Be My Ghost

by Carol J. Perry

  “I get paid for both jobs, you know,” Elizabeth said.

  “Of course. I understand,” Maureen said.

  “Okay. I’ll give you a crash course. You know how to run a credit card? Operate a cash register? The reservations are all handled on computer. You good at that?”

  Yes, Maureen could handle all of that. She learned where the room keys were kept and how they were coded. The souvenir keys, displayed on the desk, were two dollars each. She decided she’d work on the menus later in her office. She picked up one of the plastic-coated menus along with a pile of daily specials menus, which were printed on copy paper.

  The police tape had been removed from the porch and replaced with a couple of sawhorses and an UNDER REPAIR sign. Maureen wished the UNDER REPAIR sign were true. So many things needed fixing—but not at that moment.

  Some of the local papers had supplemented the reports of Wilson’s death with the old ghost stories and had attracted guests from nearby cities from Tampa to Orlando. At least four of the new ones claimed to be ghost hunters and brought with them an assortment of strange apparatuses.

  The two New Yorkers had returned and requested Wilson’s old room. Maureen denied the request because the police hadn’t finished with their investigation. Maureen thought of the storage locker where she’d learned that guests’ abandoned belongings were stored. If no one showed up to claim Wilson’s worldly goods, would they wind up there too? When she had some time, Maureen intended to inventory the contents of the place. But like other plans—that one would be shelved for later.

  She soon found that being in the lobby with the increase in business left her in a position to overhear a good many conversations. It was an interesting perspective. Some of the ghost hunters had fans among the other guests. She saw copies of Got Ghosts? and Haunted Times being autographed. A television producer called and asked permission to film inside the inn. Maureen denied the request. “We want our guests to enjoy the inn’s unique old Florida charm. We feel that the television cameras would be obtrusive.”

  Elizabeth agreed with the decision. “We sure don’t need nosy reporters running around in here talking about murder. Anyway, Officer Hubbard hasn’t found any evidence of poison anywhere in our immaculate kitchen, so he’ll be looking elsewhere to place blame for that man’s death.”

  Maureen remembered the five reasons for death she’d heard from Hubbard: natural death, accident, homicide, suicide, or judicial execution The first and last reasons could safely be eliminated, but the middle three were still in play.

  “By the way, Ms. Doherty,” Elizabeth interrupted that unpleasant train of thought. “Do you have any changes in mind for the annual Halloween celebration?’

  “Changes? Halloween?” Maureen frowned. “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”

  “Really? It’s kind of a big deal in Haven.” Elizabeth’s glance was somehow both polite and condescending. “I was just about to send George over to our St. Petersburg warehouse storage locker to pick up some decorations. Why don’t you tag along and maybe you could attend to that part of it anyway?”

  “All right,” Maureen agreed, thinking of the ten years of creative input she’d had helping to plan decorations for every holiday for a six-story-tall, city-block-wide department store. “Anything else I could help with?”

  A raised penciled eyebrow. “I’ve already ordered posters, flyers, and such. You might want to take a peek at the advertising schedule. There’ll be the full-page ad in the Times, of course—and Penelope liked to use radio. I’m thinking of TV this time too.”

  Maureen’s eyes widened. “TV? Radio? What’s our budget for this?”

  “Budget? Oh, just a tad more than last year, I should think. Not a lot more.”

  Maureen thought of the spreadsheet the lawyer had given her. The business was already bleeding money. “Does the whole town of Haven take part in the celebration?” she asked.

  “Well, sure. Everybody decorates—has special events. The boulevard is like a big street fair! Farmers’ Market. Jack-o’-lantern carving. Costume contests. Kids’ parties. People come from all over.”

  “I mean, do all of the businesses chip in for the expenses? The advertising?” Maureen wondered.

  “Oh no. We’ve always taken care of that.”

  Maureen shook her head. “I’d like to see the figures before you commit us to any contracts.” Bartlett’s of Boston had always kept meticulous figures of every promotion.

  Elizabeth did not look pleased. “I suppose so. When I get time, I’ll look them up.”

