A Wild Ghost Chase
Page 1
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Special Excerpt from Chance of a Ghost
Berkley Prime Crime titles by E. J. Copperman
Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED
AN UNINVITED GHOST
OLD HAUNTS
CHANCE OF A GHOST
Specials
A WILD GHOST CHASE
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
A WILD GHOST CHASE
A Berkley Prime Crime Special / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime Special edition / January 2013
Copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey Cohen.
Excerpt from Chance of a Ghost by E. J. Copperman copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey Cohen.
Cover photos: Man by Viorell Sima; Staircase by Harsanyi Andras; Couch by Subbotina Anna; Bird Pictures by Ultrapro; Frame 1 by Andrei Shumskly; Frame 2 by Lambros Kazan; and Frame 3 by Andrei Shumskly.
Cover design by Jason Gill.
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ISBN: 978-1-101-59663-0
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With appreciation, to Donald J. Sobol
1
“This is absolutely nonnegotiable,” said Alison Kerby. I tried to think of counterarguments that would move her off that position.
“This won’t take up much of your time,” I reminded her. “It’s simply a case of . . .”
“I don’t care, Paul,” Alison answered. “I’m not interested. There’s been enough stress on me and Melissa. No.”
“I just . . .”
“I don’t appreciate being put in this position,” Alison scolded me. “And I don’t think you should be happy with it, either.”
“It’s just a slumber party, Alison,” I said.
Alison and I have an unusual arrangement. She owns a large Victorian home here in the New Jersey Shore town of Harbor Haven, which she has turned into a guesthouse for tourists who want to come and spend vacations “down the shore,” which is what New Jerseyans call going to the beach.
I “haunt” it.
My name is Paul Harrison, and I am what you would call a ghost.
It’s a trifle complicated: I was by trade a private investigator, and about two years ago, shortly before I was murdered, I took on the case of a woman named Maxie Malone, who owned the house before Alison. Maxie had hired me to investigate and act as bodyguard, since she feared her life might be in danger. It turned out she was right, but we found out too late.
Oddly, that was only the beginning of the story. Maxie and I “woke up,” as we say, a few days later, here in the house. But there was clearly something new and strange about our existence: For one thing, we floated rather than walked, we felt less solid, could move through objects like walls, and were unable to leave the property.
It took us a while, but we finally did realize we were dead.
As you might imagine, this required a good deal of adjustment on our part. Maxie, twenty-eight years old and somewhat . . . volatile . . . did not adapt easily to this plane of existence. Being a more mature soul (I was thirty-three), I accepted my fate in only a few months.
For close to a year, the real estate agent would give prospective buyers tours of the house, but it wasn’t until Alison and her daughter, Melissa, who was nine years old then, came through that Maxie stopped trying to scare off all the prospective buyers and let Alison buy it. Maxie says she allowed it because Melissa seemed like a nice girl.
Alison didn’t immediately realize that we were here, but soon enough it became clear that she was able to see and hear us, as could her mother, Loretta, and Melissa (a family trait Alison had been previously unaware of, and took some time adjusting to as well). Even now, Alison’s ability to see people like me is not as developed as Loretta’s or even Melissa’s; we estimate she sees only about half of the spirits passing through the house, though Maxie and I are the only ones “in residence.” Presumably the area one haunts has something to do with where one dies.
“This is not the time for a sleepover,” Alison said, defending her decision. “Tony and I are renovating the powder room on the second floor, and you wouldn’t believe some of the things we’re finding. Did you know there’s no floor under the toilet?”
Actually, I had known that from various times I’d floated up through the kitchen ceiling, but had never seen a need to mention it. If Alison had called in Tony Mandorisi, her contractor friend and her best friend Jeannie’s husband, the damage must have been fairly significant. Alison is very capable with tools and usually handles repairs on her own.
“I was aware you were doing some work,” I told her. “I didn’t realize how much time it was taking.”
She sighed. “I have six guests in the house, and four of them are last-minute,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting this many people this late in the season, or I wouldn’t have started tearing the bathroom apart. I don’t have time for anything except the guests and the bathroom—I’m not even driving Liss to school; her friend Wendy’s mom is helping me out. So don’t ask me to also have four little girls over,” Alison went on now. “Especially with,” she dropped her voice to a stage whisper, “ghosts in
the house.”
