An Uninvited Ghost (17 page)

Luckily, I wasn’t the one who’d had to deal with the cast of
Down the Shore
, since I’d heard considerable shrieking and a few thumps outside my back door, where the CSI team had gone to search the cast’s trailers. H-Bomb at one point shouted loudly that she would “stand like Rosie Parks” against the onslaught, and as far as I could tell, not one crew member had so much as guffawed.

Mom stayed for a while, waiting until the dishes were washed, dried and put away. She helped Melissa and me clean up the damage the CSI team had done to the guest bedrooms, then got into her Dodge Viper and hit the road at the legal limit of twenty-five miles per hour. She’d be home within the hour, her townhouse being less than eight miles away.

When I had the chance, I asked Paul if he’d gotten any Ghostograms from Scott McFarlane, but there had been no further communication from our erstwhile client. I was starting to wonder why I was this deep in this much trouble.

I went back out to the front room to talk to the guests a bit. They were agitated because of the police activity, but most of them seemed to find the whole experience exhilarating. I have no idea what the reaction of the Joneses was, of course, since they had once again retreated to their chamber to do . . . I prefer not to think about it.

Jim and Warren, unaware their names had been prominent in our earlier speculation, peppered me with questions about the investigation, almost all of which I answered with, “You’ll have to ask Lieutenant McElone. The police don’t tell me anything.” Which was almost true.

After most of the guests went back to their newly tidied rooms, I forced Melissa to go to bed and started repairing the damage in the rest of the house. Every single book in the library had to be reshelved, a concept that left me close to tears. I started on one shelf, got emotional, and decided to finish the task in the morning.

The front room wasn’t as badly disorganized, so I concentrated on that area for a while, then moved on to the den. Maxie hovered over the fireplace, a delighted grin on her face at my inconvenience.

“You really got yourself into something this time, didn’t you?” she crowed. “I can’t believe you let that old lady die here in our house, and now you can’t figure out what to do about it.”

I was putting knickknacks back on shelves, and couldn’t remember where they belonged. “You can manipulate physical objects,” I reminded her. “How about helping me clean up?”

“This isn’t my room. The attic is my room.” So we were back to that one.

“Fine.” I went back to rearranging, putting things where I was sure Maxie would find them objectionable. “What do you want?”

“Why do I have to want anything?” she asked. “Can’t I just be here?”

“You can be in your precious attic. You don’t like me. Why come where I’m cleaning if you’re not going to help?”

Maxie floated, considering. She picked up a small figurine, one that I’d picked up in an antiques store in New Hope, Pennsylvania. It was a sea captain, sitting back in a rocking chair, smoking a corncob pipe. I didn’t care for it very much, but I thought it was a good idea to have some sea-oriented decorations at a shore house. I fully intended, someday, to replace it with something less kitschy. “Yeah, I can see why you’d be worried that this might not find its way back,” Maxie said.

“If you don’t want to help, don’t help. Some people would simply pitch in out of friendship, but don’t you feel obligated.” I was trying to remember why I wanted most of this crap out where I could see it, anyway.

“Friendship? Are we friends?” Maxie seemed genuinely surprised.

Okay, so maybe
friends
was stretching it a bit, but if Maxie was going to be in my house for, as far as I could tell, the rest of my life (if not longer), I might as well try to make a stride or two toward civility.

“We’re not enemies. At least,
I
don’t think we are.”

“You don’t like me,” Maxie replied.

“What makes you say that?”

She sputtered. “Everything.”

“Melissa likes you. That’s enough for me,” I said. “The kid has unerring judgment.”

“Where do you want this?” Maxie asked, holding a decorative mug with the seal of Monmouth University emblazoned on it that I’d bought when I was a student there. The idea that Maxie would ask instead of just deciding where she’d put it—or, more commonly, to “accidentally” drop it so it would no longer offend her sensibilities—was extremely unusual.

“Why are you here, Maxie?” I asked again, ignoring her halfhearted attempt to be helpful.

