The Thrill of the Haunt

by E. J. Copperman

  “It was a good plan,” I said, extending my lower lip.

  “Assuming no one could read the labels,” he agreed. “Now. Stop stalling. Let’s hear it before your in-home reenactment of The Exorcist, which I really don’t want to miss. Right now, no more explanation about your motives. What do you need to tell me?”

  And I just couldn’t do it.

  I wanted to; I tried to. The words There are two ghosts in my house, and they’re real were right there in my frontal lobe. I just couldn’t force them out of my mouth. “I’m not sure I want to have any more children,” I said. Technically, it was true; I hadn’t given any thought at all to the idea of having another baby, especially since Josh and I weren’t within driving distance of that conversation. But it seemed like the kind of thing I might be holding back in order to avoid driving him away. Sort of.

  “I really don’t think that’s what this is about.”

  Damn. He actually knew me well; this was the price one pays. My mind, racing, didn’t clear the words before they exited through my mouth: “Um . . . I’m still stuck on what to do with the game room?”

  Josh let out a long breath. “And I so wanted to see that exorcism,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” But I knew what it meant. And I wasn’t happy about it.

  “It means, call me when you really want to have this talk,” Josh answered, removing his arms from my shoulders and turning back toward the driveway, where his car was waiting. “I’ll be happy to hear from you then.”

  I called his name a few times, but he kept on walking.

  • • •

  “The ceremony is about to begin,” Cybill said, and she swirled into the game room looking solemn and ecstatic at the same time.

  There was quite a crowd assembled to watch: Tom and Libby Hill had come down first, expressing a desire to get “good seats,” and they had indeed taken two of the chairs I’d put out and situated themselves almost in the exact center of the room.

  Harry and Beth Rosen had arrived home from dinner just after Jeannie and Tony had shown up with Oliver, who looked embarrassed in the sailor suit Jeannie had put him in, and with good reason. Jeannie grinned at me, secure in her belief that I was Mistress in the Art of Deceiving Guests into believing my house was haunted, and stayed at the back of the room, playing with Oliver near one of the bookcases.

  At some point, Marv Winderbrook arrived and went over to the side of the room, by the windows, looking confused. I could empathize.

  Melissa, Mom, Paul and Maxie had all entered at once from the kitchen, although the rest of the assemblage could see only Liss and Mom. I looked around for Dad, whom I had told to be in the house on the extremely unlikely chance that Cybill could actually do what she’d said she could, but he was nowhere to be seen. I’d have to sidle over to Mom at some point and find out if he actually was on the premises. If not, I’d feel compelled to shut Cybill down, and I had no cover excuse to use for that purpose.

  Maxie had reported it was unlikely Everett would be able to achieve mobility soon enough to get here, and while Paul had tried to summon Matthew Kinsler, he had not yet received an answer. I wasn’t sure whether he could leave a ghost voice-mail message.

  Lieutenant McElone had indeed arrived, dressed in plainclothes (as she usually was on the job anyway) and in her personal car to divert suspicion. But she stayed out on the porch, apparently operating under the mistaken assumption that the ghosts couldn’t go outside. She looked nervous enough to take up smoking but so far was restraining herself. At the moment, she was instead appraising the “note” left by my mysterious graffiti artist (whom I still suspected was Cybill) and moving her tongue back and forth on her front teeth.

  Phyllis Coates, looking for a good feature story even if I couldn’t unmask Everett’s killer, had arrived with her notebook and informed me she’d take down as much of what was said as possible. Great. Having a friend who runs a newspaper isn’t always an asset, but I’d invited her, fool that I am.

  Brenda Leskanik had not yet arrived. Maybe my powers of persuasion were not what I had imagined them to be. Or maybe Brenda had more to hide than simply some scarred-over pain involving her dead ex-husband and her possibly-less-dead son.

  Katrina Holm arrived a few minutes before the appointed hour. She looked tired, her eyes were a little puffy, and she clearly had to steel herself before walking into the room. But once inside, she showed no hesitance and said hello to me. She introduced herself to Mom, Melissa and a few of the others, though not to Cybill (who at that time was “clearing her mind” on one side of the room, a state achieved, apparently, by putting her fingers to her temples).

