by Mary Bowers
“Any juice with that?”
“No thank you.”
She gave Benny a sly glance, then asked Ed, “Peanut butter for your toast?”
“Oh. You know who I am. No thank you. I suppose a protein would be a sound idea, though. Should I have an egg?”
“Absolutely,” Sally agreed gaily. “How do you want that?”
Ed, his mind bubbling over with questions for Benny, just wanted Sally to leave him alone. He was unable to cope with the question, and during the hesitation Benny told Sally, “Surprise him.”
“That’ll be fun,” she said, and finally she walked away.
“Now,” Ed said briskly, pulling his little recorder out of the satchel. He knew how to use his cellphone recorder, of course, but he also knew about the cloud, that nebulous collection of bubbling information so adored by hackers. Ed liked the isolation of his recorder; everything he put on it was trapped inside that little silver box, safe. Besides, he liked his little digital recorder It was part of his routine, it gave him a place to begin, and most of all, it was in his comfort zone. Holding it up to his face, he dictated the updated time, the name of the bar, and who was in attendance. At the end, he hesitated and added, “Pissarro investigation,” before setting it down between them on the table.
“Part of an investigation, am I?” Benny asked with a gentle smile. “Yeah, that was all pretty sad, what happened to Alan and Jessamine, and like everybody else, I know what happened, but I’m not really sure what happened, know what I mean?”
“In your opinion, was it murder or suicide? Off the record,” he added as Benny glanced at the recorder. “This is for my reference only.”
When Benny still hesitated, Ed reluctantly took the recorder and turned it off. “There. Now – ”
Once again he was thrown off his game by an intrusion from Sally.
She set plates down in front of both of them, Benny’s overloaded with a variety of breakfast meats and carbs; Ed’s very pretty with Eggs Benedict and a cup of diced honeydew melon and strawberries. Ed gazed at it.
“Surprised?” Sally said, “I had ‘em put your toast underneath the eggs, and since the eggs are round, I made it an English muffin. That looked kind of naked, so I had them put a sauce over it. I think I’ll call it Eggs Benedict. Whaddaya think?”
He looked up at her in wonder. “It’s perfect.”
“We aims to please.” She topped up their coffees and sashayed away.
“She’s very good at her job,” Ed said, sounding surprised. “Still, I wish she’d stop interrupting us. Uh, the Pissarro deaths. You were about to give me your opinion. Shall we proceed?”
Benny was eating steadily, and while he did, he managed to talk clearly and just as steadily.
“I like being around happy people,” he began. “I guess that’s why I always had a hard time warming up to Alan. Oh, he was a good neighbor, but he had his . . . let’s call them spells. There were days he just wouldn’t talk to you. Then there were days when he talked too much, and all of it whining.” He looked at Ed and tilted his head. “I like my life. I like being alive.”
He seemed to want a response to this generic statement, so Ed nodded and said, “Yes, being alive is good. I haven’t tried the alternative, so I have nothing to compare it to, though.”
Benny smiled warmly. “Yes, life is good. But I don’t think Alan Pissarro ever felt that way. He seemed to feel that something good was going on around him all the time, and he wasn’t included. He seemed to resent it. I always wondered if he blamed Wendy – his first wife – because people never seem to blame themselves for what goes wrong in their lives, do they? They always want to look for somebody else to blame, and Wendy was there, if you know what I mean. I figured when he traded up to Jessamine, he thought she’d be the ticket to the good stuff, and of course you can’t expect somebody else to make you happy. It’s not their job. It’s yours. You choose. You want to be happy? Go ahead. You want to be unhappy? If you do, nobody else will really care; you’ll only be hurting yourself. Everybody else just steps around you and goes on with their life, because what else can they do? There you are, determined to be unhappy, and they don’t want to be. Alan couldn’t seem to figure that out. So if you’re asking me if I think Alan killed himself, I hate to say it, but I think maybe he did. And the way it all happened, Jessamine might have blamed herself, even if she was just trying to stop him. Did it eat at her? Did she dwell on it and think she was seeing his ghost and get that Dobbs guy into the house to push the idea until she just about went crazy? I don’t know. But if she did, she might just have walked into the ocean that night and decided not to come out again. Life wasn’t fun anymore. That’s what I think, but you have to understand, I don’t know. Divorce puts people on opposite sides. I live close to Wendy, so I was on her side. I never saw Alan much after that.”
