“What about Wilson?” I asked. “Could he have gotten mixed up with a bad deal?”
Luther considered a moment. There was a knock on the door—Luther’s cubicle was the only one that had a door—and after a moment, the receptionist stuck her head in and said, “John’s going to need you in a minute, Luther.”
“Okay.” She withdrew and Luther turned back to talk to me. “Wilson was a different story,” he said. “He had the dreams, and he didn’t especially care how he got where he wanted to go. I don’t know about anything else, but I saw him smoke some weed every now and again. Hell, the fact is I smoked some weed every now and again in those days. Wilson was certainly less worried about doing the right thing than Big Bob.”
“Could he have gotten Big Bob involved in a deal if Wilson thought it was his ticket to the good life? Would Big Bob have done that for a friend?” I asked.
Luther shook his head slowly. “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “Big Bob was pretty scrupulous, but if a friend really needed his help? Maybe. I can’t call that one.” He stood up. “One of my salesmen needs me,” he said. “Can you hang on for about twenty minutes?”
“I can’t,” I answered. “A friend of mine is…ill, and I need to get back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Luther said. “But I hope your friend is better soon. Let’s walk down together.”
We did, and on the way, I brought Luther up to date with the Seaside Heights investigation. I hadn’t realized Luther was unaware of Kitty’s arrest, and he became absolutely incensed when he heard that she was not being released after her arraignment.
“How is that possible?” he asked. “The woman’s never done anything wrong in her life, and now they’re holding her in county? It’s ridiculous. Maxie’s mother didn’t kill Big Bob. I’ve only met her a couple of times, but I know she’d never do that.”
I agreed, but I told Luther about the million-dollar bail and the 10 percent cash equivalent. “She just can’t put her hands on anywhere near that kind of money,” I told him.
Luther didn’t look happy. “I don’t understand how she got arrested in the first place,” he said. “What makes them think she put a wrench into Big Bob’s skull?”
“It’s clear that somebody is framing her. It’s such an obvious case that I’m shocked the cops are going for it,” I said, echoing Phyllis, “but that’s what’s going on. They’re buying this ridiculous story—hook, line and sinker—and letting Kitty pay the price while the real killer gets a laugh out of it.”
Luther looked concerned. “It’s not right,” he said. “What can we do about it?”
“We have to find the real killer and get him to stop laughing,” I suggested.
“I like that,” Luther said. “I’ll come over tomorrow, and we’ll do that.” Then he walked toward a man wearing a Shore Cycle denim work shirt, who introduced Luther to his customer, a kid maybe twenty years old whose girlfriend was eyeing him more than her boyfriend, something Luther pretended not to notice.
I marveled at him. Sometimes, people aren’t at all what you expect.
Twenty-six
“Where were you?” I said—okay, bellowed—at Maxie. “You left Paul and me hanging out there to dry. There’s absolutely no excuse that could possibly be sufficient.”
She stared at me and said nothing.
“Well?” I demanded.
Maxie “sat down” on the dwindling pile of drywall sheets at the far end of the attic. I had measured very carefully, so there wouldn’t be a significant amount of drywall left over when the walls were hung. The last thing I needed was to have to haul all that stuff back down to where it had originated.
Paul had been up here when I’d arrived, which was something of a relief, given the way he’d left the last time I’d seen him. He looked even less solid than usual, and said nothing. But when Maxie had showed up, and it had become obvious that we were going to have a heated discussion, Paul literally sank into the floor and disappeared.
Maxie continued the silent treatment.
“What’s your excuse?” I said.
She drew in her lips and raised her eyebrows. Having to deal with a lunatic like me was clearly a trial for her. “What difference does it make?” she asked. “You just said no excuse would be good enough, so let’s just assume I don’t have one.”
“Oh, that’s great,” I said. It was way easier raising Melissa than raising Maxie would ever be. I’ll be puttering around this house in my nineties, and she’ll still be twenty-eight going on fifteen. “Do you have any idea what kind of damage you’ve done?”
