Ghost in the Wind (24 page)

I called Paul from the car. He could hear but not respond, so I did all the talking (ghosts can't be heard on the phone, seen in photographs or reflected in mirrors; I'm pretty sure they can e-mail). Then he texted to Melissa (it saved time to talk to him and then have him text), since I was driving, and told her Vance was back in the house and we should come home.

Which was just as well, since I hadn't planned on going anywhere else.

When we got there we found Mom and Dad had arrived unexpectedly. Mom said they'd just been in the neighborhood but I knew she wanted to see how Melissa and I were reacting to the events of the night before. We were fine—or at least Melissa was—and that satisfied her enough to stay for the Chinese food I was ordering in for dinner. After greeting her grandparents, Liss of course hightailed it for her room and would no doubt hibernate there until called for feeding.

Vance was indeed back, looking sad and disappointed. He hovered over my currently unused stove like a depressed basset hound, sighing and not saying much. Mom was poring over the menu like she'd never seen one before. Paul floated up from the floorboards and noted Vance, who was doing his forlorn vulture impression and not speaking. Paul stopped rising for a second, considered and shook his head slightly.

“Now can we talk about the case?” he asked. Once he'd been back on the job, he'd become just as zealous and overbearing as before. Why had I missed this?

“Jeremy,” I reminded myself.

“Exactly.” Paul hovered, not really moving around the room, which was an indication he was thinking hard. If he started tilting to the left I'd know the problem was a real stumper.

“What about Jeremy?” Vance asked.

We all started at the sound of his voice; he hadn't spoken a word since materializing in the room. I wanted to repair our relationship, so I made my voice very tender when I answered, “Jeremy is missing. You heard me tell Paul that before.”

Paul shook his head. “You told me on the phone. Vance wasn't here then.”

“Missing?” Vance said. He seemed to be in a fog. Not literally, although I'd seen that before.

“Yes. Alison tried to find him on his cell phone and at his job, and he wasn't there.” Mom was talking to Vance like she talked to me when I was six and wanted to know why there were no GO signs.

“Who cares where Jeremy is?” Vance wanted to know. “Why aren't you looking for Claudia?”

“You heard the lieutenant,” I reminded him. “Claudia disappeared in Iowa after she left the construction house.”

“And then she turned up in Vanessa's apartment the day she died,” Vance shot back. “That can't be a coincidence.”

“It's true,” Paul said, although his face looked like it hurt
to agree with Vance. “Claudia's disappearance is ominous and her presence so close to Vanessa's death . . .”

“We don't know about that part for sure,” I argued. “We know that Sammi said she heard from Bill that Claudia was in town and wanted to see Vanessa. That's like fourth-hand information. I agree we should be looking for her.” I looked at Maxie, who rolled her eyes but went upstairs for the laptop. “But we shouldn't forget about Jeremy, or Sammi, for that matter. She was pretty mad at Bill and resented Vanessa.”

“You're correct,” Paul said. “We shouldn't eliminate any possibility until we have facts that support a theory.”

Maxie floated down with the laptop already open (once she cleared the ceiling) and clacking keys madly. “I don't have anything on Claudia Rabinowitz yet,” she said. “So don't ask. I'm working on it.”

“We're going to have to hire on some operatives,” I told Paul. “I can't look for all these people myself.” I looked up at Vance. “How'd you like to follow Sammi around and report back on her movements?”

I thought I'd get a lascivious comment but Vance's eyes were cold. “I don't know if you can trust me. You told that copper I wasn't
reliable
.” Vance looked down into my eyes with a wryness unconnected to any smile. He was making his point.

And I didn't like it. The adolescent worship had worn out—you should never meet your heroes. “How do I know what you're telling me now is
reliable
?” I challenged.

He crossed his arms. “You don't.”

My father, who had been quietly observing from a point above the stove (no danger even to a living person of anything happening there when Mom and Liss weren't cooking), crossed his arms. “Bickering isn't going to help you solve your problem,” he said. “Alison, this man was your idol for decades; he deserves some respect.”

