Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (5 page)

“Alison,” she said now, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand and some unedited copy in the other. “I hear your ex has come back to rekindle the marriage.”

See what I mean?

“He’s just here to visit Melissa,” I insisted before Jeannie could offer an opinion. “He’s not staying, and we’re not rekindling anything.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

“Maybe you need a hearing aid,” I suggested.

Phyllis laughed. “More like I have to go back and check my sources,” she said. “Hey, mind if I join you two for a bit? I need to get out of the office for twenty minutes every six hours, or my doctor says I’ll die of stagnation, or something.”

She fell into step with us as we headed up the street.

“So what’s going on in town?” Jeannie wanted to know. Jeannie is a dedicated, serious gossip, and admires Phyllis for her ability to get to the truth and her willingness to pass it along.

“The usual stuff,” Phyllis answered. “Mayoral election coming up in November, so the boards are going nuts. Planning, assessors, schools—you name it. They all find stuff to talk about when the politics in town starts to heat up. Everybody thinks they’re a big shot.”

Jeannie looked disappointed. She prefers something a little more lurid. “No sex scandals?” she asked.

Phyllis shook her head. “It’s summer, honey,” she explained. “Everybody’s too busy trying to make a buck because we were smart enough to start a town near the only beaches in the country that make you pay to get on.”

It’s true—New Jersey’s beaches often require badges for admittance, and the badges require fees. Most other shore areas in the country don’t, but ours are more…beachy, I guess. Harbor Haven is one of the quieter towns on the beach (real New Jerseyans say “down the shore”), but if you want to swim near a lifeguard—and you should never go in without one nearby—you’re going to buy a badge.

“How about some crimes?” I asked Phyllis, just to cheer Jeannie up. If she couldn’t find out who was sleeping with whom, maybe Jeannie could hear about a rash of bicycle thefts or a genuine convenience store holdup. “There must be some crime.”

“Nothing,” Phyllis lamented. “It’s gotten to the point that I’m running a story on crime outside of town. Those bones they found in Seaside Heights. Sounds like a good mystery, anyway. Apparently, somebody bashed the poor guy’s head in.”

Big Bob, then, was making news miles from where he was found. I told myself there was no way I was going to get involved this time. I guess, technically, Maxie was a friend, but murderers tend to be violent, unpredictable people, and I find it comforting to stay away from such types.

“Ooh!” Jeannie perked up. “What’s that one all about?”

“A man named Robert Benicio was killed in Seaside Heights, probably about two years ago,” I said. “Like Phyllis said, someone hit him hard in the back of the head. His body was buried in the sand, but far from the water and down deep enough that the remains weren’t discovered until recently. Dental records and fingerprints confirmed his identity, and now the county prosecutor’s major-crimes division is looking into the killing.”

I kept walking and was suddenly aware that I was walking alone. I stopped and turned around to see Phyllis and Jeannie staring at me with the same expression on both faces—amazement.

“What?” I asked.

“Are you holding out on me?” Phyllis demanded. “You getting back into the PI business? Are you investigating this case?”

“Me? What? No!”

“Then how did you know all that?” Jeannie chimed in. Thanks a heap, Jeannie.

“I read it in the paper,” I said.

“But I haven’t run a story about it yet,” Phyllis said. They started to walk again, more slowly, something for which I was grateful. It was getting hot out, even at only nine in the morning.

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” I told Phyllis, “but the
Chronicle
is not the only newspaper I read.”

“I’m crushed,” she answered.

“Don’t be. It’s just there are six days of the week when you don’t publish.”

“So what caught your eye about this case that you did so much reading?” she asked. Phyllis’s reporter’s mind is rarely at rest, and she never accepts the easiest answer to any question without some skepticism.

“Nothing special,” I tried. “I just noticed the story on a newspaper when I was hanging some wallboard in the attic, and the headline got me.” That was sort of close to the truth—it had been Maxie who’d noticed the headline, but I was
there
.

“What about it?” Phyllis probed. She’d do whatever she needed to do to improve her headlines and get more people to read them.

“Just the subject, I guess,” I answered. “You know, people do just read articles casually once in a while.”

“Bite your tongue.”

We arrived at Veg Out, which was bustling on this July day. An open-air section (normally part of the parking lot) was devoted to the latest from local farms, and both Harbor Havenites and some vacationers—and after spending enough years in town, you knew which was which—picked through the Jersey corn and tomatoes, and even the occasional peach.

I started my quest for vegetables I’d theoretically put in a salad for dinner tonight, knowing full well that I almost never cooked and would probably end up ordering a pizza. But I’d made a New Year’s resolution to reverse that trend, and it was only seven months into the year. Time to begin.

“I see watermelon,” Jeannie said, and before I could suggest that lugging one around might be problematical, since she was pretty much already smuggling one under her belt, she was off to check out the possibilities.

