“Thank you,” I told my ex-husband. I never thought I’d say that to him ever again. This was threatening to become an actual touching moment, so naturally Maxie stuck her head through the ceiling, wearing an expression I wouldn’t have expected on her: concern.
“Something’s going on with Paul,” she said. “You’d better come upstairs.”
Nineteen
“It’s nothing,” Paul insisted. “I’m all right.”
“You don’t look all right,” I told him.
Getting away from Steven without a plausible explanation had been a little tricky. I was lucky that way, because making an excuse for me to leave and getting Melissa to keep her father occupied solved two problems at the same time: It got me out of the kitchen to attend to Paul, and it kept Melissa from seeing what I was seeing, which would have upset her.
“I’m fine,” Paul reiterated.
It was hard to accept his assurance on the subject. “You’re upside down,” I told him.
“No kidding,” Maxie said. “Like he didn’t know he was upside down.”
Paul was, in fact, completely inverted. In my house, that’s not entirely odd. The difference this time was that it seemed he had gotten that way unintentionally.
“I’ve been upside down before,” Paul pointed out. “I float. I’m a ghost, right?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But then, you could straighten up when you wanted to. Let’s see you do that now.”
Hanging from the newly installed ceiling in the attic, face about three feet off the floor, Paul looked like a muscular, goateed, English Canadian bat. He scowled and flared his nostrils a little. “Fine,” he said. But when he tried to straighten up, he could bend at the waist and move himself side to side but could not become normally vertical. It looked like he was doing those abs crunches where you hang from your feet (as seen on TV).
“Okay,” he said, huffing and puffing a bit. “Maybe I can’t straighten up. But that’s no big deal. I can get along just fine the way I am now.”
“Doesn’t all the ectoplasm rush to your head?” I asked.
“Okay,” Maxie said. “So you’re going to spend the rest of whatever floating around like you’re hanging by your feet from a hook?”
“Do you have any suggestions?” Paul demanded.
It was up to me to mediate this dispute, and to bring some sanity to the proceedings. Laugh if you want to. “Paul, do you think you might be sick or something?”
“He’s already dead,” Maxie noted. “How much worse can he get?”
Paul and I ignored her. “The last time I saw you, you were floating horizontally, like you were in a swimming pool,” I said. “You didn’t seem very happy then. Was this starting to happen to you already?”
Paul was silent for a moment, and I wasn’t sure whether he was pondering the question or simply wasn’t interested in answering it. Eventually he said, “I don’t know. I can’t say I’ve been feeling strangely, because I don’t really feel all that much. But something has been wrong.”
I needed to get Maxie out of the room. “Would you mind going downstairs and telling Melissa that Paul’s okay? I’m sure she was worried.” Maxie and Melissa have an interesting relationship, in that they actually like each other. You can’t always choose your child’s friends.
Maxie, glad to have reason to talk to Melissa—and warned to do so discreetly if Steven or Lucy was in the room—zipped through the attic floor and vanished. I looked Paul up and down, toe to head.
“Is this about Julia?” I asked him. “Is she weighing on your mind so heavily that it’s giving your head more gravity?”
“I really don’t think so,” he answered. “But what have you found out?”
I can be extremely stubborn when I have decided on something. “I’ll let you know when I find out something for sure,” I assured Paul. “But don’t ask me about every step of the way, because that’s just going to worry you and slow me down.”
“Worry me? Is there something for me to be worried about?”
“See what I mean?” I asked.
“All right, so finding Julia is weighing on my mind,” he admitted. “But I honestly don’t think that’s enough to turn me upside down.”
I was already craning my neck to look at him; this was going to prove to be a problem. “Is there anything I can do? Something Maxie can research?” I asked. Maxie does the online research for our investigations when necessary. She has unusually keen computer skills, especially for someone who’s dead. But the occasional floating laptop computer was the price one had to pay for such talents.
“Believe me, Alison, if I could think of something that might fix this, I wouldn’t hold back,” Paul told me. “Ask Maxie to…”
No need to wait; Maxie appeared through the floorboards once again. “I’m here,” she said. “Ask me what?”
“Where is she?” Paul asked, trying to twist himself around. “Ah, there. Maxie, I’d appreciate it if you could…What are you looking at?”
She was staring at him rather oddly. “Can you raise up?” she asked. “Your feet are in my face.”
Paul levitated higher, going face to face with Maxie, but still inverted. “That better?” Assured by Maxie’s nod that it was, he went on as if nothing had happened. “I’d appreciate it if you could get on the Internet and see if there are any reports of people like us who were inverted. Report back to me; I doubt I’ll be traveling much out of the attic until I can figure this out.”
I felt like a heel, but I had to ask, “What about the spook shows? The guests already saw a performance with only one of you.” I looked at Maxie.
“My mother is in jail!” she responded.
Paul’s voice took on a dryness that was unusual for him. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Maxie…”
“I’m on it,” Maxie assured him. She disappeared into the floor, presumably to go to one of her hiding places and start in on her assignment. I noticed that she hadn’t addressed her frustration with me, and had spoken to Paul whenever she could avoid speaking to me. Ghosts can be so self-centered.
