She couldn’t speak. She just pointed at the newspaper on the floor. So I knelt down and looked at the open page.
“ ‘Property Taxes Go up Four Percent?’” I asked. “What do you care about property taxes?”
Maxie shook her head violently and pointed again. Wrong article, I guessed.
“ ‘Human Remains Identified’?” I read. “Is that it?” Maxie nodded. I started to read.
The article began, “The remains of a man found at Seaside Heights two weeks ago have been identified as those of Robert Benicio, an Asbury Park native reported missing for more than two years. County detectives now believe Benicio was a victim of foul play.”
I looked at Maxie again. Her chest was still heaving, but less severely than before. “Did you know this Benicio guy?” I asked.
She gulped a few more times, and nodded.
“Was he a friend?”
Maxie finally made eye contact and seemed to contain her emotion. Her voice only wavered a little when she said, “He was my husband.”
Three
I don’t know how long I stood there, staring. After regaining the power of speech, I managed to squeak out, “Your husband?!”
Maxie looked at me darkly. “You’re surprised?”
“You’ve never even mentioned that you were married. When I asked if there was anyone you wanted me to contact…”
She tilted her head, an admission that perhaps she was being imprecise. “Okay, so maybe we weren’t exactly husband and wife anymore. Big Bob and I only got married for a couple of days.”
I couldn’t decide whether to react to “Big Bob” or “a couple of days,” but I came down on the latter after a moment. “You were married a couple of days?”
Maxie waved a hand. “Yeah. I knew him from when I used to go to this biker place in Asbury Park, the Sprocket, maybe three years ago. And we took a bike trip to Vegas on his hog. Took a few days to get there. We went out the first night with a couple of his buddies, and the next morning, we woke up married. It was pretty funny, really.”
She grinned at me and the look of what must have been total befuddlement on my face, then she went on. “It was a real good joke for a couple of days, but then it was time to go home, so we got a divorce or an annulment or something. We went home, but we kept calling each other ‘wife’ and ‘husband,’ you know. Drove my mom crazy. She hated Big Bob.”
“Why?”
“Oh, you know mothers.” Maxie smiled, but the sadness didn’t leave her face. “He wasn’t good enough for me, he borrowed money, he hit me…”
I took in a breath, one with actual air in it. “He hit you?”
Maxie looked abruptly in my direction, as if she’d forgotten I was listening. “Just once. We were both drunk, and we had this fight. He didn’t hurt me, or anything, and he was real sorry afterward. It never happened again.”
“Never?”
She shook her head. “No, but there wasn’t any opportunity. It was after we were, you know, annulled or whatever, probably three years ago. I made the mistake of telling Mom, and she made me leave Big Bob the next day. I never saw him again.” Her eyes turned back toward the newspaper on the floor. “Until now.”
“So what happened to him?” I asked, pointing to the article.
“It says blunt trauma to his head,” Maxie answered. “I guess somebody got mad at him.”
“I guess so.”
Paul’s face appeared in the floorboards. He seemed like he was going to say something, then saw the expression on Maxie’s face. “What happened?” he asked.
“You don’t get to find out unless you come all the way up,” I said. “You’re creeping me out even more than usual.”
Paul levitated directly up to a “standing” position, crossing his arms. “Is this adequately normal for you?” I nodded. His innate politeness mixes with a general disapproval of my native language, which is Sarcasm. I grew up in New Jersey.
“Is something bothering you, Maxie?” he asked.
Maybe I could run interference for her. “Maxie might prefer not to tell—”
“Yeah, my ex-husband died,” Maxie told him. So much for needing my interference. “Somebody smashed in his head.”
“How long has he been dead?” Paul asked her. Paul, the private investigator in life, was unable to kick the unsolved-crime habit And he wasn’t above using me and my newly acquired PI license to supply him with his brain teasers.
“Longer than us,” Maxie answered. “I’m surprised we haven’t heard from him already.”
