The Thrill of the Haunt

by E. J. Copperman

  I know you can’t hear my tone of voice, but that was meant sarcastically.

  And to be fair, the idea of Everett hearing ghosts was doing a decent job of disturbing me, as well. Did my future include sitting outside the Stud Muffin in a series of winter coats, telling people about Paul and Maxie and asking for spare change? Best not to think about that.

  “No offense taken, Marv,” I said, although I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. “Did Everett say specifically what he was hearing?”

  Marv must have figured I was asking out of professional curiosity—that I wanted to compare Everett’s spectral experience with my own. That wasn’t far off the mark, but I really wanted to know if there was any indication whether Everett had been hearing real ghosts or if they were voices in his head that would be explained by a possible mental illness. In any event, Marv flattened out his mouth in an expression that was supposed to indicate thought and said, “He told me he was hearing ghosts. Someone he knew, he said.”

  Whoa. “I guess it’s possible,” I heard myself say. It was really just a thought that came out because I hadn’t thought to guard it. “He didn’t say who?”

  “Nope,” Marv answered. “You couldn’t get much from Everett, but the ghost thing makes sense, sort of. Because that door was locked from the inside, and there wasn’t no way somebody could have snuck in, stabbed Everett all those times, and then snuck out.” He considered for a moment and then looked at me. “Why don’t you just find Everett’s ghost and ask him what happened?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I told him. Still, I’d asked Paul, who can contact other ghosts, to put out the occasional bulletin for Everett and Joyce Kinsler. And of course, so far there had been no responses he could report.

  “Too bad,” Marv said.

  I think he would have elaborated on his sentiment, but there was a very definite sound from outside. And it was a sound I really didn’t want to hear. The sound of breaking glass. From the direction of the gas station.

  Specifically, the men’s restroom.

  Maxie.

  “What was that?” Marv said, I think rhetorically, and stood up to head for the door.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I tried, but it was far too late. Marv had already pulled a jacket off a hook near his entrance, and all I could do was follow him out the door.

  We—that is, Marv with me holding up a decidedly lagging rear (no comments!)—were downstairs and at the gas station in less than a minute. For the first half minute or so, even with the lights on, neither of us saw anything.

  The difference was that I knew where to look but didn’t want to give the information away.

  “Pssssst!” Seriously? Maxie was floating around in a tree limb about fifteen feet up over the garage structure that housed the restrooms, saying, “Pssssst!” as if Marv could have heard her and she had to be discreet. I closed my eyes in exasperation for a moment, collected myself and looked up.

  Of course, I didn’t say anything, but she knew she had my attention. “It wasn’t my fault.” I considered telling her she should have that imprinted on one of her signature black T-shirts, but the whole “not speaking to the ghost in public” thing made the situation a little trickier. So I simply made a face that indicated I thought her statement was, let’s say, suspect. “Really!” Maxie insisted.

  I looked at Marv, who was still scouting around the grounds of his station, saying, “I was sure I heard glass breaking” and scratching his head. I’d never seen anybody actually scratch his head when he was thinking before; it was sort of quaint. He hadn’t looked in the key area just yet. He would soon enough, so I had to think of something to say.

  But Maxie wasn’t making my thought process any easier. “I’m telling you, I just dropped the tape measure and it broke the window,” she said. “So it’s really sort of your fault.”

  I couldn’t help it; that made me look directly at her, no doubt with my eyes bulging. “Well, you gave it to me . . .” she attempted.

  “Oh, my,” Marv said, and I turned to look, all the while knowing exactly what he had found.

  Sure enough, the window to the men’s room was smashed. And it was clearly smashed from the outside, because shards of glass had fallen inside the bathroom. What was lying outside on the grass, shining brightly under Marv’s key-chain flashlight, was my tape measure. He walked over and picked it up, examined it.

  “That’s weird,” he said.

