Night of the Living Deed (36 page)

The argument went on for hours: I finished the urethane job, putting up and taking down barriers to keep (live) people from stepping on the floor until it dried. Jeannie made two more curtains for my bedroom, Wendy’s mom gave Melissa a ride home from school, Tony called to say he’d be back after his drywall job was completed, and Maxie was holed up with the laptop doing “research,” but neither Paul nor I had moved from our original positions: Paul thought taking down all the plaster walls, which could never be adequately replaced, would save my life, and I thought the possibility was just a little too iffy to warrant the damage.

Oh, and Mom called to say she’d call later.

Melissa was upstairs getting into her Mr. Spock outfit, and we expected the horde of trick-or-treaters, discreetly followed by a few mothers (including Kerin Murphy, much to my chagrin), to arrive at our house for pickup in ten minutes. I called up the stairs.

“Liss! Come on down! I want to get pictures before you leave!”

“Just a second!” the tiny voice came back. “I’m finishing up.”

The typical wave of four- and five-year-olds had already been coming by trick-or-treating from pretty much the minute school let out, each one followed so closely by a parent it was hard to tell who was getting the candy. But that died down fairly quickly, and we were awaiting the second wave, which would include Melissa and her posse, shortly. The teenagers would come after nine, and I’d stiff them. Teenagers trick-or-treating. Really.

Paul, wearing black jeans and a tight black t-shirt, looked like he should be attending an extremely casual funeral or a reunion of New Yorkers from the Clinton era. But his face was serious. “Alison . . . ,” he started.

I cut him off. “No more. We’re done.” Once again, I called upstairs. “Melissa! They’ll be here any minute, and I’m going to get pictures whether it mortifies you or not!”

“One second!” More insistent.

Paul bit his upper lip and tried a different tactic. “All right, then. If we’re not going to look behind the walls, where else haven’t we tried yet? This is a big house; there has to be
some
area we haven’t searched thoroughly.”

“I can’t think of anyplace,” I answered. “There’s no furniture in the house; each room is empty. I’ve been behind the tiles in the bathrooms, checked the mortar and every brick of the fireplaces, and pulled up each and every rug. There isn’t an inch of this house with which I have not become intimate.”

“There’s something we’re missing.”

“Of course there is, or we would have found it by now.
Melissa!
” I ran up the stairs to move my daughter along. “You have to come down
now
!”

And I found her in her bedroom, standing in her blue
Star Trek
shirt with the insignia on the left side. Her hair had been piled up under a store-bought wig that gave her black bangs and a bowl cut with sideburns. She had on the Silly Putty ears, which for the moment actually looked pretty natural (but almost certainly would not by the fourth house).

Also, her eyebrows were half-shaved, and Maxie was kneeling next to her, applying mascara to extend them up in a diagonal line on each side.

Melissa gasped. I gasped. Maxie looked up and didn’t so much as blink.

“We’re not done yet,” she said.

“I . . . you . . . didn’t I . . . ?” I was at my most articulate.

“Looks pretty good, huh?” Maxie said.

Melissa, considerably more savvy to my expressions and the fact that I’d specifically forbidden this activity, didn’t look nearly as confident. “Mom,” she said. “Don’t freak out.”

“Don’t freak
out
?” I echoed. “I told you without any question that you could not do this, and here you are with . . . with her, doing exactly what I said you couldn’t!”

“Oh, chill,” Maxie said. “They’ll grow back.”

I advanced on her, and she tried to wield a Gillette Venus safety razor as a weapon. “I don’t want you near my daughter
ever
again, do you understand?” I bellowed.

And I turned on my heel and left the room. Behind me, I heard sobs, but I couldn’t say for sure which one of them was crying.

When push came to shove, I didn’t have the guts to ground Melissa on Halloween, especially since I arrived downstairs to find at least eight of her friends, in costumes ranging from Captain Kirk to Lieutenant Uhura to Princess Jasmine (Marlee Murphy didn’t get the memo), and four mothers, including Kerin Murphy, standing in my empty living room, eyes round and wide. At first, I thought they were admiring the restored beauty of the old place.

No such luck.

“Ready for the SafeOWeen?” Kerin asked, no doubt dredging up skills from a cheerleading past. The kids looked glum.

“Is your house really haunted?” Wendy, Melissa’s best friend, asked. She hadn’t even asked where Melissa was, and here she was inquiring after the deceased. “Can we see the ghosts?”

“Yeah!” A little girl named Sandy (I remembered her because she had been trading Melissa Twinkies for apples until I got wind of it) asked. “Where are the ghosts?”

“Do they wear sheets?” another one asked. The poor kid.

Melissa appeared at the top of the stairs. Her face registered angry, nervous and a little scared, mostly, I thought, at what vengeance I might take for her disobeying me so blatantly.

“I’m sorry, girls, there really aren’t any ghosts here,” I told the gathered assemblage, and in that first second, I must report that the mothers were the ones who looked the most disappointed, Kerin perhaps most of all—if I had a haunted house, she could probably put it around that I was a witch. “I know stories have been going around, but they’re just stories. Like Aladdin and Princess Jasmine.” I gestured to Marlee in the Jasmine costume.

“Princess Jasmine is
real
!” she insisted, and crossed her arms with great conviction.

“You’re right, my mistake,” I agreed. “But the ghost stories are just . . .”

And that was when Maxie appeared out of the floor, reached for “Captain Kirk’s” communicator (made out of a painted-over McDonald’s apple pie box) and made it “fly” across the room. She looked at me, sneered, and stuck out her tongue.

The little girl in the Kirk outfit yelled, “Hey—!” But then she stopped and realized what had happened, and her mouth dropped open.

“A ghost,” said the Uhura girl.

