“Oh no, Ghost Lady.” Everett had apparently shown up from . . . somewhere . . . behind me. “Mr. Kaplan wasn’t at the paint store when your husband arrived today. He spent his time talking to a much older gentleman.” Josh’s grandfather Sy Kaplan, the original owner of Madison Paints.
“What?” Josh sounded puzzled.
“You went to see Sy?” I pivoted and faced The Swine before Josh could react further. He no doubt understood I’d heard that from a ghost, and was certainly putting two and two together even as I spoke. If our engagement survived this evening, the marriage would be a piece of cake.
“Joshie here had told me about him, and he sounded like quite a guy,” The Swine answered. I saw Josh wince at the very idea of being called by such a juvenile nickname, one he’d hated even when I first met him at the age of twelve. “I figured I’d go and see for myself.”
Well, that was certainly a crock, but I couldn’t think my way around it and confronting Steven directly had led to our getting married, which was not the kind of thing I’d especially like to have happen again. So I decided to wait until the nagging feeling in the back of my mind manifested itself and then I could get him right between the eyes.
Unless Maroni and his twin giant redwoods got there first. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” the (alleged) crime boss said. “I won’t trouble you any further. Stevie!” He gestured toward The Swine, who could now swallow that “Joshie” and see how it tasted.
But he was stopped in his tracks and those of his minions because my thirteen-year-old daughter appeared in the entrance to the movie room. “We’ve got dinner for everybody in the den!” she announced, and then marched out.
It was amazing the effect that child had on this room of people discussing which one of them had shot a man in the head. There was no question or argument. The two large appendages of Maroni did not even look to their boss for acknowledgment or instruction. Everyone just immediately started filing out of the room and heading toward the den.
I held back on Josh’s arm. “I’m sorry it sounded like I didn’t trust you,” I said.
His stare was not exactly warm and inviting. “You sent a ghost to spy on me,” he said. That wasn’t the case, but I couldn’t argue now because Josh was following the others into the den as Melissa had commanded.
I could see it was going to be a fun dinner.
Twenty-three
The chicken, done with a mango glaze, was astonishing. The carrot-and-cauliflower soufflé, a personal favorite of mine when Melissa is feeling ambitious, was superb. There were green beans that were terrific, and I don’t even like green beans.
But I could barely eat a bite of anything. My fiancé was mad at me.
Well, mad might be an overstatement. Josh was clearly disappointed in me, and that was as negative as he’d ever been, which was very upsetting. He wasn’t looking at me with an amused twinkle in his eye, and that was unusual, especially under these bizarre circumstances.
I didn’t even get to sit next to him at the enormous table Mom had set in the den. It was the largest room in the house, so we could seat the rather bloated guest list now chowing down on what was, I was sure, the dinner for four Mom had packed for when she left the house this morning. She and Melissa were magicians with food.
And everyone was eating. Well, besides me. You’d have thought that Maroni or his henchmen might have opted out just because it didn’t look sinister enough to ask for another helping of soufflé. You might assume Constance, whom I had never actually seen taking nourishment for fear of adding an extra pound to her petite, patrician frame, would have eaten some green beans and declared herself full. But no, she was packing it in (daintily, of course) with the rest of them, something I attribute to my astonishing daughter’s culinary prowess.
Jeannie and Tony, at the other end of the huge table, were used to dinners à la Melissa, so they were relaxed and happy. At a separate smaller table Ollie was eating the same food as the rest of us (Mom had not brought Cheerios, but I had some in the cabinet; they had proven unnecessary) while Molly was in her father’s lap, not so much eating as watching the process around the table with a high level of fascination. She wasn’t ready to get there yet, but she knew where she wanted to go.
Bobby, always at Steven’s elbow, had not relinquished that position now, but he was taking in food so quickly I wondered if he had eaten . . . ever before. He wasn’t saying much, but was nodding enthusiastically at everything Dr. Frankenstein (my ex) said, polishing up his hunchback and chuckling at The Swine’s lame jokes. It was sort of disgusting.
Mom, of course, was enjoying the compliments aimed at her granddaughter, and although she had never really connected with Steven’s parents, she was seated next to Harry Rendell and chuckling at something he’d said. Harry might possibly have stopped for a drink on the way to my house this evening.
Liss, as was her habit when people—especially those who had not done so before—were sampling her cooking, was sitting at the head of the table, the best vantage point, and taking in every reaction. She doubts her abilities the way it is said that some of the greatest actors in the world have stage fright, and so every reassurance is absolutely necessary.
The only ones besides me not eating heartily were the ghosts, including Maxie, who had dropped into the room but was staying close to the ceiling with Everett nearby. She hadn’t uncovered anything else of note yet, she told me, but felt that she should watch to see if there was some question she hadn’t tried to answer to this point.
Actually there was one other person not heartily digging into the meal, and that was Josh, who seemed detached and stole glances at me when he thought I was turned away.
What had I done?
