Inspector Specter, page 3
My lip curled a little bit; I didn’t agree with his assessment. “I knew Detective Ferry a little, Paul. He wasn’t my favorite person on the planet, but I’m not happy he’s dead.” I walked back inside to the air-conditioning.
Paul scowled, following. He doesn’t like it when I call him out on things, especially when I’m right. “That wasn’t what I was saying,” he said.
Now I scowled, and for the same reasons. “Well, let’s move on,” I said magnanimously. “Can you get on the Ghosternet and look for the detective?”
“He’s not gonna be there,” Maxie kicked in. I hadn’t even realized she’d come inside with us—she doesn’t care if it’s a hundred degrees out. “Like you told the police lady, he hasn’t been dead long enough.” Maxie doesn’t mind the word dead as long as it’s not being applied to her.
“Nothing is uniform,” Paul told her. “We don’t know that I can’t find him. It’s all I can do, anyway. I’ll get on it immediately. I will let you know if I get a message back.” (That’s what he calls the communication he gets from other users of the Ghosternet.) Without another word, Paul sank through the floor of my front room to the basement, which is where he prefers to commune telepathically with those of his own kind.
Knowing my guests would likely be coming back from the beach shortly, I decided to go clean up the game room, where I’d been working, since there wouldn’t be enough time now to finish stripping the white paint off the paneling. Maxie followed me, which wasn’t astonishing but is unusual. She doesn’t often seek out my company and relishes time she can spend on the roof, by herself.
I walked into the movie room (as I’d decided to call it) and assessed its condition. The room was a long rectangle with windows on two sides and hadn’t seen much use as a game room. Maxie had suggested turning it into a home theater, while Paul actually thought we should turn it into a “consulting room” for the detective business (I shot that down in a hurry), so obstinately I’d decided to make it a fitness center for the guests—until I asked a few and discovered they had no interest, combined with the high cost of the equipment I’d need to buy. And my father, a former handyman, agreed with Maxie.
As usual, I realized that Maxie, who’d been an interior designer when she was alive, had actually had the best idea first, and subjected myself to her endless crowing when I announced my change in plans. I sold the pool table on Craigslist, and now the space was becoming a movie room.
First step: Strip off the white paint I’d used to cover the paneling because it made the room too bright for viewing movies, especially during the day. And because it was just ironic enough to fit my life. Paint on, paint off. Maybe the first movie we’d show would be The Karate Kid.
Maxie stopped at the door and considered. “How dark are you going to go on the stain?” she asked.
“Light,” I said. “Just not a real high-gloss finish, because I don’t want glare and I don’t want it to be reflective.” I started to clean up the site, first removing the can of paint thinner. It was extra hot in this room because I had some windows open to reduce the fumes.
“Probably a good idea,” she agreed. Ah, so I was going to get the reasonable Maxie this afternoon. Reasonable Maxie was a rare sight, and disturbing in her own way.
I put the lid back on the can of thinner, placed the morning’s front section of the Asbury Park Press on the lid and stood on it. That way you know the can is closed properly. But there’s not much to do when you’re standing on a paint can, so I looked at Maxie. “How’s your mom?” I asked.
“Fine! She’s fine! Can’t I do anything without being questioned like a criminal?” She flew up into the ceiling and kept going.
I got down off the can of thinner. The reasonable Maxie had left the building.
Four
With Paul downstairs, Melissa upstairs with Wendy and Maxie’s whereabouts anyone’s guess, I didn’t have much time to consider why a young female ghost would fly (literally) off the handle (figuratively) at the mention of her mother.
What I did have to do was clean up the movie room, or more specifically, the construction area. I put the paint thinner, stepladder and other tools in a utility closet handily located in the room and did a little quick sweep-up, and the room was presentable again.
I, however, was not, so I went upstairs to shower and change before any of my guests returned from the beach or the town.
I’d barely gotten myself into a presentable pair of cargo shorts and a blue top before my cell phone rang. The Caller ID indicated the call was coming from Jeannie Rogers, my closest friend.
