Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  “Get out of my house,” Mom repeated. “And don’t ever come back.”

  “Mom,” I began. If Lawrence left and couldn’t be contacted, I would never be able to find out what else he knew about his case that he’d been concealing. Lawrence was the only one who could answer the questions that might come up after tonight’s performance of the New Old Thespians. The whole case was gone if he was gone. “You can’t just—”

  Mom shook her head slowly. And she pointed behind me. I turned back to face into the living room.

  Lawrence Laurentz had left the building.

  It wasn’t until I was halfway to Asbury Park that I realized I wasn’t sure whether I still had a client or a case to investigate. Somehow it felt odd to consider not finding out what had actually happened to Lawrence; on the other hand, if I were to find out and still never see him again to tell him, what would I have accomplished?

  Mom had been immediately apologetic about the way she’d reacted to Lawrence’s confession and had even tried (through gritted teeth, but still) to summon the ghost and forgive him, but he had not responded, and we were left with no client, no source of information on his death, and no forwarding address.

  It was only nine in the morning, and already I had lost ground to yesterday.

  Route 33 was not cooperating this morning, which was typical, and I was stuck in traffic, frustrated, and cranky. This was not the proper attitude for a woman about to drop in unexpectedly on a guy she’d had a first date with only the night before.

  I decided to call Jerry Rasmussen, whose number was luckily programmed into my cell phone since he had once called me to apologize. He answered on the first ring, and I asked him if I needed to buy tickets in advance for tonight’s performance of Peter Pan.

  He sounded just a little startled. “You want to come to Brookside Manor to see Peter Pan?” he asked. “You sure?”

  “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?” I said. “Does the play need more rehearsal or something?” I’ll admit it; I threw that in because I knew it would annoy him. I wanted to get a reaction out of him.

  “Of course not,” he huffed. “We are professionals.” They weren’t, really, but there was no use quibbling—I didn’t want to alienate him entirely. “The show will go off exactly as planned. My concern is the venue.” He said that last word with a real sense of heady condescension in the pronunciation.

  “The venue?” I realized it was a straight line, but it was the only way to get to the next piece of information. I’d been sitting with my foot on the brake here for five minutes. There was no sense that any of us would ever move again, so I needed at least the illusion of progress.

  “Yes,” Jerry answered, having been properly primed. “It is an assisted-living facility. Many of the residents will be in some way incapacitated, so it will not be exactly the best showcase for our troupe. The stage is simply a raised platform. I’m not sure it will be large enough for all the scenery.”

  Like I cared whether it was the best showcase. “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said. “But again, do I need to buy tickets in advance?”

  “There are no tickets,” Jerry admitted. “But if you like, I will leave your name at the front gate. Brookside is fastidious about security. How many will be in your party?”

  I decided to go with the best case scenario. “Eight,” I said.

  Jerry sounded astonished. “Eight?”

  I counted again: me, Mom, Melissa (how could I leave her behind, even on a school night?), Jeannie and Tony, Nan and Morgan and Josh. “Yup, eight,” I confirmed. “Unless babies count. Then nine.”

  “Excellent!” he shouted. “We will look forward to seeing you there!” He hung up before I could return his enthusiasm, which was just as well since I was feeling particularly unenthusiastic as it became obvious that the three lanes on the highway were being condensed into one, and some of my fellow drivers were doing their very best to ignore the alternate feed rules that most Jersey drivers are usually pretty good with, at least in comparison to those assassins from New York and Pennsylvania.

  I checked in with Mom again, ostensibly to confirm the time for the play but really to find out if Lawrence had reappeared; he had not. Mom said she’d considered baking cookies to lure him, then realized that would not do much good. Ghosts don’t eat. Which takes a lot of the allure out of the afterlife for me.

  Mom and I ended the conversation, and I mused on my latest theory, that Dr. Wells and/ or the grumpy ghost had left the first two messages in my house. This was based strictly on the timing of his death and of Dad’s vanishing (and the complete lack of other ghostly suspects), but it was all I had to go on. Assuming he had been the intruder, how could the doctor have gotten my address?

