Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  “Then you won’t reopen the case?” I asked. That was the outcome Paul had hoped would result from this meeting. He wouldn’t be pleased.

  McElone grunted. “I’ll do some looking based on the threatening e-mails, but I still don’t think it’s murder,” she said.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I told her. “Why would these two people commit suicide?”

  McElone shrugged. “Lovers’ quarrel?”

  I practically spat. “Yeah, right!”

  Her eyes narrowed. “How well did you know these people?” she asked again.

  Oops. “Um, we never met,” I said. “I bought the house almost a year after they died.”

  “Uh-huh. And where were you living at that time?” Great. Paul sends me to open the investigation, and immediately I become the chief suspect. In a double suicide.

  “In Red Bank. I was just filing for divorce then.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” she said in a voice that indicated she couldn’t care less.

  I stood up and reached a hand out for my laptop. “Well, I guess I’ve been wasting your time,” I said.

  McElone did not offer the computers back. “I don’t know that yet,” she said. “Until I have this figured out, I’m going to need to keep these.”

  I blanched. I didn’t care what she did with Maxie’s laptop, but I relied on my old dinosaur. “That’s not possible,” I sputtered.

  “Sure it is,” McElone answered. “Watch how easy it is for me not to give it back.” She slipped the two computers into her desk drawer and wrote me out a receipt.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked her. “Doesn’t the department give you your own computer?”

  “You’ve given me evidence that someone is making terroristic threats against you,” the detective responded. “Until I determine whether or not a crime has been committed, those computers are staying.”

  “And how long will that take?”

  “It’s a small town,” McElone said. “We don’t get that much crime during the off-season. Shouldn’t take more than three or four days.”

  “Days? My whole life is on that computer!” Suddenly, the separation from my ancient notebook computer seemed horrifying. Okay, so I don’t get along with technology, but that doesn’t mean I want to live without it. I couldn’t get along with The Swine, and . . .

  Bad example.

  “We have to follow up,” McElone said, her voice never showing a hint of emotion. The woman could probably watch Old Yeller and not tear up. “I promise I’ll call you the minute you can pick it up.”

  In the end, I had no choice. But then, that was becoming my fallback position on just about everything.

  I went to pick up Melissa from school. Maybe I could check my e-mail on her cell phone.

  Eleven

  Paul had given me explicit instructions to come back to the house and report on my meeting with the police, but I didn’t. Instead, I picked Melissa up at school and tried to linger a few minutes, hoping to run into Mr. Barnes. No such luck, but Melissa was in a mood to “work on the house,” as she said, and she whined and begged to help enough that I relented quickly. I didn’t want my daughter anywhere near the two spirits in the guesthouse, particularly Maxie, but what could I do? It was where we lived, and no matter how many times she could go play at Wendy’s or do homework at another friend’s house, I really did miss having Melissa pitch in with the renovations (plus, I feel the need to pass on to her the skills Dad taught me). It’s not like I could I tell her I’d spent most of my mornings repairing damage done during the night by dead people. And anyway, I didn’t want her to be afraid in her own house. Though if there was one thing I’d learned since my knock on the head, it’s that you should be afraid of ghosts.

  They’re a colossal pain in the butt.

  We were working in the dining room, a large, long space with ornate moldings around the entrance and along the ceiling. Today’s jobs were to skillfully fill in cracks in the plaster (me), and carefully scrape the paint off the window frames to prepare them for staining later (Melissa, armed with Dad’s paint scraper but no chemical stripper).

  I didn’t see Paul when we entered the house, which was odd—I figured he’d be waiting breathlessly (quite literally) for news of my meeting with Detective McElone. But Maxie wandered in from the kitchen, looking bored, or pretending to be bored.

  Until she started staring directly at my daughter.

  The way Maxie was looking at Melissa was creepier than anything I’d seen since the bucket made its impact with my cranium. And that’s saying something.

  “Don’t do that window first,” I told Melissa. “Do this one, closer to me.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “This one’s closer to me,” I said. Maxie smiled a truly bloodcurdling smile.

  “Well, I don’t see what difference that makes,” Melissa protested. “This one looks out on the beach, and all I can see from that one is the house next door, and it’s all boarded up.”

  “Do this one,” I said, a little too loudly.

  Melissa grumbled, but she walked over and started scraping the window next to me, as I began sanding down a small crack in the plaster. Maxie, still grinning that evil grin, moved closer to Melissa.

  “If we finish today, this room might actually be ready to be painted, and then we can do the floor, and we’ll have a whole room done,” I told Melissa, sounding way too cheerful.

  Kids can see right through that. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s wrong?’ I just said we can almost have this room finished.”

  Melissa put the scraper down. “I mean it,” she said.

  “Nothing’s wrong, honey. I’m just tired.” You can always tell kids you’re tired. They’re not familiar with the concept. They never think they’re tired, even when they can barely keep their eyes open.

  Then Paul walked in. Through the outside wall. I’d never seen that before, and I gasped a little.

  “Mom, you’re scaring me.” Great. I’m trying to keep my nine-year-old away from two deranged ghosts, and I’m the one scaring her.