She put the mug on the mantel over the fireplace, pretty much the last place I’d have wanted it. I guess two could play at this game. She looked around the room and found a photograph of Melissa and me, a copy of one taken as a gift for my mother on Mother’s Day when Liss was about six years old. Maxie floated over and picked it up. “It’s my birthday next Wednesday,” she said.

“What?”

“My birthday. I’m going to be . . .
would’ve been
thirty years old on Wednesday.” Maxie didn’t look at me. She swirled around to the other side of the room, moved around some things I’d placed in unacceptable spots, and then vanished up into the ceiling, leaving me to wonder what the hell that had been about.

Usually, I liked being alone when the house was quiet like this, but it had been an unbelievably long day, and now all I wanted was to get to bed. So I straightened up just to the point of acceptability and then turned to head for the stairs, and bed. I’d do the rest in the morning.

When I turned around, Dolores Santiago was standing in the foyer by the staircase, her gray hair down to the waist of her long flannel nightdress and without her usual inch-thick eyeglasses.

“Something I can help you with?” I asked her. Inside, I was thanking my lucky stars it wasn’t Bernice; another complaint right now might put me in the fetal position and on the floor until September. The look in Dolores’s eyes, however, was chilling—she was staring straight ahead and appeared to be in what I could only call a trance. Was she sleepwalking?

She walked directly toward me, but never made eye contact. I repeated my question, but she didn’t answer me, and when we were only a foot apart, she reached up and touched the amulet hanging from my neck. The silver one in an uneven triangular shape.

The one Arlice Crosby had given me the night before.

Dolores cupped the amulet in her palm and caressed it with her thumb.

“Are you all right?” I asked her. “Is there something about my necklace that you want to know?”

“It’s a family secret,” Dolores intoned. Then she pulled hard on the amulet and snapped the chain right off my neck.

“Ow!” I shouted. “Hey!”

But she had already turned and headed for the stairs. Luckily, being forty years younger, I still moved more quickly than she did, and stood between her and the landing. “Where do you think you’re going?” I asked. I pulled the necklace out of her hand and stuck it in the pocket of my jeans. It was a tight fit, but better uncomfortable than missing, I always say.

Dolores still didn’t answer. She just continued up the stairs as I called to her, and then disappeared into her room.

I gave it a long, hard thought and decided not to think about it again until I’d gotten a good night’s sleep.

It had been an unbelievably long day. Or have I said that already?

 

 

“Have you seen Tiffney?” Ed the director was walking around my extremely large backyard, his camera crew at the ready, his cast (or most of it, anyway) assembled and his patience, apparently, wearing thin. “Do you know where she is?”

I had no idea and told him so. I wasn’t interested in trailing the cast of
Down the Shore
around my property, since the four of them seemed, to my sensibility, a quartet of spoiled brats who needed to be told to sit down, shut up and eat their spinach, or there’d be no tequila, posturing or sex later. You have to have standards, after all.

They were shooting a sequence in the backyard that was meant to show off the cast’s athletic skills (and most of their bodies) while they played “beach volleyball.” To achieve this, the crew had imported hundreds of pounds of sand to dump on my grass, despite there being an actual beach not three hundred yards away that had all the sand you could possibly want. No doubt the sand there didn’t look as sandy as this sand. I had been assured any damage done to my lawn would be repaired when the company was finished shooting, a moment I was starting to anticipate almost every minute of every day.

I, in the meantime, was trying to forget all about last night and Dolores’s attempt at robbery while apparently sleepwalking. I hadn’t seen her this morning and assumed she was either out or hiding in mortification.

I had found the library’s bookshelves mysteriously restocked (although very badly sorted) when I awoke this morning; maybe my speech about friendship had gotten through to Maxie after all. So, having rescued the rest of my house from the indignities heaped upon it by McElone’s CSIs, and having made it through the first ghostly performance of the day, I was now relaxing a bit in the backyard, watching what was supposed to be filming.

Phyllis Coates had come by at my invitation (and because she wanted some pictures of the
Down the Shore
crew for the
Chronicle
), and we were eating burgers from the Harbor Haven Café that she’d brought with her as payment.