“And you?” Paul asked me.
“I’m going to sing a little karaoke and go to bed,” I told him. “Any requests?”
“Yes. Keep the volume low.”
“Julia MacKenzie worked here for about a year.” Bud Pandell, the human-resources manager at CableCom, was a balding, red-faced man who breathed through his mouth and wore a white short-sleeved polyester-blend shirt. “She never got written up for shoddy performance or insubordination.” Wow—did companies really still use words like insubordination? “And that’s really about all that I know. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”
“Why did she leave?” I asked. If she’d moved out of the area, that might give me a direction to follow. “Any record of that?”
It had taken a little fast talking to get into the CableCom offices to speak to Pandell this morning. I’d told the receptionist I was from a government agency (no initials, but the work was “classified above your clearance level”) that was considering Ms. MacKenzie for a somewhat sensitive position and wanted to vet her through some information from past employers. Pandell, once notified by the receptionist, had appeared to escort me into his office in less than a minute.
Pandell looked through the folder marked “MacKenzie, Julia,” and ran his finger down one particular page. “According to her file, she had just gotten her master’s degree, and I guessed she was either going for a doctorate or looking for a job in the field she’d studied.”
“And what was that field?” I asked.
“Psychology,” he answered. “CableCom actually contributed to her education.”
“Don’t you sort of frown on employees leaving right after you finish paying for them to go to college?” I asked.
“It’s not our favorite thing,” he admitted.
“Did she leave an address where she might be found when she left?”
Pandell looked at me. “Who are you wi
th really?” he asked.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re not with a government agency, Ms. Kerby. You’re not asking human-resources questions, and you’re not interested in classified information. You’re trying to find Julia MacKenzie, not vet her for anything. So I’ll ask you again—who are you with really?”
There was no point in attempting to play my original role. “I’m a private investigator,” I said. “I’ve been hired to try to find Ms. MacKenzie, but I promise you, it’s not for any purpose that will cause her trouble.”
Pandell looked at me for a long time, and it seemed like he was deciding something. He ran his hand through what hair he had left and twitched his mouth for a while. Then, apparently having made his evaluation of me, he leaned forward with a great degree of confidentiality.
“You’re looking for Julia?” he whispered, and the way he said “Julia” sent a warning shiver up my spine. This wasn’t a human-resources response.
I nodded, but didn’t venture saying anything.
“Have you made any progress?” Pandell asked hopefully. “Do you know where she might be?”
“Not yet,” I managed. “That’s why I came here to ask you.”
“But you’re a detective,” he said. “You’ll find her eventually.”
This conversation was veering into weird territory with dizzying speed. “I intend to,” I said. “But I can’t guarantee anything.”
“This client of yours,” Pandell went on, not acknowledging what I’d just said. “Is it her parents or someone like that?”
“I really can’t say,” I told him. No, it’s her almost-fiancé who happens to be dead. “I keep my clients confidential.” When it suits me.
“Can I be your client?” he asked, suddenly seeming like an overeager terrier whose owner had just come home from work. “Can you search for her and tell me when you’ve found her?”
“Did she steal from the company or something?” I asked. Why would the HR guy from her job want to track down an employee who’d resigned? And wouldn’t he be in a better position to do it?
Pandell shook his head vigorously. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Then, what’s it something like?”
He bit his lips and looked toward the window. “It’s personal,” he said. “She just left without saying anything.”
This had an eerie feel to it. “You mean, she didn’t say why she was resigning from CableCom?” I could hope.
“No. I mean she didn’t say anything to me.” Pandell reestablished eye contact and sat up straighter in his chair. “We…dated for a while.”
After I recovered enough to speak, I asked Bud Pandell about his relationship with Julia MacKenzie. The dates coincided with the time she was also seeing Paul exclusively (Paul had believed). And that, no matter what scenario I could fabricate in my head, wasn’t good.
He said he’d asked Julia out a number of times before she’d agreed to a date, and that even when they were as involved as they’d ever get, she was never his “girlfriend.” They hadn’t discussed exclusivity, but based on the way he talked, she’d certainly never told him about Paul.
Eventually, having squeezed as much information out of the little man as I could, I sympathetically told him I was unable to contract with two clients for one investigation—I did not mention that the other client, being deceased, was not paying me anything except a two-a-day spook show to keep my guesthouse going—and promised, when I located Julia, to “tell her Bud said to call.”
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t going to be tops on my list of messages for Ms. MacKenzie when I found her, but if it came up during the conversation, I’d be sure to pass it along.
Twenty
My mind was spinning as I drove to the Sprocket to talk to Little Bob and Rocco Palenty about Big Bob again. This time I thought I could let them know I was looking for Wilson Meyers as well (if by “looking” one meant “trying to figure out how to look”), and see if they had any ideas about where he might be. I’d asked Luther if he wanted to come along, but he’d been strangely aloof on the phone—maybe a reaction to our awkward kiss—and said he had to work. Men.
