An Uninvited Ghost (33 page)

Then she vanished.

“Damn!” Maxie yelled. “I was all set to break her nose.”

“What just happened?” McElone called. She hadn’t put handcuffs on Donovan, but was holding his arm, and it looked like she was holding it tightly.

“She got away,” I explained. “What should I do?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Paul was looking contemplative, and he closed his eyes. “I don’t think she’s gone far,” he said in an unusual, dreamy voice. He seemed to be taking the room’s spectral temperature.

“Maybe she’s gone for good,” Mom attempted.

“Will someone
please
tell me what happened?” Jim shouted from the other side of the room. “I’m stone cold sober, and it’s scaring me!”

But of all the people in the room, the least likely one said the most crucial thing. “How come that black thing is floating around in the air?” H-Bomb asked.

Sure enough, Dolores’s black “ghost finder,” the revamped surge suppressor, was still suspended by itself, as if held up by invisible wires. Trent gestured to Ed, who said something into his headset, and one of the camera operators spun to capture it.

The black box, red lights still flashing randomly, held its position for a moment, just long enough for Paul, who was about ten feet from it, to turn and head in its direction. Then it moved.

The back-end panel opened, and a small, very effective-looking knife appeared from within. A hideous disembodied cackle of laughter began and started to grow louder. Then the box dropped to the floor, and the knife stayed in the air and started to move very quickly.

Toward me.

Melissa gasped behind me. The scene seemed to go into slow motion. But it didn’t give me more time to react, and before I could do anything, I realized the knife was going to make it to my chest. I couldn’t move fast enough to stop it.

But somehow, Scott did. I don’t know how he got there, but he stood in front of me faster than I could blink. And he raised his arm, approximating from sound or movement where Dolores might be, and he swung with all he had. This time, his aim was accurate.

There was a crack in the air. The knife fell to the floor. I recalled, vaguely, how to breathe.

“Did I get her?” Scott asked. “I hit
something
.”

“I think you did,” I answered. “You saved my life.”

I almost jumped when I felt something encircling my waist, but that turned out to be Melissa’s arms, and I never have a problem with a hug from my daughter. She wasn’t crying, but she was working very hard at not crying, I could tell.

“Look,” Maxie said. She pointed at the floor.

Dolores, motionless, had reappeared on the floor of the den, and was starting to moan. She moved a little, just as she regained what passed for consciousness, and her hand went to her jaw. She looked up and saw a gang of at least twenty ghosts standing around her.

Her first impulse was to reach for the knife, but a high-heeled, black-booted foot was already on the blade. “I don’t think so,” Maxie said.

Biker guy reached down and pulled Dolores to her feet. He held her blouse by the back of the neck. “What can we do with her?” he asked.

Before this had a chance to get ugly, I called out again. “Lieutenant!”

McElone looked over. No doubt she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “Now what?” she asked.

“Is there a jail for ghosts?”

There’s a reason I live in New Jersey—the national language here is Sarcasm. “Yeah,” McElone responded. “It’s right next to the one where we keep vampires.”

“There is a state of being,” one very distinguished-looking deceased gentleman offered. “We can’t always interact with physical objects, but we can create a state of mind. A prison that exists on our plane, if you will. You probably wouldn’t be able to see it, but it would certainly contain our captive here. In all likelihood, forever. It simply requires the group of us here to donate some of our own ectoplasm, which we can do through concentration. I’ve seen it done, although not for this purpose. I think it would work.”

Dolores’s eyes had widened as he spoke. “It’s not possible.”

“Actually, it is,” one female spirit said. “I saw them do it to a ghost dog that had gone mean, once. There really wasn’t anything else they could do, the poor thing. He got over it in a couple of hundred years.”

Now, Dolores’s voice was a croak at best. “You wouldn’t,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t we?” Paul asked. “Crime is crime, even if you’re dead when you commit one.”

He reached out toward Dolores, but her eyes were already rolled back into her head, and she was chanting something very faintly, unintelligibly, at a rapid pace. She almost seemed to be hyperventilating. And she made the sign of a triangle in the air, again and again.

“Oh my,” Paul said.

Before he could grab her, Dolores had vanished. Well, no. She had dissolved. There’s no other word for it—she seemed to disappear into a mist, and then a fine white powder, a tangible, physical, visible one, which hit the floor and lay there in a small pile.

“What the migraine is
that
?” H-Bomb asked.

Linda Jane dropped to her knees to examine what was left of the murderous ghost. “I have no idea,” she said.

Paul was motionless, staring at the powder. “I’d heard it was possible, but I’ve never seen it before,” he said.

“What just happened here?” Trent asked.

“We made white powder,” I told him. “Explain that to your viewers.”

Melissa hadn’t let go, and I hadn’t wanted her to. I hugged her good and hard and then told her she needed to go to bed. Which is a parent’s way to cheat a kid—she’d never sleep now, but I needed the time to decompress.

McElone dragged Donovan over from the door. “The Dolores . . . person . . . is gone?” she asked.

“That’s right. Thanks for the help.”

She raised an eyebrow. “There wasn’t any way I could arrest her. What did you want me to do, fire my weapon into a crowd when there wasn’t anybody there to shoot?”

“You have a point,” I sighed. “I just felt very alone there for a few minutes.”

McElone looked warily around the ceiling. “I can’t imagine you
ever
feel alone in this house,” she said. “This place is freaky.”

