Bones Behind the Wheel

by E. J. Copperman

  We were going to pretend I’d spoken to Paul as a gag to get under her skin. Okay. I could play that game. “Sorry, lieutenant. I’ll stop.”

  “You shouldn’t worry the lieutenant that way,” Paul said. “I want to be a help, not a source of anxiety.”

  I exercised great restraint and showed what a good friend I was by not responding to him. I looked instead at McElone. “Even if you don’t think the threat is credible, I do. Can you give me any advice on security measures I can take without alarming my guests?” I give each guest a key to the front door but I almost never lock it because they tend not to remember them when they go out. That leads to text messages at one in the morning when a good innkeeper should be asleep. And so should I.

  “I’m not discounting the threat entirely,” McElone said.

  “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

  “I understand. I don’t think you’re in real danger because there isn’t anything you could have done and if there is damning evidence on the gun we’ll find it and arrest the person who’s threatening you.” She looked around the room in the direction of the ceiling. It didn’t help her see anything but maybe she felt better. “But in the meantime, I will ask a cruiser to drive by more often than usual and I’d advise you to call me—directly—if anything happens that you think is dangerous. You have my cell number.”

  “Do I need to go pick up my daughter when school lets out?” I asked.

  McElone considered. “It can’t hurt.”

  That sent a shiver up my spine. “Okay.” My voice sounded shallow.

  “I’ll check the outside of the house,” Paul said. He was out through the wall before I could even acknowledge that he’d spoken, which I wouldn’t have done anyway.

  “In the meantime I’m going to get forensics on your kitchen and the gun so maybe we can wrap this whole thing up quickly and you won’t have to worry.” The lieutenant actually has a very compassionate nature but she doesn’t want you to know that. So if you run into her don’t mention that I said it.

  McElone left just as Paul came in to say nothing around the house, front or back, was out of the ordinary. He said he’d get Maxie working on some of the questions that were lingering, including possible places a person might have been able to rent or borrow heavy machinery in the early Eighties. He suggested I check in with Phyllis on anything the medical examiner might have turned up regarding the bones in the car or the blood on the seats.

  Before he could rise into the ceiling in search of Maxie, I asked Paul if he’d managed to turn up Anthony Blanik, the cop who had investigated Herman Fitzsimmons’s disappearance when it was first reported. “I’ve gotten some communication and I think it is from Sgt. Blanik,” he said. “It was difficult to decipher.”

  “It would be so much easier if you guys would set up your own email system,” I suggested.

  “I don’t think the technology exists just yet,” Paul said drily. “In the meantime, the mode of communication I use consists mostly of feelings and impressions rather than words, as you’ll recall. What I heard from Sgt. Blanik was that he’d mostly suspected Mr. Fitzsimmons’s wife was withholding some information but he never found out what it might be. The sergeant died five years ago and appears to be somewhere in Thailand at the moment.”

  “Does distance matter on the Ghosternet?” I asked.

  “No, but he is distracted by what he’s seeing and that leads to a less direct message, and therefore a less clear one. If I can determine the proper time of day to try again I might get more useful data.”

  “Okay. Go get Maxie. I have an hour or so before I have to pick up Melissa but I’ll text her and let her know I’m coming and I’ll tell Josh what’s going on.” Paul vanished—I wasn’t looking straight at him so I’m not sure how—and I sent a text to my daughter, who wouldn’t see it until she was out of classes. Then I called my husband and filled him in on the latest news in the guesthouse.

  “Do you want me to come home?” Josh asked. He sounded, as I would have expected, concerned.

  I was about to tell him that wasn’t necessary but I happened to look out through the library window. And I saw Sgt. Menendez, who was supposed to be banished from this case, walking purposefully toward my house from the beach side. Her hand wasn’t on her weapon, which was something of a relief, but I stopped and stared as she walked.

  “Alison?” Josh asked, sounding more than concerned now.