“Yes, I appreciate that.”
“Why aren’t you eating?”
Startled, Ed looked down at his plate and began cutting into the Eggs Benedict. It tasted so good, he almost wished he’d begun to eat while it was still hot. After that thought, he forgot about the food again.
“Michael Utley mentioned that you had seen Jessamine and Wendy talking privately at a party. Do you know what they were talking about? Perhaps Wendy was berating her for flirting with Alan?”
“I don’t know. Wendy was doing most of the talking, though. No, I don’t think she knew about the affair yet. She would’ve been upset in a whole different way if that was it. She looked like she was describing something that had scared her, not something she was furious about. It was intense enough that everybody else at the party sort of edged away from them.”
Ed probed for details, but Benny seemed to be one of those rare people who are able to say “I don’t know,” instead of embroidering. Finally, Benny said, “Listen, you’ll get a lot more solid information if you just go straight to the horse’s mouth, know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“Talk to Wendy. She knew Alan better than anybody, and she can tell you exactly what she was talking to Jessamine about at the party.”
Ed was taken aback. He began to talk in half-syllables while Benny pulled out his cellphone and placed a call.
“Hey, Wendy?” Benny said, “I got a guy here who’s trying to figure something out. Now just stop me right here if you think I’m out of line, but there’s no point in all these people dancing around you instead of talking to you. Would you be willing to be interviewed about, you know, Jessamine? He’s that investigator she tried to hire a while ago. He’s worried she’s haunting or something. Actually, I’m not sure what he wants, but there’s a lot of weird talk going around, and you don’t want this kind of thing getting out of hand. So what do you say, would you be willing to see him? His name is Edson Darby-Deaver. Yeah, that ghost-hunting guy. You would? Good. I’ll bring him over in ten or fifteen minutes. Now you’re sure you don’t mind? Thanks. See you soon.”
He hung up, told Ed, “There. Now wasn’t that easy?” while Ed stared at him open-mouthed.
“Is she a hot-tempered person?” was all Ed could find breath to say.
“Volcanic,” Benny said. Then he cracked a smile. “Naw, she’s okay, she’s just been through a lot, and she’s not shy about talking about it. She talks about it all the time, to anybody who’ll listen. That’s why I thought she wouldn’t mind me bringing you over. She actually sounds excited about meeting you.”
Ed straightened. “I’ve been forbidden to contact his mother by my client. He’s unusually protective of her, it seems.”
“You’re right about that, but if Kent kicks up a fuss, just tell him it was all my idea and his mom said to bring you over, she wanted to meet you. She’s a nice lady, Ed. A real lady. Don’t worry, she’s not going to go off on you. You about done there?”
Ed looked down at his Eggs Benedict, with the one bite missing. Quickly, like a human vacuum, he ate the rest of the meal thinking it had tasted a lot better when it
had at least been warm. Nevertheless, one needs one’s protein.
* * * * *
To Ed’s discomfort, after Benny introduced him to Wendy Pissarro he said he had some things to do and left them alone together.
It was a coup, being able to interview the wronged woman in the love triangle where everybody else was dead, but Ed felt squeamish about it.
The neighborhood where Benny and Wendy lived was a step down from Paradise Island, but a step up from the one Ed lived in. Since he had recently inherited a beachfront house, he was aware of real estate prices, and he put Wendy’s house at around $800,000. Not a shack, by any means, and only a block from the beach, but no second kitchen on another floor of the house.
Wendy Pissarro was small and dark and was aging gracefully, but she was a complete contrast to Jessamine, who had been triumphantly younger, blonder and more voluptuous. She seemed friendly enough, but the first thing out of her mouth once they were seated in the living room was, “So what did that bitch tell you about me?”