“You don’t have to whisper. We know we’re ghosts.” Maxie said, appearing from the ceiling, wearing a very brief pair of shorts and a black t-shirt with the slogan “Just Don’t Do It” emblazoned on it.
“I should have expected you,” Alison told her. “You’re behind this, aren’t you?”
Maxie grinned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
Alison rolled her eyes and said, as she left the room, “Don’t ask me for anything for a while—I’m warning you in advance, I’ll say no!”
I gave Maxie a look. “Did you think that was going to help?” I asked.
“I couldn’t help it. It’s so much fun to get her mad.” She vanished back into the ceiling, no doubt heading for the attic room she “shares” with Melissa, now ten.
I shook my head. Maxie took some getting used to, and even now, I have moments when I fight the impulse to scream at her. She is good-hearted when the chips are down, but when they’re not . . . she’s Maxie.
There was no time to think about that, however, because just then Melissa came into the game room. She looked, unfortunately, hopeful.
“How’d it go?” she asked me. My expression must have said enough, because her face dropped before I could answer. “That bad?”
I nodded. “Pretty bad.”
Melissa looked distressed. “Mom’s not saying so, but I think my dad didn’t send the check again, and she took on these extra guests to make some money. But this is the only time I can get all my friends to sleep over before winter break, and they’re all going away for the holidays.” Her face was less disappointed than thoughtful; Melissa was pondering strategy.
“I don’t know why you didn’t ask your mom yourself,” I said. “You know I’m no good at persuading her, especially when it’s not my thing.”
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “You talked her into getting a PI license. I figured you could talk her into anything.”
It was true, part of a quid pro quo arrangement between Alison and us. A while back, word had gotten around the town about the ghosts “haunting” her guesthouse (although we’d never haunted anyone until we were asked to do so), and a man from a tour company that offered travelers “unique experiences” had approached Alison with a proposition: He would furnish a steady supply of guests, but they would be paying for the opportunity to interact with the spirits of the house on a regular basis.
So Alison had asked me—she knew better than to approach Maxie—if we could stage “spook shows” twice a day to help launch her business. I was more than happy to oblige (Maxie took a little more persuading), but at a price. I told Alison I wanted to keep investigating cases, and I needed her help to do so.
One of the things you need to know about the afterlife is that it is not only completely unexplained, it is also eternal and exceedingly dull. Investigation is what I felt I was born to do, but I’d only just gotten my license before my demise (Maxie was my first client) and hadn’t had much time to practice. So in exchange for providing the ghostly entertainment—and keeping Maxie placated—I convinced Alison to sit for a private-investigator’s license and be my “legs” on cases that would require someone who could move outside the grounds of the guesthouse at 123 Seafront Avenue.
“Well, I couldn’t convince your mother this time,” I told Melissa. “You should wait until she’s less busy and then be more direct with her. She respects that.”
“That doesn’t help. She respects me and says no anyway.” Melissa is a very intelligent girl, in some ways remarkably mature for her age, but she is still a ten-year-old, and devoted to the things ten-year-olds care about, like slumber parties. “And she’s never going to be less busy. She’s always busy.”
“Nonetheless . . .”
Melissa turned suddenly and cut me off. “Did you hear that?” she asked.
I hadn’t heard anything unusual, and said so. Melissa held her finger to her lips. “Shh!”
She pointed toward a closet in which I knew Alison kept some cleaning supplies, a vacuum cleaner, spare pool cues and balls—hardly ever needed, since the game room wasn’t a popular destination for the senior tourists—and a stack of old magazines that she’d simply never gotten around to recycling. Melissa gestured again toward the door, and I shrugged.
Then I, too, heard a sound come from the closet. Something that sounded like a person shifting weight from one leg to the other on what is inevitably, in this house, a creaky floorboard. Or someone taking something off a creaky shelf.
I nodded to let Melissa know I’d heard it as well that time before she could say anything else. Melissa moved slowly toward the closet door, but I held up a hand. If there was danger inside the closet, clearly I was the right man for the job. There is very little anyone can do to me. Anymore.
“Stand back,” I hissed at her, and Melissa nodded. She stopped in her tracks. I focused on the door—something I’ve learned to do in order to avoid gaining too much velocity and going all the way through to the outside of the house—and launched myself slowly toward it.
