Night of the Living Deed (6 page)

“I’m sorry,” was all he said.

But with those words, with that tone, with that accent (Canadian? English?), came a terrible, terrible truth—these two people
were
here, they
were
dead, and they
were
in my new house. So this was what a concussion could do to you.

“I am crazy, or seriously hurt,” I said. “I have a brain injury.”

“No, you’re not,” Paul told me quietly, in a soothing tone. “There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with
us
. We’re dead.”

“I don’t understand . . . anything,” I said.

“Neither do we,” Maxie responded. That wasn’t much help.

“It’s true,” Paul said. “We don’t know what happened to us. We don’t understand what’s going on. But we’ve been stuck here in this house for almost a year. And when you started in last week with the repairs and the construction, we thought you might be able to help us.”

I closed my eyes. “So one of you dropped a bucket of compound on my head to get me to
help
you?”

There was loud knocking on the kitchen door, and through the window I could see Tony standing on the back stoop. Paul and Maxie both turned and looked.

“Who’s he?” Maxie asked. She grinned, which was kind of scary. “He’s cute.”

“He’s taken,” I answered reflexively. “Besides, you’re dead.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t
look
.”

“Get rid of him,” Paul hissed. “We need to talk.”

“What do you
mean
, ‘get rid of him’? He’s here to help me.” I figured Tony could also prove my sanity—if he saw the two ghosts, then I wasn’t crazy.

I walked to the door and unlocked it. “Thank goodness you’re here,” I told Tony.

“More self-crumbling plaster?” he asked.

“He’s
better
than cute,” Maxie said.

“Calm down,” I warned her.

“I’m perfectly calm,” Tony said. “I was just joking about your plaster.”

“He can’t see or hear us,” Paul told me, hovering next to Tony. “Only you can.”

I stared at him. “Why?”

“Because you asked me to come here and look at some wall with a big ol’ hole in it, and this time, I’m happy to say, you’re awake and not bleeding,” Tony said. “That’s why.”

“How am I supposed to know?” Paul answered. “You think they give us a handbook? We died, and when we woke up, we were here. There’s no welcome wagon.”

“What?”

“Is your head okay?” Tony asked. He looked at it like a large neon sign reading “INJURY” would present itself. None did.

“Tell him you’re fine and to come back later,” Paul said. “Or I’ll let Maxie loose on him.” Maxie looked very interested. She walked right up to Tony and ran her finger down his spine. He shivered, turned to look, then turned back to me. “Chills,” he said. “Maybe you need to fix the furnace first.”

“I was thinking that, too, but I can look at it myself,” I told him. Paul was right—I had to get Tony out of here before Maxie did . . . something. Oh, damn: I was thinking of my two apparitions as real.

Maxie licked her lips in a way that suggested something other than hunger. For food.

“You’d better go,” I told Tony.

“What? Don’t you want me to look at that wall for you?”

“No! I mean, yes, I want you to look, but not now. I . . . have to go pick up Melissa at Wendy’s.” Yeah. That was it.

Tony chuckled. “So go. I can’t look at a wall by myself?” He started toward the living room. Maxie was following him. Closely.

“No,” I told him. “I don’t ever want you left in this house by yourself.”

Tony turned and considered me. “You’re serious.”

“You bet. Insurance. Anything happens and I’m liable. So come back later. I’ll call you.”

“If you hadn’t stopped me to tell me to go away, I’d be gone already.” Tony turned and, not waiting for a response, walked into the living room despite my protests.

Maxie tried to follow, but I held my ground in the doorway and hissed at her. “Step back.”

Surprisingly, she did.

“Wow.” I could hear Tony from the next room. “You weren’t kidding about this wall. The plaster just fell down by itself?”

Maxie picked up a small rubber mallet from my toolbox and stroked it. She grinned at me nastily.

“Yeah,” I said. “Spooky, huh?” I snarled, and Maxie put the mallet down.

“Could be trouble,” Tony said, walking back into the kitchen. “All the best plasterers are dead.”

“Who isn’t?” Maxie said.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked Tony.

“I don’t see how there’s a choice,” he answered. “You’ve got to take the whole wall down and put up drywall. Maybe in the whole hallway, and possibly into the living room, depending on how it goes.”

For a second, I forgot about the deceased people in the room, and thought only about my house. “Oh, Tony,” I moaned. “I
love
the plaster walls. They give the place character. I can’t make that room look like every other one built in the last fifty years.”

Tony shook his head. “I don’t see an alternative. But let me ask around. Maybe someone knows someone.”

Maxie licked her lips and moved closer to Tony. She reached a hand in his direction again.

“Tony.” My mind cleared—I had to get him out of here. “I’m not so sure I should be driving yet. Can you pick Melissa up and bring her home?”

“You drove over here this morning.” Now Tony was going to argue with me.

“And I probably shouldn’t have. I’m just a little tired now. Please?”

Paul nodded silently, as if Tony would have heard him even if he’d screamed at the top of his lungs.

“Sure,” Tony said. “But I’m calling Jeannie and telling her to check up on you, too.”

“Yes,” I said, staring in Maxie’s direction. “That’d be nice. Tell
your wife
to call me.”

Maxie yawned.

“
I will
,” Tony answered, matching my tone. Then he left, shaking his head, probably wondering if it was safe to go off and abandon someone as crazy as me in an empty room.

Empty.

As soon as I heard his truck pull out of the driveway, I turned to Paul. “Okay,” I said. “Explain yourself. Why did I just hustle my friend out of here so we could talk? What do we have to talk about?”