Ah. Ed understood why she had agreed to see him. It made everything easier somehow.
“She believed,” Ed began primly, “that her husband was haunting her. She had evidentiary anecdotes, but they were not convincing. My assignment was to have been to put his spirit to rest.”
“And out of her hair. Well, bravo, Alan, at least you did one thing right. You came back and hounded that bimbo into her grave, and thank you very much for that, you bastard.”
Her venom was throwing Ed off his normal routine, and he tried to remain steady. “Do you mind if I record this?”
“Bring in a camera crew and get it from three different angles; I’ve got nothing to hide. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
She began a tortuous history of her marriage, motherhood, even waitressing at The Big Catch until Alan and Roy managed to get the place on its feet. “He would have been nothing without me. I helped him get the place up and running, helped him manage the place, I even did the bookkeeping for the first few years, until Kent was born. I stuck with him through the lean years, and then he dumped me for a little gold-digger. Well, all I can say is the damn fool got what he deserved.”
She was becoming teary-eyed, and Ed nodded, tried to look sympathetic, winced and otherwise tried to respond appropriately, but he was having a harder and harder time maintaining his own composure. Crying women panicked him. Even worse, she wasn’t letting him get any questions in, so finally he interrupted her.
“I believe that previous to your husband’s, um, indiscretion, you had been friends with Jessamine.”
“Who told you that?”
“It was described to me how you had intimate conversations with her at cocktail parties.”
“Sez who?”
While Ed groped for a vague response so he could avoid naming either Michael or Benny, she blinked and said, “Wait. I think I know what you’re talking about. The Summer Cotillion at the Lightner Museum. Fundraiser, of course. The Lightner is an old Gilded Age hotel, and we got to talking about whether or not it was haunted. It’s the kind of place that should be. She asked me if I’d ever seen a ghost, and I told her I had.”
“You had?” Ed didn’t want to get side-tracked, but he had a responsibility to his profession to log any encounters reported to him. “May I hear about it?”
“It was my grandmother. She sent me a dream about blueberries. She was Old World Slovak, and she believed that if she dreamed about blueberries, something bad was going to happen. I know that doesn’t make sense, but that was grandma.”
Ed was nodding. “I’m familiar with the concept. Blueberries as a harbinger is new to me, but in the context of a dream, they merely represent – ”
“Right,” she said, waving the harbingers away. “What I was telling her was that I actually saw my grandmother’s ghost after she died. She came to say good-bye to me. I don’t believe all that nonsense about visions and dreams, but I know my grandma when I see her, and that was her. I couldn’t help but be worried when I had a dream about blueberries myself. I had never dreamed about blueberries before. Who dreams about blueberries? The whole thing got to me, and after a couple of glasses of champagne and tugging at that stupid dress all night because the straps kept falling, and Jessamine saying it would be so cool to see a ghost in the hotel, I told her, ‘You wouldn’t say that if you ever actually saw one,’ and I told her about my grandmother coming to say good-bye to me.”
“I see. Tell me about that.”
“That’s it. I wasn’t there when she died. About three weeks later I woke up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, and there she was, standing by the side of my bed, looking down at me. When I opened my eyes, she smiled at me and faded away, and then I heard her voice – her voice – saying , ‘Good-bye, Winnie.’ She used to call me Winnie. That’s it. It was all she wanted, I guess; just to say good-bye.”
“And yet she still sends you dreams about blueberries, to warn you?”
“Just the one time. It was about three weeks before Alan told me he wanted a divorce. When I had that dream, I knew something bad was going to happen, and then it did. And how stupid was I? The only person I told about the dream was the person who was about to ruin my life, Jessamine. She knew what I was talking about, I bet.”
“How did she seem to be taking it? Was she amused? Smug?”
