Night of the Living Deed (30 page)

Phyllis’s “friend” at the medical examiner’s office had called again, apparently. “They reexamined the tissue samples they took at the time, and I hear the coroner is going to issue a report on the two ‘suicides’ tomorrow. They figured out how the poison was administered.”

“Really!” Paul would be transparent with envy when he found out I’d hear first. “How did they do it?”

“Judging by the contents of their stomachs and the way the poison—the acetone—had circulated through their systems, the best guess is it had been taken in a glass or two of red wine each. Probably about forty-five minutes to an hour before they died.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. But Melissa is quicker than I am. “So whoever did it was probably at Café Linguine when Paul and Maxie went there after the planning board meeting,” she said.

“You get the blue ribbon, kid,” Phyllis said. “So the killer has to be someone who was at the restaurant, and probably at the meeting before that, too.”

Melissa beamed at the compliment. She sipped her hot chocolate (which, unlike Phyllis’s, was not spiked with rum) and grinned.

“Phyllis,” I said carefully, “Mayor Bostero owns part of Café Linguine. She even might have been at the bar or in the kitchen that night.”

“I know, honey,” Phyllis said. “But the interviews the cops had with the bartender and the waitstaff didn’t mention her doing anything except sitting at the table with the planning board and ordering shrimp.”

“I’m going to have to tell Paul,” I said to myself.

“What was that?” Phyllis asked, confused.

I caught myself. “I said, ‘If that don’t beat all,’ ” I told her.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

 

 

I tore Melissa away after three cups of cocoa and as many trips to the bathroom and, thanking Phyllis, headed out on our most serious errand of the day. Halloween House of Horrors, a specialty store that had set up shop temporarily on Route 35, was packed to the gills, which wasn’t surprising, seeing as how Halloween was all of a day and a half away. Melissa, in an uncharacteristically fatalistic mood, was dragging her feet next to me, and not crazy about taking my hand.

“People will see us,” she whined. “I’m not a baby.”

“You’re
my
baby,” I told her, which I’m sure was exactly what she wanted to hear. “And I’m not letting you get swept up in a human tide and taken from me forever.”

“I have a cell phone,” she pointed out in her best “my mom’s an idiot” voice. Honestly, it was a miracle I could dress myself without her help in the morning, I was so stupid.

“I’m holding your hand. Deal with it.”

Melissa put on a grump face and said nothing, but didn’t try to yank her hand out of mine, which I counted as a minor victory. Our mission for the day: Find a pair of pointed ears, preferably not already attached to another person. If my daughter wanted to be a blue-shirted, bowl-hair-cutted, eyebrow-raising (she wanted me to shave them halfway to make them more pointed, but
that
wasn’t going to happen) male Vulcan for Halloween, so it would be. Everything was in place but those freakin’ ears.

The sales desk was packed seven deep, so asking for help from someone behind the counter was a lost cause. And since there was no large sign with red twenty-two-inch letters reading “Pointed Ears,” I’d have to do some investigative work on my own. If only Paul were here.

“Why don’t you want to be a ghost for Halloween?” I asked my daughter. “That’s easy.”

She looked at me with pity. “Ghosts look just like everybody else,” she said. Oh yeah, I’d forgotten. She was actually friends with ghosts. The whole sheet-over-the-head thing would probably be considered a form of discrimination, or an unbearable stereotype, to my fair-minded daughter.

We hadn’t walked very far down the aisle (which seemed to be filled with fake bloody body parts, and try saying
that
three times fast) when I heard a voice from behind me. “Alison! Alison Kerby!”

I turned, and there stood Kerin Murphy. I looked down at Melissa, who was considering a rubber hand with a rubber knife through it and rubber blood gushing from the rubber wound. It was charming, and only seventeen ninety-five. Obviously, my daughter wasn’t going to be much help.

Kerin was wearing the most casual of high-end clothes, not exactly a jogging suit but something that clearly could be used during exercise, yet had cost as much as my television. She had no doubt just arrived on her way home from the fitness center at Buckingham Palace.