I'm not used to hearing my father call me out, so I stopped and stared. “Daddy?” I said.

Dad turned toward Vance. “And Mr. McTiernan, you shouldn't
ever
raise your voice to my daughter in my presence, is that clear? It's people like her, never forget, who gave you the life you wanted.”

“Understood,” Vance said. “My apologies, Alison.” Damn! I believed him!

That's when the doorbell rang and the van from Master Clean was at the curb outside my house. A woman in what appeared to be a somewhat stylish sort of hazmat suit was standing at the door and identified herself as Maggie Reznick. She showed me a piece of identification she could have gotten online, but I nevertheless let her and two men into the house. I led them to the hallway, which I had admittedly been avoiding all day.

I stopped at the entrance to the movie room. “If you have any questions, I'll be in the kitchen.” Then I told them where the kitchen was, because in a house this big, that can be a question. You don't really need a map but a Sherpa guide isn't an awful idea.

Maggie looked inside briefly. “If it makes you feel any better, I've seen worse,” she said.

“That doesn't make me feel at all better. But thanks.”

I went back into the kitchen, where apparently Vance was once again trying to sell his plan to somehow intuit Claudia's presence. This time he was peddling it to Paul.

“You understand,” he said. “You know what I'm talking about. If I just fly into each one of them, I'm sure I can figure out which one she is.”

I didn't have a chance to argue the point before Paul, shaking his head slightly, said, “I don't know. Based on your remembrance of a woman from more than four decades ago? A woman you really only knew for one night? I don't like to deal in feelings, Vance. I need facts.”

“I'm telling you, I can do it.” Vance's face was impassive, stubborn.

“Well then, why do you need our permission?” I asked. “You keep acting like you're asking for our approval. If you think you have this special power to find Claudia Rabinowitz, why is it necessary for me and Paul to okay it for you?”

Vance's head turned quickly, as if he hadn't realized I'd reentered the room. “I asked you to help me with this,” he said after a moment. His voice was quieter now. He seemed almost embarrassed. “It would be wrong for me to take off on my own after I asked for your work.”

I had no idea whether to believe him or not. Vance could sell a story, but that one seemed weirdly genuine. It was flimsy but it was the kind of logic that might come from the same guy who wrote an acoustic album and called it
Electric Spur
.

But I didn't get to respond to him (which might have been a blessing, since I had no idea what that reaction would be) because Maggie, the cleaner, appeared at the kitchen door. “Excuse me, ma'am,” she said.

I know it's a cliché, but for a split second I actually thought she was talking to my mother. I'm not used to “ma'am.” I recovered quickly enough and asked, “What's up, Maggie?”

“Your room is not in bad shape,” she reported. “It isn't a very hard job. But we found something in there that you might want to take a look at, if you have a minute.”

Paul's eyes lit up, at least as much as they can, and he was out of the kitchen through the wall before I could tell Maggie that I'd be right there and follow her out, trailed by Mom. Dad and Maxie were no doubt following Paul's route.

We got to the hallway and I assessed the job Maggie and her crew had done. “You really did well, and so quickly,” I said. I sounded like a TV commercial but you want people like this on your side.

She walked to one of the men in the plastic suits, which in the scope of things were probably an example of overkill. “Where is it, Tom?” she asked.

“The small bin.” Tom pointed to what was actually something the size of an ashtray.

Maggie nodded. She was just a step away from where Tom, who was applying some sealing compound to the hardwood floor, was standing. She reached over and picked up the dish.

“These fibers were about where the outline would indicate the person's left thigh would have been on the floor,” Maggie said. She showed me the contents of the dish, and at first I thought it was empty. “I'll have to report it to the investigating officer, of course, but I wanted to show you first before I handed it in for them to analyze. I'm surprised the crime scene team didn't catch these.”

I leaned over a little closer. Melissa, who had not said a word since entering the room (against her grandmother's wishes and best attempts to keep her outside) was staring at the floor, no doubt trying to determine where the outline must have been. Maggie said she'd called the Harbor Haven police and gotten permission to remove the tape and all signs that something
unusual
had occurred here.

