Night of the Living Deed (10 page)

Melissa put the scraper down. “I mean it,” she said.

“Nothing’s wrong, honey. I’m just tired.” You can always tell kids you’re tired. They’re not familiar with the concept. They never think they’re tired, even when they can barely keep their eyes open.

Then Paul walked in. Through the outside wall. I’d never seen that before, and I gasped a little.

“Mom, you’re scaring me.” Great. I’m trying to keep my nine-year-old away from two deranged ghosts, and
I’m
the one scaring her.

“Alison!” Paul said. “What happened with the police?”

Reflexively, my head swiveled in his direction. And that was when my daughter said the scariest thing I’d ever heard.

“Mom! You mean you can see them, too?”

 

After all the shouting (mostly from me) died down, I sat my daughter on the folding chair I’d bought to replace the compound-encrusted one and asked her how long she’d been able to see our semitransparent guests.

“Remember the first time we were here?” she asked. “Then.”

“Why didn’t you
say
anything?” My voice rose about an octave. I could have been singing
Aida
. Not the Elton John version, either.

“Maybe she just doesn’t trust you,” Maxie suggested. If looks could kill, the one I gave her would have been redundant.

“I
did
say something, but I didn’t think you’d believe me,” Melissa said. “I thought I’d sound crazy. I didn’t know you could see them.”

“I couldn’t, until
somebody
hit me on the head with a bucket of compound,” I told her.

Maxie smiled a little more. “See? There’s an upside to everything.”

“Upside? My daughter sees ghosts and you want me to see the
upside
?” Too much oxygen in my brain . . .

Paul knelt down to look Melissa in the eyes. “Why didn’t you say anything to us, Melissa? I didn’t know you could see us all these weeks.”

Melissa gave him her best “well,
duh
” look. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she said.

Maxie actually looked thoughtful. “That’s very good,” she told Melissa. “You really
shouldn’t
talk to strangers.”

“Yeah, but then how will I ever make any new friends? Everybody’s a stranger when you first meet them.”

Control. I needed to regain control. I knelt down beside my daughter and looked her straight in the eye. “Okay. You can see the ghosts.”

“Maxie and Paul,” Melissa corrected me. It was important, she seemed to believe, to be polite to the dead people.

I nodded. “Right. Paul and Maxie. You can see them. Which would indicate that they’re not just hallucinations.”

“How could you think . . .” Paul began, but I ignored him.

“So you have to know, Liss, that it’s
really
important we keep this a secret, right?”

Contrary to popular belief, a mother can usually tell when her daughter is lying, and the nanosecond of panic in Melissa’s eyes told me exactly what her words meant. “Oh sure, Mom,” she said. “I won’t tell anybody.”

Oh boy. “Who have you told already?” I asked. Paul frowned.

“Nobody!” It came out much too fast and too loud.

“Come on, Liss. We’re in damage-control mode here. Who did you tell? Did you tell Wendy?” Wendy is Melissa’s BFF. There are times I believe they’d actually sign up to be joined at the hip if they thought Wendy’s mom and I would agree to the surgery.

Melissa looked away. Swell. “Um . . . maybe.”

“Maybe? You’re not sure whether or not you told Wendy that there were two ghosts in our new house?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I won’t be mad,” I said.

Melissa made eye contact with me, her own eyes starting to tear up a little. “You won’t?”

“I promise I won’t get mad,” I told Melissa. “But you have to tell me the truth.”

“Don’t believe her,” Maxie said. “Parents always say things like that, and then they turn on you.”

I glared at Maxie. “I really don’t have time for group therapy now,” I told her. “Go haunt the basement.”

Maxie didn’t move, but she did shut up.

My daughter took a deep breath. “I told Wendy,” she said.

I clamped my mouth shut for a moment, to avoid making Maxie right. Then—admirably, I believe—I smiled, and said, “Okay. As long as it was just Wendy.”

“Well, I told Andrea, too.” Now that Melissa knew I wouldn’t yell at her, she was going to give me every reason to do so.

“Andrea? Anybody else?”

“Just Lenore.”

“So you told three girls that you saw ghosts in the house.” I was still getting used to the idea that
I
was seeing ghosts in the house, and now it was becoming a spectral chain letter for fourth graders.

“Yeah. But Wendy probably told Sophie, who probably told Clarice, who . . .”

“Who’s Clarice?” Wait. What was the point here? “Never mind. Okay. So we can now logically assume that every fourth grade girl in your school has heard this story.”

“Clarice is in third grade,” Melissa said. Well, that put
me
in my place.

I sat on the floor and held my head in my hands for a moment. My ghostly infestation was no doubt the talk of the elementary school by now, and by logical extension, the town. People were probably gossiping about us behind our backs. They were wondering what kind of mother I was to let Melissa go around telling these bizarre stories. I’d probably have to move out of town again in disgrace, change my name, leave the investment I’d made with my life savings and get a job as a cocktail waitress in a bar with peanut shells on the floor.

“So,” Paul said, oblivious. “Tell me about your meeting with the detective.”

Adam Morris was a very busy man; that was obvious the first time I called his office to ask for a meeting. It took two separate transfers just to get my call to his secretary, who then told me four different times herself that Mr. Morris was a very busy man.

Strangely, however, when he heard that the new owner of 123 Seafront Avenue was calling, Adam Morris managed to put off his very busy-ness and pick up the phone.

“Alison!” As if we were old friends. Already I didn’t like the guy. “What a delight to hear from you!”