  There were enough crazy threads to this case that I could have knitted a sweater out of it. If I knew how to knit. If Dad wasn’t being held captive and was free to move about, why wouldn’t he come to Mom at least? Did he know all that was going on?

  Once the merging was done, traffic started to move fairly well again, and I was in Asbury Park in about a half hour. I parked across the street from Madison Paint, took a deep breath, wrapped my scarf back around my mouth and got out of the car.

  The plan was this: First of all, I hoped to see Sy Kaplan. But Morgan’s pep talk about finding the source of the messages in my house had hit home in ways he hadn’t expected—I knew the perpetrator of the first two little shockers was a ghost, and the grumpy ghost had known my name. Could he have known my address, too?

  If I could go in without showing the old lemon sucker I was afraid of him, maybe I could get up the same kind of attitude I’d used this morning against Lawrence. While that situation hadn’t worked out in exactly the way I would have liked, it had gotten Lawrence to fess up about what he’d done, and he’d seemed on the verge of telling me some truths before Mom had rashly banished him. This time, I’d have to seize any moment I had when Sy and Josh were dealing with customers. I hoped business would be brisk.

  So screwing up my courage was a definite need here, since I wanted to work that same kind of magic on the grumpy ghost. The only problem was—he creeped me out.

  Before entering a scenario like this, I usually get myself amped up by thinking about The Swine. Preferably with his “significant other” of the moment, although right at this second I was unable to remember which one might be most significant. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been planning to move in with a woman from the San Diego area; I’d heard now that the arrangement “hadn’t worked out” and he was living with an aspiring actress who worked at Starbucks. That sort of thing usually gets me irritated to a point that I can confront my quarry with exactly the right amount of attitude.

  I made a grumbling sound in the back of my throat to remind myself I was fierce and got out of the car. The frigid wind hit me smack in the face, and effectively blew the sum total of my fierceness away. Still, I was determined, so I crossed the street and headed for Madison Paint.

  But as I crossed, I couldn’t help but notice that a blue Hyundai had parked directly behind my car despite there being plenty of empty spaces on both sides of the street. I also noticed that the driver bore a certain resemblance to Tyra Carter. But the driver was wearing sunglasses despite this overcast day, and a hat that obscured part of her face, so it was difficult to tell.

  It was so cold, however, that my brain simply said, I can’t wait to be inside! It’s a question of priorities. I’d worry about being followed by a six-foot former man later. Plus, once I was inside the store, the relief of the heating system—so much more efficient than the one in my Volvo—removed all anxiety. Which was bad, because anxiety was what would motivate me if I ran into the grumpy ghost. On the other hand, here came Josh, and…emotionally, this was getting complicated.

  “Alison! I wasn’t expecting to see you until tonight!” Josh didn’t look disappointed and gave me a quick hug.

  “I know,” I said when we unclenched, “but I wanted to see if your grand
father was around. It’s been forever since I’ve seen him.”

  “Yeah, I told him I saw you, and he was really disappointed to have missed you. Come on, he’s in the back.” Josh led me to the back of the store, less an “office” than an area with a desk and a couple of chairs. I thought I glimpsed a ghostly leg disappear into the ceiling as we approached, but there were no other spirits visible. The modern laptop computer sitting on the desk was a jarring reminder that it was no longer the 1990s, but the man sitting behind the desk was not.

  Sy Kaplan, at ninety-one, looked like the Sy I remembered, only smaller. It was like he’d spent too much time in a clothes dryer—he was the same man, but if you tried him on again, he wouldn’t fit. His eyes lit up when I approached, which for a guy that old, was something of a pleasant surprise. I didn’t expect him to be able to see me from ten feet away.

  “Ally” he shouted. “How are you, sweetie?”

  I walked over as Sy stood up, which took longer than it used to and didn’t get him as far, a strange incongruity, and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek while Josh beamed in the corner. “I’m good, Mr. Kaplan,” I said. “You look terrific.”