Now at close range, I could see a few strands inside the black dish. “What is it?” I asked.

Maggie flattened her mouth and gave a “can't be sure” gesture. “Some kind of fiber. I'm thinking maybe from a mohair sweater or something like that, but they're very small so it's hard to tell. The cops can do a better analysis.”

“They're green.”

She nodded. “Yeah. From what I know of the incident, I'm thinking that the victim fell on the fibers heavily, and that kept them from getting covered in . . . anything.”

“Do you think it's a clue?” My mother likes to clarify things to the point of obviousness. It's actually a useful tactic. Meanwhile, Paul had studied the strands in the dish and was now assessing the area of the floor Tom was finishing, which
to the naked eye was pretty much in the same condition it had been before Bill Mastrovy had made the unfortunate choice of crashing our premiere.

Dad was hovering next to Mom, his permanent place for all eternity, no doubt. But he was watching Tom work and paying special attention to my floorboards.

“I wouldn't have any idea,” Maggie answered. “I do the cleaning. The cops decide what's relevant. I just wanted to give you a look.” She produced a plastic bag from a box on the floor and put the dish and its contents inside. “This will go to the police as soon as we leave here, and I imagine you'll hear from them if there's anything helpful in the sample.”

Within minutes she and the crew had packed up and headed for the door, making sure to warn us not to walk on that section of the floor for at least an hour. Since nobody wanted to come in and finish our viewing of
Ghost
, that didn't seem to be a problem.

The second they were out the door, Dad (who no one in the crew could have heard anyway) said, “Green fibers. Was anybody in the crowd wearing something that color green?”

“I don't think so,” Maxie answered. “It's pretty bright. I'd remember.”

“It looks like something but I can't remember what,” I said.

“Welcome to my life,” my mother told her. “About thirty years early.”

Paul leaned back as if he were going to rest on the window sill and stopped short of sticking his head into my driveway. “It looks like we have a lot of work to do,” he said.

Questioning one's guests in a murder investigation is sort of a tricky proposition. Add to the equation the fact that the people being interviewed were
paying
guests, and it gets more complicated by a geometrical factor.

I got a D in geometry. Suffice it to say, I was prepared to tread very lightly today.

The previous evening's huddle had narrowed our list of suspects, but not by much. Paul noted that Tessa and Jesse had been sitting in the front row of the movie room so they could have the cushiest chairs, and that they were still in those chairs when the lights came back on. “While it's not impossible that Tessa could have snuck to the hallway, stabbed Bill Mastrovy and then made it back to her chair before you turned on the light, Alison, I find it very difficult to picture.”

Jesse, of course, was not a suspect as a possible new identity for Claudia Rabinowitz any more than Stan Levine, Josh or A.J. Didn't mean he hadn't killed Bill Mastrovy, though.

My boyfriend and his friend were disqualified not just due to gender, but also age: They weren't born when Claudia gave birth to Vanessa.

So just playing the which-one-is-Claudia game, that left Maureen, Tessa, Berthe and Liz. It seemed unlikely that Liz would want to kill Bill Mastrovy, but she had after all insisted on being present when I'd questioned him after Once Again's set at the Last Resort. Was that level of interest a sign of hostility?

No, because there was that whole too-young-to-be-Claudia thing again. But Claudia was not the only suspect.

Let's face it—all I knew for sure at this point was that I definitely hadn't killed Bill Mastrovy. And I was sure I could vouch for my parents and Melissa. I was willing to stand up for Josh. Everybody else was going to have to fend for themselves.

Any one of the other people in the room—dead or alive—might have done it out of revenge, fear of exposure or the desire to really test out a great sharp kitchen knife.

Hey. Wait a minute.

I walked into the kitchen and did something I should have done immediately after the
Ghost
fiasco: I checked my block of knives on the kitchen counter.

The block was full. No knives were missing.

“Well, that's weird,” I said aloud, to no one in particular.

I thought. Paul, having slipped into the room at a point when I wasn't looking, asked, “What's weird?” I started a little from the surprise of his voice, but I hoped he didn't notice.