In the end, McElone took Donovan in and booked him on charges of conspiracy (although it would be a rough job explaining with whom he’d been conspiring), attempting to defraud the estate of Arlice Crosby and various other violations of laws that, frankly, I didn’t understand. He said he’d fight the charges, and I thought he had a good chance to beat the rap, given that the chief witness against him no longer existed and had been dead when the crime was committed. But a cadre of municipal and county accountants, trained to find the money that lawyers siphon off estates, could prove more difficult to evade.

The case file on Arlice Crosby’s murder was left open.

It’s always interesting around Harbor Haven.

Since she was no longer a suspect, Linda Jane could leave whenever she liked, and she told me she’d probably go the next morning, assuming she could arrange travel. I said, honestly, that I would be sorry to see her go.

“It’s been an experience” was all she said. “But it was certainly not boring, no matter how you look at it.”

“Maybe you’ll come back someday,” I said.

She smirked with the left side of her mouth. “Uh-huh,” she said.

We woke Bernice Antwerp up again to get her to bed, and she did, grousing all the while that the couch was more comfortable than the bed I’d given her and that she didn’t see why she had to go up to the bedroom when she could sleep so well in the den.

The
Down the Shore
cast and crew retreated to their trailers and hotel rooms, respectively. Rock Starr looked a little pale, and his abs were considerably less pronounced than they’d been earlier in the evening. I’m told stress can do that.

H-Bomb, thong bikini unruffled, yawned the whole thing off and said she was going to head back to the boardwalk. It was only midnight, and she was getting ready for a night of serious partying.

After the guests had retreated, I sat with a bottle of red wine and exhaled for a long time with Jeannie and Tony. Mom took off pretty much as the guests were going up to bed and probably needed some alone time herself.

Tony had been astounded by all that had gone on, of course, as any sane person would be. But I was on my third glass of wine before Jeannie spoke at all.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said to me. “You sure do put on a hell of a show.”

They left soon after. Tony and I exchanged many looks, all of which said the same thing: “There’s no point in arguing with her.”

That left just me and the three deceased people. They weren’t drinking wine, but I could easily take up the slack. “I knew Dolores was weird, but I was miles off on how weird,” I told Paul.

“I can’t believe I didn’t know she was a ghost,” he answered. “I’m not sure how she looked so . . . solid. It must have taken tons of concentration. She had me fooled—clearly she knew when I was around, because she put on that show about worshipping the amulet. She’d planted clues all over the place to throw us off.”

“So the amulet didn’t mean anything?” I asked.

He shrugged. “As far as I can tell, all it meant was that Arlice liked you and wanted you to have something to remember her by.”

I smiled at that. I fingered the amulet hanging from my neck.

“You have to feel better, Scott,” I said. “Not only did we prove that you did no one any harm, but you actually saved my life when Dolores came at me with the knife.”

Scott had been talking very little so far, and he now seemed distracted. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said. “I’m glad you didn’t get hurt, Alison.”

Paul looked at him strangely. “Scott,” he said, “is something wrong?”

He took a long time to respond. “No. I don’t think so.”

He was looking a little glassy-eyed, but I figured there wasn’t much that could happen to him, so I decided to return to the subject at hand. “I don’t understand why Dolores didn’t just vanish after Arlice was gone,” I said. “She’d done what she set out to do. Why not leave? She could have done it whenever she wanted.”

“She seemed to enjoy watching everyone scramble,” Paul said. “She left us clues. She made sure to be around whenever anything happened. I think she was reveling in it.”

“That was one crazy old broad,” Maxie offered. She was heavily into deep philosophy. “She got her lawyer to book her into this tour just to see if she could get a chance to off her sister. I mean, is that random or what?”

We all sat there (well, I sat—the ghosts sort of hovered) and stared off for a moment. I wasn’t sure whether this was good wine or not, but I wanted more.

“Seems like I can see all the ghosts now,” I said, wondering if my speech was slurred at all. “There must have been fifty in the room tonight.”

Paul and Maxie looked at each other and smiled.

“What?” I asked.

“There were at least a hundred and twenty-five spirits here tonight, Alison,” Paul informed me. “I think your increased ability is, at best, limited.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure whether I was glad or disappointed.

“Something is happening,” Scott said suddenly. He stood straight up in the air, stiff as a board.

Paul moved in his direction, but when he got near, Scott put up a hand. “Don’t do anything,” he said. “I think this might be a good thing.”

Scott’s eyes opened wide as his form became more and more difficult to see. It was as if he’d swallowed a klieg light, and it shone from within him. I had to shield my eyes from the glare. Then the light went out just as Scott said something I couldn’t make out.

When I could look again, he was gone.

Paul and Maxie, openmouthed and wide-eyed, circled the spot where Scott had stood. Neither of them spoke for at least a full minute, which doesn’t sound like a long time, but try it and see.

Finally, Paul cleared his throat. “I guess we just saw Scott move on to the next level,” he said.

“How’d he do it?” Maxie wanted to know. “He didn’t seem to try or anything.”

“I guess it had to do with his saving Alison and helping to unmask Arlice’s killer,” Paul said. “But who knows? I haven’t understood a thing that’s happened since you and I . . . ended up like this.”

“
Died
,” Maxie said. “We died. Say it. We’re dead now.”

“Yes,” Paul nodded. “We are.”

“Say it.”

“We’re dead.” Paul was still examining the area where Scott had been standing. “But we’re not necessarily done.”

We sat there, none of us really speaking very much, for a while, and then I decided I’d had enough for one day. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept. So I bade my two housemates a good night—I have no idea what they do in place of sleeping—and headed toward the staircase.