I made it through the door easily, but it was dark inside the closed closet. I am used to this by now, however, so I was carrying a small penlight in my pocket. (Some time back, Maxie and I had discovered that we spirits could transport solid objects through other solid objects like walls if we concealed the items inside our clothing. No idea how or why it works, but it does.) I reached into my pocket now, still hearing some sounds of scuffling in the pitch-black darkness, and turned the light on quickly, but my actions were just a hair too late.
I had just enough time to see a bare foot—a small foot, like that of a child—exiting the closet through the back wall, which led toward the hallway and the rest of the house. It moved through the solid wood with no problem whatsoever, although some small object hit the wall and stuck, before falling to the floor. The foot and the small amount of calf I could see preceding it out of the closet was semi-transparent in the split second I had to notice it.
I didn’t see any point in following through the closet; whoever it was had now had enough time to make it anywhere else in the house, or even outside. I puffed out my lips in disgust with myself for being so slow, and then bent down to pick up the small object that had been dropped in its owner’s haste. It was a small unpolished stone in a rough triangle shape, with a hole drilled through its broadest side and a piece of leather looped through it. I frowned.
“Is there someone in there?” I heard Melissa’s voice from outside. I stuck the object and my penlight into my pocket, then floated through the door back into the game room.
“There was,” I answered her. “But whoever it was is gone now.”
When Melissa looked puzzled, I pulled the small stone from my pocket and examined it in the light. “The intruder didn’t need a door,” I explained. “The back wall was enough of an escape route. It was someone like me.”
That took Melissa by surprise. She opened her eyes wide. “Maxie?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Someone much smaller. A child, I think.”
“There’s another ghost here in the house?” Melissa looked intrigued but also apprehensive. “A kid?”
I nodded as I admired the stone. “It would appear,” I said.
2
We agreed that for the time being, it would probably be best not to tell Alison about the possibility of another person like Maxie and me residing in her house. Alison tends to be somewhat squeamish about such things—she’s only been seeing us for about a year—and until we knew the whole truth, there was no point in alarming her. Plus, given her current state, which was bordering on frantic, it seemed a bad idea to involve her. But I did concentrate my mind on Maxie, my way of calling for her, and she appeared in less than a minute.
I filled her in on recent events, and mentioned that until such time
as we could locate the child, I thought we’d best not let Alison know.
“You sure?” Maxie asked with a wicked smile. “I’d be happy to break the news just to see her reaction.” Maxie and Alison have an interesting relationship. Deep down, I think they each like and respect the other, but on the surface, their competitive sniping and attempts to get the other’s goat are, in my opinion, a little tiring.
“Maxie,” Melissa warned. “Please don’t tell my mom. It’s not going to help us, and it will make my life miserable; if there’s a ghost here she doesn’t know, she’ll never let me out of her sight again.” Alison is a fiercely protective mother, so I could see Melissa’s point, and I believe Maxie did, too. Besides, Maxie might enjoy taunting Alison, but she loved Melissa and wouldn’t want to do anything to get her in trouble.
“Fine,” Maxie agreed. “But when we do decide to tell her, I want to break the news. Can I? Please? Please?” She looked at me.
Melissa gave Maxie an “oh, grow up” look but didn’t say anything, so I answered, “Let’s table that until the time comes, okay? We might never have to tell her.”
Maxie scowled. “Spoilsport.”
“The first thing we need to do is determine who this child might be,” I went on, choosing to ignore Maxie. “I didn’t get enough of a look to see if it was a boy or a girl, but I’m sure I saw a child, younger than you, Melissa.”
“Younger than me, and here alone?” Melissa responded. “No mom or dad? That’s scary.”
“Don’t make assumptions,” I cautioned her. “Just because I didn’t see anyone else doesn’t mean there isn’t someone here with him or her.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small stone artifact. “This is all we have to go on.” I held it out by the leather strap and let the stone dangle off my hand. Melissa and Maxie leaned in to get a better look.
“A rock?” Melissa asked. “Why would someone carry a rock?”
“That’s not what that is,” Maxie chortled. “It’s an arrowhead. An Indian arrowhead. They’re all over the place down here.”