“Yeah, so the quaint little tourists didn’t get to talk to the spooky ghosts,” she mocked. “The world will probably come to an end now.” She yawned theatrically.
“You know, it must be really easy when you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself,” I said. I turned to the wall, where I was lightly sanding a seam between two sheets of drywall with the hand sander attached to my shop vac. There was very little dust, but it was fairly loud, so Maxie had to shout to be heard over the work. What a shame.
“Yeah, I have it real easy!” she screamed.
Halfway through her sentence, I turned off the vac, so her words echoed around the room. Her eyes narrowed, and she stuck out her lower lip.
“You know, I never signed on for this vaudeville gig you worked up with Paul,” Maxie growled. “He gets to keep his mind active with this gumshoe stuff, and you get us to help put your guesthouse on the map. What do I get out of it?”
Without thinking, I shot back, “You get to stay in my house for the rest of eternity!” And I immediately felt bad about it. Maxie has a talent for making me say things that I’m going to regret later, sometimes as soon as they leave my mouth.
She looked absolutely stunned. “You think that’s what I want? To stay in this place until time finally ends?”
“No, Maxie, I—” I was backpedaling, but not fast enough.
“Forget it! You don’t ever have to see me again if you don’t want to!” And before I could say another word, she had vanished in a blink. I looked around the room, called “Maxie?” timidly and realized that I’d rarely felt quite so alone. I gave up the sanding and went downstairs.
But once I arrived in the den, where Don Petrone and Albert Westen were playing gin rummy (Don grinned when I walked in, but Albert barely acknowledged my presence), Maxie was there, talking confidentially to Melissa in the corner closest to the kitchen door. And when I got closer, I noticed the one thing I really didn’t want to see.
Melissa was crying. I was the only one who could tell, because she was concealing her face, but we mothers have a sixth sense about such things. Besides, Don and Albert were concentrating on their cards.
I rushed to her just as Maxie finished saying, “not what I wanted,” and glared at me.
“What’s going on?” I asked Melissa. “What’s wrong, baby?”
It took Melissa a while to get herself under control, and when she did, she quietly told me, “Maxie…Maxie says she’s going away and never coming back, and she says you told her she had to go. Why did you say that?”
I think I might have literally seen red. “I didn’t say that,” I announced loudly for Maxie to hear, “and I wouldn’t say that, ever.” Don and Arthur looked up. Arthur pursed his lips and shook his head—Nice try, lady, but there’s no ghost there—and Don just smiled. Don would probably smile if someone dropped a bowling ball on his foot.
I was feeling a level of anger I hadn’t reached since the pre-divorce era, and I looked up at Maxie, who was hovering with a smug grin on her face, arms folded in a gesture of defiance. I didn’t care who heard me anymore. “How dare you lie to Melissa like that? Try and make me look like the villain to my own daughter? What kind of monster are you?”
“It’s okay, Alison,” Don said, not looking up from his rummy hand. “We believe there are ghosts in the house, honey.”
“You’ve wanted me out of here since the day you
found out about me,” Maxie shot back, her eyes slits and her clothes changing into the more aggressive black leather she seemed to unconsciously sprout whenever she was angry. “Well, I’m giving you what you want. You can explain it to Melissa any way you want, but the fact is, I’m leaving because of you.”
“You can’t leave!” Melissa wailed. “You’re my friend!”
“You know, it’s really sort of in bad taste to get your daughter all upset just to convince us,” Albert told me.
“I’m not…Look. I can’t prove it to you right now, but I’m having a pretty heated argument with one of the ghosts right now,” I said.
“Say something, Mom!” Melissa begged, gesturing toward Maxie.
“She’s not going anywhere, Liss,” I told her, staring at Maxie the whole time. “You forget—she can’t leave the grounds of this house. She’s just saying that to be mean.”
“You think so?” Maxie yelled. “You couldn’t find me when you wanted me to put on your little spooky show, could you? Where do you think I was?”
You know how, just when you think things can’t get worse, they inevitably do? From behind me came my ex-husband’s voice.
“Lissie, honey! Don’t worry—I won’t leave you again!”
See what I mean?
