Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (22 page)

I wondered what he’d tell her, since I didn’t think he knew about the ghosts. Unless…

“Liss,” I asked my daughter, “have you said anything to Dad about Paul and Maxie?”

Melissa looked up from her turkey sub with a slightly alarmed expression. “No!” she said with great force. “I know I’m not supposed to. But if Dad’s going to live here…”

“Dad’s
not
going to live here,” I told her. “Get that out of your head. I’m very happy that you and he are getting along so well, and that you’re able to spend time together this summer, but no. I’m not letting him come back, we’re not getting married again, and he’s not living in this house, ever. Is that clear?”

No one can look at you with pity better than a ten-year-old girl. And among ten-year-old girls, mine is considered the gold standard at this activity. Other ten-year-old girls come to her for “looking at your parents with pity” lessons. This wasn’t necessarily the pinnacle of her work in the area, but it was certainly in her top ten attempts.

“I meant, if he’s going to live here in Harbor Haven,” Melissa said.

“Oh.” If I had felt any smaller, I could have squeezed between two boards in the kitchen floor and vanished.

“Anyway, if he is going to live here, he’s going to hear the rumors about the house,” Melissa continued, as if I hadn’t just been reduced to a quivering mass of stupidity. “What are we going to tell him then?”

“Let’s see if that time comes first,” I said. “But for right now, let’s just ignore the fact that Paul and Maxie are here when Dad’s around, okay? And you’ve been doing a really good job of keeping him out of the house when the spook shows are on, so let’s keep that going. Think you can do that?”

“Sure,” Melissa said. “He goes pretty much wherever I suggest.”

I remembered what that was like, and hoped that The Swine wouldn’t disappoint his daughter the way he had his wife. “Okay,” I said. “Now, do you have any idea what’s been bothering Paul?”

She widened her eyes in recognition. “No!” she said. “I thought you would know. He’s been floating around like a bath toy all day.” Once again I gave my daughter credit for being more perceptive than I am. “I know he asked you to do something for him. Do you think it’s about that?”

“Maybe,” I said. Before she could ask, I added, “He wants me to find somebody for him, someone he knew when he was alive. And it’s been harder to do than I expected. I hope he’s not getting like this because I’m letting him down.” My roast-beef sub was suddenly less appetizing than a minute ago—was I being arrogant in trying to find Julia without Paul’s help, and causing him the ghost equivalent of pain in the process?

“So you’re trying to help Luther and Maxie find out who killed her ex-husband, and you’re trying to find an old friend of Paul’s?” Melissa asked. “Isn’t that a lot to do all at once?”

I nodded. “I’m worried I can’t do it all myself.”

Melissa tilted her head in an expression that said, “Well…?” Then she said, “You know what you do whenever you feel overwhelmed. Who do you always call?”

Jeannie.

I sighed. “Not sure I can do that this time. It’s a ghost thing.”

My daughter smiled with her wise-beyond-her-years demeanor. “You’ll find a way,” she said. “Or Jeannie will figure a way that it’s not a ghost thing. She’s really good at that.”

Steven pushed the swinging door open and walked back into the kitchen, grinning. “I think I actually convinced her there was a real person carrying a laptop whom she didn’t see because of the way the light hit the computer casing,” he said, sitting down and picking up his sandwich. “There are days I believe I can talk anybody into anything.” He took a big bite and chewed thoughtfully. After he managed to clear his mouth again, he looked at me and asked, “Now, what was that all about?”

Luckily, I’d had time to think. “There’s no point in trying to keep it from you, Steven,” I said with my best sincere voice. “You can’t have been in town even a few days and not heard the rumors about this house.”

The Swine does many attitudes well, but coy is not one of them. “Rumors?” he asked. Melissa stifled a laugh.

I nodded with great solemnity. “I hadn’t been back here long enough when I bought the house, or I might have held off,” I said. “But it’s relatively common knowledge around Harbor Haven that this place is haunted.”

