“He is an odd duck,” Paul said. “But I did get one piece of information I think might be useful.”
“And what would that be?” Sergeant Robert Elliot’s voice came from the darker corner of the room, near the door to the den, and again I was taken with how wispy his presence could be.
“Sergeant,” Paul said. He gestured toward Alison and Melissa. “These are my associates, Alison and Melissa Kerby.” Melissa smiled proudly at the distinction; she loves being treated like a valued member of the team, and Paul always makes a point of doing so.
Robert nodded in their direction, then reiterated his question. “You said you had a useful piece of information. Have you got my bracelet?”
“We’re not sure,” Paul said. “We have seen a POW bracelet with your name on it, but it was not in this house until a few days ago. It came in on someone’s wrist.”
“Really?” I thought Robert looked considerably less surprised than he sounded, but the light from the candles in the room wasn’t great for reading a transparent ghost’s expression. “Whose wrist is it on?”
“I think you know exactly whose wrist it’s on, and I think you’ve known all along,” Paul said. “Because the woman you sent for it knew exactly whose wrist to tug on.”
There was something about that phrase—“wrist to tug on”—that triggered a connection in my mind. “Mac said his hand smelled like chicken—that ghost was using my cup of pan drippings to grease Mac’s wrist and get the bracelet off, wasn’t she?” I said to Sergeant Elliot.
The sergeant looked stunned. His mouth flapped open a few times, and then he vanished into thin air.
“That’s becoming a rude habit,” I said, even though he was already gone.
Alison squinted at Paul as if he were harder than usual to see. “What was that all about?” she asked. I wondered if she’d seen Sergeant Elliot at all, but she had been looking in his direction when he spoke.
Paul let out a nervous chuckle, which is sort of incongruous coming from a transparent man calf-deep in floor. “It was a gamble, and I don’t usually approve of gambles,” he said. “But I think that one paid off.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I think I might have just solved this case,” Paul said.
Chapter 8
“Okay,” Alison told Paul. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”
“I can’t yet,” Paul answered. “The sergeant will be back, and I think we can help him, but we need to do a few things first. Where is Mac?”
“In his room,” I said. “Why?”
“Soon, someone will need to ask him to come out here,” Paul said.
Melissa began clearing dishes from the island and putting them in the sink. “Don’t wash them yet, Liss,” Alison told her. “We’ll have to boil some water first. The radio said some of the water supply is not being filtered because of the storm. We don’t know if ours is affected yet.”
“Okay.” Melissa looked up at Paul while Alison moved to fill a large pasta pot (which I’m fairly sure she never uses) with water in order to boil it for use later.
“I can knock on Mac’s door,” I said, “but he might be asleep.”
“You’ll have to wake him up,” Paul said.
Alison’s eyebrows rose. “Why don’t you do it?”
“I would, believe me, but Mac doesn’t see ghosts.”
“He’d feel a bucket of cold water if we threw it on him,” Maxine suggested. Her solutions to problems are often effective, but not always subtle. She’s always trying.
“You said before the sergeant came that you’d found something useful,” I reminded Paul. “But you didn’t say what.”
“In a minute. Alison, do you think the refrigerator has been running long enough to give Maxie a chance with the Wi-Fi network?”
Alison considered, then nodded. “We can let it go for a while; it won’t hurt anything. But there is some water in the basement, even if it’s not much. I want to get the extension cord down to the sump pump and maybe pump out the water so we can be ready before it gets dark.”
Paul seemed to agree; he looked at Maxine, who was already heading for Melissa’s room in the attic. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. Alison picked up a candle and headed for the door to get the things she needed for an Internet connection. Paul, pacing as if there were a floor beneath his feet, appeared to be considering options. His eyes were almost gleaming, even as they were transparent. I’d rarely seen him look so happy.
