Chance of a Ghost (72 page)

“What if she’s in the bathtub or something?” he asked me late that night after Melissa had gone to bed and the other ghosts were elsewhere, giving us time. Dad was floating high above the floor of the hallway, widening the hole he’d made in the plaster above the library door.

“I think Larry is going to stay away from all bathtubs for a very long time,” I told him. I pointed at the rectangle he was creating in my wall. “You know, you could have come up with something less cryptic than ‘stop go up.’”

Dad shrugged. “It made sense. You wanted to widen the door. You couldn’t. But you can get more brightness in the room with a window here. You needed to stop what you were doing and go up. Take out a piece of the wall above the door, bring in more light.”

“You’re a master,” I told him.

“You’re my daughter. You’re supposed to think so.”

I watched him smoothing the edge of the plaster he’d sanded down. “In this case, I happen to be right,” I said.

Dad looked at the hole he’d made, which would eventually house a stained-glass panel made from light colors, which I’d found in the basement of the guesthouse when I’d first moved in. Tony had said he’d install the panel for me and offered to make the sturdy brace to hold it, but Dad was already at work.

“Do me a favor, baby girl,” he said. “Go get me a two-foot level, would you? I need to make sure this is right.”

“Sure.” I knew just where that was in my tool room in the basement. I went down the stairs quickly, headed straight for the level, found it hanging on a pegboard and rushed back up the stairs. I stopped at the basement door and took a moment to ponder. A drop of anxiety hit me just as I opened the door.

But when I swung it open, Dad was still there, hanging up in the air, smoothing the joists he’d cut to get ready for the four-by-four brace he’d put in sometime later in the week. I smiled.

“Don’t just stand there,” he said. “Let’s see that level.” So I handed it up to him.

We stayed up talking until very late in the night.

Thirty-three

“I couldn’t look you or Melissa in the eye,” Dad said.

We were in the kitchen at the guesthouse again. I’d secured a promise from my father that he wouldn’t fly off into the clouds and leave me wondering, and Dad always kept—keeps—his promises.

There hadn’t been time to have this talk, which no doubt would be a doozy, while we were at Mom’s. Morgan had found Melissa and called in a connection at the New Jersey State Police. Those guys don’t worry about snow. They’d made it to Mom’s, gotten the power restored and contacted the plowing service at her complex, so they could speed in and arrest Frances. This had the added benefit that the roads were cleared by the time we’d sorted things out.

It pays to have friends in high places. Speaking of which, Lieutenant McElone called ten minutes after the state police must have posted a report on Frances’s arrest and apologized for not calling back in real McElone fashion,
saying, “You should have mentioned it was an emergency.” Clearly, it was my fault.

Frances was very, very arrested, particularly after my voice recording of her stating in no uncertain terms that she’d killed Lawrence and was going to shoot the three of us was played. When she came to, Frances denied it, said we’d been rehearsing Jerry’s latest play and was put in a trooper’s cruiser in rapid succession.

Jerry, who owned up to snitching on just about everybody in the New Old Thespians, was not arrested but had to change his clothing after the scare he’d gotten. Before leaving, he said he thought his next production would be
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
. The man’s an artist.

The troopers had been kind enough to give me a ride back to Harbor Haven, and I’d insisted Mom pack a bag and come, too, which took very little convincing, since she wanted to hear Dad’s story. Many of the large roads had been plowed by now, but there were still hardly any cars on the road, and we were home in no time, much faster than traveling by ghost. Maxie and Dad tagged along in the trunk. Well, their legs were in the trunk, anyway. If I’d been driving, it would have been disconcerting to look in the rearview mirror and see my late father and my deceased tenant staring through the back window, but luckily the trooper didn’t have that problem.

We’d had to leave Lawrence at Mom’s, since he wasn’t able to travel beyond the community’s boundaries. He’d explained that he’d been lurking out of sight in the powder room when Frances had begun threatening us and went off to find help. He couldn’t leave, but he apparently could tap into the Ghosternet like Paul, and Dad had come running (flying?). They’d met in the garage, grabbed the rope and gone to work.