Wendy stopped herself. “I’d like to say she was, because Alan must have already told her that he was going to leave me, but it didn’t seem like that, even now that I look back at it. She seemed . . . afraid. Like me. Like my fear was making her afraid, too. Do you think the bitch actually had a conscience? Or maybe she realized my dream was a bad omen for all of us?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t mention it at our interview. Did you think she was a superstitious person? Did she imagine things?”
“All in all, I’d say yes. She was excited about all the talk about the hotel being haunted, but when I told her about my dream, and that it meant something bad was going to happen, she seemed really worried about it. So what did she say to you at that interview? Did you record it, like you’re recording me now?”
He reluctantly said yes.
“I want to hear it. When can I come to your office? I’m free this morning; let’s go there now.”
“I don’t think . . . it wouldn’t be . . . I’m very busy at the moment. I won’t have any time today at all. I need to prepare for a special event. It’s Halloween, you know.”
“Oh, that’s right. You’re busy with my husband’s ghost. Tiffany told me. She’s nervous about it. I guess in a way I am too. Alan wasn’t the kind of man to simply fade away without giving holy hell to somebody first, and now that he’s done with Jessamine . . . I’m coming with my children to the séance tonight, by the way. Tiffany wouldn’t admit this, but she wants me there for moral support – or mommy support. She really believes something might happen. I think Kent does too, though he doesn’t like to admit it. He’s the strong, silent type, and usually he just ignores things, but he’s not ignoring this, so he must think there’s something to it. So I’m coming tonight, and you can give me a copy of your recording of Jessamine’s interview then.”
“No no no no no no no,” Ed said, and he would have gone on that way for the next half-hour if she hadn’t firmly said, “Yes yes yes, I’m coming. It’s all arranged.”
“The medium would not consider holding a sitting with such a hostile presence in the room. I already informed her that your children were coming and she balked. The ex-wife? It would be madness. Chaos. At the very least it would deter your husband’s revenant from coming anywhere near us, and the whole séance would be pointless.”
Wendy Pissarro was complacent, though, and she cut through his protests without turning a hair. “I already cleared it with Roy. It’s his gig, right? He says I can come if I want to. I even offered to chip in half the fee. So I’m a paying customer, and you can’t keep me away. We’re all going to be there at 10:00. I’m interested to see that
damn palace he bought for her on Paradise Island, the son-of-a-bitch.”
“Oh dear,” Ed said in the voice of a dying dove.
Chapter 17
Ed couldn’t bring himself to tell Taylor over the phone, so he drove straight to Cadbury House after he managed to get out of Wendy Pissarro’s house. He found Taylor in The Cattery, playing with an elderly Persian, one who would probably live out her days in the shelter since people usually wanted kittens, not older cats with looming vet bills.
“It’s my own fault for being so greedy,” Taylor said when Ed told her the whole Pissarro family was coming to the séance. “If I’d just asked for the going rate, he wouldn’t have let her in. Obviously, he only told her she could come because she offered to split the fee with him. What was I thinking?”
“You were thinking about creatures like that one,” he said gently. “You didn’t want the money for yourself. Don’t feel guilty. As you said, you can control the situation tonight. You’re good at things like that. It’s just one more attendee, that’s all.”
“It’s the attendee,” Taylor said, putting the Persian aside, getting up and brushing off the seat of her jeans. There was a scattering of white fur on her pantlegs and she ignored it. “Hell’s fury on wheels, and if I say her husband is in the room, she’s going to cut loose on him. We’re going to hear stuff that’ll blister the paint off the walls.”
“I’ve been warning you, you need to take this more seriously.”
She looked at him as if she were hearing him for the first time. They exited The Cattery, and a late-October wind riffled her short blond hair. She stood still for a moment, letting the breeze wash over her. Then she looked back at Ed.
“How many people does that make it now?”
He mentally counted. “Seven, including you.”
“Isn’t that too many?”
“It’s a crowd, all right, but that’s not what bothers me. It’s the composition of the crowd that’s worrisome. A client with questionable motives, a bereaved family that doesn’t get along with the client, and a novice investigator, Dobbs. Even with seasoned pros like you and me there, it’s going to be hard to keep things from getting out of hand.”