Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts

by E. J. Copperman

  I put the phone on speaker so the room could hear Luther say, “I was glad to. She didn’t deserve to be in jail, and I had the money.”

  “Yeah, that’s some kind of bike shop you have there, with a hundred grand lying around in cash,” I told him.

  “Cash?” Luther laughed. “I don’t have money lying around in piles, Alison. I wrote them a check that will pay through an account I have just for emergencies. I’m pretty sure Kitty’s not a flight risk, so I don’t have to worry about losing the money.”

  “I’m right here,” Kitty said into the phone, louder than was necessary. “This is Kitty Malone, Luther. I can’t believe how generous you were. I really can’t thank you enough.”

  Luther seemed slightly cowed by the new voice in his ear. “It’s perfectly okay, Mrs. Malone,” he said after a pause.

  Kitty said, “But I have to ask—why? Why would you lay out that kind of money for someone you’ve barely met?”

  Luther let out a long breath. “You know, ma’am,” he finally sighed, “I think maybe I wanted to change your opinion of the kind of people your daughter hung out with. I knew Maxie, and I liked her. And I thought maybe because you saw how we dressed or because you watched her ride away on the back of Big Bob’s bike, you thought we were out of the Hells Angels or something. I wanted you to know that we’re decent people like anybody else. Big Bob might not have been the son-in-law you were hoping for, but he did love your daughter in his own way. I think maybe you didn’t give him a real fair break. And I wish I had said that to Maxie, too, when I had the chance.”

  Kitty’s eyes welled up, and Maxie had already turned away from us, her hand to her mouth. Kitty gulped, shook her head to herself, and when I offered her the phone, she took it. “It was never about the way he looked or the bike,” she told Luther. “He hit Maxie. And that wasn’t ever going to be okay with me. You don’t get a second chance on that. Can you understand, Luther?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I can,” came the answer. “I didn’t know that until Alison told me, but I do understand how you feel.”

  I took the phone back from Kitty and decided to rally the troops. “Now that we’re all here,” I said, “we need to mobilize. We need to figure out how to keep Kitty out of jail, and find out who really did kill Big Bob. We need to go to…”

  Paul started to gesture in my direction, so I turned toward him. He checked to see if Maxie was still looking away, gathering her thoughts, and she was. So Paul silently pulled his index finger across his throat, the universal signal for stop. For some reason, he didn’t want me to say any more in front of the group.

  “Uh, to see if we can find some stuff out. So I’ll call you to keep you informed. Okay, Luther?” I said. I must have sounded like a lunatic who couldn’t make up her own mind.

  “Um…sure,” Luther answered, sounding justifiably confused, and we ended the call.

  “What do you think we should do?” Kitty asked.

  “What I’d like you to do is go home and relax,” I said. “You’ve had enough of an ordeal for the time being.”

  “Where are you going to be?” my mother said.

  “In Levittown, Pennsylvania,” I answered, “looking for a man named Wilson Meyers. Do you know him?”

  Kitty shook her head. “I heard about Wilson, but I never met him. He didn’t seem to be one of the main…people in that group.” She looked where she thought Maxie was hovering, and got a good look at the karaoke machine. Kitty did not comment.

  Maxie looked over at me. And our eyes met for a second without any rancor. It was hard to know what that meant, because she almost immediately vanished.

  Kitty regarded me carefully. “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “Leaving the state will violate your bail agreement, and Luther will lose his money.”

  Kitty looked determined, but beaten on that point. She nodded. “I wouldn’t know Wilson if I saw him, anyway,” she said.

  “Neither would I,” Mom said. “But I’m going anyway. I’m not out on bail.” She nodded conspiratorially at Kitty, who grinned.

  A long argument ensued, and it turned out that Kitty Malone was almost as difficult to dissuade when she got an idea in her head as my mother.

  “You and Maxine need to sit down and clear the air,” my mother said.

  We were driving through White Horse, New Jersey about noon the next day on I-195, not far from the “Trenton Makes” Bridge (bearing lettering that read “Trenton Makes / The World Takes,” which harkened back to another era), which would take us into Pennsylvania. We’d be in Levittown in less than half an hour.

  I had decided specifically not to call ahead to Meyer Wilson, despite Lieutenant McElone having given me a phone number taken at the time of his speeding ticket (seriously, twenty-nine?). If Wilson was hiding out from something and didn’t want to be found, calling him ahead of time would be sort of counterproductive.

  On the other hand, if he wasn’t home now, what would Mom and I accomplish?

  “First of all, I’m not sure Maxie actually sits down these days,” I answered her. “And the air, while certainly not clear at the moment, is breathable. Why should we have another screaming match in an attempt to explain the last one?”

  I had eschewed the GPS for this trip, as it was almost all on the major highway, and Mom, MapQuest pages in hand, could navigate. Sometimes that British woman who tells me to “go straight on” when I hit the highway sounds snotty.

  “I’m just the grandmother, but to me it looks like the tension between you and Maxine is upsetting Melissa,” my mother suggested. That’s as close as she’d come to criticizing me, and it packed a wallop. I drove silently for a long moment.