Dr. Wells had been at Madison Paint, having been alerted by the grumpy ghost, an old patient of his (a painter
crony of Dad’s named, incongruently enough, “Sonny”), where Dad had been hiding the whole time, and heard the call from Lawrence. (Lawrence had not tried to contact Dad, having gotten no response in any of his previous attempts. But he’d heard Mom discuss Dr. Wells and, in a Hail Mary play, focused on the doctor.) There hadn’t been time to sort it out, and they’d both answered his plea.

The doctor turned out to be a very nice man haunted by Dad’s case, for reasons he wouldn’t discuss. But Dad put his arm around Dr. Wells and thanked him (asking him to pass the sentiment along to Sonny). The doctor gave Dad a few more stern looks, said something about “coming clean” and went off.

Melissa had been clearly relieved when we’d returned but strangely shy around her grandfather. She was spooked (pardon the expression) by his odd absence for all this time and seemed wary of what he was going to tell us, though despite my concerns that the conversation might be upsetting for her, she would not be moved. Frankly, I couldn’t blame her.

“What do you mean, you couldn’t look us in the eye?” she asked Dad.

Dad looked absolutely forlorn when he turned toward Melissa. “I was ashamed, honey. That’s the truth. I was so ashamed, I couldn’t even talk to you or your mom. I thought you’d hate me.”

“Dad!” I shouted. Maxie, hovering near the ceiling, started at my volume. Luckily, after a lengthy briefing on the Laurentz case, Nan had insisted they go out to explore the blizzard and forage for food. If they weren’t back in two hours, I would call the National Guard.

“It’s true, baby girl,” he said. “Your mom knew I was upset, but she still doesn’t know why, and I’m sorry for that, too, Loretta. I shouldn’t have handled it the way I did, blocking out our daughter and granddaughter, and not telling you the reason.”

Mom looked over at him and sniffed. “I still don’t even
know what we’re talking about,” she said. “It’s time to unburden yourself, Jack.”

Dad nodded.

“Dr. Wells sent your friend Sonny here after he died, and he wrote two things, Dad. He said he knew where you were, and then he said you didn’t die the way we thought. Is that what this is about?”

Dad looked like he was mortally wounded, which under the circumstances was impossible, but he nodded. “The doctor knew exactly what was going on, and once he passed away and found me again, he tried to get me to tell you, but I refused, so he tried to push you into finding out. I’d been bragging about my daughter the detective.”

“So you went into hiding,” I noted.

Dad waved his hand. “Hiding? I didn’t go into
hiding
; I just managed to be away from you and Mom for a while so I could think. Wells guessed where I was from conversations we’d had in the hospital room…back then…and he sent out a message. Sonny heard it. The two of them have been badgering me at the store for days.”

“You were there the whole time?” Mom asked.

Dad nodded again. “Mostly. I knew you wouldn’t look there, Loretta,” he said quietly, then looked at me. “But it didn’t occur to me that
you
would come looking there. I had to duck out pretty quick when you showed up there. And what’s this about you and Josh Kaplan?”

“This is
your
confession,” I reminded him.

“It’s true,” Dad agreed. “And I have a lot to confess.”

“Like what, Grampa?” Melissa wanted to know. “You can tell us anything. We won’t be mad.” Twenty years from now, when you meet my daughter, don’t judge her for being a successful prosecutor. Judge her based on her heart.

Dad smiled, but it was a sad smile, if such a thing is possible. “Okay, Lissie.”

“Nobody calls me that anymore,” Melissa told him. But after a beat, she added, “But you can.”

“Thank you,” Dad said. He seemed to gather his thoughts and said, “Dr. Wells was right. You really didn’t know what happened when I died.” He turned and looked at me. “You remember, Alison, what kind of shape I was in at the end.”

Paul, all stiff-upper-lip restraint, was having a hard time watching the scene from the area around the stove. He seemed to be fascinated by something on the ceiling. Except there wasn’t anything on the ceiling.