“Kerin!” I said. “So you were late thinking about Halloween too, huh?” At least I could wallow in the idea that someone else was as negligent a parent as I was.

“Oh no.” Kerin waved a hand at that notion. She dropped no hint that we’d both been in the room with Terry Wright’s corpse. “I’m here dropping off my oldest. Syndee is working here part-time as part of a work-study program at the middle school.” No doubt Syndee was also volunteering at a homeless shelter on weekends and staying up nights knitting nuclear bomb shields for the Middle East. “What about you?”

“We’re just putting the finishing touches on a costume we’re donating to a shelter for gifted children,” I said. Melissa’s face shot up toward mine with an absolutely appalled expression on it. “Then we’re going to Staples to pick up an
appointment book
.” Melissa knew better than to say anything, but her face was asking if I’d lost my mind.

“Well, maybe I can get Syndee to help you,” Kerin offered. She didn’t so much as blink.

“Oh no, we’re just fine.”

Melissa started scanning the crowd, no doubt looking for a better mother she could adopt.

“Good,” Kerin said, and for a golden moment, I thought she was going to walk away, but she stopped and spoke to me in a confidential tone. “Oh, by the way, Alison,” she hissed. “I know your secret.”

It occurred to me to say that I knew hers, too, but I played it safe. “Really? You’d better not tell me, or it won’t be a secret anymore.”

“I know about the ghosts,” Kerin went on, oblivious to my incredibly witty remark.

I froze. Maybe she meant something other than what I thought. “Ghosts?” I said.

“Sure. The girls have been talking about it for weeks. I hear you have two ghosts living in your house.” Kerin smiled the most annoying smile I’d seen since The Swine had taken the highway to the Golden State.

I reflexively looked down at Melissa, who was suddenly very interested in studying her shoes.

“Girls like to tell stories,” I said, staring at my daughter. “You know how it is.”

“Of course,” Kerin said. Then she looked down at Melissa and said, “Did you make up the ghosts, sweetie?” When I was Melissa’s age, I would have decked someone who talked like that to me, but my daughter is much more evolved, and doesn’t have the same reach with her left.

“No,” Melissa said, staring straight into Kerin’s eyes. “Maxie and Paul are real.”

Nice covering, Liss.

“That’s so adorable!” Kerin gushed. “I wish Marlee had such a vivid imagination.”

“It’s not imagination,” Melissa countered, voice as calm as a mid-May breeze. “They died in our house, and now they can’t leave. They’re my friends.”

Kerin’s smile faded a little bit. “But you have some
real
friends, don’t you, sweetie?”

“Her name’s Melissa,” I reminded Kerin. “And yes, she has living, breathing friends as well.” What the hell, I thought. My business was doomed from the start, anyway. I might as well shovel dirt on its grave. Seemed appropriate, somehow.

“As well?” Kerin was quick enough to pick up on that.

“Yes. In addition to Paul and Maxie, the ghosts, Melissa also likes to play with living people. So on Thursday, we’ll be skipping the SafeOWeen to have some
real
fun. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to find some pointed ears.”

We walked off, and Melissa actually reached out and took my hand.

The ears were sold out.

After another two stores with no luck, I followed Maxie’s suggestion (to my irritation) and we ended up buying some Silly Putty at a Toys “R” Us in the hopes that we could figure out a way to attach it to Melissa’s actual ears and fashion it into the proper configuration. That was the plan, anyway.

But I wasn’t thinking about it yet because Halloween was still two nights away. At the moment, I was thinking about how Ned Barnes was a very charming man who was looking at me with a good deal of warmth, a real asset in the late-October chill as we strolled down the boardwalk in Point Pleasant, one town over from Harbor Haven.

“Whose idea was this, anyway?” I asked him, snuggling into my very alluring puffy down vest. Could I dress to entice a guy, or what?