  “Today,” Maureen spoke firmly, wondering what the cost of an off-property warehouse would be. “What time will George leave for the warehouse? I’d like very much to go along and attempt an inventory.”

  Elizabeth’s laugh was short. “Good luck with that! Penelope kept everything. You’ll see. I’ll have George call your cell. Should be within the hour.”

  Maureen took Finn back up to the suite via the elevator, filled his water dish, and changed into jeans and a Boston Celtics T-shirt. That warehouse sounded as though it might be pretty messy. She picked up the menus and took the stairs down to suite twenty-seven and printed out some simple generic inventory sheets. She’d deal with the menus later.

  George parked the late-model Ford pickup with HAVEN HOUSE INN emblazoned in large letters on both sides—in front of the inn as promised. Maureen waited at the curb, briefcase armed with inventory sheets, pens and pencils, cell phone, bottled water, and canvas gloves, wondering as she climbed into the passenger seat how much the truck had cost.

  “Glad to have you aboard, Ms. Doherty,” George said. “Hardly anybody else around here is brave enough to come with me to the warehouse.”

  “Brave? Why? Do you drive too fast?”

  “Naw. I’m a good driver. See, all that stuff used to be crammed into suite twenty-seven before they made it into an office. Even Elizabeth won’t go near it.” He grinned “Afraid of the ghost. All of ’em. They won’t admit it, but that’s why. Molly’s been there with me a couple of times, but she’s not crazy about it.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard the whole story about whatever or whoever the man is that’s supposed to be haunting my office,” she said.

  “No kidding? You really want to hear it?”

  “Of course I do. Everybody is so hush-hush about it, I haven’t dared to ask how the story got started.”

  “Strange thing is, as far as we know nobody ever died in there.”

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Maureen realized that Lorna Dubois had died down the street at the playhouse, but she haunted the inn, and probably Billy Bedoggoned Bailey hadn’t died at the inn either.

  “Okay. Here’s how I heard it. Seems this guy and girl checked into the inn. It was sometime in the seventies I think. Suite twenty-seven. Mr. and Mrs. John Smith, they said—yeah, I know, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, right? Anyhow, people in the rooms nearby heard a woman crying that night—real sad crying. Then everything got quiet. The woman went downstairs later that night and drove away. Next morning the housekeeper cleaned the room, made the bed.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “But both the man and woman were gone. Left their toothbrushes and everything.”

  “I suppose Ms. Gray tried to find them—to return the belongings?”

  “I suppose she did. But they’d used a fake name, fake address. Even the license plate number was fake. They were both just gone,” he said. “Just flat out disappeared.”

  “Creepy,” Maureen said. “Did the police investigate?”

  “Nothing to investigate,” he said. “They’d paid for the suite in advance. No law broken. Ever since, a lot of the guests who slept in that room said they saw him—John Smith—come out of that closet in your office. He stood over them, just staring. Sometimes he sat on the bed, touching them.”

  “Creepy,” she said again, meaning it. “Really creepy. I’m almost sorry I asked.”

  “Yeah. There are different stories about t
he ghost. Some people said the guy was crying for his mother. He sat on the bed and whispered, ‘Mother, Mother.’ ”

  “That would terrify me,” she said. “Really depressing.”

  “Yep. Most people said the place is depressing. They couldn’t take more than one night in there. Some said it was a feeling of evil and that the whole room turned icy cold sometimes.”

  “That reporter, Jake, from the newspaper said that. About the room getting cold.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” George said. “The suitcases they left—his and hers—are in the storage locker we’re going to. Nobody ever claimed them.”

  “Eeew. That’s even more creepy. Is the storage locker haunted too?”

  “No. Not that I know of anyway. But just the same, hardly anybody except maybe Sam actually wants to come over here with me.”

  “Well, if I can work in suite twenty-seven with no problems, I guess I can handle a storage locker.” Maureen hoped she sounded more confident than she felt.

  “Want to know a secret?” George winked.

  “Sure,” she said. “I love secrets.”