“All the knives are still in the block,” I explained.

I didn't have to elaborate. “So where did the knife come from that ended up in Bill Mastrovy?” Paul said, clearly not expecting an answer. “Very good work, Alison. I'm amazed we didn't think of it sooner.”

“McElone said it was a kitchen knife,” I told him. “She must have already checked in here because she didn't ask me if it was one of mine. So she at least has the same information. But whoever was planning to kill Bill at the movie screening must have brought their own knife. Where would that have come from?”

“Is there a store in town that would sell such items?” Paul said. Since he doesn't get out of the house and didn't live in Harbor Haven at all (his apartment had been on Long Beach Island in Surf City), he doesn't know the town or its merchants nearly as well as I do.

“There are a few,” I said. “Assuming they didn't come here packing their own weapon, I can ask around and see who might have sold it. They might remember which of my guests made that kind of purchase. I just wish I remembered exactly what kind of knife it was, and I'll bet you McElone won't share that information.”

Paul smiled. “I had Maxie take some crime scene photos with her laptop,” he said. “For exactly this purpose, so we could review any evidence. I'll get them from her and see if she can use them to identify the knife.” Before I could agree, he was through the ceiling. I thought about his “waking” Maxie at this hour and did not envy him the task.

Of course, the one I had before me was to make my treasured guests feel like I thought each one of them might be a murderer (which technically was the case), so I wasn't exactly thrilled with the morning's potential, either.

Berthe Englund came into the den first, after Melissa had made herself the coffee/milk hybrid and then taken it upstairs to fortify herself through the dressing-for-school process. Berthe, having spent a decent amount of time on her vacation in the surf of the Harbor Haven shoreline, had taken on something of a glow, which I mentioned to her.

“Thank you,” she said. “This has been a very interesting
week for me, reconnecting with the sport after some years. I didn't realize how much I'd missed it.”

“I'm glad that what happened the other night hasn't ruined your vacation for you.” See how slyly I could bring the gruesome murder into the conversation without being accusatory? Maybe Paul was right; I was getting the hang of this after all.

“Well, it's not the kind of thing you expect when you go for a relaxing holiday,” she admitted. “But I know you didn't plan it. Have the police found out any more about who that poor man was and why someone would want to do something like that to him?”

How to bring this up delicately . . . “The theory is that he was involved in the death of a woman a few months ago and that someone the woman knew did it for revenge.” That wasn't bad. It didn't actually say that McElone or the cops had this theory, but that the theory existed. You'd be amazed how fine a line you can walk once you decide to do some snooping for dead people.

Speaking of which—Morrie and Vance passed through the wall from the kitchen at that moment, pointing fingers at each other and raising a racket only I could hear.

“You didn't write lyrics!” Vance was insisting. “You listened to what I wrote and you made suggestions!”

“Right, and then you changed the lyrics to what I said they should be!” Morrie countered. “So that's me writing lyrics, isn't it?”

I must have flinched at the sheer volume of it because Berthe looked at me funny and asked, “Is something wrong?”

“No.”
Recover quickly, Alison! Some of the guests are still queasy after the murder!
“It was just that I was thinking about the poor man and why someone would hurt him like that.” Now I had to shift the focus back onto Berthe. “I guess you didn't actually see what happened, did you?”

“That's like saying that the guy who transcribed
Hamlet
deserves credit,” Vance persisted.

“No,” Berthe said. “Thank goodness. I was watching the movie and didn't know there was anything wrong until there was all that commotion and the lights came on.”

“So now you're Shakespeare, are you?” Morrie and Vance exited as they had come, through the opposite wall. I could be sure that if I asked them later, they wouldn't remember being in the room at all.

“Well, that's good,” I told Berthe, having heard most of her answer. Melissa, eyes clouded over with that before-school ennui, spiced with I-just-woke-up-twenty-minutes-ago, stomped into the den, created another café au lait for herself, didn't really acknowledge either of us and stomped out. “But if someone saw something, it would be easier for the police to unravel this whole thing. Did you know Bill Mastrovy?”