  “Alison!” Paul said. “What happened with the police?”

  Reflexively, my head swiveled in his direction. And that was when my daughter said the scariest thing I’d ever heard.

  “Mom! You mean you can see them, too?”

  After all the shouting (mostly from me) died down, I sat my daughter on the folding chair I’d bought to replace the compound-encrusted one and asked her how long she’d been able to see our semitransparent guests.

  “Remember the first time we were here?” she asked. “Then.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” My voice rose about an octave. I could have been singing Aida. Not the Elton John version, either.

  “Maybe she just doesn’t trust you,” Maxie suggested. If looks could kill, the one I gave her would have been redundant.

  “I did say something, but I didn’t think you’d believe me,” Melissa said. “I thought I’d sound crazy. I didn’t know you could see them.”

  “I couldn’t, until somebody hit me on the head with a bucket of compound,” I told her.

  Maxie smiled a little more. “See? There’s an upside to everything.”

  “Upside? My daughter sees ghosts and you want me to see the upside?” Too much oxygen in my brain . . .

  Paul knelt down to look Melissa in the eyes. “Why didn’t you say anything to us, Melissa? I didn’t know you could see us all these weeks.”

  Melissa gave him her best “well, duh” look. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she said.

  Maxie actually looked thoughtful. “That’s very good,” she told Melissa. “You really shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

  “Yeah, but then how will I ever make any new friends? Everybody’s a stranger when you first meet them.”

  Control. I needed to regain control. I knelt down beside my daughter and looked her straight in the eye. “O
kay. You can see the ghosts.”

  “Maxie and Paul,” Melissa corrected me. It was important, she seemed to believe, to be polite to the dead people.

  I nodded. “Right. Paul and Maxie. You can see them. Which would indicate that they’re not just hallucinations.”

  “How could you think . . .” Paul began, but I ignored him.

  “So you have to know, Liss, that it’s really important we keep this a secret, right?”

  Contrary to popular belief, a mother can usually tell when her daughter is lying, and the nanosecond of panic in Melissa’s eyes told me exactly what her words meant. “Oh sure, Mom,” she said. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  Oh boy. “Who have you told already?” I asked. Paul frowned.

  “Nobody!” It came out much too fast and too loud.

  “Come on, Liss. We’re in damage-control mode here. Who did you tell? Did you tell Wendy?” Wendy is Melissa’s BFF. There are times I believe they’d actually sign up to be joined at the hip if they thought Wendy’s mom and I would agree to the surgery.

  Melissa looked away. Swell. “Um . . . maybe.”

  “Maybe? You’re not sure whether or not you told Wendy that there were two ghosts in our new house?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I won’t be mad,” I said.

  Melissa made eye contact with me, her own eyes starting to tear up a little. “You won’t?”

  “I promise I won’t get mad,” I told Melissa. “But you have to tell me the truth.”

  “Don’t believe her,” Maxie said. “Parents always say things like that, and then they turn on you.”

  I glared at Maxie. “I really don’t have time for group therapy now,” I told her. “Go haunt the basement.”

  Maxie didn’t move, but she did shut up.

  My daughter took a deep breath. “I told Wendy,” she said.

  I clamped my mouth shut for a moment, to avoid making Maxie right. Then—admirably, I believe—I smiled, and said, “Okay. As long as it was just Wendy.”

  “Well, I told Andrea, too.” Now that Melissa knew I wouldn’t yell at her, she was going to give me every reason to do so.

  “Andrea? Anybody else?”

  “Just Lenore.”

  “So you told three girls that you saw ghosts in the house.” I was still getting used to the idea that I was seeing ghosts in the house, and now it was becoming a spectral chain letter for fourth graders.

  “Yeah. But Wendy probably told Sophie, who probably told Clarice, who . . .”

  “Who’s Clarice?” Wait. What was the point here? “Never mind. Okay. So we can now logically assume that every fourth grade girl in your school has heard this story.”

  “Clarice is in third grade,” Melissa said. Well, that put me in my place.

  I sat on the floor and held my head in my hands for a moment. My ghostly infestation was no doubt the talk of the elementary school by now, and by logical extension, the town. People were probably gossiping about us behind our backs. They were wondering what kind of mother I was to let Melissa go around telling these bizarre stories. I’d probably have to move out of town again in disgrace, change my name, leave the investment I’d made with my life savings and get a job as a cocktail waitress in a bar with peanut shells on the floor.

  “So,” Paul said, oblivious. “Tell me about your meeting with the detective.”

  Twelve

  Adam Morris was a very busy man; that was obvious the first time I called his office to ask for a meeting. It took two separate transfers just to get my call to his secretary, who then told me four different times herself that Mr. Morris was a very busy man.

  Strangely, however, when he heard that the new owner of 123 Seafront Avenue was calling, Adam Morris managed to put off his very busy-ness and pick up the phone.

  “Alison!” As if we were old friends. Already I didn’t like the guy. “What a delight to hear from you!”

