Night of the Living Deed (20 page)

I was trying very hard to decide whether to follow Kerin or the blonde, and had decided Paul would want me to follow the blonde because she had the book, so I didn’t notice that Kerin had headed, not for her car, but for mine. I almost jumped through the roof when she appeared in my window.

“Alison!” she enthused. “Are you ready for next Thursday?”

What the hell was she talking about? “Next Thursday?” I stammered.

“
Halloween!
” Oh yeah.

It occurred to me that Kerin, whose boss had been dead for only about a day (and who had obviously had some shady goings-on, um, going on), had bigger things than trick-or-treating to worry about, but then, her bringing up the subject reminded me that, no, I
hadn’t
gotten Melissa’s costume together. The woman was like a giant Jiminy Cricket.

“Almost,” I lied. The blonde had gotten up and walked back the way she came. Another thirty seconds and I’d have no chance to catch her. “I was just on my way, Kerin. Nice seeing . . .”

“Wait a second,” Kerin said. She gestured toward my passenger’s side door. “Let’s talk.”

What excuse could I use? Sick child? Nah, she’d find out I was lying. Sick mother? I didn’t want to send bad luck Mom’s way, and besides, she’d have to be
really
sick to require my presence, and if that were true, what the heck was I doing at Oceanside Park?

“Sure,” I said, and unlocked the passenger side door. It didn’t matter; the blonde woman was gone by now, anyway.

Kerin sat down opposite me and smiled amiably. “So,” she said. “Why were you hiding in the real estate office the night of Terry’s death?”

Whoa! Didn’t see
that
coming!

“I have no idea what you’re—” I began.

“Alison.” The smile faded just a bit, then quickly returned. To anyone watching, it would look like we were chatting pleasantly about Halloween costumes. “Let’s not play games. I know you were there. Your file was open on the desk when I got there. The police took you in for questioning. Don’t you think I heard about it?”

“Okay, I
was
there,” I admitted. “But I was just looking through the file on my house. I didn’t see anyone else, and I didn’t even know Terry was there until after you left.”

For a second—and
just
for a second—Kerin’s eyes widened. “You saw me there?”

I guessed, I wasn’t supposed to say that. “Um . . . yeah, just for a minute.”

“Did you say anything about me to the police?” Her face was positively vibrating with urgency. No, really. If you’ve never seen a vibrating face, you’ll have to trust me on this.

“No,” I lied, since in fact I
had
told Detective McElone about Kerin. Why hadn’t the police talked to Kerin yet?

The smile became wider, but not warmer. “Listen to me, Alison. We can help each other. If you don’t tell anyone you saw me there, I won’t tell anyone you were there, either. And we can both breathe easier. How does that sound?”

It was a lot of work to keep my eyes from spinning in their sockets. “Um . . . sounds good. Yes. Let’s do that,” I said.

Kerin opened the door. “I’m so glad we had this chance to talk,” she said.

And then she left. And Paul had heard the whole thing through my cell phone, which had been lying on the floor at her feet the whole time.

Paul had indeed overheard my conversation with Kerin earlier today, and reamed me out royally for not having brought binoculars or shaking Kerin fast enough to follow the young blonde woman. But he’d agreed with me that our list of suspects (now including Kerin Murphy, Adam Morris, possibly the Prestons and everyone on the planning board) was expanding. That didn’t make me feel better.

I had therefore decided to instead concentrate on having a nice evening out with a very attractive man and, for once, I could actually do that.

“So I hear you have ghosts in your house.” Ned Barnes, dimple, tousled hair and all, sat across the table and studied my expression with mischief in his eyes.

“I beg your pardon?” I sputtered.

“Ghosts. It’s the talk of the school.”

Ned had been frustrated in his desire to see my house. His Acura had, ironically, broken down (not the fault of our minor fender bender), and I’d had to pick him up in the Volvo. So he had complained, but good-naturedly.

We’d chosen the restaurant—a Greek place imaginatively named the Parthenon—because it was located a few towns over in Point Pleasant and decidedly not in Harbor Haven. Ned was a teacher in the local elementary school and I . . . well, I appeared to be the talk of the town. Or at least the fourth grade.

“I can explain that,” I told Ned.

Ned waved a hand. “Not at all necessary,” he said. “Nineyear-old girls say all sorts of interesting things. Melissa’s moving into a new house and her dad’s not around. She’s probably trying to spice things up a bit. I think it’s very creative, actually.”

“I’m glad you understand.” Dodged
that
bullet!

Ned smiled. “She told a few of her friends this ghost story, and they told a few and, well, now it’s . . .”

“The talk of the school? Let’s make a rule: While we’re out on a date—this is a date, isn’t it?”

Ned nodded emphatically—oh yes, this was a date, all right.

“When we’re out on a date, no talk about Melissa. It’s like shop talk for you, and a little un-romantic for me, frankly.”

He smiled. “You’re absolutely right, Alison. So tell me about you. You grew up in this area?”

I nodded. “I grew up in Harbor Haven, spent a couple of years at two different colleges, dropped out, worked at HouseCenter, got married, moved up to Bayonne with my husband, had . . .”

“Don’t say her name,” he teased. “It’s a rule.”

“
Right
. So we moved back down here, first to a little house in Red Bank. My ex paid for Melissa to go to school in Harbor Haven because I knew the schools were good.”

