Spouse on Haunted Hill

by E. J. Copperman

  Throughout, Richie was sporadically talking to Maroni and his crew, now more pointedly because Harry had made him suspicious. When I got close enough, I could hear them discuss their distance from Josh’s store, as well as, despite having the proprietor in the car, the instructions from the GPS Maroni had in what had to be a crowded vehicle.

  Occasionally I’d hear Josh say something innocuous, giving me the impression he just wanted me to hear his voice and know it was still functioning. It wasn’t the drive I was worried about. It was what was almost certainly going to happen when they arrived and didn’t find the treasure they sought.

  There was a flash of lightning and then some thunder. Susannah had mentioned that thundersnow didn’t often last very long, making me wonder why she’d strayed from her first true love, which had clearly been meteorology.

  Paul rose through the floor quickly, positively aglow, which was due either to his state of excitement or too much exposure to all that electronic equipment. “Just a few minutes!” he shouted, as if anyone understood.

  Maxie was upstairs, so just Mom and I could hear him. If Mom were awake. So it was just me, and I turned toward the ghost, who was holding a length of electrical cord he’d clearly cut from a longer extension, with the two ends stripped so they could be connected elsewhere. Susannah, luckily, was not facing in his direction or I’d have had to make up a nonsense excuse for the hovering object again.

  “It’s going to happen!” Paul went on. Obviously I was too dense to get his meaning, so he explained himself. “I anticipate the storm will be directly over this area in four minutes, and that increases the chances of lightning striking the device I installed on the roof. The current is going to flow through and I can evolve. Alison, this might be it. We might not see each other again!”

  Now? Even if Josh or I didn’t get shot, Paul was going to move on to the next level in his ghostly video game and I had to say my good-byes now? “Paul,” I said.

  “Paul?” Richie asked, turning toward me but luckily not toward Paul. “Who’s Paul?”

  This had gone far enough. I no longer cared if Susannah and Richie thought I was a lunatic, but the Rendells had The Swine’s ear and Constance certainly had enough spite built up for me to use my supposed insanity as a wedge in custody hearings. But I had leverage with her and besides, I wasn’t thinking straight anymore.

  I looked right at Paul. “You can’t leave now!” I insisted. “Look around! There’s a man with a gun threatening my life!”

  “We’re going in now,” Maroni reported through Richie’s cell phone. “We should have the package in a minute.” But I knew better.

  “What are you talking about?” Constance demanded of me. “Who are you talking to?”

  Paul took stock of the situation, and his eyes showed indecision. He looked up as a rumble of thunder sounded.

  “Alison,” he said intensely, “this is my chance.”

  I took a deep breath. “Then I can’t hold you back. It’s been a real gift to know you.”

  Paul hovered without so much as drifting, which meant he was concentrating very hard. “It has been my privilege,” he said.

  “Who the hell are you talking to?” Susannah said.

  “The ghosts,” Tony told her. “They’re everywhere.” Oliver laughed.

  “Oh, cut it out,” Jeannie said from under the table.

  Richie, intent on his phone, was paying no attention to the hovering electrical wire, but Harry seemed mesmerized by it. “How do you do that?” he asked me.

  “Do you have it yet?” Richie asked the phone.

  Another rumble. “I have no time,” Paul told me. “I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head. “Nothing you could do. But you should say good-bye to Melissa.”

  “What’s she talking about?” Constance demanded of her husband, who waved a hand at her.

  “I wish I could. But this is—” The thunder was indeed closer. A flash of lightning grabbed Paul’s attention, and the crack was only a second later. He flew—really—to the window where he’d installed the strange box. Apparently the last step involved attaching it to the length of wire he had in his hands.

  “Ghosts?” Susannah asked.

  “Didn’t you see the sign outside?” Tony said. “It’s a haunted guesthouse.”

  “I thought that was her idea of a joke.” Constance sniffed. “Haunted guesthouse, indeed.”