Paul tilted his head and raised an eyebrow in a “you never know” expression. “Not everyone who dies ends up like us,” he reminded her. “And it’s not like we mingle with everyone who does, either. Do you want me to see if I can locate him?” Paul has the ability to connect mentally, or something, with other ghosts. He and I call it the “Ghosternet,” but it doesn’t always work. For instance, he hadn’t reported any luck communicating with my father, and although my mother apparently sees Dad on a semiregular basis, she’d been no help to me in that area either.
“Try, would you?” Maxie said. She still looked shaken but was becoming herself again. “I’d like to know what happened to him.”
“As soon as I get a moment alone,” Paul told her.
“You’re a ghost,” I said. “You can have a moment alone whenever you want.”
“You and I still need to talk,” he said.
“I need to go tend to my child and my ex-husband before they work out a deal where he doesn’t have to pay for his room,” I told him. “We can talk later.”
“Alison…”
But I was already on the pull-down stairs. I needed to get past the embarrassing moment I’d had with Paul when he extended the jewelry box, and to be brutally honest, I didn’t want to leave Steven and Melissa alone long enough for her to start liking her dad better than me.
Now, by any analysis, Paul could have certainly followed me downstairs. He can, after all, levitate and move through solid objects, so it wouldn’t be at all a stretch to say he could easily have beaten me to the ground floor. But he didn’t. Maybe he understood that I needed a little time to regroup.
So I made it to the front room without any interference and found The Swine there, apparently holding court with some of the guests. He was sitting on the sofa with Don Petrone, a seventyish gentleman of impeccable manners and tailoring, wearing a tie and blazer even in this heat, while Lucy Simone, a rare non–Senior Plus guest, was sitting on the facing easy chair. Lucy, an attractive woman in her early forties, was gazing at The Swine with a smitten look. I could relate—it was easy to fall for Steven when he wanted you to do so.
Both guests, in fact, were listening to Steven with something approaching rapture.
Melissa, surprisingly, was nowhere to be seen. I’d have thought nothing could tear her away from her father. (I later discovered that she’d run back to her room to excitedly text her BFF Wendy about her dad being “back home.”)
He, of course, was grinning from ear to ear and gesticulating with enthusiasm. “So we check into the honeymoon suite, and Alison goes to take a shower,” he was saying. “I want to make the atmosphere as romantic as possible, but I can’t think of what to do. And I remember seeing movies where they spread rose petals in a path leading up to the bed. Now, I don’t know where you go to get rose petals, but then I see the hotel has provided us with a bouquet of, waddaya know, roses right there on the table. And I figure they won’t mind if I borrow a few. But here’s the thing…”
“The hotel left a bouquet of roses for you?” Lucy asked. “I haven’t seen so much as one flower since I checked in here.” Perfect; now they were comparing my humble little guesthouse to a four-star hotel.
Wait a minute—I’d been so caught up in Steven’s story that it hadn’t occurred to me it was a new one. I didn’t remember any rose-petal story associated with our honeymoon. In fact, our honeymoon had been essentially an overnight stay in a local motel because S
teven had needed to be at work the following day at the investment firm that would, eventually, steal his soul.
I sidled up behind the couch and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “This story isn’t about us,” I hissed. “You’ve got the wrong honeymoon.”
He ignored me and addressed his audience. “Well, Lucy, I’m willing to bet we spent a great deal more per night at that hotel than you’re spending here, and we didn’t get many of the extra touches that a guesthouse like this can offer.”
“Well, there are plenty of towels, I guess,” Lucy responded, seeing that The Swine wanted her to like the place. She’d accommodate if necessary. “But it’s spooky. Sometimes I think I hear things.”
Don Petrone gave me a look. He knew, as did all the Senior Plus guests, that the spirits in the house were not to be discussed with “civilians.” The seniors seemed to enjoy the exclusivity of the knowledge. I nodded just a tiny bit at Don.
I couldn’t see Steven’s eyes from behind the couch, but I could picture his expression. I hadn’t mentioned any ghosts to him, but I knew they were more or less the talk of the town in Harbor Haven. He might have heard something before he’d arrived.