  “It sure is,” I decided to agree. “Why’d somebody go out of their way to break your window with a tape measure? Why not use a rock? Why do it at all?” I wanted to add, “Am I babbling?” but decided against it.

  But Marv was examining the tape measure and not the damage to his window. “It’s got initials on it,” he said.

  Oh, yeah. I do that sometimes, so my tools won’t get mixed up with someone else’s, or in case I leave them somewhere . . . I’m a little OCD, okay?

  “A.K.,” Marv went on, and it actually took him a second. He turned to me. “You last name is like Kerber, or something like that, isn’t it, Alison?”

  “Kerby,” I said. He had me dead to rights. I almost stuck out my hand to introduce myself.

  “Is this yours?” Marv asked. He was truly confused, and given that we’d been sitting a few feet away from each other when the glass had broken, he had every right to be.

  I considered telling Marv the tape measure didn’t belong to me, but that would require so many verbal hoops to jump through that I honestly didn’t think I could pull it off. Mom had always told me that the person who tells the truth doesn’t have to remember the lie. “Yes, it’s mine,” I told Marv, and held out my hand. He actually handed me the tape measure. “I’ll pay to have the window fixed.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, which indicated that he was an intelligent man. He looked around to see where my accomplice might have gone. She was up in the tree, for once not finding the situation hilarious, which was almost a refreshing change of pace for her. “Why would you want to break my bathroom window?”

  “I don’t. Didn’t,” I told him. “I didn’t want to break your window, and I didn’t break your window. But someone did, and they used my tape measure to do it.” That was all true. Mom didn’t say you had to tell them everything and make an idiot of yourself.

  “That’s good,” Maxie said from the tree, where she was pretending to sit on a limb. “It’s all true, and you’re covering your tracks.” My eyes narrowed, because I was covering her tracks, but I couldn’t honestly claim to have had no hand in the night’s activities.

  “How’d they get your tape measure?” Marv asked. I’m not sure if he was being suspicious or simply thinking aloud, but I felt an obligation to answer him.

  “They must have gotten it out of my car,” I said. Okay, now I was skating on very thin truth—but technically the tape measure had made the trip here in my car. Feel free to look at it any way you like; that’s the point of view I was taking.

  “You leave your car unlocked?” he said, incredulous that any self-respecting Jerseyan would allow such a careless breach of security.

  “The backdoor of the wagon doesn’t lock,” I said, which, unfortunately, was true. “They could have gotten in that way.” They hadn’t, but they could have. If there had been a they.

  “Better get that fixed,” he said. “Bring the wagon in this week, I’ll take a look.”

  Wow.

  Marv and I agreed that I’d pay for a new pane of glass and install it myself. But for the time being, he fit the open space with a piece of plywood and said he’d clean the glass out of the restroom himself, “because it’s the men’s room, and you oughtn’t be there, Alison.” He believed in his heart that I had made it to my late thirties, married and had a child, and I had never realized that men’s and women’s restrooms have different equipment. You had to like Marv.

  Except now the police seemed to like him for Everett’s murder, although I had no clue—literally—why they w
ould.

  Maxie floated down to the car quickly, probably aware that I was annoyed with her and might drive away and leave her to find her own way back to the guesthouse. She stayed silent for a while as I drove, but her head kept turning to me and then toward the window. She sat (or simulated sitting) in the passenger seat, not getting in my line of sight, but not climbing into the backseat where she could be, quite literally, invisible.

  Finally, she could no longer contain herself. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said again.

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “But it wasn’t. I didn’t mean to drop the tape measure—I got startled. A little.” She looked away again, and now it was my turn to wait until the urge got too strong to avoid speaking.

  “Startled by what?” I managed to say.

  Maxie turned her head slowly toward me to heighten the drama of what she wanted to say. “There was someone in there,” she said.

  I blew out some carbon dioxide. “Impossible,” I told her. “Marv locks the door to the bathrooms when he closes the station, and he checks to make sure they’re empty before he does.”

