Once inside the kitchen, though, Alison looked desperately at me. “How do you make coffee on the stove?” she asked.
It was worse than I thought. My daughter actually didn’t know how to boil water. “When the power comes back on, I’m giving you cooking lessons,” I told her.
“Not now, Mom . . .”
“No, when the power comes back on. You need to learn.” I knew what she meant, but I wanted her to know I was serious.
“Teach Liss, not me. There’s still hope for her.”
I filled a teapot with water and put it on the stove, which I lit with a match from the top drawer next to the sink. “I’m teaching both of you,” I said firmly. Then I told her about the measuring cup, but neither of us could come up with a plausible explanation for its migration to Mac’s room. “We’ll ask Paul when we can,” I said.
“What do you think the POW bracelet on Mac means?” I asked Alison just as Maxine was emerging through the wall from the den.
“No clue,” Alison said. “That’s Paul’s department.”
“Did anybody get a close look at the POW bracelet on Mac’s wrist?” I asked Maxine. “Whose name is on it? Was it Sergeant Elliot’s?”
“I don’t think Melissa was able to see it, or at least she hasn’t said so yet,” Maxine reported. “And he’s been moving his hand around too much for me to see. I can ask Paul if you want.” Maxine is always so eager to help; it’s a wonder that Alison sometimes says she’s difficult.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Alison said. “We need to get back in touch with the sergeant.”
Alison got four mugs out from the cabinet, and I got some instant coffee from the pantry section next to the refrigerator. “Four mugs?” I asked.
“Liss likes coffee now,” Alison said. I thought she was a little young, but Alison treats Melissa like an adult, and Melissa acts like one, so I suppose I can’t argue with how that girl is growing up.
The wind was still howling around the house, and we could hear the rain pelting the roof and the boarded-up windows. Alison had checked three times for water in the basement; she had one small gas-powered generator to run the sump pump if necessary, but so far it had not been needed. “Why would Sergeant Elliot suddenly need that bracelet? Why wouldn’t he answer when Paul tried to Ghostmail him?” Alison continued.
“Ghostmail?” I asked.
“I’m trying out a new catchphrase.”
“Fail,” Maxine sang as she disappeared back through the kitchen wall. Alison looked up at the spot, shook her head and went to fill the cups with hot water from the teapot.
• • •
“Fail?” I asked.
“Okay, maybe we didn’t fail,” Marilyn Beechman said. “But you certainly can’t say we succeeded in Vietnam.”
The television behind her in my studio apartment showed helicopters taking the last American troops out of the war. I had thought it would be a time for celebration, particularly among those of us who had opposed United States involvement, so I’d called Marilyn, now working for a local law firm. She’d come over after work for a glass of wine.
“I’m not talking about the country succeeding,” I said. “I’m talking about us. We protested to the point that the government had to end the war. Isn’t that success? I can take off this bracelet now, can’t I?” I reached for the POW bracelet, a little worse for wear, that had rarely been separated from my wrist for three years now.
Marilyn reached over and grabbed my hand gently. “No, you can’t,” she said. “Colonel Mason is still missing. You can’t take it off until he’s accounted for.”
I stopped looking for the corkscrew and turned to look at her. “But he might never be accounted for,” I said. “I mean, I’ve gotten used to wearing the thing, but I don’t want it to be on my arm forever.”
“Oh, they’ll eventually account for everybody,” Marilyn assured me. “It’s just going to take a while for them to figure it all out. They always do.”
“Oh yeah? What about the tomb of the unknown soldier?”
Marilyn scowled at me. “You have a bond with Colonel Mason,” she said, pointing at my wrist. “Everybody who got his bracelet does. You took him on and swore he wouldn’t be forgotten. It’s your responsibility to keep that bond, through that bracelet, until he’s found or declared dead, so he can rest in peace. That’s the deal. You knew it when you put the bracelet on your wrist.”
“You put the bracelet on my wrist, and I never swore anything,” I pointed out. But I already saw the logic in her argument. I had sort of made a promise, even if I hadn’t realized all the implications at the time. And I was already seeing the ghosts of our soldiers—the ones whose bodies had been discovered and flown home—hovering almost everywhere I went. Some of them had been home long enough to change out of their uniforms, having realized they were no longer bound to duty.
There was one outside the apartment as we spoke, circling a streetlamp at about seven feet off the ground. He was still in uniform and seemed lost. I guess, when the only thing you can think to do is circle a streetlamp, you probably don’t have much on your plate. I felt bad for him and would have called out through the window if Marilyn hadn’t been here. No one except my family knew about my gift. In those days, I thought I had to keep it a secret. As you age, you realize that what other people think doesn’t matter.
“You keep that thing on, young lady,” Marilyn reprimanded me. “Don’t worry. It won’t be long.”
• • •
“I got it at Berkley in 1971,” Mac was saying as we sipped the instant coffee Alison had made. It was a trifle on the weak side, but I’m sure it was hard for her to read the proportions on the jar with this lighting. “The bracelet was a way of protesting the war and showing solidarity with the poor guys—and believe me, the rich never went—who were taken up in the war.”