Melissa’s eyes showed no change, but she scratched her nose, which is something she does when she’s nervous. She was clearly wondering if I was going to let Steven in on the truth about Paul and Maxie.

My ex laughed. “Haunted?” he said. “People really believe in haunted houses?”

I saw an opening, a way to make things easier, even in spite of what I’d said to Liss only a few minutes before. “Can you believe it? But then I discovered that there are people who
want
to take a vacation in a haunted house, so I’ve been playing it up to some of the guests.” I told him about the Senior Plus Tours, excluding the fact that the ghosts involved were actual ghosts. No sense telling The Swine
everything
. He hadn’t done so for me, after all. “So we do some spook shows twice a day now—all fake, of course, with flying objects and stuff—but that’s just for the Senior Plus guests,” I explained. “Lucy’s not part of the tour, so she isn’t in on the gag. And I guess something happened in front of her that wasn’t supposed to.”

Steven’s face had gone from amused to enthralled as I’d told him my sordid tale, and now he was positively jubilant in his demeanor. “That’s
amazing
, Alison!” he gushed. “You took a business challenge and turned it into an asset. I’m so proud of you!” Really, his pride in me made me feel so
vindicated
(that’s sarcasm, ladies and gentlemen)! He walked over and embraced me, which I endured without reciprocation. I just let him hug me, smiled neutrally, and took a bite of my sub. “Did I also hear that a TV show shot here a few months ago?” he asked. “Was that about the ‘ghosts,’ too?”

That comment about the TV show was kind of out of nowhere, and my suspicious nature tickled the back of my throat. “No, that was just an accident,” I said. “The house they were going to use burned down, so they stayed here for a few weeks. It was no big deal.”

Steven had a way of looking at me that made me think he didn’t believe me. But he shrugged it off and asked, “How can I help?”

Help
? When we were married, he’d never so much as volunteered to help me with the dinner dishes, so this question had caught me sort of off guard. “Help,” I said, thinking. “Well, one of the more difficult things is seeing to it that Lucy is out of the house when we’re putting on one of the spectral spectaculars. And she seems to find you fascinating. Think you could keep her occupied for a short period twice a day?”

The Swine smiled, then a thought seemed to occur to him, and he looked at our daughter. “That’s what you’ve been doing with me, isn’t it, you little minx?” he asked her.

Melissa grinned and looked away from him. Perhaps she was a little minx, after all. “I guess so,” she drawled at him.

Steven gave her a big hug and laughed. “It’s okay, honey,” he said. “You were helping Mom. You did the right thing.” Then he turned to me. “All right, Alison,” he said, although I could tell he wanted to say “Ally.” “I’ll help out with Lucy.”

“Thank you,” I told my ex-husband. I never thought I’d say that to him ever again. This was threatening to become an actual touching moment, so naturally Maxie stuck her head through the ceiling, wearing an expression I wouldn’t have expected on her: concern.

“Something’s going on with Paul,” she said. “You’d better come upstairs.”

Nineteen

“It’s
nothing
,” Paul insisted. “I’m all right.”

“You don’t look all right,” I told him.

Getting away from Steven without a plausible explanation had been a little tricky. I was lucky that way, because making an excuse for me to leave and getting Melissa to keep her father occupied solved two problems at the same time: It got me out of the kitchen to attend to Paul, and it kept Melissa from seeing what I was seeing, which would have upset her.

“I’m fine,” Paul reiterated.

It was hard to accept his assurance on the subject. “You’re upside down,” I told him.

“No kidding,” Maxie said. “Like he didn’t know he was upside down.”

Paul was, in fact, completely inverted. In my house, that’s not entirely odd. The difference this time was that it seemed he had gotten that way unintentionally.

“I’ve been upside down before,” Paul pointed out. “I float. I’m a ghost, right?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But then, you could straighten up when you wanted to. Let’s see you do that now.”