I didn’t want to disturb his train of thought, and Melissa seemed fascinated with watching him think, so I said nothing. But the facts of the situation with Sergeant Elliot and the POW bracelet were perplexing me in a way that I think escaped the others in the house. None of them understood, because none of them (aside from Mac) were old enough to have been part of the era the bracelets were made and distributed.
You weren’t supposed to take off a POW bracelet until the soldier in question was accounted for. Many people removed theirs, sadly, when it was discovered that the person whose name they wore had been confirmed as killed in action. Not nearly as many others received good news about their POWs, but there were cases of men—they were almost all men—recovered either from a prison or simply as part of a sweep of the area. It was years after the war was over for the United States before the bracelets stopped being fairly common sights on wrists all over the country.
But if Sergeant Elliot’s fate had never been confirmed, that meant Mac was technically right in keeping the bracelet on his wrist all these years; he was in fact honoring the sergeant’s memory as he understood it.
I knew a number of people who had taken off the bracelets without really confirming that it was time to do so. Having seen so many ghosts over the years, I’d been squeamish about giving mine up, and even when I did decide not to wear it every day, I had never really put it away for good.
So the question that I couldn’t quite articulate yet was about the bracelet itself. The only way Mac’s bracelet would stand between Sergeant Elliot and the next level of his existence (if his claim that the bracelet and the person named on it were linked somehow) would be if Mac had the only bracelet with Sergeant Elliot’s name on it. That seemed impossible—there were many bracelets made with each POW or MIA soldier’s name imprinted on them.
I was about to ask Paul about it when Alison returned to the kitchen, carrying the small box that connected to the Internet. “I hope the towers are up and running,” she said.
“The Internet doesn’t work like a cell phone, Mom,” Melissa informed her as Alison unplugged the refrigerator from the generator and plugged in the network.
Maxine came down from the ceiling in her trench coat, from which she immediately pulled the old MacBook Alison had reluctantly given Maxine to do research on and had rarely seen since. Maxine’s clothing immediately reverted to her usual jeans and a black T-shirt whose legend read, “Yes?”
“What am I looking up?” she asked Paul as she hovered over the center island.
“First, find out anything you can about Barbara Litton, Sergeant Elliot’s ex-fiancée,” Paul told her. “I have a theory, but no evidence yet to support it. That’s your job, Maxie, but if I’m right, it won’t take you long.”
She didn’t respond; she just started clacking away on the keys. “This thing won’t hold a charge for more than a minute,” she told Alison, pointing to the laptop. “Can I plug in?”
Alison plugged the power cord into the generator and handed the other end up to Maxine, who rose a few inches as Alison extended her arm. “Very funny,” Alison said.
“What?”
Maxine grinned as she reached down to take the cord and plug it into the laptop, then began clicking keys again. She seemed very engrossed, so I took the opportunity to mention my confusion about the POW bracelet to Paul.
He listened very carefully,
as he always does, and made a pyramid of his fingers under his nose. “Couldn’t it be simply that Mac just kept wearing the bracelet out of nostalgia?” he asked when I was through. “He seems . . . unusually loyal to that period in time.”
“Maybe, but why does that one bracelet make so much difference to Sergeant Elliot?”
“It’s a good question.”
Maxine snapped her fingers above our heads. “Ha!” she shouted. “This is interesting. I looked up Barbara Litton. And guess what?”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Paul doesn’t often show off, but I suppose this time he couldn’t resist.
Maxine looked stunned, and a little annoyed at having the spotlight taken off of her. “That’s right,” she said. “She died three years ago.”
“I don’t understand,” Melissa chimed in. “How did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” Paul said. “I suspected. There’s a difference. When I tried to send out a general message and mentioned her name, two people got back to me saying they knew a ghost named Barbara Litton, but couldn’t be sure if it was the same one.”
“That was the interesting information you’d gotten,” Alison said. Paul nodded.
“But I don’t understand,” Melissa said. “Even if Sergeant Elliot’s girlfriend died three years ago, he’s been a ghost for forty years. What does it have to with the bracelet?”