  I was about to make my way to Katrina to ask if she’d brought a photograph when the guests of honor, Helen and Dave Boffice, drove up at the last minute in a very sleek-looking but nondescript car that had probably cost more than my entire budget for on-site renovations this year, a far cry from the plain old Toyota Dave had been driving when I was following him. After a few moments, they tentatively came inside. Helen, in an incongruous hoodie and dark sunglasses that covered most of her face, looked like Lindsay Lohan out on yet another perp walk; Dave’s eyes were hooded and he assessed the room carefully. They stood as conspicuously as people can stand when trying not to be noticed, on the opposite side of the room from Jeannie and Oliver, near the French doors to the backyard, probably as a contingency plan in case I had cleverly brought in undercover police officers who looked like middle-aged tourists, a jolly mother, a contractor inspecting the crown moldings, an eleven-year-old girl, her grandmother and a baby. Little did they know the only undercover cop on the property was afraid to walk inside.

  As they passed me on the way in, Dave Boffice mumbled in my direction, “I have a gun.”

  I wanted, immediately, to get Melissa out of the room. I thought to say, “Nice way to prove your innocence, Dave,” but he was already past me and taking up his station at the far end of the den.

  Before I could get to Mom and Liss, however, Cybill was beginning her spiel.

  “I’ll need candlelight only,” she said. Before anyone could respond, she reached over and hit the light switch, and the game room went completely dark. I could hear a couple of the guests pull in sharp breaths, but almost immediately, a match ignited in Cybill’s hand, and she lit three candles I had placed on the covered pool table. She was a good showman—she had total control of the room instantly.

  I was trying desperately to think about the task at hand, about making a statement about the murders and getting Paul and Maxie to outdo themselves, if I could just get them to understand what it meant to me, if they would simply get it through their transparent heads that this was my house and my life and they were getting to be more of an impediment than a help.

  It’s possible I was also thinking a little bit about Josh at that moment and letting my feelings get the better of me. It’s possible. I’m not saying for sure.

  “This house is infested,” Cybill began. Swell. Now she would have my guests thinking about bedbugs in their rooms. Cybill was turning out to be an even greater threat to my business than I had anticipated, and the storm had already done enough. “There are undead spirits that have penetrated this house and endangered it.” That was simply inaccurate: Paul and Maxie weren’t undead; they were dead. That’s the opposite of undead, isn’t it? Did that mean I was undead?

  I shouldn’t have let Josh walk away. I should have blurted it out. Even if he thought I was crazy, that would be better than his thinking that I didn’t trust him. Dad had been right. Maybe I should call him.

  “Tonight we will find the source of this infestation,” Cybill went on. “We will root out the cracks in the foundation and seal them. We will rid ourselves of this plague and cleanse this house of its infection.”

  As she spoke, Kerin Murphy and four or five of her interchangeable minions arrived at the game-room entrance. Kerin folded her arms like Mr. Clean when he encountered a grime outbreak, looked smug—he
r go-to expression—and gestured for her posse to fan out and man the perimeter, which they did. I wasn’t sure what Kerin had in mind, but I could be reasonably sure I wasn’t going to be crazy about it.

  At least one killer in the room, and I was worried about the cast of Mean Girls: The Previous Generation.

  Maybe I could text Josh about the ghosts and he’d come back. Was that the kind of thing you could text someone? It seemed crass, somehow.

  This was Paul and Maxie’s fault, I decided. Mostly Maxie. If they hadn’t been in this house when I’d bought it, so much of my current difficulty simply wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have a PI license, certainly, and would not be involved in the investigation of two murders. Suspected killers—at least one holding firearms—would not be in the room.

  Of course, I also wouldn’t have found Dad again or probably wouldn’t have reconnected with Josh after all these years, but those incidentals didn’t occur to me at just that moment. It’s funny how thoughts are influenced by circumstances, isn’t it?

  Maybe funny isn’t the word.