The wind wasn’t whipping quite as noisily around the house anymore, and the gaps between boards on the windows indicated the sun had come up, although it was hardly shining brightly through all the clouds.
There wasn’t any point in being coy. So I simply asked Mac whose name was on his POW bracelet.
He didn’t have to look to answer. “Sergeant Robert Elliot,” he reported. “Lost in Thua Thien-Hue Province, South Vietnam, on November 5, 1970.”
Chapter 7
We would probably have questioned Mac much more thoroughly, but even Paul couldn’t think of the proper follow-up question, so he finished with his coffee, which he’d barely sipped, and no one objected when he decided to go to his room to change his clothes. He said he might try to go back to sleep for a bit first. “There’s no point in trying to go outside, after all.”
Once he was easily out of earshot, Alison looked immediately up at Paul, who was pacing in a tight circle around the chandelier, hands uncharacteristically behind his back instead of stroking his goatee. This puzzle was truly getting the best of him.
“Sergeant Elliot asked us to search this house for a POW bracelet with his name on it,” he said, seemingly more to himself than anyone else. “Before we could do a proper search, it showed up on your guest’s wrist. What can we deduce from this?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer from us, which was fortunate.
“It looked like the old guy had been pulled out of bed by that lady ghost last night,” Maxine chipped in. “Do you think she was trying to get his bracelet off?”
“I don’t know,” Paul said through clenched teeth.
Melissa looked thoughtful, and also a little worried, as Paul’s agitation was pretty clear to everyone in the room. Maxine, hovering in the corner near the ceiling, chewed her lower lip and scrunched her eyes as if trying to see through the candlelight better. Alison sat down on the easy chair Mac had vacated and looked at me. “You’re going to have to teach me how to make instant coffee, Mom,” she said. “I can’t even manage that.”
>
“You do everything wonderfully, honey,” I told her. “I’m sure the coffee was just sitting on the shelf too long. Those expiration dates are really bogus, you know.” All of which was quite true. She smiled, but I don’t think she believed me.
“Could it be that Mac just happened to get a bracelet with Robert Elliot’s name on it?” Melissa asked. “They made lots of them, right?”
Paul shook his head. “Your grandmother says many groups did, but it’s too big a coincidence. An investigator should allow for coincidences, but never trust them.”
“Isn’t it about time you got in touch with Robert again?” Maxine asked Paul. “He can’t just leave us here in a hurricane to sort through his personal business.”
Paul’s mouth twitched. “You’re probably right, Maxie.” Without another word, he sank from the chandelier through the floor. It was an elegant move.
“He’s off to check the Ghosternet,” Alison said to herself. She stood up. “Probably time to turn on the radio and see where we stand.”
Melissa brought in the car-shaped radio and we listened to the news reports about the storm. It wasn’t encouraging. Millions were without power, and we were advised not to expect the lights to come on anytime soon. The weather forecast had improved somewhat, but power lines were down, whole homes on the shore had been destroyed by wind and water, and the winds would not die for at least another day.
Alison sighed. “I guess we can’t take down the window boards yet,” she said. “But I’ve checked on the basement, and so far we’ve been lucky; there’s only a tiny amount of water down there. We haven’t needed the sump pump yet.”
“Will the basement flood?” Melissa asked.
“If it hasn’t by now, I don’t think it will,” Alison told her. “Don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Melissa said, although I’d bet that she was. “I was just wondering why it would be bad at other houses near here and not as much for us.”
“I think it’s the dunes in the back,” Alison answered. “They were built up a couple of years ago—was it when you owned the house, Maxie?”
Maxine turned abruptly, as if startled. “What? No, it was before I bought the place. They were already there. A beach erosion project, they told me when I bought it.”
“That probably kept the worst of the storm away from the house,” Alison told Melissa.
Maxine looked thoughtful. “I’m going to check on the roof,” she said, and ascended into the ceiling. That’s always been one of her favorite places to get away and think.
“That sounded like quite a branch in the backyard, Alison,” I told her.
Alison nodded. “I don’t have a chain saw, but maybe Tony will be able to come by. I hope their place is okay.”
Paul rose up from the basement and immediately told Alison, “I think I got through to Robert Elliot. He might be on his way here now.”
“You ‘think’?” Alison asked.
“It’s not a precise thing,” Paul reminded her. “It’s more like impressions, feelings, not direct communication. Sometimes I have to interpret a little.”
Since the wind seemed to be coming from the back of the house, off the ocean, Alison decided to see if the rain had abated to the point that she might take down some of the boards on the windows at the front. “We’ll need as much light as we can get while the power’s out,” she said, picking up a hammer from a toolbox she’d taken out of a hall closet. She saw Melissa head for the toolbox and held up a hand. “Hold up, young lady. Not a chance you’re going out there yet,” she said.
Melissa looked like she was going to argue, but I jumped in: “She’s right, Melissa. You don’t know how bad things are outside. If it’s too bad, Mom’s not going to stay out there, either.” And I made a point of looking at Alison with a serious expression on my face when I said it.