“No, no,” I told them. “This is just a big, drafty house, and sometimes the wind . . .”

“All the windows and doors are closed,” Kerin said. Her smile was just a little evil. “There’s no draft in here.” I decided there and then to destroy her.

But Maxie wasn’t finished getting her revenge. She pushed the hanging overhead light in the living room and made it sway. Then she made the communicator hover in front of Captain Kirk until the little girl understood she could take it back. And Maxie topped it off by picking up Melissa and carrying her down the stairs, then placing her gently on the floor. Melissa looked up and nodded at her.

“Thanks, Maxie,” she said.

Maxie looked in my direction. “No problem, Melissa,” she said. “I’ll
always
be your friend.”

“You can
see
them!” Wendy said to Liss. “You know their names!”

“I told you,” Melissa said, very matter-of-factly.

Kerin stared at me. “There really is no explanation, is there?” she said in a cold, calculated tone.

I can’t justify it. Maybe the pressures of the past few weeks just exploded out of me all at once. Maybe it was the imminent threat that I’d be deprived of my life in six hours or less. Maybe it was the scared expression on the faces of those mothers and the delighted ones on the faces of their children.

“Sure there is,” I said loudly. “Yes, there
really are ghosts
in this house. Melissa and I can see them. We can talk to them. Why can’t
you
?”

“Oh, there are not,” one of the other moms protested. “You’re just playing a Halloween trick on us.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. Suddenly, I felt like there was nothing left to lose—let the guesthouse idea go down the tubes. Let the rest of the town think I was insane or a “Wiccan Gone Wild.” Let the fourth grade think my daughter was weird. “They’re real ghosts. Real dead people, still existing in this house, and they can
never leave
. Go ahead, tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! The place is
haunted
, I tell you,
haunted
!”

Paul, attracted by the noise, floated into the front hallway and looked at the amassed children and parents, aghast. “What are you doing, Alison?” he asked.

“I’m telling the truth!” I shouted, and then I pointed at the mothers, who stood stock-still and widened their eyes to the size of Oreo cookies. “They all need to know, in case their kids want to play here! There are ghosts here, and they’re not the
least bit dangerous!
”

Maxie picked up the little girl dressed as Lieutenant Sulu and swirled her around the room, something the girl (I think her name was Soyong) could not possibly have enjoyed more. She squealed with delight and clapped her hands when put back down.

Her mother, thankfully, was not present, but Kerin grabbed “Sulu” by the shoulders protectively, once she was back on solid ground.

“Any questions?” I asked.

The girls applauded mightily, and I noticed Melissa among the most arduous clappers. One of the mothers backed out the door.

As the kids each grabbed a mini Crunch bar and the remaining mom stood absolutely motionless, I pulled Kerin to one side. “I know you’re sleeping with Adam Morris,” I said. Mentally, I thanked Bianca for my newfound power: Kerin’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “If you don’t want that information in the hands of someone who’ll use it”—why use Jeannie’s name?—“you’ll skip SafeOWeen and watch my daughter like a hawk door-to-door all evening, is that clear? Don’t say anything, just walk away.”

Kerin just walked away. Quivering.

Chattering with excitement, the girls headed out to an evening of sugar-fueled avarice. The mothers huddled together on the way out, and I knew that there was no chance I’d ever be elected PTSO president in my lifetime. If I had one.

I knelt down by Melissa before she turned. “You look wonderful, sweetie,” I told her, and she gave me a hug. I made sure she took her cell phone with her, and told her to call in at half-hour intervals. I also reminded her of the eight-thirty curfew, and told her that under the circumstances, it was even more unbreakable than it would have been otherwise.

Melissa didn’t argue. She was gone far too soon for my liking.

After all, it might have been a last hug.

Tony got back to the house with Indian food just as the sun was setting, but I wasn’t eating. Nothing had happened, and while I should have thought that was a good thing, it just made me feel that a bad end to the evening was coming closer and closer.

Occasionally, we’d get some business from trick-or-treaters, and the ones Melissa’s age (and some younger) seemed to crane their necks to get a good look inside the house. Obviously, the story of the earlier part of the evening was getting around town. Some of the kids even forgot to ask for candy.

One of them yelled, “Hey, ghosts!” when he came in, but was not rewarded with a reaction. But once he turned his head, his friends could see the plastic pumpkin holding the candy fly around the room. When they shouted, he turned back, and the pumpkin was back on the chair by the door.

Odd.

Mom called at about seven-thirty, saying she wasn’t a bit worried, but wouldn’t be coming tonight because she had “business to take care of.” I was going to ask, but what would have been the point?

Melissa remembered to call after the first half hour, and I waited fifteen minutes after the second to call her. She was fine. I was . . . I’m not sure what I was. Nervous? Annoyed? Frustrated?

Just before eight, the doorbell rang again, and I reached for the latest bag, this one holding tiny 3 Musketeers bars (let other people’s mothers worry about cavities). But I didn’t need them, because it was Ned Barnes who showed up at the door, and he was carrying ingestible items from Dunkin’ Donuts.

What was weird was that when I opened the door to let him in, there were maybe twenty kids, ranging from eight to sixteen or so, standing a few yards from the house.

Just staring.

They weren’t coming to ask for candy. They weren’t playing tricks. No toilet paper or eggs were visible.

They were just staring. I hustled Ned into the house and shut the door quickly.

“I have coffee and I have Munchkins and muffins,” he announced. “Let’s get this party started!”

Everybody in the house, dead and alive, looked at him as if he were truly crazy.

“All right, I was trying,” Ned said. “I hoped I could distract you.” I gestured for him to join us at the collapsible picnic table I’d been using as a tool table until this afternoon. He sat down opposite Tony, and Paul, hovering toward the ceiling behind him, seemed to scrutinize him especially carefully.