“Who?”

“The man who passed away Sunday night.”

Berthe's eyes got wider and narrower in succession. “Oh, no,” she said. “Never laid eyes on him before. I didn't even know that was his name. Did you know him?”

Me? When did I become a suspect? “I met him once,” I said. “The night before it happened.”

“Really.” Now Berthe was clearly going to go home and tell her friends she'd stayed at the home of a murderess. This interview wasn't going exactly as I had hoped.

“I mean, I didn't really know him.”

Paul was dragging—and I
mean
“dragging”—Maxie down through the ceiling. She was dressed in a bathrobe large enough to conceal the laptop (plus a baby elephant if that became necessary) and also to communicate that she had been “sleeping” (or something like that) and didn't appreciate being forcibly awakened.

“I'm coming!” she shouted. “What's the hurry?”

“You have to tell Alison what we found,” Paul told her.

“Now?”

“I hope not,” Berthe said. “I wouldn't want you to lose a friend like that.”

What? A friend? Oh, yeah. “No,” I told her. “I'd only talked to him that one time.”

Berthe nodded slowly, a small move probably meant just for herself. “Well, I didn't see anything. I really didn't see much even after it happened. I didn't want to look once I heard what was there.”

“Yes,
now
,” Paul told Maxie. “Get out the laptop.”

“It's too big,” she protested. “The lady will see it. I need a tablet or something smaller.” She'd barely had her precious notebook computer back for a month and she was already lobbying for something more up-to-date.

“Maxie,” Paul said.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Um . . . how did you find out?” I asked Berthe. “Who told you what had happened in the hallway?”

Maxie positioned herself behind Berthe so she could uncover the laptop without the guest seeing it. It wasn't exactly a necessity with the Senior Plus guests; it was more of a courtesy so they wouldn't constantly be distracted by floating objects. She opened the computer and pressed a couple of keys.

“It was Maureen,” Berthe said. “She said a man had been stabbed and I shouldn't look.”

Maureen? “But she was all the way at the back of the room,” I said. “You were in the front.”

“I walked around when the lights came up,” Berthe said. “I sort of wanted to see, but then I got a little nervous and decided I shouldn't get a look. So I went to Maureen and asked her.”

“Look here,” Maxie said, indicating the computer screen, which was close enough to Berthe's head that I could pretend to be looking at her. “We figured out what kind of knife it was.”

“It's not a kitchen knife,” Paul said. “This knife is something less precise. Its blade is very sharp but fixed and probably had a three- to five-inch blade.”

“So Maureen knew what had happened?” I asked Berthe.

“Yes. She didn't seem especially upset about it, but she's short, so she said she had just barely seen him.”

“It's a box cutter, not a knife,” Maxie said. “Paul's telling you all the details you don't need, but the point is that it's a box cutter.”

“It's not a box cutter.” Paul shook his head. “It's a utility knife, but an outdoor one, not the kind of disposable or movable blade commonly called a box cutter.”

“Where in town would someone buy that?” Paul asked.

“There's a place,” Maxie told him. Maxie spends a decent amount of time on the main drag in Harbor Haven and knows all the stores. “It's called Cut It Out. Specializes in all kinds of knives, and I bet you they have some box . . . utility blades.”

“Well, the waves are waiting and this is my last day here,” Berthe told me.

“Yes! Don't let me hold you up. You have a fun day, Berthe.”

“Alison, you should go there and talk to the owner today. See if he or she recalls anyone buying a fixed utility knife, just one, in the days just before the murder.” Paul seemed positively giddy.

“Can I go back to bed now?” Maxie moaned, and before there could be an answer, she flew up into the ceiling again. I assumed the whole “go back to bed” thing was metaphorical.

“This is getting close,” Paul said. “I would guess we'll have an answer within a day.” Pleased with himself, he sank through the floor.

Berthe stopped at the glass doors leading to the deck and the beach. “It's a fine morning,” she said. “I'm glad we had this time to talk alone.” She waved and walked outside.

“Yeah,” I said now that no one else could hear. “We should do this more often.”