Hanging from the newly installed ceiling in the attic, face about three feet off the floor, Paul looked like a muscular, goateed, English Canadian bat. He scowled and flared his nostrils a little. “Fine,” he said. But when he tried to straighten up, he could bend at the waist and move himself side to side but could not become normally vertical. It looked like he was doing those abs crunches where you hang from your feet (as seen on TV).

“Okay,” he said, huffing and puffing a bit. “Maybe I can’t straighten up. But that’s no big deal. I can get along just fine the way I am now.”

“Doesn’t all the ectoplasm rush to your head?” I asked.

“Okay,” Maxie said. “So you’re going to spend the rest of whatever floating around like you’re hanging by your feet from a hook?”

“Do you have any suggestions?” Paul demanded.

It was up to me to mediate this dispute, and to bring some sanity to the proceedings. Laugh if you want to. “Paul, do you think you might be sick or something?”

“He’s already dead,” Maxie noted. “How much worse can he get?”

Paul and I ignored her. “The last time I saw you, you were floating horizontally, like you were in a swimming pool,” I said. “You didn’t seem very happy then. Was this starting to happen to you already?”

Paul was silent for a moment, and I wasn’t sure whether he was pondering the question or simply wasn’t interested in answering it. Eventually he said, “I don’t know. I can’t say I’ve been feeling strangely, because I don’t really feel all that much. But something has been wrong.”

I needed to get Maxie out of the room. “Would you mind going downstairs and telling Melissa that Paul’s okay? I’m sure she was worried.” Maxie and Melissa have an interesting relationship, in that they actually like each other. You can’t always choose your child’s friends.

Maxie, glad to have reason to talk to Melissa—and warned to do so discreetly if Steven or Lucy was in the room—zipped through the attic floor and vanished. I looked Paul up and down, toe to head.

“Is this about Julia?” I asked him. “Is she weighing on your mind so heavily that it’s giving your head more gravity?”

“I really don’t think so,” he answered. “But what have you found out?”

I can be extremely stubborn when I have decided on something. “I’ll let you know when I find out something for sure,” I assured Paul. “But don’t ask me about every step of the way, because that’s just going to worry you and slow me down.”

“Worry me? Is there something for me to be worried about?”

“See what I mean?” I asked.

“All right, so finding Julia is weighing on my mind,” he admitted. “But I honestly don’t think that’s enough to turn me upside down.”

I was already craning my neck to look at him; this was going to prove to be a problem. “Is there anything I can do? Something Maxie can research?” I asked. Maxie does the online research for our investigations when necessary. She has unusually keen computer skills, especially for someone who’s dead. But the occasional floating laptop computer was the price one had to pay for such talents.

“Believe me, Alison, if I could think of something that might fix this, I wouldn’t hold back,” Paul told me. “Ask Maxie to…”

No need to wait; Maxie appeared through the floorboards once again. “I’m here,” she said. “Ask me what?”

“Where is she?” Paul asked, trying to twist himself around. “Ah, there. Maxie, I’d appreciate it if you could…What are you looking at?”

She was staring at him rather oddly. “Can you raise up?” she asked. “Your feet are in my face.”

Paul levitated higher, going face to face with Maxie, but still inverted. “That better?” Assured by Maxie’s nod that it was, he went on as if nothing had happened. “I’d appreciate it if you could get on the Internet and see if there are any reports of people like us who were inverted. Report back to me; I doubt I’ll be traveling much out of the attic until I can figure this out.”

I felt like a heel, but I had to ask, “What about the spook shows? The guests already saw a performance with
only one of you
.” I looked at Maxie.

“My mother is in
jail
!” she responded.

Paul’s voice took on a dryness that was unusual for him. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Maxie…”

“I’m on it,” Maxie assured him. She disappeared into the floor, presumably to go to one of her hiding places and start in on her assignment. I noticed that she hadn’t addressed her frustration with me, and had spoken to Paul whenever she could avoid speaking to me. Ghosts can be so self-centered.