  “The only person who actually wanted to come over here with me was the dead guy.”

  “Conrad Wilson?”

  “Yep. Brought that fancy little camera with him too.”

  They’d pulled up in front of a huge, sterile-looking building surrounded by a chain-link fence. George pressed a key fob and a gate swung open. “We’re around back, where the really big lockers are. It’s a big one.”

  Maureen asked again, “Conrad Wilson came here with you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “Didn’t tell anyone. Not even Molly. He gave me a hundred bucks. Told me not to tell anybody. Was I going to say no? Anyway, it was a long time ago. At least a month. Didn’t have anything to do with him dyin’ like that. You aren’t going to tell anybody, are you? I only told you because you don’t put much stock in that ghost stuff either. I can tell.”

  Maureen thought about Gert’s story of money changing hands when Wilson wanted to see suite twenty-seven. There was more than one person who had access to the rooms and could use some extra money. “I don’t see any reason to mention it,” Maureen agreed, and it was true. However, she’d begun—with darned good reasons in black and white—to put at least some stock in “that ghost stuff.” Ghosts, real or imagined, were already impacting her bottom line. “After all,” she reasoned aloud, “Mr. Wilson was a reporter. Wrote for ghost magazines. He probably went lots of places around here.”

  “Everywhere,” George said. “Took pictures everywhere.” He stopped the Ford. “Come on. This is it.” She climbed out of the cab and watched as George unlocked a tall, broad door.

  “Looks like a two-car garage,” she said.

  “Bigger,” he replied. “Much bigger.” The door rolled up, revealing what appeared to be hundreds of large, oblong plastic boxes, stacked one atop the other all the way to the eight-foot-high ceiling of the place. There was a narrow path between the stacks leading deep into the darkened building. “Well?” he asked. “What do you think of it?”

  She paused, trying to think of an appropriate word. “Overwhelming,” she said. “It’s overwhelming. How do you find anything?” Plans for doing any sort of inventory that day evaporated. Her late benefactor had been a hoarder, no doubt about it, and this hoard was spectacular.

  “It’s not quite as bad as it looks,” he said. “See?” He pointed to a box marked BEACH TOWELS in neat block print. “Ms. Gray marked most of them with black marker.”

  “But—what are they all for?”

  “It’s all stuff folks left behind after they checked out of the inn.” He shrugged. “She figured they might come back for their things someday. Kept everything for years. Every once in a while, someone did come back and remember something they’d left and they’d be so happy to get it back—it just made Ms. Gray so pleased that she’d saved it for them—and it just kept piling up like that. Some of this junk has been here probably forty, fifty years.”

  Maureen shaded her eyes and looked up. “How do you get to the top of the pile?”

  “Ladder,” he said, pointing to an adjustable aluminum stepladder, leaning against the wall just inside the door. “Those Halloween decorations are right in the front row. Christmas ones too. Wait a sec. I’ll get them.”

  George seemed pretty agile for his age, and scampered up the ladder, pulling a box from the top and handing it down to Maureen. “These are the newest ones. Last year’s.” He stayed on the ladder while Maureen removed the cover and looked inside the box, revealing a jumble of pumpkins, black cats, witches, ghosts—the usual trappings of the holiday.

  “These are mostly plastic—modern designs. I was thinking of something more in keeping with the age of the inn—you know, the old-fashioned decorations.” Maureen couldn’t disguise her disappointment. “But I guess they’ll do, unless there are some older ones.”

  George moved the ladder a little deeper into the locker without climbing down. He just sort of hopped it along the narrow path, bracing himself against the piles of boxes. “Elizabeth always uses the newest ones, and adds a few more new ones every year. Like I told you before, Ms. Gray, she never got rid of anything. I’m willing to bet we’ve got decorations back to when she first came here.”

  “Do you know when that was?”

  “Back in the fifties is what I heard. I was here in Haven but don’t remember much about back then. I was just a kid. But Molly says she heard that Ms. Gray came here just about like you did. Somebody left her the place and a pile of money and she just ran it ever since.”