“I remember you were in a lot of pain,” I said. “It was so hard to watch. I felt awful for you.”

Dad nodded slowly, remembering.

“We know that, Jack,” Mom told him. “And it’s natural for a family to be upset when someone goes the way you did. But you have nothing to be ashamed of.” She reached out to Dad, but he was a few feet up out of her reach.

“Yes, I do,” he answered. “I didn’t want to leave you, not the three of you, at all, but it got so bad—the pain—that I couldn’t stand any more. And that night, Dr. Wells told me it could be six or seven more days before I…before the pain ended. That sounded like forever. So I asked…No. I
begged
him to make the pain stop.”

“Didn’t they give you medicine, Grampa?” Of course I questioned my decision to let Melissa in on the conversation. But I believe that children are stronger than we think and that they can handle things as long as they’re told the truth. That was the excuse I was using today.

“You asked the doctor for something that would put you out of your misery,” I said, in an effort to word it delicately that ended up not being so delicate.

Mom bit her lip, but she didn’t cry. “It must have been awful for you,” she said.

Dad closed his eyes and nodded. “He didn’t want to; he held out for what seemed like a very long time.” He opened his eyes and looked at me to make his point. “But he really is a compassionate man, and he couldn’t bear to see how I was suffering. He waited until the nurse’s shift was changing
and put something in my IV drip. And the next thing I knew, I was…like this.”

“And that’s why you haven’t come here or talked to us in five years?” I asked, incredulous. “But you came to see Mom once a week, on Tuesdays. If you could do that…”

“I couldn’t see you,” Dad said, his voice quivering. “A husband is different from a father, baby girl. Believe me I wanted to all the time. But I thought…well, I broke my promise to you. I looked you right in the eye and promised you I’d fight until the end. Besides, just because you didn’t see me doesn’t mean I wasn’t here. I was with you sometimes when Melissa was at school, before you met your two friends there.” He gestured toward Paul and Maxie, who were uncharacteristically silent. “And sometimes I’d sneak in and see you, Lissie, when you were sleeping or from a distance. I couldn’t
really
stay away from you.

“It wasn’t until Dr. Wells was here, like us”—he gestured to Paul and Maxie—“and he was saying you needed to know, and if I didn’t come clean, he’d tell you himself, although he insisted it wasn’t his place to do that. But I couldn’t get the courage together to do it until that Laurentz guy told us your lives were in danger. Then I had no choice,” Dad said. “But if you can’t forgive me for being so weak at the end, I’ll understand.” He looked at me. “You don’t ever have to see me again, Alison.”

It was very hard to fight back tears, and Dad was right—I was angry at him. But not for the reason he thought I was. “The only thing I won’t forgive,” I told him, “is that you didn’t give us the chance. I understand how much pain you had, and I don’t blame you a bit for asking Dr. Wells for help. I didn’t ever want you to suffer like that.” I made serious eye contact with my father, something I’d wished for desperately over the past five years. “But you assumed we’d never want to see you, when that was the one thing we wanted most of all. Don’t you
dare
ever go away again, Daddy.”

I don’t think there was a dry eye in the kitchen, among those of us who still have tear ducts, anyway. The others weren’t faring much better.

“I won’t, baby girl. I promise.”

Josh Kaplan called a little while later to see how I was
dealing with the snow. I shoveled out the front porch and the walk (with a little help from some “invisible” shovelers) and left the rest for Murray to do the next day.

“It’s clear enough for you to come over if you want to,” I said.

Josh sounded his usual amiable self, but there was a hesitation I hadn’t expected. “I don’t think so, Alison,” he said.

I knew I shouldn’t have involved him in all this, ushering a guy I’d just gotten involved with into this crazy life with my family, my guests and my criminal investigations (he didn’t even know about the ghosts!) so soon. Another huge miscalculation. “I understand,” I said. And I did. I didn’t
like
it, but I understood.