To be fair, I hadn’t done that much. When I sent Everett out to tail The Swine and find out what he was up to, I had not expected him to visit Madison Paints. So my intention never had been to check up on Josh at all. You had to give me points for that, didn’t you?
Well?
Still, I had accepted the information I was given and jumped to an unflattering conclusion without asking for an explanation. Maybe that was the problem here. I hadn’t given the man I loved the benefit of the doubt. And I knew deep down that was indeed wrong.
But hadn’t Josh lied to me? Hadn’t he hidden Steven’s true whereabouts on the night Maurice DuBois was murdered? What about that? And besides, who would have thought The Swine was driving all the way to Asbury Park to meet Sy Kaplan?
That was the part that was weird. That didn’t make sense at all. And as Paul would say, when something really stuck out as unusual or uncharacteristic, you had to take a closer look. I knew The Swine as well as anybody, and the idea that he would show some interest in a ninety-two-year-old man whose grandson was about to marry me was, at best, suspicious.
It was bothering me that I couldn’t talk directly to the ghosts in this crowd. Really, Jeannie, Tony and of course Mom and Melissa would have been fine with it, as would Josh when he wasn’t in a grumpy mood. But with the Rendells—all three of them—in the room just itching for an excuse to sue for custody of my daughter, not to mention the three representatives of at least semiorganized crime, it seemed a bad idea to start talking to the ceiling and then getting answers.
So when the situation isn’t working for you, change the situation. I stood up. “I need something in the kitchen,” I said. If I could get out of the room and have my spooky friends follow me, I could start getting some answers. I started toward the kitchen door and noted that not one ghost was following me.
Maxie and Everett were huddled in a corner, so I tried to catch their eyes and got nothing. My father was near my mother, as always, so looking in his direction would have required a full hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and while I adore my dad, the fact was he probably had no information that would help the investigation at all.
But Paul was the brains of the d
etective agency, if there had been a detective agency. So he was my best bet and my most reliable source of confidence. I knew he’d be able to give me an idea of what to do next.
Except that Paul was installing another of his homemade electrical boxes into an outlet near the floor under a window and wasn’t watching me. Luckily nobody was looking toward him or there would be questions about a flying black box. There were none.
The only person I could count on right at this moment was Melissa. And she was engrossed in her phone, looking something more than perplexed and perhaps a hair short of frantic. I was going to ask what could possibly have been that wrong, but she got up from the table and headed toward the stairs before there was the chance. I don’t usually require Liss to ask to be excused—what is my dinner table, anyway: solitary confinement?—but she pretty much always sticks around to help clean up even when she was the primary chef for the evening. Something was up.
I’d already announced my intention to go to the kitchen, so at this point not going would have sent a very strange signal. I walked to the door and pushed it open, then went inside and started to wonder what the hell I was doing here and how this whole ridiculous ball had started rolling.
I decided it was the ghosts’ fault. Mostly Maxie.
There I stood in the middle of my own kitchen with absolutely nothing to do, contemplating my life. All I’d wanted was to have a nice guesthouse on the Jersey Shore where I grew up, to share the area with people for the first time and help them love it the way I always had—and maybe to make a decent living doing that.
Was that really so much to ask? Apparently so. I hadn’t even gotten this very room in shape before a certain ghost had dropped a heavy bucket on my head and gotten my attention. Now I couldn’t extract these dead people from my life, and every other month it seemed someone was being murdered, leading me to be called upon for some reason I couldn’t fathom to investigate.
Backing out wasn’t even an option. This time The Swine had entangled me, not Paul, as had become the custom. But if I stuck by my vow to vindicate Melissa’s father, would I alienate the guy I really wanted to stay with for the rest of my life—and possibly beyond, for all I knew? I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I had no doubt in my mind at all that Steven was responsible for the current rift between Josh and me.
Wait. I’d come in here to think about Maurice DuBois’s murder. What did I know for sure?
Maurice had shown up in my house looking for Steven, who had apparently gotten into some serious debt with the guy I had thought was Maurice’s employer, Lou Maroni. But as soon as the two of them were (mostly) alone, they worked out some odd détente that had them both chuckling when leaving my library and, according to Maxie, agreed on the idea that I’d sell my house and give all the proceeds to my ex-husband, which made as much sense as . . .
. . . as two dead people floating around my house. Sense didn’t have much to do with anything that had happened to me in the past four years.
But then Maurice had gotten himself a little bit killed in an alley outside a local bar. According to Josh, whom I could usually trust, Steven had been with him the whole time that was happening. So DuBois must have gotten himself into trouble with someone else very quickly.
Now, though, Maroni was saying—and Maxie was confirming independently—that Maurice DuBois had actually been the mastermind who had created SafT, the program everybody (except Maroni, until recently) thought was going to be bigger than Google. So the obvious motive was that someone had wanted to claim the patent on SafT and they shot DuBois and somehow took over the rights to the software.