I turned to see The Swine, arms open, inviting Melissa to come over and shield herself from me in his comforting embrace. Liss, to her everlasting credit, looked at him as if he must have lost his mind, and managed to croak out, “It’s not about you, Daddy.”
The Swine looked absolutely stupefied. “It’s not?”
Then I looked up at Maxie, who had spontaneously changed into a pair of ripped jeans and a shirt bearing the logo of Roadside America, a tourist attraction in Pennsylvania. “You can make yourself invisible whenever you want, but I know you can’t just leave,” I told her.
“That’s not fair,” said my ex. He’s so vain; he probably thinks this book is about him.
“You watch me,” Maxie spat back. And she turned to head for the wall.
“Maxie!” Melissa yelled. And Maxie did turn back, saw her expression, and suddenly looked sad. She hesitated.
“Who’s Maxie?” Steven asked.
But at that moment, a voice from the direction of the front door shouted at her, “Maxine! What do you think you’re doing?”
We all (except the two card players) turned and saw my mother standing at the doorway to the den, a look of sincere concern on her face. “Why is Melissa crying?” Mom asked.
“It’s…She…” Maxie pointed at me.
Mom turned toward the door and said something I couldn’t hear. She nodded her head.
And then Kitty Malone walked through the door and, looking a few feet to the left of her daughter, called out, “Maxie, you stay right here, and let’s talk this thing out.”
Twenty-seven
The ensuing pandemonium lasted a good few minutes, with Maxie coming down from the ceiling to try to embrace her mother, and Kitty seeming to feel the physical presence of her daughter. Mom walked to Melissa to comfort her and find out what the tears were about, and I rushed to Kitty with a thousand questions on the tip of my tongue.
Don and Albert simply nodded to the two ladies and went back to their game of rummy.
My biggest concern was The Swine, who, after realizing (with much prompting) that Melissa wasn’t crying about him, became justifiably suspicious about all the people talking to the ceiling. But then he sidled up next to me and said, “Is this a spook show?”
“Yes,” I told him, mentally thanking him for giving me the out. “Can you get Lucy out of here?”
“Where is she?” he asked.
“I have no idea. Go look.” And he was out the door.
It turned out that Mom and Kitty had just met on the doorstep, both having arrived independently. Mom was brought up to speed on Kitty’s ordeal, which she found horrifying, and having known Maxie’s mother for a grand total of forty seconds, declared that the charges were completely baseless. Mom and gray areas have met, but they’re not close.
Kitty clearly found Mom fascinating, and was especially jealous of the fact that my mother can see Maxie, but she can’t.
When the excitement died down, those of us in on the situation (minus Melissa, who was told she’d be brought up to date shortly, and took the news well, stomping up the stairs to her room in protest) reconvened in the kitchen, with Mom continuing to pass on messages from Maxie to Kitty because it was simply faster than Maxie trying to communicate directly via pad and pen. I considered getting Maxie a phone so she could text her mother.
Paul, somehow having been alerted to the situation—maybe he’d run into Melissa as she huffed by—materialized in the ceiling, head down of course, and listened very carefully, stroking his goatee fiercely throughout.
Mom, disturbed by Paul’s “less than right side up appearance,” expressed concern, but Paul deflected it, saying he was just seeing the world from a new perspective because he could. Mom’s eyes narrowed, as she was clearly having some trouble buying that story, but she turned her attention to Kitty, who said she wasn’t sure why she’d been released, but was relieved anyway.
“They never moved me to the other prison,” she told us. “They never even suggested that they were going to move me. So I was pretty much in the same place you saw me, Alison, and being treated quite well for someone they thought was a cold-blooded murderer. They sent out for Chinese food for me last night.”
That was all nice detail, but as Phyllis would have told Kitty, she was burying her lede. “But how did you get out?” I asked.
“Well, that was the strange part,” Kitty said.
“The strange part?” Maxie asked, still not looking at me when she could avoid it. “This whole thing has been insane from the beginning.”