  “Well?” Richie shouted at his phone.

  “Got it!” came the reply. I was astonished. The papers were really at Madison Paints? Maybe we’d be saved after all.

  My elation was not long-lived. As soon as the words were out of Maroni’s mouth, there was an unmistakable sound coming through the phone. A great commotion and then a voice I recognized.

  McElone.

  “Police! Stop what you’re doing! Hands where I can see them!” I heard her yell, and my stomach sank. On the one hand, this probably meant Josh would be safe, and that was very good news for sure. On the other hand . . .

  Richie’s eyes narrowed to slits. He turned and faced me with rage on his face and the gun in his hand.

  The rage I could have handled.

  “Look, Richie . . .” I began.

  “You did this,” he said, advancing on me. I looked up into the ceiling for Maxie. She wasn’t there. A glance at Paul: He was waist-deep in the floor tinkering with his contraption and looking up through the den window. No lightning at the moment. “You called the cops!”

  Paul turned and looked. He wasn’t that preoccupied. “Alison,” he said softly.

  I shook my head. This was his only chance and I could take care of Richie. All I had to do was stall until Maxie showed up or one of the others distracted him.

  Lord knows, Tony tried. “Oliver!” he said, pushing his son back under the table. “What a thing to say!” Tony didn’t leap to his feet, but he was standing very quickly. Jeannie grabbed her son under the table.

  “Rub my leg,” she instructed Oliver. “It fell asleep. Did you ever see a leg that was asleep?”

  “Snoring?” Oliver asked, and then he laughed and so did Jeannie.

  But throughout this vaudeville Richie’s eyes never left my face. “You had to do it. Nobody else could have gotten in touch with the cops. I had all the phones.” He stopped and considered, then looked upstairs. His voice dropped even more. “Your daughter?” he asked.

  “No!” I shouted. “You were right. It was me. I texted Lieutenant McElone when you were fiddling with your phone, before you took mine away.” There had been no such time, but logic wasn’t exactly the priority at the moment.

  Luckily Richie wasn’t going back over the videotape of the evening to see if my explanation had been accurate. “I knew it,” he said. The other end of the phone line still sounded like chaos, but quieter chaos. After a long moment, I heard Josh’s voice come through, as he must have picked up Maroni’s cell.

  “I’m okay, Alison,” he said, sounding worried. “Are you?”

  Richie took the phone from the table, face contorted with anger. “No, she’s not!” he yelled, and disconnected the call, throwing the phone on the table. “You took everything.” He took two steps toward me. I saw Tony’s body tense and lean forward.

  Then so many things happened at once that I can’t really tell you what order of events is correct. It was like that moment when you’re in a car crash—it all seemed to go in slow motion, and none of it seemed real.

  Tony jumped across the dining table, not realizing it had been constructed from three separate folding card tables because my actual one would not have been nearly large enough. The impact of his weight on the surface, and the fact that he hit squarely between two of the tables, was enough to make the near (to me) end of the structure collapse, and he ended up on the floor.

  “Oof,” he said.

  Jeannie, under
the far end of the table, was untouched by the avalanche of food, dishes, linen and Tony that landed on the other side. She looked over, saw her husband was not badly hurt and said, “What are you doing?” Tony was trying to scramble to his feet but seemed uninterested in telling her that.

  Richie’s phone, and mine, and Mom’s, and probably a couple of the others, started to ring. Richie, holding the bag with the phones hostage on a seat next to him, made no effort to answer any of them.

  Susannah, seeing Tony leap and flop, got up presumably to help him to his feet, but tried instead to reach for her cell phone. Richie hit her hand with the butt of the gun and she yelped.

  Constance, now with chicken gravy saturating her lap, yelled something quite unladylike and then berated Richie. “You should have let us go an hour ago!”

  “Oh, shut up, Connie,” Harry answered. “Go tell your reverend about it.”

