An Uninvited Ghost (31 page)

The detective’s expression went from exasperation to mock pity. “Oh, that’s a pip of a plan,” she said. “I’m so glad I was here for its inception. It’s like a little piece of history just unfolded right in front of me.” Then her mouth curled on the right side, and she added, “Are you out of your mind?” And that’s the moment when her eyes betrayed her—McElone glanced nervously into the den.

“Quite possibly,” I said. “But I’m not the one who’s afraid to walk into this house.”

“This place is freaky,” she said.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

I spun on my heel and walked purposefully into the den before McElone could come up with one of the seven thousand logical arguments against what I was about to do. Once again, the stepstool from one of the upstairs bathrooms served as my platform, and I stood up on it. But this time I had left the bathrobe in my bedroom, convinced it had not enhanced my “conduit to the supernatural” presence at all.

Donovan walked in just as I rose above the crowd, and I nodded in his direction so that McElone could see. She sneered at me, indicating she had seen him and needed no additional help.

“Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” I began.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Bernice groused. “The noise would have kept me awake.”

“This evening will be much different than our last séance,” I plowed on, not responding to her. “This time, we are here to solve a murder.”

Linda Jane Smith, standing in the same spot she had been Thursday night (about three people to my right, next to Rock Starr), looked amused. “Really, Inspector,” she said. “How will we do that?”

“We will expose the killer of Arlice Crosby,” I said, having lapsed into a contraction-free speech pattern for my role as medium, “by contacting the spirit of the victim.”

I had instructed Mom, Jeannie, Paul, Tony and Melissa to pay careful attention to the faces of our suspects when I said that. McElone would be doing that without my prompting, I figured. They’d give me their reports later when we could talk, if there was still a need. I could only look in one direction, and I can report without any reservation that Linda Jane lost her amused look when I made that pronouncement.

“Like, how are we going to do that?” H-Bomb asked.

“I will make contact with her spirit the same way I communicate with the two spirits who occupy this house,” I said.

“Paul and Hortense,” Rock Starr remembered.

Maxie made an exasperated face. “Hortense?” she said.

“Yes. But for this séance, there are many more spirits in the room,” I announced, a little too fervently, in retrospect.

From my other side, I heard Dolores Santiago say, “Yes. There are twenty-six spirits in this room.” I turned to face her, and saw she was placing the converted surge suppressor on the side table and, to my eye anyway, it was flashing its lights just as often as it had the last time, so I had no idea how she could make such a statement.

But, of course, she was off by quite a number of ghosts. There had to be fifty present, according to the count Mom and Paul had given me before I’d walked in. I looked for Scott’s bandana, and it had not moved. Good.

“Thank you,” I answered. “Now, I will request complete silence from each of you, as I must concentrate very deeply to contact the wandering, possibly traumatized, spirit of Mrs. Crosby.”

“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” H-Bomb immediately piped up. “You could say, like, Biggie and Tupac were here, and there’s no way we could prove you were lying.”

I had to rearrange my expression, as I’d just started working on “serene and searching” and now had to work on “authoritative and believable.”

“I understand your skepticism,” I told the bikinied reality star, who looked like she needed someone to define “skepticism” for her. “But I think I can allay your fears.” (Now, H-Bomb looked positively baffled, but I chose not to speculate on why.) “Arlice has been in contact before, but very briefly. She is only now getting acclimated to her new level of consciousness.”

“You didn’t answer her question,” Rock Starr noted, his abdominal muscles practically puckered in their irritation. I could tell because Rock had decided to go shirtless tonight. “How do we know it’s the old lady?”

“You will know because she will make herself visible to you when she becomes strong enough,” I said.

I thought Dolores’s eyes were going to actually leave their sockets. “She’ll be
visible
?” she said. “That’s astonishing!”

“Apparently, the ability to materialize is connected to the vigor of the emotion the spirit is feeling,” I said. “Arlice has communicated to me, in the short times we have had to discuss the matter, that she is very angry. I believe that will work to our advantage.”