We all walked over to the front door to look outside. Our first post-storm look at the street was harrowing: There were dozens of branches, some very large, blocking the street. One had come down directly on top of a 1988 Chevy Monte Carlo that someone down the street had left parked in his driveway. A power line was definitely down. Alison’s across-the-street neighbor Mrs. Arbogast had lost a whole section of her picket fence. There was a telephone pole four houses down leaning at a precarious angle.
But the rain had mostly stopped, and while the wind was still blowing hard, it was nowhere near the strength it had been the night before. Alison got to work on the front windows, and the light that came in as each board came down was a relief, beginning what we knew would be a slow return to normalcy.
Paul hovered outside on the porch as Alison worked, and Melissa and I watched through the front window.
“We should have a plan for when Sergeant Elliot gets here,” Paul said, pacing with his feet buried in the front porch.
“Why are you so nervous?” Alison asked him. “We’ll get out the nice tablecloth and he won’t notice we’re serving leftovers.”
“Very funny,” Paul answered. “But this case has become very puzzling, and I’d like to have a strategy for our meeting with our client when he arrives.”
“We ask him where the heck he’s been, why he was so hot to get his hands on that bracelet and then disappeared, and whether he knows the deceased woman who was flying through my guest bedroom last night,” Alison suggested, pulling down another board. The wind grabbed the board as she brought it down and pulled it all the way to the other end of the porch. “Maybe I’ll just do every other board so we can have light, but leave some up,” Alison muttered to herself.
Melissa called through the closed window, “I don’t understand. We know the bracelet is on Mac’s arm. Why can’t we just ask him for it?”
“That’s an excellent point,” I told her.
Paul puffed out his lips and rubbed his hands together. “The real question is why Mac has the bracelet with Sergeant Elliot’s name, and why Sergeant Elliot asked us for it.”
“That’s two questions,” Alison pointed out.
Paul ignored her. “The point is, Sergeant Elliot must have known Mac has the bracelet. He asked us to find something that could only have gotten to this house with the man who wears it. Why doesn’t Sergeant Elliot just reach over and take the bracelet off Mac’s arm if he really feels that he needs it?”
“He doesn’t want Mac to know there’s a ghost following him?” Melissa suggested.
“Why not? Once he has the bracelet and moves on, it won’t matter.”
“I get that,” Alison said in answering Paul, “but clearly Sergeant Elliot needed help, or he wouldn’t have asked for it. What I’m really wondering about is whether the female ghost in Mac’s room last night was there for herself or because the sergeant wanted her to be there.” She pulled down the middle board on the last window and asked Melissa and me, “Is it lighter in there?”
“Much,” I told her. “How bad is the wind?” It’s not that I couldn’t see it, but it’s not the same thing as being outside.
Alison hung the hammer in her belt and walked inside, where she could speak in a more normal tone. “Not that bad,” she said. “I think the worst of it is over. We’ll see how long it takes for the power to come back on.”
We looked back out onto the porch to find Paul, but he was gone.
“I guess he went to ask about the lady ghost,” Melissa said.
“Ghostmail,” Alison said. I think she was still trying the word out.
Maxine returned first. She did not descend from the ceiling, as I had expected, but instead came into the kitchen from the beach side, in the back. “It’s wild out there,” she reported before anyone could ask.
Alison, noting that the water in the basement was “just a puddle, really,” had brought the portable generator upstairs and set it up just outside the kitchen window, running an extension cord to power the refrigerator fo
r a little while.
“Did you see anyone who needs help?” Alison asked her.
“No one’s out there,” Maxine answered. “But I got a little farther in a police car up and down Route 35. Part of the boardwalk in Seaside Heights is gone. The roller coaster is in the ocean. There are houses that are completely off their foundations; some of them all the way in the road. Trees are down all over the place. Nothing’s open. It’s going to take a while to come back from this one.”
“The roller coaster?” Melissa looked upset, so I gave her a hug.
“They’ll rebuild, baby,” Alison told her.
“How’d you get back?” I asked Maxine.
Maxine smiled. “There was a really cute group of National Guardsmen coming up from the south, so I hitched a ride,” she said. “What’s going on here?”
I recounted for her how Paul was presumably trying to locate the poor lost female soul Maxine had glimpsed, and that we were expecting Sergeant Elliot to appear at any minute. Maxine looked over at the generator.
“Will that thing run my laptop?” she asked Alison.
“You mean my laptop, and yes, it would. Why?”
“I can do a little research on Robert Elliot if I’m connected.”
Alison considered, but shook her head. “Not without Wi-Fi,” she said. “We’d have to run the modem and the network as well as the laptop, and I can’t keep all four of those things going at once.”
“Four?” Maxine asked.
“The refrigerator. I want to run it now so I might be able to use some stuff later when it’s dark.”
Maxine made a face but said nothing. She might be impatient, but she’s not unreasonable.
Paul rose up from the basement. “I’m drawing a blank,” he said. “Nothing from Sergeant Elliot, and nothing about the woman Maxie saw. Has Mac come back in?”
“Not yet,” Alison told him. “He really hasn’t been anywhere but his room much at all since he came two days ago. Except for this morning when we heard the branch fall, I’ve barely spoken to him.”
An Open Spook (A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery) Page 5