“Hey, Jeannie.”
“Heeeeellllloooooo.” The mournful elongation of Jeannie’s greeting indicated either that the world had just come to an end and it was left to Jeannie to break the news to me, or that her one-year-old (pardon me, eleven-month-old) son, Oliver, was already tracking below the necessary requirements for a terrific preschool he wouldn’t be able to attend for at least two years. Equally unmitigated disasters in Jeannie’s world.
“What’s wrong, Jean?”
A sigh that could have driven a hyena to Xanax emanated from my phone, but I’ve known Jeannie for a while, so I was expecting it. “Nora broke her leg,” she moaned. “She fell down the basement stairs going for a suitcase.”
Nora? Who was Nora? Oh, yeah: “Tony’s mother broke her leg? Oh, that’s too bad.” Tony Mandorisi, my friend and home improvement guru, is also Jeannie’s husband.
“It’s beyond bad,” she went on, intimating that I had clearly missed the tragic implications of her—Jeannie’s—misfortune. “She and Jimmy were due in tomorrow morning.”
This rang a vaguely familiar bell, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was that bore significance here. “Well, I’m sure Tony’s parents can visit after her leg is better.”
Now Jeannie’s voice took on a decided edge, since I had not picked up on her deep and lasting misery. “You don’t understand. Tony and I are leaving on the cruise tomorrow afternoon. Nora and Jimmy were going to watch Oliver for five days.”
Oh, yeah. It had been surprising enough that Jeannie—who defines the term helicopter mom to the point that she should be decorated by the Air Force—would agree to leave her young son for five full days, but Tony had insisted that they celebrate their wedding anniversary with their first solo trip since Oliver’s birth. So Jeannie had reluctantly agreed to go on a romantic cruise to Bermuda with her husband.
Now that idyll was being threatened by a freak accident suffered by a woman trying to accommodate them, which Jeannie, of course, saw as the queen mother of inconveniences. I probably would have seen it as a dark omen indicating I should stay off the cruise ship at all costs, and that is the difference in our personalities.
Another is the fact that Jeannie absolutely won’t believe there are ghosts in my house. She’s known me for a very long time but still will not admit to the possibility that Paul and Maxie are real. She thinks I’m a master con woman, taking in gullible tourists who want to see spooky things go on, and that all the evidence of Paul and Maxie (which include flying objects, conversations that seem to have only one side and the occasional hole in one of my walls—it’s a long story) is just prestidigitation on my part. Her husband, Tony, however, has taken to the idea of the ghosts, and occasionally even tries to communicate with Paul. He’s a little afraid of Maxie.
“Well, there must be someone else who can take care of Ollie,” I said, slipping as I used the nickname that Tony used for their son but Jeannie disdained (“It makes him sound like he should be hanging around with a guy named Stan and getting into fine messes”). “It’s just a few days, right?”
“It’s five days, tomorrow through Sunday,” Jeannie answered. “And it’s impossible. My brother can’t get here from Omaha in time. And none of our friends have children.”
That irked me a little. “Hey, I have a daughter, you know.”
And even before Jeannie responded, I knew I had done something very, very stupid. I had walked into the middle of the highway as the tractor-trailer came barreling down from the mountain with its brake line cut. I had stood in front of the wall during the firing squad’s daily target practice. I had seen the funnel cloud and gone driving toward the tornado.
“Really? You wouldn’t mind?” Jeannie squealed. “Oh, Alison, I can’t thank you enough—you’re saving my marriage!” Jeannie is, among other things, given to hyperbole; as far as I knew, there was no trouble between her and Tony.
But that wasn’t the point. I had inadvertently just volunteered to bring Oliver to my house and care for him while his parents were on a ship at sea. Now don’t get me wrong: I adore Ollie and think he’s the sweetest baby on the planet since Melissa, but Jeannie is, let’s say, a little exacting about his care. She had interviewed seven different day care centers before deciding on a private babysitter, who had undergone every possible vetting mechanism short of a polygraph test. That was canceled only because Jeannie couldn’t find a qualified technician. And even after all that, Jeannie wouldn’t trust poor Katie the babysitter with her son for five whole days.