  That jarred me back to consciousness. “I’m okay,” I said. “I was just looking out the window.

  “Now I am worried. It’s a slow day. I can come home.”

  “No, I don’t want you doing damage to your business. If there’s any reason to be concerned I’ll call you, I promise.” Menendez had a brief conversation with Bill Harrelson, who was near one of the Caterpillars, and seemed to be listening very intensely.

  That reminded me I needed to talk to Katrina. Or maybe …

  It was perfect timing that brought Paul and Maxie down from Melissa’s room or the roof (all I knew for sure was it was a level higher than the one I was on, which seemed symbolic). “Where is Everett?” I figured it was best to head off any discussion they might want to start while I was making plans of my own.

  Maxie stopped in midair. No, really. “Why?” she asked.

  “I want him to follow one of my guests.”

  * * *

  Paul and Maxie have a complicated relationship. They didn’t know each other well when they were murdered together and died in what is now my house. I wouldn’t really call them friends but they are like siblings who live under the same roof and have learned to put up with each other’s foibles. They exchanged a look of puzzlement. “I’ll get him,” Maxie said. She reversed her direction and headed back upstairs to find her husband. Or whatever he was.

  Paul stayed in the library with me. “Do me a favor,” I said. “Go outside and see if Sgt. Menendez is still there.” She had moved to a position I couldn’t see from this window. Paul, without commenting, looked serious and pushed himself through the wall.

  I wasn’t alone in the room for a full minute when he returned. “The sergeant is no longer on this property,” he said. “What was she doing here when she was removed from the case?”

  “My question exactly,” I said. “She was talking to Bill Harrelson.”

  The mention of Bill’s name seemed to spark Paul. He made a motion like snapping his fingers but produced no sound. There are disadvantages to not actually having a body. “We have made some progress in our research,” he said. “Mostly it was Maxie, but she is so consumed with redecorating the kitchen that I’ve had to stand over her shoulder most of the time.”

  “Cut to the chase, Paul,” I said. “What did Maxie find out?” I like to give credit where credit is due. I should have waited until Maxie was in the room because she loves getting praised for doing the computer research, but I figured she could hear it from Paul later. My relationship with Maxie isn’t any less complex than hers with Paul.

  He did not have to refer to notes. Paul has an uncanny ability to remember everything that has to do with a case he’s investigating, and nothing about anything else. “First of all, the records regarding heavy equipment rentals in the early nineteen eighties are understandably thin. Even if we knew where the earth mover or other excavation equipment had been rented it would probably be impossible to determine exactly who had done so or what they had taken.”

  “Okay, so that’s a dead end. What else?” Who had time for hearing what they didn’t find out?

  “Wait. We do have a lead in that area. There was a company that owned and rented just the sort of backhoe that might be used to inter a large sedan, and it was owned by William Harrelson, Sr.”

  William Harrelson … “Bill’s father?”

  “Precisely. He might have had some involvement in the burial, if not in the disappearance and murder of Herman Fitzsimmons. In fact, there had been talk in town, according to articles in the Chronicle, that there wer
e allegations Mr. Harrelson had helped Herman Fitzsimmons disappear so Mr. Fitzsimmons could avoid divorce proceedings. Apparently word about his affair had gotten around after he vanished. No one believed he didn’t know where Mr. Fitzsimmons was and that haunted him. Eventually he died of cirrhosis brought on by alcohol abuse.”

  “The Chronicle? Phyllis doesn’t print gossip.”

  “She had not bought the newspaper yet,” Paul reminded me.

  It was weird that Bill hadn’t said anything, but then, how weird? If his dad hadn’t come home one evening and said, “You won’t believe what happened at work today,” and then told a story about shooting a car dealer and burying him in the competition’s product, he might not have ever thought to mention it.

  Maxie and Everett descended through the ceiling, which fit perfectly with the conversation Paul and I had been having, although none of them knew it. “Everett,” I said.