  I’d been thinking about this latest flare-up with Maxie since it had happened, and I was ready to say what I thought out loud for the first time. “The fact is, Maxie and I aren’t ever going to be friends. I don’t mind Maxie, and I’m perfectly fine with her staying in my house, largely because Melissa likes her so much. But we see things”—I’d almost said life—“in different ways. Maxie is all about rebellion and doing things that provoke, and I just want to raise my daughter and run my guesthouse. I’m trying to get by, and she’s trying to get attention. That doesn’t mean we’ll always be at odds with each other, but it does mean we’re never going to have the same point of view.”

  Mom wasn’t entirely in my line of sight, but I didn’t want to turn my head while driving to see if I’d upset her. So I wasn’t really prepared when she chuckled lightly under her breath.

  “You know what?” she said. “I think the problem between the two of you is that you’re too much alike.”

  “Alike!” I belted out. “How on earth am I like Maxie?”

  “You know what you want, and what you have to do to get it,” Mom answered. “You’ve always been that way, even when you wanted to get that…What was it? That little lightbulb oven you wanted when you were six.”

  “The Easy-Bake Oven,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes while driving. “That doesn’t make me like Maxie.”

  “You both have a little bit of a temper. You do what you think is right and you don’t worry too much about what other people think. And you both have something that Melissa responds to. Stop me when you think I’m wrong.”

  I didn’t say anything because the thoughts were bouncing around in my head too fast. Me, like Maxie? She’d been a thorn in my side since I’d met her, and already it felt like we were eternal combatants, destined to be at odds with each other on every issue, every decision, everything that ever came up. And with Maxie, “ever” could end up being a very long time, indeed.

  “I’m more grown up than Maxie,” I said in my own defense. “I’m just trying to get on with my life after all that’s happened.”

  “I know,” Mom said, nodding. “But you had the advantage of being able to mature. You had a young daughter and a husband who wasn’t going to be much help. You had to grow up. Maxie didn’t get the
chance, and she never will.”

  “It seems like every time I think I have her figured out, I find out something that changes my view of her,” I said. “I didn’t know she went to design school.”

  Mom nodded as we got on the Trenton Makes Bridge. “Maxine told me about that one day when I was babysitting Melissa. She got a full ride from a very good college, too,” she said. “She was the only student from New Jersey who did, because they loved her designs so much.”

  “Why did she leave school?” I asked. “Was it Big Bob?”

  She shook her head. “No, she met him after she left school. She dropped out because she got into a fight with one of her professors over a design project, and the school backed the professor.”

  “What didn’t they like about the design?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t very…tasteful. You probably don’t want to know the specifics,” Mom answered. She was right; I probably didn’t.

  We got off the bridge and drove in silence for a while, other than Mom reading the directions to me. In very little time, we were pulling up in front of a cute little house that had clearly been seriously renovated since the original Levittown homes, all of them looking the same, were designed after the Second World War. It had what appeared to be recent brick facing, new windows, and a blue Ford Focus, the car reputedly driven at breakneck speeds through suburban streets.

  There was no motorcycle in front of the house.

  “This doesn’t exactly look like the home of a fugitive biker,” I said to my mother.

  Mom looked cautious. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” she said.

  “You think he’s dangerous?”

  She raised an eyebrow and looked at the Focus. “I’m pretty sure you can outrun him in that thing if you have to,” she said.

  “Let’s hope I don’t have to find out,” I said. I got out of the car. “Do you want to come in?” I asked through the open door as July closed in around me. Air-conditioned cars are wonderful, but I really couldn’t afford to buy one right now. I had stuck to the seat in areas I’d not thought about in years.

  “Well, I didn’t drive all this way to sit in a hot car,” Mom answered, and in a moment, the two of us were standing across the amazingly quiet street from a house with the address for “Meyer Wilson.”

  We stood there for a while, considering. But we couldn’t come up with anything more creative than walking over and ringing the doorbell, so that’s what we did. For the record, it was my finger on the doorbell button. Then Mom and I breathed in a bit and waited.

  From inside the house, we could hear a woman’s voice yell, “Door!”

  And a man’s answered, “What?”

  Woman: “There’s somebody at the door!”

  Man: “Who?”

  Woman (exasperated): “I don’t know!”

  Man: “Well…?”

  A few seconds later, the door opened, and a woman, presumably the one who had been trumpeting our arrival, stood in the doorway. As any human with a functional nervous system in this heat would be, she was wearing shorts and a tank top, and she eyed us warily. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  That was the question I had driven here to have answered.

  “We’re looking for Wilson Meyers,” I said, in what I hoped was a businesslike tone. “Does he live here?”

  The woman’s face grew suspicious. “No, Meyer Wilson lives here,” she said. “I don’t know any Wilson Meyers.” But there was something in her eyes that made me think maybe we were in the right place after all.

  “I’m a private investigator,” I said, flashing the license I’d gotten ready for just such an emergency. “I just want to ask him about someone he used to know. He’s not in any trouble.” That I knew of for sure.

  But it didn’t matter, because the woman’s eyes had widened at the words “private investigator.” She turned her head toward the inside of the house and hollered, “Meyer!”