It hadn’t ever occurred to me that Rocco and Little Bob wouldn’t be at the bar in the middle of the afternoon, and luckily, it hadn’t occurred to them, either. I found Little Bob back at the bowling machine, and Rocco, mug of beer in hand, cheering him on.
Rocco stopped encouraging Little Bob for a moment to say hello, and, after eyeing me uncomfortably (for me) up and down, to comment, “I see this is what you really look like. Sorta liked the little black skirt, myself.”
“Sorry about that, Rocco.”
Little Bob didn’t look over—he was trying to convert a difficult spare—but he also offered greetings and a beer. I opted for a diet soda, then told the two men why I’d come to the bar today, and after Little Bob’s game (“Only a two twenty-three”) was completed, we sat down to discuss any possible leads I’d missed on Big Bob Benicio or Wilson Meyers.
Rocco did some head scratching to show off how hard he was thinking, but after a little while, he said, “I just can’t come up with anything. Big Bob didn’t seem any different around that time than he’d been before. He wasn’t worried or anything. I don’t know what the deal was.”
“That’s not exactly right,” Little Bob jumped in. “Big Bob was antsy for a couple of days before he disappeared. I don’t know why, but I do remember he was moody and just sitting around staring into his drink for two or three days.”
I turned toward Rocco. “And you didn’t see any of this?”
Rocco shook his head. “Nope. But then, my memory could be a little off. You know, I drink a bit.” He winked, probably thinking it made him look impish. It really didn’t.
“Did you ask him what the problem was?”
“Tried,” Little Bob said. “He jumped right down my throat, told me to go away and leave him alone. So I did.”
This was leading a grand total of nowhere. “I hear that you and Big Bob got into a fight right before he vanished,” I told Little Bob. “What happened?”
Little Bob looked sheepish, like a small boy who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar for the seventeenth time this morning. “We did have a little dustup,” he admitted, hanging his head (or just looking down to make eye contact with me). “But it was at least a month before Big Bob went away.”
“What was it about?” I asked, remembering that Luther had said the fight was over Maxie, or maybe not.
“Tell the truth, it was about Maxie,” Little Bob told me. “I knew they had got a divorce, or an annulment, or something, and I asked Big Bob would it be okay if I asked Maxie out to a movie or something. And he got real mad.”
“You wanted to go out with Maxie?” I needed a minute to wrap my brain around the concept.
Little Bob nodded. “I had a little crush on her, you know. But Big Bob started yelling at me that Maxie deserved better than us, you know. Said she should find herself some college guy or something. Said her mom was right about us, that we were nothing but criminals and drug addicts.”
Rocco suddenly looked as if someone had hit him in the face with a garbage-can lid and flattened his features. He made a sound like a horse does with his lips and rubbed his hand over his unshaven chin. “Her mom said that?” he asked.
You’d think he’d be more upset that his friend Big Bob had categorized him as a criminal and a drug addict, but that didn’t seem to faze either of the guys.
“I dunno,” Little Bob told him. “I wasn’t there. That’s just what Big Bob told me.”
But I was focusing on another part of Big Bob’s alleged rant. Maybe I could get one of them to react. “He said you were criminals and drug addicts? Did Big Bob have a substance-abuse problem?”
Rocco grinned. “Not unless beer is a substance,” he said. He took a nice long swig on his own to provide the visual.
Well, actually, it is, but that
’s not the point. “Did Big Bob drink too much? So that it was getting to be a problem? Or was he into anything else, anything illegal?” I asked Little Bob, having come to the conclusion that talking to Rocco was not going to be incredibly helpful.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Little Bob replied, chewing his lips a little in a sign that he was thinking. “I never heard about anything like that. Big Bob was always either working at the grill, riding his bike or here drinking with us. He didn’t have time to be a drug addict, too.”
Maybe it wasn’t going to be incredibly helpful talking to either one of these guys.
I decided to shift gears (no pun intended). “What about Wilson Meyers?” I asked. Wilson was my last chance. “What can you tell me about him?”
“Wilson was basically a weasel,” Rocco said. “I don’t think he had a real job. He’d just pick up work, delivering packages for people, sometimes doing little odds and ends around a house. He wasn’t a real good carpenter, but he could paint okay. During the off-season I think he might have worked at the bike shop sometimes when Luther was just the manager, but Luther never kept him long because Wilson would only show up for work on time about once a week. Half the time he was in jail after getting into a fight or sleeping something off.”
That was something, anyway. I’d have to ask Luther about Wilson again the next time I saw him, if he ever called me again. Boy, don’t react to one little kiss the way they want, and men get all funny around you. I might have to suck it up and call him myself; officially, he was still my client after all.
“Wilson didn’t have a crush on Maxie, too, did he?” Maybe this whole thing was a product of the twisted power Maxie had on men. Though the thought absolutely baffled me.
“I don’t think so,” Little Bob piped up. “He never said nothing about it. I think he was just lazy.”
“What did you think when he vanished around the same time as Big Bob?” I asked them.
Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts Page 17