  “Ghost lady?” In the last years of Everett’s life when he’d been plagued with mental illness and homelessness he’d known me by that phrase and I had agreed to let him keep calling me that if it made him feel comfortable. It doesn’t bother me.

  “Do you know Katrina Breslin?” I asked him. “She’s one of the guests here this week.”

  “I am familiar with the guests,” Everett said, floating almost at attention. Everett, in his military mode, does not take any relaxation of discipline for granted. “I know who Ms. Breslin is.”

  “Good. I would appreciate it if you follow along with her when she goes out on a date tonight.”

  Everett did not break his stance but he did look at me funny. “You want me to follow a woman on a date? Do you think she is in some kind of danger? There isn’t much I can do.”

  I explained the Everett and Maxie about Bill’s claim that he’d never asked Katrina out despite her being quite clear that she’d gone to dinner with him both of the past two nights and that she thought the relationship had a future even after she went home. “I need to know which of the two of them is lying or mistaken,” I told Everett. “If you can follow Katrina when she leaves tonight and confirm where she’s going and whether or not Bill is there, that will be enough.”

  “No it won’t,” Paul interjected. “Everett, if they are together, see if you can hear what they’re discussing. That information could be pertinent to our case.”

  Everett stood tall, if you can call floating without a body in the middle of the room standing. “If two people are on a date, I will not get close enough to hear their conversation,” he told Paul. “That is an invasion of their privacy and something I would not be comfortable doing.”

  “Good for you, Everett,” I said.

  Paul looked back and forth between Everett and me, made a frustrated motion with his hands and bit on his bottom lip to keep from speaking. Everett had the moral high ground and Paul would just have to deal with it.

  “I will be happy to observe from a distance and confirm whether Ms. Breslin meets Mr. Harrelson, ghost lady. I’ll remain to do recon until the mission is complete.” Everett’s face was without emotion but Maxie just couldn’t help but bust out in a grin. She really loves it when Everett gets all military.

  “Thanks. Do you want to take Paul’s cell phone to text information?”

  Paul, forgetting that I was the one who paid the cellular bill each month, looked like he was about to object, but Everett shook his head. “I will return as soon as I confirm the information I’m going to gather,” he said. With a house full of ghosts like Everett I could rule the world. Probably better than I don’t have a house full of ghosts like Everett.

  It was agreed Everett would stake out Katrina’s room from the outside and stick with her when she left for what she’d said would be another dinner date with Bill. But Paul clearly wanted to talk about something else he and Maxie had uncovered. So Everett was dispatched to the roof to see when Katrina would return from her afternoon of shopping in town and I looked over at my two other resident ghosts (Lester, who stayed in Melissa’s room almost all the time because I was allergic, counted, but was much less often a member of the conversation).

  “Okay, what else have you two dug up that I don’t know about?” I probably should have asked that question of Maxie alone to make up for the time when I said something nice about her but she wasn’t there. Opportunity missed.

  “There was another matter,” Paul began, but Maxie, intent on the spotlight, floated in front of him.

  “Harriet Adamson’s husband died of suicide,” she said. “And he sold Lincoln Continentals.”

  Chapter 29

  “This seems awfully late in the game to be bringing in more suspects,” Josh said.

  We were sitting in our kitchen, or what was left of it. The stove and center island were where they should be, as were the cabinets, which had never been moved. But the fridge stayed out on the deck beyond the French doors and the much-examined hole in the floor where it should have been just added insult to injury. We could eat dinner here but Melissa had once again been frustrated in her plans to cook it. We were having Chinese food.

  “To be fair, we have no idea how late in the game we are,” Melissa told Josh. “We might just be starting to gather information that leads to suspects.”

  Paul, who had been descending into the basement, stopped and smiled. “That is very astute, Melissa,” his top half said. “You are becoming a very good investigator.”

  Liss smiled and looked shy, which is not how she usually looks. “Thank you, Paul.”