  “That’s just it,” Maxie said. “It wasn’t somebody who would get stopped by a locked door.”

  I really didn’t want to ask the next question, but what choice did I have? “You mean whoever was in the men’s room was a ghost?”

  “Probably,” she said. “There was a guy in there, and I’m pretty sure he was like me. You know, not exactly alive.”

  “Yeah. I know.” I thought for a moment. “Was it Everett?” If so, we could turn the car around, park somewhere unobtrusive, and just ask him who had stabbed him. Case closed. I looked for a place to make a K turn.

  “I don’t think so. He was too clean,” Maxie answered. So much for the K turn. “It was a guy, though. I mean, thank goodness.”

  “Why is it better that the ghost was a man?”

  “Well,” she said, “it is a men’s room.”

  Twenty

  Josh had painted over the latest vandalism on my house as well as could be expected, which was ridiculously nice of him considering what a lousy girlfriend I’d been since pretty much ever. It was a temporary fix; the words were still visible, but not as visible. Then, Mom reported, he’d made his farewells and gone home.

  I, on the other hand, had spent the evening discussing a murder in a public restroom with a gas station owner and a dead interior designer. Such was the state of my social life these days.

  Paul, of course, had wanted—and gotten—a full report from me on the exciting incidents at the Fuel Pit. And the goatee stroking he’d done indicated this was either very thrilling or extremely perplexing, or both.

  “We have two very puzzling cases,” he said after I’d retreated to the kitchen for a bowl of Edy’s slow-churned chocolate. I wasn’t sure from his tone whether that was a good or a bad thing. I knew which way I’d have voted, but no ballots had been handed out.

  Apparently, my house was not a democracy, and worse, I wasn’t the dictator.

  “You could say that,” I told him. “I’m feeling just a little in over my head.” Like, two stories over my head.

  “Don’t worry,” Paul assured me. “It’s all under control.”

  “Sure, from where you’re floating.”

  Mom, who also reported that Melissa had gone to bed reluctantly a half hour before, looked at me with sympathy, understanding what kind of day I’d had. “What should we do, Paul?” she asked, getting the conversation back on track.

  Paul was clearly relishing his role as head of operations for our detective agency. “First, don’t panic. It’s a good sign that things are starting to happen. In Everett Sandheim’s murder, we’re seeing evidence that there was indeed another spirit involved, or at least that there’s one at the scene of the crime now. You’re going to have to go back and talk to that spirit, Maxie.”

  Maxie, who had been cruising around the room horizontally like Cleopatra on a barge, stopped dead in what would have been her tracks and stared at him. “Me?” she wailed. “Why me?”

  “For one thing, because you can get in and out of there without anyone knowing. And because we don’t know this ghost. It’s possible he is dangerous and violent,” Paul explained, his voice never betraying anything resembling emotion. This was strictly procedure. “There’s nothing he can do to you, so you are the logical choice to interview him as a witness.”

  “I’m not going back in there,” Maxie protested.

  “There’s no reason for you to be afraid,” Mom told her.

  “I’m not afraid. I’m grossed out.”

  “You’ll be keeping Alison out of danger, Maxine,” Mom went on. “That’s very important to me and to her father, and especially to Melissa.”

  Maxie pouted, but didn’t shake her head. “You’re not playing fair,” she said, and rose up very close to the ceiling, in order to make a hasty escape if any more responsibilities were flung in her direction.

  Paul shrugged that off and looked down at me (he had risen a bit when Maxie did, probably without thinking). “And you should see if Lieutenant McElone has the final medical examiner’s report yet,” Paul continued. I didn’t want to talk to McElone again if I didn’t have to, and I realized that I probably didn’t, because Phyllis would get it from her special “friend” at the ME’s office before McElone got it. I’d call Phyllis in the morning. “Then you should check to see if any of the other homeless people in town might have known Everett or had reason to wish him gone.”

  “Other homeless people?” I said. “In Harbor Haven? I don’t think we have any other homeless people. I figured Everett was the franchise.”

