“What makes you think Alice was stupid?” I asked Maria.
“She never figured out how her father made his money. Apparently she was clueless about a lot of other stuff. She was kind of the family imbecile.”
“Imbecile!” Alice protested. “My papa would never call me that.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Sure of what?” Maria said.
“Alice, please show yourself. It would be a whole lot easier on all of us.”
“What are you talking about?” Maria demanded. She sure got pissed easily, which I guess wasn’t surprising.
“I don’t know if I can,” Alice declared.
“Try,” I implored.
“Try what?” Maria demanded.
Alice squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fists.
I heard a pop, and then a gasp—from Maria.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Alice, and I’m not stupid,” my flapper friend declared.
Maria turned an angry glare on me. “What the hell?”
“Maria, meet your great, great aunt.”
“Bullshit!” Maria said.
“No, really. This is Alice. She’s a ghost.”
“No way.”
“Way,” I said, feeling just a tad smug. How many ghosts had I communicated with during the past couple of years? “Alice, is there anything you want to say to Maria?”
“Yes,” Alice said, indignantly. “Why did you hurt my friend, Jeff?”
I turned back to Maria. “I wouldn’t mind hearing that answer, too.”
“What the fuck? This is bullshit!” Maria declared.
“You are a foul-mouthed woman,” Alice practically spat. “An embarrassment to my entire family—past and present!”
“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” I muttered, and once again Maria’s gun rose to zero in on my nose.
“Shut up!” she shouted.
A cloud passed in front of the sun, dimming the light. Alice rose to her full height, full of indignation. “What kind of woman did my Papa marry that begat the likes of you and your horrible brothers?”
“Someone with a stronger spine than the one from whom you were weened,” Maria grated.
Whom? Maria at least had good grammar.
“My mother was a kind and gentle person,” Alice asserted.
“Another chump,” Maria said with scorn.
“You are evil,” Alice said, sounding hurt and confused.
“Why, because I can identify an idiot when I see one?”
“Why have you come here?” Alice demanded.
Maria’s lips curled into a mockery of a smile. “To kill this stupid jerk,” she said, waving her gun in my direction.
“What did he ever do to you?”
“He’s too smart for his own good. His boss, Tom, actually listens to what he has to say. “
“And because I warned him about you, you destroyed his business by arson?” I accused.
Maria laughed. “He rebuffed my advances. If I could have married the jerk, it would have better served me. I wouldn’t have had to pay a penny for The Whole Nine Yards. So instead, I destroyed his business. Now that it’s worthless, I can buy it for pennies on the dollar,” she practically crowed.
“Why?” Alice implored. “Why would you do something so terrible?”
“Because I’m my great grandfather’s great granddaughter.” Maria lurched forward and grabbed one of my crutches. Hampered by the cast and hobbled by the brace, I couldn’t move fast enough. She hauled off and whacked me on the back—knocking me off the stone bench. I fell face-first to the ground, my top front teeth digging into the dirt.
Alice screamed and was suddenly at my side. Though I couldn’t seem to catch my breath, I looked up to see her eyes were wide with horror—but she wasn’t looking at me. “You are despicable,” she screamed at Maria. “Hitting an injured man like that. You’re worse than my papa ever could have been.”
“You obviously didn’t know your papa,” Maria sneered.
Alice stood ramrod straight. “Something should be done about you. Something should be done about all people like you!”
“And what can you do? You’re nothing in death—just like you were a nothing in life.”
I spit out dirt as Alice’s eyes widened until they seemed to grow to an obscene size.
From out of nowhere came a strong wind that rustled the leaves on the trees. The sky above us darkened as the sun was totally obliterated by angry gray clouds that seemed to boil.
“What the hell?” Maria yelled over the rising gale, but the fury of the unexpected storm muffled her words.