“Whoa, hold on there, Jeannie.” This required a moment. I’d volunteered, sort of, and I did want my friends to have a good time. Tony, especially, needed the break (mostly from watching Jeannie hover over their son). I wasn’t going to renege on what she saw as a promise, despite its stemming simply from my mention of having a daughter. “I’m happy to help you out, but I want to get a few ground rules straight before we start.”
I could hear her eyes narrow. “Ground rules?” she asked.
“Yeah. You need to understand that Liss and I are crazy about Oliver”—I avoided using his nickname so that this time Jeannie could concentrate on what I was saying—“and we’re happy to have him visit for a few days.”
Jeannie’s audible eyes were down to slits now. “But . . . ?”
“But, we’re not going to be able to do everything exactly the way that you do. He’s going to be on vacation, too. You have to be prepared for the idea that some things in Oliver’s day might be just a little bit different than normal.”
“How different?” Jeannie asked.
“Well, for example, I’ll try to stick to the foods he eats already, but if I have to make substitutions based on what we have in the house or what my mom might bring one night, I’ll do so. Carefully.”
Jeannie made something approaching a chewing sound, which indicated that she was rotating her jaw, something she does when confronted with an idea she had not considered before. “How carefully?” she asked.
“I’m a gift horse, Jeannie. You want to look me in the mouth?”
There was a long pause while Jeannie undoubtedly considered her options. She had none. “Okay, you’re hired,” she said.
“Try not to sound too grateful,” I told her. “You don’t want me to get a swelled head.”
“Oh, come on, you know I love you, and I’m thrilled you’re taking Oliver! But . . .”
I smiled, but she couldn’t see it. “But you’ve never left him alone this long before, and you’re nervous. I get that.”
Jeannie had the nerve to sound amazed. “How did you know?”
“I told you. I have a child.”
We arranged for Tony and Jeannie to drop Oliver off at noon the next day. I started mentally calculating how much I’d have to pay Melissa to help me out with the baby whenever I couldn’t care for him myself but was interrupted by two of my Senior Plus guests, Don Coburn and his “better half,” Tammy, returning from their day at the incredibly hot beach.
In addition to the Coburns, I had another couple and two single guests at the moment, and while six people are plenty to deal with, at the height of the season, having any guest rooms vacant was not a great sign. We were still struggling to get back to normal after the Sandy damage, no matter what the TV commercials told us about being “Stronger Than the Storm.” I wasn’t worried about making the mortgage payments, but the knowledge that college tuition was just seven years away could send me into a cold sweat at night.
Red as beets, walking slowly with fatigued legs, the Coburns nevertheless appeared to be the two happiest people on the planet. Tammy was from Grinnell, Iowa, she had told me, and she was getting a look at the ocean for the first time in her life. Don, who’d moved to Iowa and met Tammy forty years earlier but had grown up in Avon-by-the-Sea, not far from Harbor Haven, just seemed tickled that she was so pleased.
They agreed that the Shore was the best ever (although Tammy really didn’t have a basis for comparison) and went up to their room to shower and change before heading out to dinner. A lot down the Shore is different since the storm, but sand still gets into your clothes and hair.
Paul rose up from the basement at that moment—it was clear I just wasn’t going to get much cleaning done this afternoon—with a puzzled look on his face. “I tried to contact Detective Ferry, and as we suspected, he is not yet in contact, if he ever will be,” he reported. “It would be much easier if everyone evolved the same way.”
“The lack of rules really bothers you, doesn’t it?” I asked him.
“A lot of things bother me,” he said. That was unexpected. Paul usually didn’t do the passive-aggressive thing; that was Maxie’s territory. And sometimes my mother’s.