  Maureen smiled to herself. That’s not quite like I did, she thought. Not much left of that pile of money.

  “Could you find some decorations from back then?” she asked.

  “Sure. Might take a minute or two.”

  “Sorry to cause you extra work,” Maureen apologized.

  “No problem.” George’s smile was broad and genuine. “I get paid by the hour—and I guess you’re the one who’s payin’ me.”

  It was true. Maureen gave a brief salute in his direction. “Guess so. Any way I can help?”

  “Sure. Think of a way to get rid of it all. It was easier to get at when it was spread around in suite twenty-seven.”

  Maureen visualized her spacious new office, the accompanying even larger empty bedroom and bathroom, trying to picture the multitudes of boxes there. George moved the ladder deeper into the place. “What’s all the way in back there?” she asked. “More boxes?”

  “All the way back?” George waved a hand. “A wall full of suitcases, overnight bags, backpacks, that people left behind.”

  “Including the ones the Smiths left behind?”

  “Guess so. Ms. Gray put stickers with the people’s name on them on each one.”

  “A wall full of suitcases? And the inn didn’t—or couldn’t—return any of them to their owners?”

  “Oh sure. Ms. Gray sent letters, made phone calls. But you’d be surprised how many people use fake addresses. Like the John Smiths. Maybe they’re traveling with someone they shouldn’t be, you know?” George winked. “And some folks just don’t care about their stuff, I guess. It doesn’t happen so much these days, what with e-mail and cell phones and all. Most of the luggage back there is ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years old.”

  “Weird,” Maureen said. “I wonder what’s in them? Did you ever look?”

  “Not me.” He held up both hands. “Elizabeth might have but not me. Molly and me, we don’t ever do anything that might piss off any ghosts—just in case there are any. That’s why I’m not afraid to go in suite twenty-seven.” He frowned. “You haven’t seen anything in there, have you?” Without waiting for an answer, he plopped another plastic box on top of the one marked 1950S HALLOWEEN. “Here’s some sixties stuff. Think that’ll be enough? You’ll probably be buying some new things too. Got your costume yet?
”

  Maureen had used the same witch costume for years at the annual trick-or-treat promotion at Bartlett’s. She’d given it away with the winter clothes back in Saugus. “Not yet,” she said.

  “Ms. Gray’s costume is here. It might fit you. It’s really nice. It has a crown and a wand and everything.”

  Maureen had an immediate and unsettling mental picture of herself as an aging Disney princess. “I’m sure I can whip up something. Let’s take the fifties and sixties boxes, and maybe the unopened packages of paper plates and paper napkins out of last year’s box. No sense buying new ones.”

  “Why not take the whole box? You can pick out what you need. And do you want me to grab that costume? It’s right up front here in a dry cleaner’s bag.”

  “Okay. If you want to.”

  “No problem.”

  The two of them loaded the boxes and dry cleaner’s bag into the back of the Ford and headed back to the inn. There wasn’t much conversation. Maureen looked out the window at the passing Florida scenery and George concentrated on the afternoon St. Petersburg traffic. She had more to think about than Halloween decorations. Attorney Jackson’s frank assessment of this new business had been discouraging. The realization that she was now responsible for paying the bills bordered on terrifying. Was Elizabeth paying the bills from the desk in her cheerful little office—happily running through the remainder of Penelope Josephine Gray’s onetime fortune? If so, didn’t she realize that time was running out on the hayride?

  Maureen glanced around the Ford’s interior, noting the new-car smell. “Does the inn own any other vehicles besides this one?” she asked.

  George nodded. “Oh sure. There’s another truck—not as new as this one—Sam drives it, and Elizabeth’s big, black Lexus of course. And I think the inn bought the old beater that Ted uses for grocery shopping.” She’d have to take another look at those spreadsheets. Were there car payments listed there, along with goodness knows how many holiday advertising expenses for the whole town?

  George parked at a side entrance just past the far end of the porch. “Where do you want me to put this stuff? Up in your office—I mean suite twenty-seven? Or in your own place?”