that’s interesting, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s really good work, Maxie.” Give her what she needs, you’ll get more back. “So how do we trace the money?”

  Maxie stared at me blankly. “Huh?”

  “How do we trace it? How do we find out what she’s been using it for?”

  Her expression indicated I needed some remedial education. “We don’t,” she said. “I just told you that.”

  I looked to Paul for help. “So how does this help us?”

  “Any and all information helps,” he said. “We’ll have to determine how, though, when we get more.”

  That wasn’t a huge help itself.

  “So what’s my next assignment, boss?” Maxie asked Paul.

  “Since when are you Samantha Spade?” I said.

  They ignored me. Which was probably wise. My mind was still asking when could we talk to Josh, and my stomach was telling me it was best if we didn’t.

  “Try to find out if there were any increases in Dave’s bank accounts, if maybe she was giving him the money,” Paul told Maxie. “I can’t imagine why she would, but until we know for sure, we can’t eliminate any possibility.”

  Maxie saluted him like a soldier. “Gotcha, chief.” She was putting on a show, though I couldn’t figure out who the audience might be.

  “But while you’re at it,” Paul continued, “see what you can find out about Joyce Kinsler herself. The more information I have, the better the chances I can contact her directly once she moves to this level of existence, assuming she does.”

  “I’m on it,” Maxie said. I think she pretended to crack a piece of gum in her mouth, too. She suddenly changed back into a trench coat, put the laptop inside and vanished. Probably up onto the roof. She says she does that because the WiFi access is better up there, but the fact is, Maxie does her best work alone.