You have no evidence, I could hear my inner Paul saying. You have a theory that fits the few facts we know, but you have nothing that ties anyone to the DuBois killing. Even if that was the motive, you have no way of knowing who might have been the person pulling the trigger.
My inner Paul is really annoying.
That left me with nothing. I didn’t know who killed Maurice DuBois. I doubted it was Susannah, who couldn’t decide if she was a killer shark businesswoman or The Swine’s bubble-headed plaything. For one thing, she didn’t seem to have a motive, although her story about throwing the gun in the river was reason enough to suspect her; it was so stupid you had to figure there was no better true explanation available.
The Rendells were never really serious suspects. I had just made them show up because I wanted to see Constance squirm with the knowledge that I had some blackmail material on her and could drop it at any time, even if I wouldn’t ever do it. I liked Harry too much for that.
Maroni, or by extension one of the silent twins he’d brought with him? Why would they keep looking for Steven and then the patent if they’d already killed DuBois to get the patent? That didn’t seem to hold water.
I was starting to think it was possible I had killed Maurice DuBois just to give myself some aggravation, which I was now doing with a great deal of success.
Maxie floated through the wall and hovered over me. “Where did you go?” she asked.
“Portugal. This is a film of me.” I wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Or couldn’t you tell?
“What’s your problem?” she persisted. “You got up and came in here for no reason and now you’re standing in the middle of the room not doing anything.”
“I’ve decided you’re responsible for everything that’s gone wrong with my life,” I told her. “You dropped that bucket of compound on my head and since then I’ve had to deal with dead people and investigate murders. It’s your fault.”
“It was an accident,” she said, because that’s what she always says when the subject is broached. “Besides, if all this hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t have met Josh and you wouldn’t be getting married.” And there were people who thought Maxie actually wasn’t paying attention most of the time. Okay, not people. Me.
“Josh isn’t talking to me,” I said, and to my amazement there was a sob in my voice. Was I back in tenth grade? A guy didn’t like me enough and so I was going to cry? This wasn’t turning out to be a great day.
Maxie waved a hand. “He’ll get over it. You’re just difficult to deal with sometimes.” What Maxie giveth, Maxie taketh away.
Maxie! “Where’s Everett?” I asked suddenly, perhaps so suddenly that it startled her. “I need to know what happened exactly when Steven went to Madison Paints.”
“You already know.” Maxie recovers quickly and is always happy to remind me when I’m wrong. “Josh wasn’t there.”
“That’s not the point. Get Everett.”
She was so taken with my authoritative manner, it seemed, that she didn’t even complain about my ordering her around like she does when I’m not actually ordering her around. Now I was and she simply obeyed, heading through the wall to go fetch her boyfriend.
This was going to be my last case, I would tell Paul. If he and Maxie wanted to quit doing the spook shows and making my guesthouse a destination for those wanting scares that didn’t really exist anyway, so be it. I could run an honest inn the way I’d intended before my head started bleeding. I didn’t have to put myself through this again and again.
I sort of heard a ghost coming through the wall (there wasn’t really an audible “whoosh” because they were not actually displacing air at all, but there was an audible sense that something was happening in a direction so you could turn your head in time) and expected Maxie and Everett.
Instead I got Paul. And I was about to launch into my speech about no more nosing around in other people’s murders when he launched into one of his own.
“There’s a thunderstorm on the way, Alison!” Paul was as giddy as a boy of ten when a new Star Wars movie is opening the next day. “It’ll be here in less than an hour. I have to get my equipment ready—this is it!”
The man had gone insane. “It’s February, Paul. The forecast is for maybe—maybe—an inch of snow
tonight. Nobody said anything about you being able to electrocute yourself into the next realm. Tonight.”
“You don’t understand. There are lightning storms with snow. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Anyway, I have no time!” And down he went through the floorboards, heading no doubt toward his pile of recycled electronics in a frantic dash to black out most of Ocean County.
There was no point in going down there to watch. I’d told Paul he could play with his toys when the time was right, and even if this was an opportunity to solve a murder and he should have been all about that, it was clear Paul’s priorities were elsewhere tonight. Trying to persuade him to change his mind was like trying to convince a beagle puppy that chewing shoes didn’t really make any sense when approached from a logical point of view.
That was when Maxie and Everett came phasing through, both wearing expressions of either concern or confusion. “Here’s Everett,” Maxie said, apparently now operating as his agent. “What did you need, exactly?”
Anne Kaminsky stuck her head through the door. “Excuse me,” she said. “I don’t want to interrupt the dinner party.”
I gestured her in. “It’s fine, Anne,” I said. “This was just sort of impromptu. What can I do for you?”
“Have you seen Mel? I’ve been looking for him, but he’s not around.”
That was all I needed—a missing guest. “He’s not in his room?” Clearly he was not, so I went on. “Did he mention any plans today?”
Anne shook her head. “What do you mean, ‘his room’?” she asked.
What did she mean, what did I mean? “The one downstairs. The one you were in until you asked me for a separate room.”
Spouse on Haunted Hill Page 22