  Cybill lit some incense sticks and placed them in a vase I’d given her (one that I didn’t much care about) to put in the center of a card table she’d asked me to set up in the middle of the room. “This scent will repel the spirits in the house,” she said. I couldn’t say it was doing much for me, either, but Paul and Maxie, watching with some fascination, didn’t seem especially repelled. Except that Maxie started to wrinkle her nose. Paul leaned over and whispered something to her; she nodded in agreement then looked at me. Unhappily.

  Cybill struck a dramatic pose: One arm bent at the elbow and drawn back, the other aimed at the ceiling as she craned her neck upward, like she was about to shoot an arrow into the sky. “This is a safe house!” she hollered. I noticed Libby Hill wince at the volume. With the candlelight in the room and the echo from the high ceiling, it did indeed create an eerie feeling. “We will tolerate no more interference from these evil beings!” She began to twirl slowly. “You are not welcome here! Be gone!”

  I’d actually gotten my phone out to text Josh to come back so we could talk honestly. I had typed “sorry” and hit the Send button when my mind caught what had just been said. Wait! This didn’t sound like a spell that would keep new ghosts out!

  “Cybill!” I said, breaking the mood and making everyone look at me (Melissa stared, alarmed by the tone the presentation had taken). “This is not what you promised!”

  I looked up. Paul and Maxie looked positively sickly; their usual transparent pallor slightly tinged with green it seemed from where I was standing. Paul looked at me and weakly murmured, “Do something.”

  “The house must be cleansed,” Cybill insisted. “The presence of these spirits is in opposition to all living beings who enter. They must be cast out.”

  “Stop! Now!” I advanced on her and walked through the crowd, ignoring her astonished expression. “I’ve been very clear about this—I don’t want you to get rid of the ghosts in this house!”

  Cybill turned and smiled at me and dropped her voice. “It’s okay,” she said, sotto voce. “You don’t have to put on a brave face for your business. This way, I can rid your house of these evil demons and you appear to be against it.”

  “I am against it!”

  Cybill nodded tolerantly at me. “Very good,” she whispered.

  Kerin Murphy stood forward among her crowd, with the most irritating smug grin I could imagine—and I’m pretty imaginative. She folded her arms and spoke loudly enough for everyone in the game room to hear.

  Clearly, this was the moment she’d been waiting for.

  “You see?” she said to the crowd, most of which looked perplexed. “She is the ghost lady!” Was that it? Kerin’s plan all along, to out me as a true believer and regain her stature in the community? It was sort of clever, in a really vile way.

  I saw Libby turn to Tom and mouth, “Who’s that?”

  “Not now, Kerin,” I said. I was too annoyed and, yes, panicking about losing the ghosts in my house—where was Dad?—to have time for her nonsense.

  “No! Not this time! You’ve been denying and denying and making me look like a fool because you insisted the ghost thing was just for business, but I know you believe! You made me look like the crazy one. You’re the crazy one, Alison!”

  Tom and Libby Hill looked fascinated, but the Rosens, in the opposite corner, seemed more unnerved; they were looking toward the hallway as if trying to figure an escape route. Dave Boffice leaned over and said something to Helen, who put her hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle. Lovely. The suspects were finding me amusing.

  Cybill simply went back to chanting. “I cast out these spirits. I cast out these spirits. I cast out these spirits . . .”

  Paul’s eyes widened and he actually seemed to double over in pain.

  “No!” I shouted at Cybill. “Stop now! You’re hurting my friends!” Before Kerin, who looked positively jubilant, could bray her victory to the heavens, I turned toward her. “Fine! You want me to say it? There are two ghosts in this house, their names are Paul and Maxie, and they’ve never done you or anyone else an ounce of harm. They’ve become my friends, they watch my daughter, and they help me with my business. So what exactly is your problem, lady?”

  Phyllis was in the corner, furiously taking notes. The feature article in the next Chronicle was a sure thing whether I liked it or not, so I decided to like it.

  “You want me to say it?” I shouted to Kerin. “You want me to claim the title? Fine! I am the ghost lady!”