We did not pass that comment along to Kitty, who simply continued, “Maybe two hours ago, Sergeant Packer—you didn’t get to meet him, Alison, but he was very nice—came in and told me I’d made bail. It took about an hour or so to process the paperwork and get me back into my street clothes, and they even drove me back to my house, but I knew Maxie would be worried, so I came right here.”
Everyone in the room took a moment to absorb that information. “So you paid a hundred thousand dollars in cash? Where did you get that kind of money, Kitty?” I asked, my head reeling.
Kitty examined my face for a moment, then burst out laughing. “I didn’t come up with the money, Alison!” she said. “Goodness, no. I’d be lucky to find 10 percent of that in an emergency. No, the bail came from someone else, and that’s something I wanted to ask Maxie about.” She looked up, and Maxie moved into the spot where Kitty was staring, perhaps just to feel like her mother could see her for a moment.
That’s the thing about Maxie: Just when you’re all set to hate her, she acts like the girl she was, one who died much too young, and the sympathy gene kicks into gear. It’s really annoying.
“Tell her I’m listening,” Maxie told Mom, still deliberately ignoring me in the process. Okay, so she wasn’t always a sympathetic character.
Mom passed on the message, and Kitty said, “The bail came from Luther Mason. You remember him, don’t you, honey? Wasn’t he a member of the motorcycle gang you were involved with?”
Maxie rolled her eyes like a practiced teenager (Melissa had already perfected her technique at ten, because she’s precocious) and took the time to write “IT WASN’T A GANG” on the pad to show her mother. Then she said out loud, “Sure, I knew Luther. Luther’s the guy who asked her”—that was me—“to find out who killed Big Bob.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Luther Mason put up your bail? A hundred thousand dollars?”
“That’s what they told me,” Kitty said, nodding. She looked pretty surprised herself. “He didn’t even stay long enough for me to thank him. Apparently, he just showed up, paid the money and left.”
Luther? I mean, the motorcycle dealership was very impressive,
but a hundred thousand dollars lying around with nothing to do? Luther never failed to explode my expectations. He must have left for Seaside Heights right after he’d seen me.
“That’s amazing,” Maxie said. She wrote on the pad for a while and then showed Kitty the message: “SEE? BIKERS ARE NOT SUCH BAD PEOPLE.”
“No,” Kitty agreed. “I guess you’re right. But I can’t imagine what made Luther suddenly show up and get me out of jail. I can’t have met him more than three times in my life. He came by just a few days ago, and that’s when I told him about you, Maxie. Why he’d come out and give all that money, it’s mystifying.”
“I know,” I told her. “Luther’s my client. I just saw him a few hours ago, but he didn’t say a word about—”
Mom cut me off before I could finish the sentence. “You saw Luther just before he bailed out Kitty?” she asked. “Did you tell him about her bail?”
“Well, yeah, but I didn’t ask him to—”
Maxie’s eyes widened. “You did this?” she asked me, addressing me directly for the first time since our blowup. “You got my mother out of jail?”
Paul’s eyes narrowed. I think. It was hard to tell with him in that position. He might have just been getting sleepy.
Maxie swooped down and hugged me as best she could. It was interesting how the sensation differed from when Paul had touched me; whereas he felt like a warm breeze, Maxie’s touch was closer to a paper fan on a hot summer day like today. Light, pleasant, but not really all that different than the way you felt before.
“Hang on,” I told the room. “I’m happy Kitty’s free now, but it wasn’t my doing. I don’t have the money. I didn’t ask Luther to put up the bail. This is his good deed, not mine.”
“Don’t be modest,” Mom said. She thinks I am the second brightest spot in the universe—just behind Melissa—and that everything I do is absolute perfection. Yeah, I know it sounds great, but it wears at the nerves, let me tell you.
“I’m not being modest. Look, I’ll prove it to you.” I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Luther’s number. When he answered, I began with, “You bailed Kitty out of jail! That is just so…I’m at a loss for words. It’s probably the first time I’ve been at a loss for words in years.” (Actually, it was since the moment The Swine told me about Amee, and I overcame that feeling quickly.)
Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts Page 22