  I could barely see into the living room of the house, which was a little cluttered but clean. From inside, wearing a pair of blue-jean cutoffs and a “Car Talk” T-shirt, came a thin man, shorter than I’d expected, slightly balding, fairly sunburned and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He was drying his hands on a dishtowel. And that confirmed my suspicions: Obviously, Meyer Wilson was a completely separate person from Wilson Meyers, so Mom and I had just made the drive from the New Jersey Shore in a sweltering Volvo for absolutely no reason. The ride home would be even more delightful, because this was clearly not the biker who had so spooked everyone back at the Sprocket. We had caught ourselves a wild goose. I was sure of that.

  Until the woman said, “These ladies say they’re detectives, and they’re looking for Wilson Meyers,” and I got a look at his face.

  The guy looked absolutely stunned. And more than a little frightened.

  Wilson—because that had to be who he was—took off the glasses and regarded the two women standing on the other side of his doorstep.

  “Detectives?” he said. He looked at Mom. “Really?”

  “I’m the private investigator,” I told him, and handed him a business card to prove it (like you couldn’t just print them up if you wanted to). “My name is Alison Kerby, and this is my associate, Loretta.”

  Mom waved a hand. “Associate,” she mocked. “I’m her mother. Can we come in? It’s really hot out here.” Mom believes honesty is the best policy, and I believe Mom should shut up every once in a while.

  Wilson shot a glance at his girlfriend/wife/caretaker and stood aside. “Of course,” he said. “Please come in.”

  It was indeed a relief to get into the house, whose central air-conditioning could be heard as a low hum throughout. Wilson gestured us into the living room and offered us some lemonade, which I gratefully accepted. The woman he finally introduced as Alice went into the kitchen to retrieve it, still giving us a wary look.

  “Do you want something to eat? I could get the grill going.” Wilson seemed to be trying to make this a social visit. “I’m really good on the grill.”

  I declined the offer and introduced myself, not mentioning that the deceased version of Maxie was inhabiting my attic. “Now, you really are Wilson Meyers, aren’t you?” I asked, keeping my voice down in case Alice did not know the real identity of the man she lived with.

  The guy seemed to think about it for a moment, then nodded and stole a quick worried glance toward the kitchen door. He didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not here to get you into trouble, Wilson,” I told him. “But I’d appreciate it if you could answer some questions honestly for me.”

  “It’s about Big Bob, isn’t it?” Wilson asked. “I figured as soon as I heard there was a detective here.”

  Mom and I looked at each other. “You know that he’s dead?” I asked.

  Wilson nodded. “I saw the newspaper article on the Internet,” he said. “They found his body, right?”

  That sounded ominous. “That’s right,” I told him. “Do you know anything about what happened to him?”

  Wilson stared at me for a moment, then drew back in shock. “You think I had something to do with what happened to Big Bob?” he said.

  Wouldn’t you know it—that was the moment Alice returned from the kitchen with a tray bearing a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses already filled with ice. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “They think I killed a friend of mine two years ago,” Wilson shrieked. “They tracked me down just so they could accuse me.”

  “That’s not what we think,” I assured him. “We’re trying to find out what happened, and we thought that since you left at right around the same time, you might have some idea of what was going on with Big Bob back then. Why someone might have wanted to murder him.”

  “I don’t know nothing,” Wilson said, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Nothing?” I asked. “You were pretty close to Big Bob in those days. Then he gets killed and you leave at almost the exact same moment. Seems like a big coinci
dence.”

  “I don’t know nothing,” Wilson repeated.

  “If he says he don’t know nothing, he don’t know nothing,” Alice reiterated for us, in case there had been some misunderstanding of Wilson’s initial statement.

  I felt my face scrunch up as I thought. Clearly, Wilson did know something, but what that could be might go in any number of directions. Just striking out in the wrong one could shut him down entirely as a source of information.

  Wilson must have taken my silence as a sign of disbelief, which was probably accurate. “Look,” he said. “I’ve got a nice life here. I’ve got a job at the Walmart as an assistant manager. I’ve got a nice wife.” He gestured toward Alice, who looked baffled. “People like me. I don’t do any of that stuff anymore. I didn’t do anything to Big Bob. So why don’t you just leave me alone?”

  I looked at Mom, and she got the hint. She leaned over and spoke confidentially. “Wilson,” she said, “they arrested someone for Big Bob’s murder and they put her in jail.”

  Wilson turned white, which was impressive, given the redness the sun had bestowed on his face and bald head. “Who’d they arrest?” he asked.

  “Kitty Malone,” Mom said. “She’s a very nice woman. Do you know who she is?”

  Wilson’s voice came out as a wheeze. “Maxie’s mom,” he said.

  Twenty-eight

  It took some more coaxing, but the thing Wilson Meyers really needed was time. Once he had actually taken in what we had told him, he was ready to cooperate. But he was clear that anything he told us could not be shared with anyone who carried a badge for a living.

  “No cops,” Wilson insisted. “I came out here to get away from the cops, and I don’t want to have to move again. And I’m sure not going to jail. I didn’t do anything, almost.”