I’d caught Phyllis up on the developments in Arlice Crosby’s murder—as many as I knew, anyway—and told her I was still deliberating about Tom Donovan’s offer, when Trent Avalon, stonewashed jeans, black T-shirt and two-hundred-dollar running shoes at the ready, raced onto the “set,” where a remarkably small volleyball net had been erected on the imported sand.

Trent headed directly for Ed, and they began talking and gesturing. Everything in television, I was discovering, was a crisis. No cold water bottles? A crisis. A pimple on Rock Starr’s left (facial) cheek? Crisis. Threat of rain in the afternoon? Massive crisis.

But Arlice Crosby getting murdered in my den while the crew filmed four narcissists flexing their muscles? Great television.

It’s a funny business.

“From what I’ve heard through my police sources, Detective Anita McElone has more suspects and more evidence than she knows what to do with,” Phyllis was saying. “I guess it’s feast or famine in the police business.”

“None of it makes the least bit of sense to me,” I told her. “I’ve been thinking about it. As far as I know, nobody in that room had any reason to want Arlice dead. And yet, everybody seems to be a suspect.”

“For all you know, there wasn’t a person in the room who
didn’t
despise her.” Phyllis took a large bite of her burger and washed it down with black coffee. I loved Phyllis, but I doubted her digestive system shared the sentiment.

In the distance, Trent’s hands went to the top of his head. He looked like he was trying to keep himself from flying up into space. This must have been a
big
crisis, like running out of H-Bomb’s favorite brand of sunscreen.

“I didn’t despise her,” I said.

“You barely knew her,” Phyllis countered. “But it doesn’t even have to be someone who despised her; it could just be someone who thought they’d speed up the distribution of her estate. Maybe you should take Donovan’s money and do some investigating.”

“I’m not a
real
investigator,” I argued. “I have the license, but it’s not like I know what I’m doing. I’d be taking the money under false pretenses.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Donovan would get exactly what you’ve told him you are. You’re the one he’s asking. You should do it.”

“Ah, McElone will have the thing solved before I ask my first question,” I said hopefully. “She’s annoying, but she’s good at what she does. I’d just gum up the works. I’m sure we’ll discover this is much simpler than it seems, when all is said and done.”

“That’s lunch, everybody!” Ed clapped his hands once for attention and shouted so the assembled crowd could hear. “Back here in two!”

The crew, union members all, were gone in the blink of an eye, but the cast seemed puzzled and (of course) annoyed at the sudden interruption. “What the migraine was
that
?” H-Bomb wanted to know. “I’ve been, like, getting my volleyball skills ready all morning.” If by
volleyball skills
, she meant greasing up the area in and around her pectoral muscles, she was being entirely accurate.

They stomped off, no doubt in search of fattening foods that would mysteriously never make so much as a tiny bulge on any of their waists, while Phyllis and I exchanged confused looks. I stopped Trent as he tried to motor on by me by grabbing his arm and holding on for dear life. He had strong arm muscles, I noticed.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “You looked like you were just about to shoot.”

“We were,” he said. “Something came up.”

“Something’s always coming up,” I pointed out. “This must have been a big something.”

He looked grim as he nodded. “Tiffney is missing.”

Trent Avalon, having heard that in addition to operating a guesthouse I was also a licensed PI, immediately asked me to look into Tiffney’s disappearance. He seemed quite disappointed when I told him I was already in the middle of another investigation (having made the spontaneous decision to take Tom Donovan’s offer instead) and would not be able to conduct both. As I later told Paul, I was more comfortable taking a case that I knew McElone could solve ahead of me, and besides, I really had no idea how to track down a missing person. And the truth of the matter was, in the back of my mind, I really wasn’t all that sorry that Tiffney was gone.

Besides, she’d been gone—what, two hours? That’s not a disappearance; in Tiffney’s world, that’s a bathroom break. But Trent was acting like she’d vanished off the face of the earth two weeks before. I was not interested in getting involved in his craziness.