Anyway, he didn’t react. And I didn’t give him time to finish his enthralling tale. “I’m sorry to drag him away,” I told the assemblage, “but my ex-husband and I have a lot to discuss.” I sort of grabbed The Swine by the arm and pulled him to his feet.
“Are you sure?” Lucy asked with great breathiness. “I wanted to hear the end of the story.” Or any other story he was selling, no doubt.
“Maybe later,” I said, but that didn’t seem to console her much.
I finally managed to extricate Steven from the room and into the kitchen, which the guests rarely entered because I don’t actually serve food. I barely cooked for Liss and me as it was.
“Okay, Melissa’s gone,” I told The Swine. “So will you finally tell me what’s going on? Why are you here?”
“I told you, Amee and I are taking a break, and I wanted to see you and Lissie.” The Swine even managed to look sincere while saying that. “Is there a problem with that?”
“There’s only one problem—I don’t believe you. Come on, Steven. You walked out of our lives almost two years ago, and we’ve barely heard from you since then. Now that your pre-midlife-crisis blonde has turned you out, all of a sudden you feel the need to fly three thousand miles and come visit unannounced? Or don’t they have working cell phones in California?”
Steven leaned back on the counter and did his best to look thoughtful. “I understand why you feel that way, Ally,” he said.
“Don’t call me ‘Ally.’” I can be petty when I have the opportunity. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true.
He held up his hands, palms out. “Absolutely, Alison.”
“And don’t patronize me. You understand why I feel this way? That’s big of you. You’re the reason I feel this way. I don’t trust you, I’m never going to trust you again, and I’m going to ask you one last time: Why are you here?”
The Swine bit his lower lip. “I missed Melissa. Okay? I’m a father, and I wanted to see my little girl. Is that really so far out of your experience with me that you can’t believe it?”
“Why didn’t you call ahead?” I figured I could poke a hole in his explanation.
“Because I thought you’d tell me not to come.”
Damn. He was right.
“Okay, so I would have told you not to come. Can you blame me? Did you see how you’ve disrupted her life? Can you see how she has that gleam in her eye now, that hope that Mom and Dad will get back together? How can you do that to her?”
Steven closed his eyes a moment, then took a deep breath. He looked at me. “Because maybe I have that gleam, too,” he said.
Four
“That’s what he said?” My best friend Jeannie Rogers, seven months pregnant and great at being astonished, was outdoing herself at the moment. “He wants to get back together with you?”
We were walking from our favorite bakery café, Stud Muffin, and heading toward the neighborhood greengrocer, Veg Out. I needed a few things for a salad I probably wasn’t going to make tonight, and Jeannie wanted to get in her walking for the day, determined as she was to gain only baby weight and no Jeannie weight. Having given birth ten years earlier, I was perhaps a bit skeptical about her chances of that, but I was grateful for the company, since I needed to vent to someone, and telling my mother about Steven’s return was not high on my to-do list. Luckily, Steven had taken Melissa to the boardwalk in Seaside Heights in his latest attempt to convince her that he was the good parent out of the two, so I had a good few hours (between the randomly scheduled spook shows, today to include a hideous substance—rubber cement, which rubs off easily—slithering down the walls) to do my venting.
“He didn’t say those words exactly,” I answered. “But he was certainly delivering that message. What do you think I should make of it?”
“What do I think?” Jeannie replied. “I think you shouldn’t have let him back into the house when he showed up. I think you should boot him out before he gets a chance to hurt you again. I think you should leave him alone in a room with Tony and come back after we’ve had a chance to clean up.”
As we crossed the street, I saw two men walking away from us into the intersection. They were semitransparent. A car passed through them. This ghost thing was getting to be routine; I barely even started at the sight, and Jeannie didn’t notice my reaction at all. I was getting to be a pro, even though Mom and Melissa insisted I was capable of seeing only about 20 percent of the ghosts floating among us on a daily basis. But I thought they were just being spirit snobs.