I was sure the delight was all his, but since Paul was listening on the speakerphone, I’d agreed to be civil, at least. This was a man who might have had a hand in two murders, could be threatening my life and, at the very least, might want to take my home and business away from me.

“Mr. Morris,” I said, not giving him the satisfaction of calling him by his first name, “I’m calling because I just found out you’d been trying to . . . acquire my property before I bought it.”

“Among others,” he admitted. “Are you interested in selling?”

“Actually, I thought it would be a good idea for you to come here. See the house, and what I’m doing with it. You’ll see that its value has certainly increased.” I figured I’d let him think I was interested in his money, since that’s what most businessmen understand. I had no intention of selling the house to him or anyone else, but the purpose of leading him on was twofold: bring him to the house so Paul could get a look at him, and just on the chance that he
was
the person who had killed Paul and Maxie, give him a reason to believe he might be able to get the house from me without having to resort to violence.

A win-win, if you will.

“I’m sure it has, Alison,” he said, still taking no notice that I hadn’t started calling him Adam yet. “But I don’t intend to rent the house out as a B and B, like you.”

“It’s not a—”

“I was planning to knock it down, in order to make room for Seaside Estates,” he went on, undeterred.

“I see,” I said, though of course I already knew that. Let him think the bumpkin was now stumped. In the development game, there’s nothing like a stumped bumpkin.

“I would offer a very competitive price,” he said.

“I’m sure you would,” I told him, despite thinking that he would probably try to lowball me just on principle. “But I don’t know that I would feel right letting you knock down such a historic property.”

Paul whispered, unnecessarily, “Ask him why he didn’t buy it after Maxie died.”

I waved a hand at him: I was getting to that. “I’m curious—if you’re that interested in the land, why didn’t you buy it when it was on the market, before I did?”

He hesitated. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

“You’re the head of your company. You can discuss anything you want.” I hadn’t meant to be rude; it just slipped out—I didn’t like the man.

Paul shook his finger at me. “Don’t do that!” he shouted. I guess he’d finally realized I was the only one who could hear him.

Morris, of course, answered immediately. “That’s right. I can. And I’m not discussing that, Alison.”

“Well, I appreciate your picking up the phone,” I said. “I’ll have to reconsider selling the house. Please give me a few days.” I didn’t like to think that request was a literal one, but I couldn’t be sure.

“A few days,” Morris said, and hung up.

“Well, what did we find out?” I asked Paul.

“That you can’t follow instructions,” Paul answered. “And that you just made an enemy.”

 

 

“I don’t think we ran anything other than that little column-filler.” Phyllis Coates, editor of the
Harbor Haven Chronicle
, frowned in thought.

“I thought newspapers didn’t print articles about suicides,” I said. “I was surprised that one was there at all.”

Phyllis’s office, a throwback to a bygone newspaper age, was filled with actual paper and dust. There was a concession to the twenty-first century in the iMac on her desk, but other than that, you would have expected men in green visors to be yelling, “Copy!” at the top of their lungs in the “newsroom” outside, which held old back issues, an unconnected telephone and, at the moment, my daughter. Melissa was examining the bound copies of the
Chronicle
that seemed randomly tossed around. Phyllis hadn’t cleaned up for some time, and there didn’t appear to be anyone else on staff here.

And I have to admit, every time Melissa looked up or turned her head, I tensed a little, wondering if she was seeing someone else who wasn’t exactly, you know, alive.

This was going to take some getting used to.

“We usually don’t,” Phyllis answered, bringing me back to the conversation. She was as dated as the office, her face showing every bit of her seventy-something years. I’ve known Phyllis since I was a papergirl for the
Chronicle
when I was thirteen, and I had renewed the acquaintance when I’d moved back to Harbor Haven. But she insisted she didn’t need a papergirl these days, so I’d asked about advertising rates for the guesthouse. Phyllis was still a feisty ex-newspaper reporter and a closet softie, and I really liked her.

Besides, Paul said the local newspaper editor
always
knows more about what is going on in town than anybody else. If anybody knew anything about the “suicides” or Adam Morris, it would be Phyllis. “We only publish on suicides when the person is a celebrity, or if the suicide happens in a public place.”

“This happened to civilians in a private home,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but we didn’t know they were considered suicides right away,” Phyllis answered. “And the deaths immediately followed a contentious planning board meeting where one of the deceased spoke. People wanted to know what was going on.” She allowed herself a slight smile. “Besides, it was the off-season, and we needed to fill the space.”

“Are you sure it was suicide?” I asked Phyllis. “Did you just rely on the police reports?”

Phyllis’s voice took on an edge. “Honey, I was a crime reporter for the
New York Daily News
for thirty years before I bought this rag. I don’t just rely on the police reports. We reported the incident the week after it happened, and I followed up. Harold Westmoreland, the detective on the case, wasn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes, but he looked into it. The medical examiner showed a high concentration of Ambien in each of their bodies, enough for almost a whole jar of pills
each
. Now, you don’t get people to take that many pills by pointing a gun to their heads, and you don’t take them by mistake. Those people were trying to die.”

Through the glass, I could see Melissa close one book of past issues and then turn to look in my direction. I’d told her not to come into the office until I gestured, but she was running out of things to be interested in at a newspaper office. I’d better get to the point quickly.

I bit my lower lip. “Yeah, see, I don’t think they were,” I told her.

Phyllis raised an eyebrow with interest, not skepticism. I took that as a good sign. “Really,” she said.

“Yeah. It seems that Maxie Malone—who owned the house then—was getting threatening e-mails telling her to get out of the house before something happened to her. And then something happened to her. You don’t find that suspicious?”