  He waved a hand and in doing so, called me a liar. “I look like I should have died ten years ago,” he said. “And call me ‘Sy.’ You’re not nine years old anymore.”

  He might have been smaller, but he hadn’t changed. “I wasn’t kidding. You look good, Sy.”

  Sy made a “yeah, sure” face but let it go. “I heard you went for dinner with Josh last night,” he sort of half sang. “Something going on?” You have to love old people; they figure the regular rules of polite conversation don’t apply to them, and they’re right.

  “Give us a few more days to decide, would you?” Josh laughed from the corner.

  “Well, hurry up. There’s no telling how much time I have left.”

  “You’ll outlive all of us,” his grandson told him.

  “I hope not.”

  The banter was everything I remembered from my days here with Dad, and once again, it was strange not having him present when it was going on; it was like he’d gone next door to the deli to get me an orange juice or a bagel, and he’d be back in just a minute.

  But I hadn’t forgotten why I was there, and instead of my father, I had indeed found the grumpy ghost, who rose from the basement looking just as displeased and threatening as he had when I’d been here on Saturday. I swallowed my dread and tried to think of The Swine. It was working but not as well as usual.

  Sy excused himself to use the adjacent restroom at just about the same time a customer entered the store through the front door and Josh headed off to assist her.

  And that left me in the room with this disapproving, vaguely dangerous presence, as I’d planned. I spent a moment concentrating on my ex-husband in Malibu, no doubt sitting by a pool instead of freezing his butt off in an ancient Volvo, and then I looked up at the grumpy ghost and didn’t give him time to stare me down. I spoke quietly but firmly in his direction.

  “All right, you’ve gotten my attention. Now drop the silent act and tell me what this is all about.”

  If anything, the grumpy ghost stared at me more intently. But I stared back, put my hands on my hips and waited.

  Nothing. Okay. I could wait him out (well, until Sy and Josh came back, but why think about that now?). It took a while, but I finally got the grumpy ghost in my gaze and held him there, and eventually he cracked.

  “Your father did not die as you think he did,” he intoned, probably wishing his voice were echoey and spooky, like ghosts in the movies. So it was him!

  “Yeah, I got your messages. How did you find me?”

  His grumpy expression changed to one of condescending pity. “They do have a phone book here,” he said.

  Okay, so I was an idiot, but one with a mission, and somehow his comment made him less scary. “I’m here to tell you, I don’t appreciate your sneaking into my house and playing your little games,” I said. “If you have something to tell me, let’s hear it. But you don’t come back into my bedroom without an invitation. Is that clear?” I wasn’t as confident as I hoped I sounded, and I did indeed check that neither Sy nor Josh was anywhere near when I made that comment about being invited into my bedroom.

  “You needed to be told,” he said in the old monotone. The guy was out of a Vincent Price movie.

  “Yeah, but so far you haven’t actually told me anything. What do you mean, my father didn’t die the way I thought? How did he die?”

  “Badly,” the old gasbag let out.

  There was a familiar sound from the direction of the bathroom, then water running, indicating that Sy would be back in the room in a few moments.

  “I don’t have time for this, pal. Tell me straight up: Did you kill my father?”

  Sy opened the bathroom door, smoothing his hair with his left hand. Frankly, at ninety-one, it was amazing the man had hair to smooth, even if he had the receipt for it in a drawer at home. “Ally,” he breathed. “It’s been such a long time. There are days I still expect your father to come walking in, and then I remember.”

  “I know what you mean, Sy,” I said, and looked up for Grumpy.

  He was gone.

  I reminisced for about an hour with Sy and Josh, hoping the old ghost might come back, but to no avail. Today was turning out to be my day to make ghosts disappear. A trick that might come in handy with Maxie; I’d have to remember it.