  Constance stared at him. Her mouth opened and closed and for the first time since I’d known her, no sound came out.

  Mom, startled by the noise, woke up and saw Richie advancing on me with the gun. She didn’t even comment on the table or the contractor on the floor. “Jack!” she shouted, and my father was launching himself across the room.

  But even he couldn’t get to Richie fast enough. “I said I’d shoot you,” he said. “And I will.” He raised the gun and aimed at my chest.

  I figured my best chance was to not be there when the bullet arrived, so I turned to run toward the kitchen, my heart pounding in my chest. I knew I didn’t have enough time, but I literally couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  And I saw Anne and Mel coming out of the kitchen, Mel saying something about how all the action seemed to be going on up here. They were holding hands. That was nice, I thought.

  I heard Melissa’s voice from the entrance to the den, where I knew she couldn’t be because she was under orders not to leave her room. And of course teenagers never disobey their parents. “Mom!” she screamed. She sounded terrified. But I knew that couldn’t be her. Maxie was upstairs making sure of that.

  Except Maxie dropped through the ceiling, saw the situation and made the trench coat disappear. She grabbed the baseball bat and aimed at Richie’s head as if it were a fat fastball in her happy zone just asking to be hit out of the park.

  She hit him once, hard, and it had the effect she’d hoped for; he dropped. But on impact he fired the gun, maybe not even intentionally. And it was aimed in my direction.

  At that moment, I heard Paul yell, “This is it!”

  There was a tremendous flash of lightning and the thunder was simultaneous. The storm was right over my house. I saw some sparks and heard the crackling of electricity to my left. But my attention was on the gun. I looked to see its trajectory.

  But I couldn’t because as soon as that spark lit, the room went completely dark. The only thing I could see was Paul, who was indeed glowing. And almost immediately he seemed to be fading away. And I could hear something whirring by, which I believed to be Richie’s bullet.

  Then something hit me in the head and I didn’t know what happened after that.

  Twenty-seven

  When you come out of anesthesia, your main desire is to go back to sleep. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been out, your body is telling you that it’s not interested in doing anything at all and your eyes are absolutely not involved in the idea of being open. You have thoughts, but they’re random and diffuse, moving from one topic to another like people at a speed-dating event. Hi, I’m Alison and I like to— Oh, sorry, who are you again? And what’s that unicorn doing next to you?

  I remembered that something had hit me in the head, but I didn’t know what. There was something about a bucket of wall compound; maybe that was what had fallen on me. Yeah. I was working on the ceiling in the new house and this bucket just fell off the ladder onto my head. That was it.

  My head definitely still hurt. But I didn’t raise a hand to touch it; doing so would have required effort. Who needed that? Instead I just lay there, wherever I was, with my eyes closed, wondering why I had awakened at all.

  “Mom?” Melissa’s voice sounded small and younger. I thought it was Melissa, anyway. It might have been a baby giraffe or my grandmother on my father’s side, whom I hadn’t seen since she died in 1994. “You awake?”

  Now, that was a perplexing question. Was I awake? Was anybody really awake? What did Goethe say about being awake? Did he say it in his sleep? Who was Goethe, anyway?

  “I dunno.” That was the closest I could get to an honest reply. “Where are you?”

  “I’m right here,” Liss said. Is that really a response to give someone whose eyes are closed? Where’s “right here”? For that matter, where was I? Was I “right here,” and if so, was I Melissa?

  “Where’s here?”

  “You’re in the hospital.” Melissa’s voice had suddenly deepened and sounded very tired. I forced my eyes open.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Of course I am,” my mother said. “I’m not the one who has the concussion. How are you?”

  It was, as advertised, a hospital room. I seemed to remember it from before, but not really. That bucket of compound must have hit me hard.

  Wait. The bucket of compound! That was . . . four years ago! So why was I in the hospital now? Was I just waking up? How long had I been under sedation?

  Had I just dreamed the whole thing? The ghosts, the guesthouse, the investigator’s license, the murders?