  “I’m sure there are at least a few,” Paul said. “The lieutenant will know who they are and where they can be found, as well.”

  “Man,” Maxie marveled, “you are so insensitive.” She started whirling in slightly tighter circles but not any faster.

  “Maxine,” Mom scolded.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Kerby.” A familiar refrain. She vanished into the ceiling.

  “Now,” Paul said as if nothing had interrupted him (it’s a coping mechanism for him), “about the Joyce Kinsler case.”

  Ugh. I really didn’t want to think about that one. “I think it’s too much for me,” I said to Paul. “You brought in her father and guilted me out, and that wasn’t fair. I don’t know what to do for him.”

  “I’ll tell you exactly what you should do.” My father’s voice came from behind me; naturally, I hadn’t heard him come in. “You go help that man find out what happened to his daughter.”

  I turned to face him. “Oh, Dad,” I whined. “You, too?”

  “Me especially,” he said. “Who would know better what it means to want to protect your daughter?”

  “You’ve managed, a couple of times,” Mom reminded him. She likes to build him up. It’s rough on Dad, being dead and everything.

  “It’s not the same thing,” he said. “Alison” (he only calls me “baby girl” when we’re alone with family; the man is sensitive), “Paul is going to tell you what you should do, and you’re going to do it, okay?”

  I couldn’t argue with my father even when he was alive. Now the level of guilt was exponentially higher, and he was playing it. “Okay,” I managed.

  “Good. Paul, I’ll leave it to you.” And Dad vanished up into the ceiling, probably to go watch Melissa sleep. He says he finds it comforting; I think he’s standing guard. My father was a successful handyman in his life, and in order to be successful, he had to deal quite a bit with clients. The ones he worked for loved him, and the ones he didn’t work for respected him. He had a good touch with people.

  That made it all the more incongruous that Dad really doesn’t like crowds. Even now, he comes around to my house after the guests are in their rooms and the daily group meetings in the kitchen around dinner are over. He sees Mom when she’s alone, goes to Josh’s paint store to sit in with a few of the old painters, living and dead, and
the rest of the time, he has a few places he likes to spend time thinking and looking at the ocean.

  The five of us in the kitchen was probably a little more than he was up for this time of night.

  I turned toward Paul. “Fine,” I said. “You’ve got the whole world conspiring against me. What is it I’m supposed to do about Joyce Kinsler?”

  “You need to talk to Helen Boffice,” Paul said. “Outline for her exactly what you intend to do, of course, leaving out the fact that we have a second client.” Paul likes to think of the ghosts we help out as clients, and on my polite days, I refrain from pointing out how they don’t ever pay me.

  “My client is Helen,” I told him now. “She’s the one who signs the checks.” This wasn’t one of my polite days. I’m pretty sure the last one was in late 2006. “What am I asking her?”

  “Exactly where she was when Joyce died would be a nice piece of information, but wait until late in the interview for that one.” Paul sometimes gets a little tilt-y when he’s thinking hard about a case, and now he was listing to his right, at an angle to the floor. It was just a little distracting, and with the second bowl of Edy’s (What? I was upset) going down a little rockier than the first, a little nauseating.

  “You want me to ask a potential murder suspect for her alibi at the time of the killing?” I asked. Mom looked concerned and took a spoonful of Edy’s for herself. Like daughter, like mother.

  He stopped, straightened himself (thankfully) and focused his attention on me. “Yes. Why?”

  “Nothing. Forget I brought it up. So if that’s what I’m saving for late in the interview, what do I ask to break the ice?”

  “Ah!” Paul said, pointing his finger in the air. “That’s the interesting part.”

  But he was interrupted by Maxie, who descended from the ceiling in her “I’m carrying something” trench coat. “You’ve got to see this!” she said, pulling my Stone-Age laptop from the coat. She drifted over to Paul and showed him the screen.

  It took a few moments. “Wow,” Paul said.