“Yours,” Ned answered. “I had suggested a movie. In a nice warm theater.”

“Fine. Lord your sanity over me.” It was hard to remind myself that Phyllis had mentioned Ned being interested in the Washington deed long before I bought the house.

Before Ned and I left, Paul had informed me that the “very thorough” search he and Maxie (mostly Paul) had made of the house had turned up no documents emblazoned with George Washington’s John Hancock. “It’s entirely possible the whole story is just a myth,” he’d said.

“But then you and Maxie . . .” I hadn’t thought before speaking.

“Yes. If we’re right about the killer being after the deed, we’d have died for nothing.” Paul’s face had been so unspeakably sad and angry that I’d left him alone, mostly because he’d asked me to do so.

Now, on the boardwalk, Ned grinned at me, which was altogether unfair, and shook his head. “I’ll never claim to be the sanest guy in the room,” he said. “I gave up copper mining to teach history to nine-year-olds.”

“Yeah, who wouldn’t pine for the romantic life of the copper miner?”

He put his arm around me, ostensibly because I looked cold, and I didn’t do anything to dissuade him of that notion. Yet while I was reasonably warm in my down vest, I noticed that Ned himself wore nothing but a thin blue denim jacket, which would have set off his eyes if we hadn’t been mostly in the dark.

“I’ve decided not to let you out of my sight until Friday,” Ned told me. “This deadline you’ve been given is not something to take lightly.”

I shivered, and not just because it was cold. “I’ve been trying not to think about it,” I admitted. “I’ve been joking about it, pretending it isn’t real. I keep thinking something will happen, and I’ll wake up and this will have been an odd dream. I won’t have seen . . .” Oops. He didn’t know about my boarders.

Ned stopped and looked at me. “You won’t have seen what?” he asked.

“
Seemed
,” I “corrected” him. “I won’t have
seemed
like a hysterical maniac to you.”

But Ned wasn’t buying: His eyes narrowed, and he grabbed me gently by the upper arms. “Alison, don’t play games with this,” he said, pleading. I couldn’t figure out what he meant. “If you’ve found that Washington document, you should just give it to these people.”

That
was what he meant? He thought I was holding on to the deed out of . . . what? Greed? Stubbornness?

“I don’t have the deed,” I told him, maybe a little too harshly. “I haven’t the vaguest idea where it is or if it even exists.”

Ned didn’t let go of my arms, and his voice got thick. “I’m trying to save your life here, Alison,” he said. “Tell me where the deed is, and let’s hand it over right now, before another minute goes by.”

There was something about his manner—okay, it was
everything
about his manner—that was frightening me. I shoved his hands off my arms. “I
don’t have
the deed!” I repeated. “What’s gotten into you?”

He covered his tracks well. He put up his hands in a conciliatory gesture and smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m worried about you. I don’t want you to be facing this thing.” He held out his hand for me to take. “Forgive me?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t take his hand. We walked the rest of the boardwalk in silence, and then Ned drove me home.

I’d left Melissa at the house with Jeannie, and I wasn’t in much of a mood to talk when I got back, so it was even worse that Tony had joined her there, and because we’d come back so early, Melissa was still awake. So I had three people wondering what the hell my problem was when I’d just been out to the boardwalk with an attractive man. (Although Melissa was barely hiding her glee that my date with her teacher hadn’t gone well.)

Their subtle probing of my mood (Jeannie: “What the hell is your problem?” Tony: “Did he do anything,” looking in Melissa’s direction, “you know, that I need to talk to him about?” Melissa: “Are you
sure
I can’t shave just half of my eyebrows?”) didn’t last very long, as they could see I didn’t feel like talking about it. I changed the subject to the new plaster mold. Luckily, Tony bit.

He immediately got to his feet with enthusiasm. “I still think it’ll work,” he said. “The screw holes are in line to attach to the studs, and once the seams are dry, you can cover them up so that nobody will ever know they were there.”