Movement to my right startled me. Sweet, petite Alice’s usually pretty features had morphed into a malevolent caricature of the young woman I’d known in death. But worse, she seemed to be expanding, growing larger and larger into an opaque, amorphous blob with blazing red eyes that advanced toward Maria, exuding a malevolence I hadn’t thought her capable of.
Maria stumbled backward in panic. “The dead can’t do anything to the living,” she asserted as though trying to convince herself.
The thing that had once been Alice said nothing, still advancing on her quarry with murderous fury. The force of her rage washed over me, the howling wind that circled around me was horrific—like a hundred wailing sirens, accompanied by thunder and flashes of blue-white lightning. Tree limbs snapped like matchsticks. I tried to raise myself on my elbows, but the buffeting wind kept me pinned.
Maria fired her gun, spraying the entity with what would have stopped flesh and blood, but the projectiles sailed right through what was left of Alice Newcomb.
Maria shrieked again as the unearthly entity swooped over her, as though consuming her.
The screams abruptly stopped.
Panicked, I needed to get the hell out of there. Drenching sheets of rain pummeled me as I groped around until I could grab my crutches and began to crawl toward the van, dragging my useless leg along, afraid to look behind me.
I’m not sure how I managed to get back inside the van, entering via the passenger side door. The driver’s side was drenched where I’d left the window open. Still, I pulled my muddied self into the sopping wet seat, started the car and hit the window control, which sealed off the rain, but the wind continued to yowl. Was that what a tornado sounded like? The descriptor ‘like a freight train’ was right on the money.
I dug into my soggy sweatpants pocket and pulled out my phone. No signal. I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I just leave Maria where she lay? I still couldn’t bear to look to my left and, absurdly, turned the windshield wipers on high, which manically thumped against the glass.
I wiped the wet from around my eyes and realized my hand was shaking. The cast on my foot was saturated. I’d have to get it replaced, but when was that likely to happen?
Working up my courage, I looked through the driver’s side window, but the glass was so beaded with rain I couldn’t make out anything but vague shapes outside in the gloom.
I must have sat there for two or three minutes, finally noticing that the shaking traveled from my hand and reverberated through my entire body. The windows had fogged, and I switched from AC to heat. It took less than a minute for the front window to clear, and as it did, the rain abated. Up ahead, I could see the sky had begun to clear, leaving a patch of blue sky among the scattering clouds. I turned off the windshield wipers and looked out the driver’s window.
I couldn’t see Maria. Where she should have been was a heap of leaves from a very thick limb that had been wrenched from the maple overhead.
There was no sign at all of Alice Newcomb.
26
It’s amazing how many things you take for granted when you have a broken leg. Like standing under a shower for ten minutes and letting the warm water sloosh off you; jumping in the car to get a six pack of beer; walking across the damned room without the aid of crutches.
Getting rid of that accursed knee brace meant freedom of
a sort, but the cast was replaced by a walking boot, which made me feel like I wore one of Frankenstein’s discarded shoes. If I had to walk any great distance, I’d use a cane, but that wouldn’t last too long. (I hoped.) Technically I still wasn’t supposed to drive, but I found I could ditch the boot and wear a loose sneaker and make short trips—but not when my stick-to-the-rules-of-healing brother was anywhere near.
Best of all, my cat and I got to go home.
The day I got my boot, Richard drove me back from the orthopedist’s before helping me to pack up and move back across the driveway to my own digs. I waited until just after midnight to head to the bakery to visit Sophie. She wasn’t there, which wasn’t totally unexpected, but I was disappointed. After all, Richard and I had not yet gone into business—and since Sophie and I had last spoken, I hadn’t used my so-called gift to do more than avoid phone calls from telemarketers. I still clung to the hope that her threat to abandon me had been just that—a threat. Only time would tell.
I wish I could say that I had a peaceful rest of the summer, but that wouldn’t be true thanks to my physical therapy regimen, but my goal was to eventually walk without a limp and I decided to do whatever it took to accomplish it.
And then there was Richard.