Ned tilted his head. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. But then The Swi . . . Steven and I decided to divorce, and I remembered that I hadn’t always wanted to work at HouseCenter or in a lumberyard. I wanted to open a guesthouse in Harbor Haven. So I started looking for the right house, and we ended up . . . well, you know where we live now.”

“I think it’ll make a great guesthouse,” Ned said after the waiter took our order for souvlaki and pastitsio. “I’d still love to come by and see it.”

“I’d love to show you around,” I heard myself say. Boy, he seemed eager. I mean, I’m not bad-looking by any means, but I don’t usually inspire men to pursue me quite so fervently.

“As long as the ghosts don’t object,” he said with a twinkle—yes, an actual twinkle!—in his eye.

“So tell me about yourself,” I said, shifting gears with the ease of a twelve-year-old tractor-trailer with rusted gears.

“I don’t have a very interesting story,” Ned told me. “I grew up in Seattle.”

“Right away, that’s interesting to a Jersey girl,” I said.

“Well, for me, it was cold and rainy,” he answered. “And I got out of there as quickly as I could, when I was eighteen.”

“You escaped to the tropical climate of New Jersey?”

Our waiter appeared at that moment with our appetizers, which consisted mostly of breaded and baked cheese, and olives (because it was a Greek restaurant and you have to have olives).

“New Jersey wasn’t my initial destination,” Ned told me when the coast was once again clear. “Actually, it was Peru.”

“Peru!” Heads turned at other tables. Oops.

“Yes, you might have heard of it. It’s in South America. Go south and make a right at Brazil.”

I pursed my lips to indicate that his drollness had found its mark. “Okay,” I practically whispered. “But why Peru?”

“I was fascinated with the history of the Incas, and I wanted to see it for myself. But I spent all my money getting there, and didn’t have a nuevo sol or a college degree to my name. So I picked up work in construction and in a copper mine.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t have an interesting story,” I told him.

Ned mimicked my “droll” face. “Long story short, I got lonely for America, and American history, so I saved up my wages and found my way back here.”

“To Harbor Haven?”

“Eventually. First I went to college and got degrees in history and education, and then I taught up in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a while. But when the history teacher job opened up in Harbor Haven, I jumped at it.”

“Why?”

“For an American history nut like me, there are few better places,” Ned said. “The Revolutionary War is all over New Jersey, and that’s my favorite period to explore. So I’m very, very happy to be here.”

Another period of silence accompanied the arrival of our dinners, which I for one was already far too stuffed to consider. I took a few bites to be polite—okay, I ate half of it, but it was really delicious.

“I wasn’t aware the shore areas had much in the way of Revolutionary history,” I said. “I thought it was all further north and west, in Morristown and in Trenton where Washington crossed the Delaware.” Sure, I know a little New Jersey history. But not that much—I was an English major at Drew and a business major at Monmouth University before I dropped out altogether.

“Not at all,” Ned told me through bites of his lamb. “There was a constant watch on the shore, even if just to try to spot ships heading for the ports of New York or Newark. And Washington himself spent a lot of time on the shore. He actually loved it here.”

“Big George was a shore bunny?”

Ned laughed, and was even suave enough that he managed not to have souvlaki come out his nose. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but yes. Washington became very enamored of the Jersey Shore, and apparently had his eye on some property here.”

“Here?”

“Well, in Harbor Haven, although that wasn’t the name of the town then.” Ned nodded. “But in the summer of 1778, Washington spent a good deal of time attacking the British in Freehold, not far from here.”

“I know where Freehold is, Ned. Bruce Springsteen is from Freehold. It’s the closest thing New Jersey has to Mecca.”

“Well, during that time, the story goes that Washington found exactly the parcel of land he was looking for in what became Harbor Haven.”

“No kidding! Which parcel was it?”

“Yours,” Ned said.

Ned didn’t know much more than that, but promised to “research it with a friend of mine at Princeton.” We hadn’t discussed anyone else more than two hundred years old again that evening, and over Ned’s protests, I drove him home after dinner rather than back to my house.

I told him I did that because I was tired, but the fact was, I was hoping that postponing the tour would force us to have another date, and the strategy worked—he asked me out again for Tuesday night. Then I dropped him off and, dammit, he didn’t insist I come inside his place, either.

Nothing’s perfect.

“This is beginning to make sense.” Paul spoke very slowly the next afternoon. He was kneeling—hovering, really—next to the radiator cover in the dining room, while I finished detailing the paint on the molding around the ceiling. I’d been reserving the ladder-related activities for whenever Maxie wasn’t around, and I knew she and Melissa were upstairs watching episodes of
Gilmore Girls
on Hulu.

“It is?” I’d learned in the past two days that George Washington was among the people who had once had designs on my house; that my real estate agent, Terry Wright, was dead from what seemed to be a really coincidental heart attack; and that Kerin Murphy had taken something from Terry’s office and given it to a mysterious woman. I still didn’t know anything about either of my original dilemmas: who had killed Maxie and Paul, and who was leaving me threatening e-mails. “How is what making sense?”

I interrupted the conversation to take a cell phone call from Jeannie, who wanted to know every possible detail about my date with Ned. I told her I was in the middle of a repair—because I was
always
in the middle of a repair—and that I’d call her back. Which I intended to do, in a couple of days.