  Paul grinned and straightened up. Maxie, next to him, was still doubled over, but it was with laughter.

  “Oh, that was priceless!” she managed to cough out between guffaws. “I loved it!”

  “What?” I was so confused I could barely move. There was a murderer, maybe two, in the room, and I was losing track of my purpose here. I really had to focus.

  “It’s about time,” Paul said with satisfaction. “Do you feel better? I feel better.”

  I looked at Cybill, who had stopped chanting and was watching Paul with a grin. “I think we did it,” she said to him with a wink.

  “Did what?” I asked. I can be pretty dense sometimes.

  “Who are you talking to?” Jeannie asked. I chose to let that go by. She’d rationalize it later.

  “Your spirit friends wanted to be acknowledged,” Cybill explained. “They felt you were ashamed of them, and they had a need for you to take responsibility.”

  “You mean you two . . . you three . . . you were all in on it the whole time?” Okay, very dense.

  “I’m sorry, Alison,” Paul said. “But the point had to be made.” I made a mental note to kill him later, then realized someone had beaten me to it.

  “I’m confused,” Katrina Holm said. “Is this about Joyce’s murder?” Helen Boffice’s head turned and she sat down, but I couldn’t see her face to get a reaction.

  My attention was then diverted to the game-room entrance, where Josh Kaplan stood, looking a little wary. I wasn’t sure when he’d gotten there.

  I had three priorities: getting Melissa out of the room, getting a picture from Katrina, and getting revenge on my resident ghosts and Cybill.

  “So you see!” Kerin wasn’t off her soapbox yet. “She admits it! She likes living with these daemons!”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. “Daemons?” I said out loud. “It was you! You defaced my property!”

  Busted. Kerin’s eyes widened, and she tried to find a way out. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I told her, advancing. “You painted those crazy slogans on my house.”

  “It was just a little graffiti,” she tried. “I tagged your house . . . a little.”

  “It was thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, and I will be suing you.” Okay, so that was an exaggeration, but she didn’t know that.

  “I did it to get even.” Kerin had clearly decided to be offensi
ve in her defense.

  Enough was enough. I glanced at the Boffices, just to be sure they weren’t going to bolt, then advanced on Kerin. “Get even for what? I was never trying to do anything to you, Kerin. You weren’t a significant enough presence in my life for me to think about how my friends were affecting you. So please tell me, why exactly are you so hell-bent on revenge? Because I found out about your little fling, and your husband still hasn’t forgiven you? Because you’re not the big cheese in the PTSO anymore?”

  “You destroyed my life!” she spat.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You made sure that article ran in the newspaper!” Kerin countered.

  “No, that was me,” Phyllis chipped in, not looking up from her notebook.

  “It was her fault!” Kerin said, but her posse was looking less convinced than before.

  “Did I cheat on your husband?” I asked.

  “You . . .” Kerin just trailed off. But her hands were unmistakably taking on a resemblance to talons, and that couldn’t be good.

  She ran at me, but Maxie had seen that coming and picked up a tray I’d brought in to serve drinks. She held it up at the last second, and Kerin ran face-first into it. It wasn’t hard enough to do any serious damage, but I’d bet Kerin might need a consultation with a cosmetic surgeon about a deviated septum in the next few days.

  “Now, that was a good trick,” Tom Hill said.

  “Thank you,” I said to Maxie.

  “What are friends for?”

  This threatened to go on indefinitely, but there was a gasp from the entrance. Brenda Leskanik stood there, her face as white as a sheet. She looked like she’d just seen a ghost. And she was one of the few who hadn’t.

  “Randy!” she shouted. Everyone in the room turned to look at her. Except Dave Boffice, who was directly opposite his mother and appeared to be completely stunned.

  Standing next to him, Helen Boffice stared at Brenda, took off her dark sunglasses—which had seemed pretentious to me to begin with—and stared.

  From across the room came another wheeze of shock, the sound of someone who had been punched in the gut. I turned to look in the direction of the sound and saw Katrina Holm looking like she’d just seen . . . you get the idea. But this time it was literal.