He’d been livid with me taking off in Brenda’s day’s-old minivan, risking life and limb to drive it, as well as possible assassination, and worst of all—for buying a gun. He refused to let it come into his house and insisted I buy a gun safe for it. Of course, he ended up paying for the safe—as well as the gun, because I never did get back the money that been hacked from my bank accounts. My tab at Casa Alpert kept rising and rising.
Two good things did come from my enforced residence in the big house. CP came to love Herschel—who let her pull his tail, and smother him with wet kisses—and Richard learned to tolerate him. Upon his return from the hotel, my cat was given free rein to roam the Alpert pseudo-mansion, although usually he stuck pretty close to me. It was rather a shock one afternoon when we sat together in the living room to realize that Herschel sat on Richard’s lap while my scared-of-cats brother absently petted him. It happened more than once—whether Richard wants to admit it or not.
Ironically enough, it turned out Maria hadn’t poisoned Richard. He had the food in our hotel room fridge tested, and his leftover mashed potatoes had simply gone bad, Of course, that was after Brenda and CP had arrived back home. As Richard had predicted, Brenda had taken the very next flight and returned to Buffalo, arriving at home via a cab no more than ten minutes after we’d made it back to the house. By then, hours had passed since Maria’s untimely death. No surprise, the autopsy determined she’d been crushed to death. But I’ll never forget Alice’s terrible fury and I wondered if she’d literally scared that evil woman to death before the limb had a chance to take her out. Meteorologists were stumped as to how a localized microburst had hit the cemetery with virtually no warning, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to offer an explanation. Since my gun obviously hadn’t been fired, and Maria’s fingerprints on it substantiated my story, the police returned it to me within days.
Maggie bought a bungalow in Tonawanda, not far from her sister, Sandy. The whole deal took less than two months. I didn’t see much of her during the entire packing process, and can’t say I’m sorry I missed it. But it was the second lonely summer we’d been forced apart. It almost felt like we were back at square one again.
Richard continued to ferry me around the city to my doctor’s appointments. He also took me to visit Dave’s grave, but like at the funeral home, there was no trace of my biking buddy. He was lost to me forever and I felt like a heel for blowing him off so many times before his death. If only I’d listened…. But the truth was, even if I had spoken to him that last time he’d called, I may not have been able to stop someone as determined as Maria Spodina from getting her way.
The fire at The Whole Nine Yards was officially declared arson, but that wasn’t the worst of Tom’s troubles. Before she’d had the building set ablaze, Maria had canceled Tom’s insurance on the place. With no capital to start over, the property had been put up for sale and immediately snapped up by a developer who hoped to obtain the rest of the block when Maria’s estate was finally settled—which could take years. A heartbroken Tom left the state, leaving no forwarding address.
That one person could wreak such havoc still astounded me. So far, the cops hadn’t been able to get enough evidence to arrest Maria’s brothers for the crimes they’d committed on their sister’s behalf, but Detective Wilder promised she and her brother officers in other jurisdictions wouldn’t give up.
As I mentioned, Richard hadn’t pushed me to make a decision on us going into business, but now that I was out of the cast and brace, I expected the subject to come up yet again. I was pretty sure what the answer would be: an extremely reluctant yes.
The gardens along the fences in Richard’s yard hadn’t suffered due to my enforced inactivity, thanks to the landscaping firm he’d hired to take care of them, but I felt like I’d missed out on the entire summer.
The sun was beginning to set on that early September evening when Richard sauntered into the backyard in his beige Dockers, looking like a golf pro in his green Izod shirt—or maybe like a country club waiter, since he held a sweating beer bottle in each hand. He climbed the steps to join me on the deck behind his house.
“What’s up?” he asked, handing me one of the bottles.
I shook my head and leaned back in the wooden Adirondack chair that was comfortable to sit in, but hell for someone with a bum leg to get out of. “Absolutely nothing.”
He sat down on one of the chairs and took a sip of his beer.
“You’ve got something on your mind,” I guessed.
“And no doubt you know exactly what it is.”