“You’re so smart,” I said to my granddaughter.
“Well, maybe this starts to explain it,” Maxine answered, perhaps trying to get a little bit of the credit she thought she deserved for discovering that Barbara Litton was dead. “I tried to find a POW bracelet with Sergeant Elliot’s name on it online. I looked on eBay and a few other sources—it’s not hard to find them now, and they’re really pretty cheap.”
“It’s truly frightening what you can find out,” Alison told Maxine.
“You have no idea.”
“But you couldn’t find one for Sergeant Elliot,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Maxine or to myself; the fog was starting to lift in my head.
“No,” Maxine answered. “And there were plenty with other names on them.”
But before anyone could respond, I began to understand. And I started to think about the chicken.
When I first saw Sergeant Robert Elliot, he was attempting to steal a roast chicken that he couldn’t eat from a pan in Alison’s kitchen. And his explanation, that he was taking it to some homeless friends, was clearly a lie. Later, Mac had found the measuring cup of chicken gravy in his room, even as he’d been pulled from his bed by the wrist that held the bracelet.
“I think the bracelet on Mac’s arm might really be the last one with Sergeant Elliot’s name on it,” I told Paul. “And as long as there’s one on a wrist somewhere, the sergeant is stranded.”
Chapter 9
“I think it might be time to go wake Mac,” Paul said, “because I think you might be right, Loretta.”
“I’ll go,” Alison said and stood.
“Hold on,” Paul told her. “We need to coordinate our plan.”
“Our plan?” Alison asked. “We have a plan?”
Paul didn’t acknowledge her humor. “I think you need an excuse to ask Mac to come out,” he told Alison. “Something that’s not about the bracelet.”
“Tell him you’re making lunch,” I suggested.
“That’s not bad,” Paul continued. “He can’t go out for food in the storm; nothing will be open.”
“Mom?” Alison said. She knew we had no lunch prepared.
“I’m on it, honey,” I said. I went to the fridge, taking a mental inventory of its contents as I went. I took out the challah bread, some sliced turkey and the leftover chicken from the night before, along with some lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. I’d brought everything but the mayo in my backpack yesterday. “We’ll have chicken or turkey sandwiches. I hope Mac isn’t a vegetarian, but I can work something out for him if he is.”
As Alison left the kitchen to get Mac and I started preparing plates with all the different ingredients so we could assemble our sandwiches personally, Sergeant Elliot appeared in the kitchen doorway with a sheepish expression on his face.
Paul looked up at Robert with a quizzical expression. “Sergeant?”
“I . . . regret leaving so abruptly before,” the new ghost said. “I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely honest with you. That was a mistake.”
“You weren’t really searching for the bracelet, were you, Sergeant?” Paul asked. “You knew Mac had it, and you were trying to get it away from him.”
“I need it,” Sergeant Elliot answered. “What I told you about it was true.”
“You want to evolve, to move on to the next level of existence,” Paul agreed, “but you need that one bracelet. Is it the last one?”
The sergeant nodded. “The last one still being worn. And that crazy hippie won’t let it go.”
On cue, Alison ushered Mac into the kitchen as I started to put the food out on the island, where Melissa had been busy setting four places.
“Come in, Mac,” I said. “We’ve got some sandwiches for you, if you’re hungry.”
“Thank you,” said Alison’s guest. He was dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt with a peace sign over a tie-dyed pattern and had changed his headband to one in a khaki camouflage pattern. I noticed that Sergeant Elliot’s lip curled into a small sneer.
“Look at him,” he said, pointing to Mac. “He wears my name on his arm like another souvenir. Me and Janis Joplin are the same to him. He doesn’t begin to understand loyalty, responsibility, respect. He thinks we went to Vietnam because we wanted to kill people, and now he treats us like a black light poster or a set of love beads.”