  Josh?

  Had I dreamed Josh? Was I still a new divorcée with a nine-year-old daughter? How hard had I gotten hit?

  But no. There was Liss and she was thirteen. And there was Mom and she was still Mom. But Josh. There was no Josh.

  I hadn’t actually raised my head, but I let it fall even farther back on the pillow. There was no Josh. There had been no Paul and no Maxie. Okay, the “no Maxie” part wasn’t all that bad, except it was. I was going to miss her, too.

  “How are you?” Mom asked again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “That’s fair enough because it’s my job to answer that question.” A small woman with black hair walked in. She was wearing a white coat upon which was embroidered the name Dr. Dhenu Murthy.

  “I’m glad you came back, Doctor,” Melissa said. “I’m not sure she’s entirely aware of what’s going on.” Like for example, I didn’t know the doctor had been here before. That was one thing I wasn’t entirely aware of.

  “She’s been asleep for a while,” the doctor said, shining a light in my eyes, which was not appreciated. “That’s better.” What was better? Everything anybody said just confused me more.

  My head was sort of clearing, but that “sort of” was important. “Can somebody tell me what happened?” I asked.

  I knew what they were going to say: I had been hit with a bucket of compound and had a concussion. All the things I’d had in my mind—Paul, Maxie, my father again and mostly Josh—I’d have to keep to myself. It had been an interesting dream, but a dream nonetheless.

  “Oh, she’s awake.” Suddenly Paul was floating over the bed. Now I knew it was a hallucination, because in any version of my reality, Paul was either a dream or he couldn’t travel past my property line, and unless they’d built a hospital behind my house while I was unconscious, this was definitely not on my land. Besides, Paul had electrocuted himself into the next step up in Ghostdom, hadn’t he?

  “You were hit with a flying object in your house,” Dr. Murthy said, holding up her finger vertically. “Now follow this movement with your eyes. Don’t move your head.”

  So I did that while Melissa explained. “That guy shot off his gun and must have knocked a piece of plaster loose from the ceiling when he . . . fell down,” she said. “The plaster hit you on the head and we couldn’t wake you up,
so we called an ambulance and you’ve been here about seven hours now.”

  I was still groggy, so what I was seeing and hearing (despite Dr. Murthy’s declaration that my “eye movement is good”) was somewhat suspect. Paul couldn’t be here. Suddenly Maxie was at his side and she was smiling at me unironically. That wasn’t possible, either.

  A shot of adrenaline suddenly hit me when I realized at least some of what I was seeing had to be real. “Where’s—”

  Josh walked into the room carrying two cups from the hospital coffee shop. “Hey! You’re awake!” he told me.

  “You sure?”

  It was such a relief to see him. He’d been what I’d most worried would leave my life, and there he was, coffee in hand. He gave one cup to Melissa and the other to Mom, who now appeared to have Dad hovering over her shoulder. The room was getting crowded.

  But the weird part was Paul, so I looked at him. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  The doctor’s eyebrows lowered and she followed my line of sight toward what she saw as nothing in the air. “Who are you talking to?” she said.

  Uh-oh. If the doctor thought I was hallucinating—and I wasn’t sure if that was the case or not—she could turf me out to psychiatric or keep me here indefinitely. “I was talking to Josh,” I said, covering. “Wasn’t I supposed to keep staring ahead?”

  Melissa mouthed, “Good one.”

  “Oh no,” Dr. Murthy said. “You can look wherever you want now.” She read my monitor and probably made a mental note to have a psychiatrist consult with me. Or an ophthalmologist.

  “That was the weird thing,” Paul explained. “The energy experiment worked, but it didn’t have the effect I expected. Instead of being elevated to the next level, I now have the ability to move around as I like. I can go anywhere!” He was like a nine-year-old if the nine-year-old were transparent and floated.

  “Is there anything left of my house?” I asked him.