  He kept dropping down until he was out of sight—he had determined this would be a good time to contact Anthony Blanik—and Liss turned her attention back to her stepfather, who acknowledged that Paul had said something nice to her with a sideways grin. “I hate to think there are going to be a lot more people we have to consider,” he said. “I have a suspects file on my computer that is absolutely bursting as it is.”

  “Still, we have to consider Harriet Adamson’s husband Nathaniel,” Melissa said. “The fact that Herman Fitzsimmons was buried in a Lincoln certainly seems to point to him, but that could mean someone wants us to think that way.”

  Finally I had something I could add. “Maxie said Nathaniel Adamson killed himself only eight months after Herman Fitzsimmons disappeared, before he was declared dead.”

  “There are so many loose ends on this case you could knit a sweater,” Josh said, shaking his head. I gave him a knowing look. “Okay, not you, but somebody could.” I don’t knit.

  “The question is, what do we do about it?” I said. Josh didn’t care that I don’t knit, and neither did anyone else I could think of. Maybe my mother but she thinks everything I do is amazing so I’d never know if the whole knitting thing is a source of disappointment for her, and … what was I talking about?

  “It’s probably time to get back in touch with Phyllis.” In Paul’s absence (he was also trying to get in touch with Nat Adamson, so he might be gone a while), Melissa was acting as lead investigator. I wasn’t sure how that had come about, but it actually seemed to make the most sense. “There might be some work on the ME’s report. The idea that the person who shot Mr. Fitzsimmons was sitting on the floor. How does that work?”

  “Good point,” Josh said. “Sgt. Blanik might be able to help with that. We probably should also see if Maxie can dig into the police department’s files so we can check on the investigation into the bullets Tony and Vic found in the beam, and whether they matched the gun they found in the floor.”

  “I’d really like to know why whoever did this is taking it out on our kitchen,” I whined. “I remember when you used to be able to make food here.”

  One mention of the kitchen and you could count on Maxie appearing with her sketchpad. She was not going to be happy with Josh’s suggestion she do more computer searching when she wanted to make things in this room look … more like whatever was going on in that warped mind of hers.

  But this time Everett was with her. “I can see Ms. Breslin is abo
ut to leave,” he told me. “I am preparing to leave on the recon mission.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Thank you, Everett.” He saluted snappily and left through the kitchen wall toward the front room. Sure enough I heard Katrina’s footsteps on the stairs heading in the same direction. Everett was as dependable as an atomic clock.

  “When you’re done eating, I have some designs based on what we talked about,” Maxie said. The fact that she was waiting until the three of us finished our Chinese feast was an indicator of how hard Maxie was trying to curry my favor here. Normally she’d burst in, swipe all the food off the island and lay down her sketchpad to show me the latest in Maxie design.

  “That sounds good.” Best to stay on Maxie’s good side. “But while you’re waiting …”

  Her face closed. “What?” As flat an inflection as you can imagine.

  I nodded to Josh, who thought the idea of communicating directly with Maxie would be fun. Because he’d never done it. “We were wondering if you might be able to find out whether the police have looked at the bullets they found in the ceiling here. To see if they match the gun Alison found under the floor. Could you please do that? You can use my laptop. It’s right there.” He looked mostly at his plate while he was talking to avoid making eye contact with a Maxie who was nowhere near the real one, but pointed to the computer not far from where he was seated.

  Maxie, who was looking directly at Josh because he was visible to everybody, took a moment. “Okay,” she said, and floated directly to Josh’s laptop, which she opened, causing my husband to start momentarily and then smile. She began pounding away on the keyboard while we ate and I wondered how Josh had been able to get such a reaction without the least amount of complaining. I’d never managed it, and a few times I was even nice to Maxie when I asked.

  Melissa was hiding a smile behind Kung Pau chicken.

  I chose to ignore that and took out my phone to send a text to Phyllis with the eloquent message: Anything from the ME? Pithy without being sassy, I thought.