“That’s fascinating,” Dolores said. “Does your talisman help you communicate with the spirits?” She pointed to the amulet hanging from my necklace.

“Yes,” I told her. “It is not essential, but it acts as a kind of amplifier.”

She absolutely giggled. “Ooh!” she oozed. “How marvelous!”

H-Bomb put her hand to her ear. “What?” she screamed. “We can’t hear you!”

“Now, please let us have no more interruptions,” I said more loudly. “I will attempt to make contact with the spirit of Arlice Crosby.”

I closed my eyes very deliberately and tilted my head back a little. And then I heard Scott’s voice whisper in my ear, “I think I know who did it.”

My eyes sprung open, but I managed not to say anything. The crowd clearly thought this was a sign that I had achieved my goal, or was pretending to, and gasped just a little. And to my left, barely past the ear where I’d heard the voice, I saw a floating red bandana.

“Is that you, Arlice?” I asked loudly. “Have you crossed over from the other side to communicate with us at this moment?”

Trent, not wanting to talk because it would ruin his camera crew’s taping, put his hand over his mouth in what appeared to be amusement.

Some of the guests, especially Jim and Warren, started to look around the room for a sign of an extra presence. Mistah Motion pointed at the bandana, but didn’t say anything. Speaking was his second language.

Little did they know, they were surrounded. I could see more than four dozen ghosts of all sizes and shapes, and . . .

Wait a second. I could see
all
of them. How the hell did
that
happen? Could it just have been the increased ghost energy in the house, or was I developing my talent by hanging around with Paul and Maxie? There was no way to know, but I could surely see more ghosts than at the Haunted Mansion in Disney World. And that included the one wearing the red bandana standing next to me. He looked to be in his mid-sixties, with a slight growth of gray beard, powerfully built but not very tall. And there was some deep scar tissue all around his eyes. Just the way he’d been described to me. I wanted to say, “Scott?” But I had to go on with the show.

“Arlice,” I said, “you were taken from us here, in this room, only three nights ago. And we know now that someone who was here that night did something to hurt you. What did they do? What did you feel?”

I waited, as if listening for an answer.

“Somebody stuck her with a needle,” H-Bomb said. “Everybody knows that. Duh.”

If my looks could kill, there would have been one more ghost in the room.

“Arlice says that someone here did something unspeakable, something evil,” I said, starting to relish the role a little more. Between this and my Method acting with Donovan, I was starting to think I’d missed my true calling. “She says that person was someone she once loved, but someone she hadn’t seen in many years.” Okay, it was a stretch, but I was back into my Method acting and went where the scene took me.

“Alison, do you know what you’re doing?” Paul asked. But he was smiling just a little. And Scott, now that he was at least a little visible to me, was nodding; yes, that was what he’d discovered. How he’d come across the information I didn’t yet know.

I had to assume that Jane Smith wasn’t really dead, or I’d have no suspects. So I looked from one woman in the room to the next—Linda Jane, who seemed so friendly and straightforward, was considerably younger than Arlice Crosby had been, but it was possible she could have been the killer. And we knew the sister’s name really was Jane Smith, but Linda Jane’s birth name was Weatherby. I looked to see if Lieutenant McElone was observing Linda Jane. She wasn’t.

Bernice, sitting on the couch looking as she always did, was a sleeper candidate. She was the right age to be a close sibling to Arlice, but had no connection Maxie had been able to uncover online. McElone wasn’t looking at Bernice, either.

She was looking at me. That was no help.

H-Bomb clearly was not Arlice Crosby’s sister. I really didn’t think she’d killed Arlice, but I didn’t like her and was a little afraid of her. I also was pretty sure she’d done something to get rid of Tiffney one way or another, but I had no proof of that, either.

If I was wrong and Arlice’s sister
wasn’t
the killer, that left Jim and Warren as suspects, although that seemed a stretch. Tom Donovan was a considerably more likely candidate, as he had something to gain, at least in theory, if Arlice died and her sister couldn’t be found. The years of legal fees alone could bring millions to his firm. And he was the whole firm.