At that moment, I began seeing a way to help. But I wasn’t sure if I should try yet. Paul seemed to have a plan. I decided to let him try and see what happened.
“How long have you been trying to get that bracelet from Mac’s wrist?” Paul asked the sergeant.
“Over a year,” was the response. “First, I spent years tracking down a lot of the others. Most of them the people just took off eventually, and I didn’t have to worry about them. They ended up being sent back, thrown away, put in a drawer or forgotten. Their bond to me is broken and can’t hold me back. But the ones that were left—there were only six—were easy enough to get. One person left it behind when he went to the beach, so I grabbed it. Another took it off for bed. Easy. I got the first five in about two years, including the time it took to travel from spot to spot—you can feel when there’s one nearby. But this one.” He pointed toward Mac. “I’ve been with him every minute of every day for fourteen months, and he never takes it off.” He looked at me. “Yes. That’s why I was trying to get the bracelet off with some of the chicken grease.”
I sniffed. My chicken is not greasy. But I couldn’t say anything.
“If the little creep had put that determination to work in the army, instead of protesting and complaining back home, he might have made a decent soldier,” the sergeant added.
Alison’s eyebrow twitched. She’s very protective of her guests.
We sat down and started passing plates of food to go with the challah, and sandwiches were being assembled. I think everyone in the room except Mac was focusing on his left wrist, where the POW bracelet bearing Sergeant Elliot’s name glinted.
“Was that why you asked your ex-fiancée to help you get it?” Paul asked.
The sergeant looked more flustered. “You know about Barbara?” he gasped.
Maxine seemed especially pleased with herself when she said, “Barbara Ann Litton was born in 1948. She graduated high school in Madison, Wisconsin, just like you, and moved here to New Jersey when you were transferred to Fort Dix. You shipped out to Vietnam, and she stayed here even after you were declared missing. She waited six years, then met and marrie
d . . .”
“We get it, Maxie,” Paul said. “Very good research.” He turned toward Sergeant Elliot as Alison, Melissa and Mac discussed the severity of the storm and I listened. (Mac said the wind was “mind-blowing,” and I don’t think he was being ironic.) “You started searching for the bracelets at about the same time Ms. Litton passed away. You must have found her fairly quickly. Why were you so eager to find the other bracelets?”
Sergeant Elliot looked uncomfortable and cast his gaze toward the floor. “You know how it is—some people come back as ghosts, some don’t. When Barbara died, we found each other again, and wanted to spend as much time as possible together. But she was going to move on; she could tell. And it was going to happen fast. She’s been holding it off by sheer willpower until she knew I could go with her. I needed to get those bracelets so I could go on.”
Paul’s expression indicated he had deduced most of that already. “So it was Ms. Litton at work when Mac ended up falling out of his bed. She’s been trying to help you get the bracelets, and she was trying to get that one off Mac.”
“We both were,” the sergeant admitted. “He’s got it on so tight, it’s a miracle he hasn’t cut off circulation to his hand.” He looked at Paul. “You’ve got to get him to take it off. Please.”
I looked up at Paul then, almost involuntarily. I thought it might be time to give my idea a whirl, and I think Paul understood that from my expression, even if he didn’t know what I was considering. But Mac was listening, so I wrote my idea briefly on the bag from which I’d taken the bread and maneuvered it so Paul could see it. He read it and turned toward the sergeant.
“Why don’t you invite Barbara to join us?” he said. “Now that we know she’s here, there’s no harm.”
Sergeant Elliot appeared to consider that for moment, and then, apparently lacking Paul’s ability to communicate telepathically, looked toward the ceiling and yelled, “BARBARA! It’s okay!”
I decided, having heard Sergeant Elliot’s point of view, to find out what Mac’s might be. “You know, Mac, I have a POW bracelet, too,” I said, extending my arm with Colonel Mason’s name imprinted on the metal hanging from my wrist.
An Open Spook (A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery) Page 6