“What do you mean?”
He waved a hand. “Nothing,” he said. “I am a little concerned, however.”
“Why?” I decided to go into the kitchen in case any more guests arrived. The Senior Plus tourists are used to my conversing with people who aren’t there, and since I’d publicly declared the guesthouse to be haunted, I’d been getting fewer “civilian” guests. Still, it can be unnerving to see your hostess talking to the ceiling or the wall, so I try to keep the kitchen a guest-free zone and conduct conversations with Paul and Maxie there.
Besides, since I don’t cook, the guesthouse is not a bed-and-breakfast—no breakfast—so the kitchen is usually unoccupied.
Paul followed me. “After trying to contact Detective Ferry and failing to find him, I sent out a general message asking about him. I got a number of responses from people who had some interaction with the detective while he was alive.”
I looked into the freezer, pretending I might actually cook something if I could find the right kind of food there. This was really just a ruse; I knew perfectly well that with Wendy in the house, we’d be ordering pizza. Luckily, Mom would be over tomorrow to help Melissa cook dinner, when I’d have Oliver around. “So people knew Ferry,” I said to Paul. “Is there something suspicious about that?”
“Not on the face of it.” Paul, when he’s thinking hard, doesn’t pay much attention to his positioning, so he drifts. He was about halfway in the air to the ceiling fan now, stroking his goatee. “You would expect that a detective would have interacted with a number of people who are somewhat unsavory, criminals and such. There was one who said the detective had solved his murder.”
“I imagine that guy’s pretty grateful. Does he have any information that might help McElone?” I asked.
“No,” Paul answered, looking uncomfortable. “His information was not specific to the detective’s death.”
Something about Paul’s tone was disturbing. I turned to face him. Paul’s head was an inch from the ceiling fan, and I suppressed the urge to tell him to look out, because there was nothing the fan could possibly do to him. “I don’t like the way you sound,” I said.
“You shouldn’t. The man who contacted me said that Detective Ferry was a corrupt officer, and that even his investigation into the man’s death was motivated by a chance to help the people who were, as he put it, ‘running’ the detective.”
“You’re saying—”
“I’m not saying anything,” Paul said. “The man who says Detective Ferry solved his murder is claiming the detective was involved with a local mob.”
Five
Detective Martin Ferry had mob ties? That wasn’t good news, and it certainly wasn’t anything I was going to tell Lieutenant McElone unless I absolutely had to. Paul couldn’t get any more information out of the “connected” ghost—apparently these guys won’t break the code even after they’re dead, and that’s loyalty—to the point that he didn’t even know the name of his contact, though Paul noted that the ghost “could be holding a grudge.”
I spent much of the night, when not listening in on the latest fifth-to-sixth-grade (summer is an odd time for kids) gossip from Wendy and Melissa or dealing with the needs of my guests, wondering what else I could do to help the lieutenant.
Let me save you the time: I didn’t come up with anything.
The next morning, my Senior Plus Tour guests Don and Tammy were the first up and out. They headed off to Point Pleasant to spend the day on the boardwalk, giggling like a couple of teenagers. It was inspiring.
Another couple from Senior Plus, Stephanie and Rita Muldoon, wandered down around eight thirty and took some of the orange juice I’d made available. Even though I don’t cook, I do put out coffee, tea and juice in the mornings. This time of year, I also make sure we have plenty of ice in case any of the guests want their morning beverage cold.
Stephanie asked about breakfast places in town, and I directed her to the Stud Muffin, our local bakery, or the Harbor Haven Diner (where I have an arrangement to get a small percentage for every customer I send their way).
“The next ghost experience is at ten,” I let them know. Rita laughed lightly. You can tell the ones who are a little bit scared by the way they act like they’re not scared.
“I think we’ll be seeing some ghost juggling,” I told her. It’s not that hard to juggle when nobody can see your arms. Paul and Maxie can just hold the stuff in their hands and move it around, and people think it’s juggling, I’m told.