I took a sip of my beer, admiring a patch of pink, dark pink, and white cosmos that swayed in the light breeze along the east fence. I’d introduced them to the garden just days before my accident—attack. The thirty-six plants had taken nicely, and I decided I’d plant three or four times that next year.
“You want to end the boredom. You want to go back to work. You want to feel useful again.”
“Is that so bad?” he asked.
I turned to face him. “No, because I feel the same way. I won’t guarantee you that I’ll do this for the rest of my life, but I’m willing to give it my honest best.”
“And what about the money?” he asked, sounding wary.
I let out a breath and then took another sip of my beer. “Sophie’s right. There’s no way I can ever charge someone I help using this so-called gift of mine. Somehow it wouldn’t be right.”
“What are you trying to say?”
It was hard—damned hard—to articulate what needed to be said. “This isn’t how I pictured my life going.” My throat tightened, and yet I wasn’t going to succumb to an embarrassing display of emotion. No way.
“What do you mean?”
“I worked hard most of my life to be independent of you, and now I’m stuck.”
Richard said nothing.
“My father told me that your family owed me. But now I feel like it’s more that you own me.”
“Jeff!” Richard protested.
“Listen to me. He was right to some degree, but I don’t hold it against you. You never….” But I couldn’t go on, because for most of the time I lived in that house back when I was a teen, Richard was too preoccupied with his job to care about me. It was benign—not calculated—neglect.
But he couldn’t let it go. “Then we need to clarify the money thing.”
I shook my head.
“Yes, we have to. What do you need to live on?”
I let out a weary breath. “I don’t have a figure. I’ll only take what I need to get by.”
Richard nodded. “I’ll set up a checking account and a credit card.”
“Whatever,” I muttered.
“But there’s other business we
need to discuss.”
I looked at him and took another swig of my beer. “Such as?”
“Office space. I don’t want potential clients coming to the house. It just doesn’t feel right.”
“I agree, but aren’t you jumping the gun?”
“I’ve scoped out a few sites in Snyder and Williamsville. Nothing fancy. Just a couple of rooms, a small reception area, a conference room, and a john. Maybe we could go look at them tomorrow.”
“Sure.” I wasn’t exactly overflowing with excitement.
Richard reached for his wallet and extricated a business card, handing it to me. It said:
R & A Insights
Jeffery Resnick
716-555-1234
“It’s just a dummy. We’ll add the address and a real phone number as soon as we get established.”
He must have printed it up on his computer on special linen stock, but it looked nice—professional. “I like it.”
Richard smiled, but then his expression grew pensive. “I heard from Bonnie Wilder. She has an unsolved case that’s stumped the Amherst cops for years. She wondered if we’d like to take a look at the files.”
“What’s it involve?”
“A missing child.”
Our first consultation had involved a missing boy. I’d found him—dead. It had been a sobering experience, but it had helped the child’s mother find closure and move on.
Sophie once told me that what I really wanted to do in life was help people. She had me pegged. Helping people resolve old conflicts with good old detective work would be satisfying work—more satisfying than pouring drinks. Richard offered me a way to do it with—almost—no strings attached. He’d never pulled a guilt trip on me. Well, not really. Would I be stupid to let an opportunity like this slip away?
Hell, yes!
“Okay. Tell me all about it.”
About the Author
The immensely popular Booktown Mystery series is what put Lorraine Bartlett’s pen name Lorna Barrett on the New York Times Bestseller list, but it’s her talent -- whether writing as Lorna, or L.L. Bartlett, or Lorraine Bartlett -- that keeps her there. This multi-published, Agatha-nominated author pens the exciting Jeff Resnick Mysteries as well as the acclaimed Victoria Square Mystery series, Tales of Telenia adventure-fantasy saga, and now the Lotus Bay Mysteries, and has many short stories and novellas to her name(s). Check out the descriptions and links to all her works, and sign up for her emailed newsletter here: http://www.LLBartlett.com
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