“Let’s keep your husband out of this situation, and out of jail,” I suggested. I had introduced Jeannie to her husband, Tony Mandorisi, after he and I had become friends when I was working at the home-improvement superstore. Tony is a licensed contractor, and helps me out on my more difficult projects around the house. Although we were still working on finding a practical means of access to the attic.
“I just can’t believe you let him back into your house,” Jeannie said. Jeannie is a wonderful friend who doesn’t know when to quit.
“Technically speaking, he’d never been in that house before,” I pointed out. I know when to quit, but that doesn’t mean I will when I should.
“Either way,” Jeannie said. Don’t feel bad; I don’t know what it meant, either.
We probably would have gone on for a good deal of time, but we walked by the office of the Harbor Haven Chronicle, the local weekly newspaper, and Phyllis Coates, the owner/publisher/editor/entire staff of the paper, opened the door and called to me.
Phyllis and I have known each other since I was a thirteen-year-old delivery girl for the Chronicle. She seems to think of me as her protégé, and I think of her as a good old friend. Phyllis went into the newspaper business when it still wasn’t quite thought of as respectable for a woman, and has lived it on her own terms. I respect that. Also, she always knows everything that goes on before anybody else. It can get a little unnerving.
“Alison,” she said now, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand and some unedited copy in the other. “I hear your ex has come back to rekindle the marriage.”
See what I mean?
“He’s just here to visit Melissa,” I insisted before Jeannie could offer an opinion. “He’s not staying, and we’re not rekindling anything.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“Maybe you need a hearing aid,” I suggested.
Phyllis laughed. “More like I have to go back and check my sources,” she said. “Hey, mind if I join you two for a bit? I need to get out of the office for twenty minutes every six hours, or my doctor says I’ll die of stagnation, or something.”
She fell into step with us as we headed up the street.
“So what’s going on in town?” Jeannie wanted to know. Jeannie is a dedicated, serious gossip, and admires Phyllis
for her ability to get to the truth and her willingness to pass it along.
“The usual stuff,” Phyllis answered. “Mayoral election coming up in November, so the boards are going nuts. Planning, assessors, schools—you name it. They all find stuff to talk about when the politics in town starts to heat up. Everybody thinks they’re a big shot.”
Jeannie looked disappointed. She prefers something a little more lurid. “No sex scandals?” she asked.
Phyllis shook her head. “It’s summer, honey,” she explained. “Everybody’s too busy trying to make a buck because we were smart enough to start a town near the only beaches in the country that make you pay to get on.”
It’s true—New Jersey’s beaches often require badges for admittance, and the badges require fees. Most other shore areas in the country don’t, but ours are more…beachy, I guess. Harbor Haven is one of the quieter towns on the beach (real New Jerseyans say “down the shore”), but if you want to swim near a lifeguard—and you should never go in without one nearby—you’re going to buy a badge.
“How about some crimes?” I asked Phyllis, just to cheer Jeannie up. If she couldn’t find out who was sleeping with whom, maybe Jeannie could hear about a rash of bicycle thefts or a genuine convenience store holdup. “There must be some crime.”
“Nothing,” Phyllis lamented. “It’s gotten to the point that I’m running a story on crime outside of town. Those bones they found in Seaside Heights. Sounds like a good mystery, anyway. Apparently, somebody bashed the poor guy’s head in.”
Big Bob, then, was making news miles from where he was found. I told myself there was no way I was going to get involved this time. I guess, technically, Maxie was a friend, but murderers tend to be violent, unpredictable people, and I find it comforting to stay away from such types.
“Ooh!” Jeannie perked up. “What’s that one all about?”
“A man named Robert Benicio was killed in Seaside Heights, probably about two years ago,” I said. “Like Phyllis said, someone hit him hard in the back of the head. His body was buried in the sand, but far from the water and down deep enough that the remains weren’t discovered until recently. Dental records and fingerprints confirmed his identity, and now the county prosecutor’s major-crimes division is looking into the killing.”
Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts Page 3