“We need you to help us,” Paul said, much in the same tone he’d said it before. Like it was a foregone conclusion, and anyone who questioned his word must be demented.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I should have known better than to ask, but my head was still a little fuzzy.

“We need you to find out who killed us,” Paul answered.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. I sat back down in the lawn chair, having cleaned off the dried compound from days before, and remembering fondly the jeans I’d worn that day, now forever at the bottom of a contractor’s trash bag. “You almost crush my skull with a fifty-pound bucket of compound, and then you think I should help you find out who killed you?” The fifty-pound thing was an estimate, but I thought I’d made my point.

“Geez,” Maxie said, rolling her eyes. “Are you going to hold that against me
forever
? I
said
I was sorry!”

“Actually, no, you didn’t.”

She sneered, probably involuntarily. I got the feeling Maxie sneered a lot, and it had become second nature.

“It’s tremendously important,” Paul said. “And it seems you’re the only one who can help.”

“Help you do what? Why don’t you know who killed you? Weren’t you there when they did it?” I closed my eyes. Another headache was coming my way. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t related to the concussion.

Paul smiled in an ingratiating way. “It’s really very simple. Sit down.”

“I am sitting.”

“Right,” he began. “Here’s what happened, as far as Maxie and I can tell. Maxie here was the most recent owner of this house before you bought it,” he said.

I stared at her. “
You’re
the one who painted the walls the color of blood?”

I thought—but couldn’t be sure—that I heard Maxie mutter, “It’s
my
house,” under her breath. If she had breath.

“But as soon as she closed on the property and moved in, strange things started happening,” Paul continued, either unaware of Maxie’s comment or ignoring it.

“Strange things?” I asked. “Like plaster walls that I can’t replace coming down all by themselves?” I glared at Maxie for a moment, but she didn’t flinch. And it was my best glare, too. My glare couldn’t beat her sneer.

“No,” Paul jumped in. “She started receiving strange e-mails, phone calls, and . . .”

“You don’t tell it right,” Maxie interrupted him. Paul spread his hands, giving her the floor. “So, some creep starts sending me messages about how I had to leave the house or I was gonna die.” She snorted. “Guess he was right.”

I turned to Paul. “How did you get involved?” I asked him.

“I am . . . I
was
a private investigator,” he said. “Maxie contacted me when the threats started getting serious.”

“I wasn’t scared,” Maxie interjected. “I was pissed off.”

“Of course,” I told her. “Who wouldn’t be?”

Paul jumped back in. “Less than two days after I started investigating, we both ended up . . . like this.”

“Yeah, good thing the retainer check never cleared,” Maxie said. “Some private dick you turned out to be.”

“It wasn’t . . .” But Paul couldn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t
know
if it was his fault or not. I could see it clearly in his eyes. What bothered me was that I could see the window behind him just as clearly.

I didn’t have time to answer because just then my phone vibrated (another unfortunately accurate metaphor for my romantic life). I looked down and saw Jeannie’s number. “I have to take this,” I said.

Paul frowned. “Don’t you realize how . . .”

“If I don’t answer, she’ll send the rescue squad. Besides, you’re not alive and I am, so I outrank you.” I opened the phone. “I’m fine, Jeannie,” I said.

“That’s not what Tony told me,” she answered. “He just called me from the truck. He says you were too tired to drive Melissa home, and you’re talking like a crazy person.”

“And how is that different than usual?” I asked.

“Normally, you’re not that tired.”

“Normally, I’m not just out of the hospital with a head injury,” I reminded her.

Jeannie sighed. “Exactly. What am I going to do with you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But let me get going, because I’m two days behind on my repairs.” Not to mention a lot of dried compound on the floor in the kitchen that wasn’t going to clean itself up. We said our good-byes, and I moved toward the kitchen.

“If we can avoid any more interruptions . . .” Paul started.

Oh yeah, ghosts in the room! “What do you want
now
?” I asked. “Can’t you see I have a crisis on my hands?” And on my kitchen floor, now that I remembered that.

“
You
have a crisis?” Paul demanded. “We’re trapped in this house for the rest of eternity, and
you
have a crisis?”

I ignored him (partly because I didn’t want to think about them being trapped in
my house
for eternity), and walked into the kitchen to survey the hardened white mess on the floor. I could break it up with a hammer, but that would mean sanding and refinishing the whole floor afterward. Another day and a half of work. “What do you mean, ‘trapped in this house’?” I asked. “Can’t you leave the house? Go roam the countryside?” I looked at Maxie. “Haunt a punk-rock biker bar?”

Maxie picked up the mallet again and took a step toward me, but Paul stopped her. “Humph,” she said, and scowled off into the living room. I made sure she didn’t have the mallet with her this time.

“We can’t seem to leave the grounds,” Paul went on as if nothing had happened. “Every time we try to get past the sidewalk in front or the fence in back, we just can’t move.”

“Is this one of those things where you have some unfinished business here on Earth and have to get through it before you can enter the afterlife?” I asked.

Paul shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “Remember? No handbook.”

There was no sense in denial anymore—they were here, and they very much appeared to be ghosts. “Okay,” I sighed. “Tell me what happened and what you want me to do.”

“All right, then.” Paul seemed pleased at my apparent cooperation. “The night . . . the night Maxie and I . . .”

“
Died
,” Maxie shouted from the next room. She sounded disturbingly happy, and I chose not to dwell on why.

“That night,” Paul continued, trying to pretend he hadn’t hesitated, “Maxie and I went to a meeting of the Harbor Haven planning board. Actually, Maxie went to the meeting, and I went as her bodyguard.”

“Another bang-up job,” came the comment from the living room. Paul ignored
that
, too.