All that flashed through my mind in a second, but I didn’t have time to finish. I had to playact a little more. “Arlice, why would someone do such a terrible thing? Arlice? Are you still there?” I waited a few seconds, pretending to get an answer. “Arlice, I’m having trouble hearing you. Can you tell me more? Can you still hear me?”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Maxie yawned. “Cut to the chase. Even
I’m
getting bored.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dolores Santiago chuckle.

For some reason, that’s when it all came together. Dolores, who had put herself on the Senior Plus tour the day before it was to begin, right after Scott McFarlane had failed to scare Arlice Crosby to death. Dolores, who had been standing right next to Arlice when she collapsed and, now that I thought of it, was unusually tall, like Arlice. Dolores, who had been closest to the easel with a message from the killer, just as I discovered it. And it was Dolores who had shown such a rabid interest in the amulet Arlice had given me—the one Arlice said had been in her family “for generations.”

I couldn’t figure it all out in a flash, but it was worth exploring. “Dolores,” I said, “have you been able to make contact with any spirits since you’ve been here?”

She seemed confused. “Contact?” she asked.

Jim and Warren glanced oddly at each other. The cast of
Down the Shore
looked even more vacant than usual.

“Yes. Have you been able, let’s say, to see any spirits here in the house?”

Dolores worked hard to keep her same expression, but she couldn’t manage it entirely—her eyes narrowed just a bit. “I’ve been able to get some very interesting readings on my instruments,” she dodged.

“Who are you talking to?” Jim called to me. But I was intent on Dolores.

“You haven’t actually seen or heard any ghosts here, have you?” I asked. Paul, stroking his goatee, started to nod slowly.

Trent made sure a camera was watching me closely. Ed also had a camera pointed in Dolores’s direction. Both video images were visible on the overhead monitors he’d mounted on the wall, but I didn’t have the time to look up. Linda Jane walked a little closer. Had I been wrong?

“No,” Dolores said, looking at her shoes. “I’ve never actually seen a spirit myself.”

“Who the migraine are you talking to?” H-Bomb wanted to know.

“Then why did you just laugh at what Maxie said?” I asked Dolores.

Suddenly, there was no sound in the room. Dolores’s head snapped up to glare darts at me. The camera operators stopped moving. Mom put her arms around Melissa’s shoulders to prevent her from getting any nearer to the action. I’m not sure I was breathing.

I looked at the monitors. One showed a picture of me.

The other was pointed at empty space.

“Okay,” Warren said. “I’ll play. Who’s Maxie?”

Even Maxie didn’t answer him. Instead, Dolores tried to break into a smile and said, “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“That’s funny, because I have an idea you do,” I answered. I nodded at Paul and Maxie, and they swooped directly at Dolores. The biker guy who’d been trying to impress Maxie followed her.

“What’s going on?” Trent hissed at me. “There’s nobody there!”

The ghosts’ sudden movement startled Dolores, and she put up her hands. Then the ghosts went directly through her to the other side of the room, and she stood there, hands up defensively. For a moment.

“So, you can’t see them?” I asked. I stepped down off the stool, just in case I had to make a sudden move in another direction. And to make me a more difficult target.

“All right, so I can,” Dolores answered. Her voice had dropped half an octave, and she no longer seemed the flighty ghost hunter she’d been her whole stay here. “So what? That doesn’t mean I did anything to Arlice. I wasn’t even looking at her when she fell; I was asking you a question.”

“But you’re ambidextrous,” I reminded Dolores. “You could have been injecting Arlice with the insulin that killed her even while you were looking at me. We were packed in close that night, just like now.”

By now, the crowd was staring at what was to them empty space. But they stopped asking for an explanation, apparently convinced there was someone there, even if they were unable to see anyone.

The room seemed to be closing in around Dolores and me. “This is silly,” she said, trying to regain her original demeanor. “You’re just trying to find a killer to make yourself feel better. I understand, dear. But you shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened to poor Arlice.”