  Sy had some great stories about Dad; I actually turned on my recorder to preserve them. One, which involved a particularly difficult wallpaper customer who insisted on hanging the paper horizontally, was especially precious, very Dad, and something I’d have to tell Mom about when I got the chance.

  When it got to be about lunchtime, I mentioned something about having guests in my house, invited Josh to drop by for dinner around six (Sy, twinkling, said he’d make sure Josh was out of the store “in plenty of time to spiff up”), then wrapped myself back up in my costume from Dr. Zhivago and headed across the street to the Volvo.

  The royal blue Hyundai was still there, but there was no driver sitting in it. So I climbed into my Swedish Model T and turned the key as fast as I could, hoping the heater might have remembered that “heat” was part of its name while I was in the store.

  Luckily, I had not yet put the car into gear when I heard the voice in the seat behind me.

  “So, what are you doing about my employment situation?” Tyra Carter demanded.

  I spun, shouting, and felt my heart leap up into my throat. It’s not pleasant.

  “What the hell are you doing back there?” I yelled. “How did you get into my car?”

  “You left the back door unlocked and the wind was cold,” Tyra said, shaking her head. “What did you want me to do, freeze to death?”

  I caught my breath and tried very hard not to audibly hyperventilate. It’s so embarrassing to pass out when your life is being threatened. Or something. Was my life being threatened?

  “I wanted you not to follow me here,” I said in the best indignant voice I could muster. “If you’re so cold, why not stay in your own car?”

  “I didn’t know you were going to be in there for an hour,” she answered. “How long does it take to buy some paint?” The fact that I hadn’t been carrying anything when I left the store seemed to have been lost on her. Tyra was imposing, but she was no genius.

  “What do you want?” I asked Tyra.

  “What I said—I want to know what you’re doing about my employment situation. I need to get back at the Basie. This tire thing isn’t paying enough to cover my rent.”

  The thing about adrenaline is that it isn’t specifically purposed. If the stuff starts flowing through your veins because you’re terrified (let’s say, for example, that an unusually large woman who supposedly used to be a violent man was discovered in the backseat of your car when you weren’t expecting her) and it transpires that maybe you don’t need to be terrified, the adrena
line doesn’t simply say, “Oh well, false alarm,” and vanish from your system. It stays, and your brain decides what to do with it. In this case, my brain shifted from terrified to angry faster than I could shift from park into drive.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I demanded. I’ll admit, it wasn’t my most original or well-purposed question; has anyone ever answered in the affirmative to that one? “What makes you think you can jump into my car and tell me to find you a job? Besides, you told me not to call Penny about your job! When did I become your employment service?”

  “When you talked to Penny Fields about me and stopped me from getting my job back,” Tyra explained, as if the answer were so obvious it was a waste of her time to even address it.

  It should be noted that it is, if not impossible, extremely difficult to grind your teeth into a fine powder in a few short seconds. I can tell you that from personal experience. “I didn’t talk to Penny,” I reiterated, impressed that I could talk with my jaw clenched like that. It was possible I had a future in ventriloquism. “That didn’t happen. I never mentioned your name to Penny. Penny mentioned your name to me. Why is it difficult for you to understand that?” If I mentioned now that I actually had asked Penny to give Tyra her job back (since Penny clearly had not made an offer), Tyra would find a way to blame me for that, too. I decided not to bring it up.

  Tyra’s eyebrows lowered. So did her voice, to near-Tyrone levels. “Are you calling me stupid?” she asked.

  Once again, adrenaline is not a thoughtful hormone. “Are you calling me a liar?” I shot back.

  She rolled her eyes. “Penny Fields fired me because of your pal Larry. Now he’s dead and she won’t hire me back. What should I think?”

  That sounded disturbingly like motive to me, but there was something strange about it. “That doesn’t make any sense, but okay. Let’s say Larry Laurentz snitched on you to Penny. Why would she listen to him?”

  “Boy, you are a really lousy detective, aren’t you?” Tyra asked, I assumed rhetorically. “Because you always listen first to the guy you’re sleeping with.”