  I was sure the delight was all his, but since Paul was listening on the speakerphone, I’d agreed to be civil, at least. This was a man who might have had a hand in two murders, could be threatening my life and, at the very least, might want to take my home and business away from me.

  “Mr. Morris,” I said, not giving him the satisfaction of calling him by his first name, “I’m calling because I just found out you’d been trying to . . . acquire my property before I bought it.”

  “Among others,” he admitted. “Are you interested in selling?”

  “Actually, I thought it would be a good idea for you to come here. See the house, and what I’m doing with it. You’ll see that its value has certainly increased.” I figured I’d let him think I was interested in his money, since that’s what most businessmen understand. I had no intention of selling the house to him or anyone else, but the purpose of leading him on was twofold: bring him to the house so Paul could get a look at him, and just on the chance that he was the person who had killed Paul and Maxie, give him a reason to believe he might be able to get the house from me without having to resort to violence.

  A win-win, if you will.

  “I’m sure it has, Alison,” he said, still taking no notice that I hadn’t started calling him Adam yet. “But I don’t intend to rent the house out as a B and B, like you.”

  “It’s not a—”

  “I was planning to knock it down, in order to make room for Seaside Estates,” he went on, undeterred.

  “I see,” I said, though of course I already knew that. Let him think the bumpkin was now stumped. In the development game, there’s nothing like a stumped bumpkin.

  “I would offer a very competitive price,” he said.

  “I’m sure you would,” I told him, despite thinking that he would probably try to lowball me just on principle. “But I don’t know that I would feel right letting you knock down such a historic property.”

  Paul whispered, unnecessarily, “Ask him why he didn’t buy it after Maxie died.”

  I waved a hand at him: I was getting to that. “I’m curious—if you’re that interested in the land, why didn’t you buy it when it was on the market, before I did?”

  He hesitated. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

  “You’re the head of your company. You can discuss anything you want.” I hadn’t meant to be rude; it just slipped out—I didn’t like the man.

  Paul shook his finger at me. “Don’t do that!” he shouted. I guess he’d finally realized I was the only one who could hear him.

  Morris, of course, answered immediately. “That’s right. I can. And I’m not discussing that, Alison.”

  “Well, I appreciate your picking up the phone,” I said. “I’ll have to reconsider selling the house. Please give me a few days.” I didn’t like to think that request was a literal one, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “A few days,” Morris said, and hung up.

  “Well, what did we find out?” I asked Paul.

  “That you can’t follow instructions,” Paul answered. “And that you just made an enemy.”

  “I don’t think we ran anything other than that little column-filler.” Phyllis Coates, editor of the Harbor Haven Chronicle, frowned in thought.

  “I thought newspapers didn’t print articles about suicides,” I said. “I was surprised that one was there at all.”

  Phyllis’s office, a throwback to a bygone newspaper age, was filled with actual paper and dust. There was a concession to the twenty-first century in the iMac on her desk, but other than that, you would have expected men in green visors to be yelling, “Copy!” at the top of their lungs in the “newsroom” outside, which held old back issues, an unconnected telephone and, at the moment, my daughter. Melissa was examining the bound copies of the Chronicle that seemed randomly tossed around. Phyllis hadn’t cleaned up for some time, and there didn’t appear to be anyone else on staff here.

  And I have to admit, every time Melissa looked up or turned her head, I tensed a little, wondering if she was seeing someone else who wasn�
��t exactly, you know, alive.

  This was going to take some getting used to.

  “We usually don’t,” Phyllis answered, bringing me back to the conversation. She was as dated as the office, her face showing every bit of her seventy-something years. I’ve known Phyllis since I was a papergirl for the Chronicle when I was thirteen, and I had renewed the acquaintance when I’d moved back to Harbor Haven. But she insisted she didn’t need a papergirl these days, so I’d asked about advertising rates for the guesthouse. Phyllis was still a feisty ex-newspaper reporter and a closet softie, and I really liked her.

  Besides, Paul said the local newspaper editor always knows more about what is going on in town than anybody else. If anybody knew anything about the “suicides” or Adam Morris, it would be Phyllis. “We only publish on suicides when the person is a celebrity, or if the suicide happens in a public place.”

  “This happened to civilians in a private home,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but we didn’t know they were considered suicides right away,” Phyllis answered. “And the deaths immediately followed a contentious planning board meeting where one of the deceased spoke. People wanted to know what was going on.” She allowed herself a slight smile. “Besides, it was the off-season, and we needed to fill the space.”

  “Are you sure it was suicide?” I asked Phyllis. “Did you just rely on the police reports?”

  Phyllis’s voice took on an edge. “Honey, I was a crime reporter for the New York Daily News for thirty years before I bought this rag. I don’t just rely on the police reports. We reported the incident the week after it happened, and I followed up. Harold Westmoreland, the detective on the case, wasn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes, but he looked into it. The medical examiner showed a high concentration of Ambien in each of their bodies, enough for almost a whole jar of pills each. Now, you don’t get people to take that many pills by pointing a gun to their heads, and you don’t take them by mistake. Those people were trying to die.”