“I guess it’s just you and me,” I told Phyllis.

“Sorry,” she replied. “I was just out for the walk. Gotta get back to the office. Stop in sometime, and bring in Melissa. She’s almost ready to start delivering papers.” And she, too, vanished before I could protest. I was starting to wonder if I had properly showered that morning.

I started looking at some bunches of broccoli. That’s a good vegetable—green, with vitamins and beta-carotene and things like that. High intake of broccoli is also said to lower the risk of some aggressive cancers.

See? Wikipedia is good for some stuff after all.

The problem was, I would be making a salad for just Melissa and myself, and these heads of broccoli were tied together in bunches of two, and each one was quite large. This was, in short, more broccoli than I would probably need in the next six months. But the ties were strong, and I wasn’t sure that Mrs. Pak, the grocer, would mind if I removed them.

But my dilemma was eclipsed when I heard a deep voice very close to my left ear. “I have a knife,” it said.

I drew in a deep breath and tried to remember if under such circumstances it was better to scream or to fall to the floor in a dead faint. Unconsciousness was definitely leading when I turned to see a man next to me. A large man.

A very large man. In a black leather biker jacket and dark sunglasses. And a mustache, which was both a little retro and a little menacing at the moment. I summoned what little voice I could find, but decided not to scream. A man with a knife could move before anyone could get to me in this crowd.

“I beg your pardon?” I squeaked. Oh, like you would have come up with something more defiant.

“I have a knife,” the man repeated. He raised what looked like a very effective blade attached to a black handle. “If you want me to cut through the bands on that broccoli.”

“Oh. Oh!” The idea that my life was in fact not in immediate danger was just starting to leak through to my reasoning center. “Is it okay to do that?”

The man took the broccoli from my hand, rather gently I thought, and severed the thick ties on the vegetable with what appeared to be no effort at all. “They want to sell the broccoli,” he said. “Are they going to argue with a paying customer?”

“You’re clearly from out of town,” I told him. “Mrs. Pak is not to be reckoned with.”

“Trust me,” he said.

Sure enough, when I brought the newly liberated broccoli to the cash register, which Mrs. Pak herself was operating, there was absolutely no drama at all. “Two fifty,” she said. I provided the cash, she provided a bag, and everyone’s view of the transaction appeared to be favorable.

“Thanks for the help,” I told the man, who was no longer brandishing his lethal-looking knife.

“No problem.” He extended a hand. “I’m Luther Mason.”

I took his hand. “Alison Kerby.”

Luther nodded. “I know.”

“You know?” What the hell did that mean?

“I’ve been following you since you left the
Chronicle
office,” he said. Suddenly, my new friend seemed menacing again.

“Look, don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but you’re scaring the living daylights out of me. Why would you follow me to the greengrocer?”

Luther’s eyes seemed to squint a bit behind the dark glasses. “You don’t need to be scared,” he said. “It’s just that I heard you talking about the body they found in Seaside Heights.”

That had an ominous ring to it. “So?”

“So, Big Bob was a friend of mine. We rode together.”

This was coming at me too fast. “You…rode together?”

Luther nodded. “Yeah. On our hogs. Big Bob was in my bike club.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“We rode motorcycles together,” Luther said, speaking slowly as if to a relatively stable mental patient.

“No, I get that. I don’t understand how that adds up to you following me.”

He smiled. For a man who looked like he could tear Mount Rainier in half with his bare hands, he had a gentle smile. “It’s simple,” he said. “I heard your friend say that you’re a private detective, and I want to hire you to find out who killed Big Bob.”

I felt my bottom teeth come up to bite my upper lip. “Are you sure you wouldn’t just settle for some broccoli?” I asked.

Five

In the end, I invited Luther back to my house. For one thing, I wanted Maxie to vouch for his story—I wanted to make sure she’d seen this guy before—and to hear what he had to say.

But it was all I could do to convince my seven-months-pregnant best friend that she should
not
hop on the back of a motorcycle with a man we had just met.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Jeannie protested. “I’ve done it before.”

“Then you won’t mind missing out on this chance,” I countered. “I’m not explaining to your husband why you and your unborn baby were seen tooling down Ocean Avenue on the back of a
hog
with a stranger.”

“You’re no fun anymore,” Jeannie pouted.

“I never really was,” I said.

It was that way the whole drive back to the guesthouse. With Steven and Melissa out of the house, I could meet Luther by myself. I explained to him that the kitchen, being a sort of off-limits area for the guests, was our best place to speak privately, but I didn’t notice either ghost lurking about on the way inside, which was unusual. And a little worrisome, since I had also insisted on Jeannie going home to protect her, in case my instincts about Luther turned out to be mistaken.

“You don’t want me to investigate Big Bob’s death,” I told him as soon as we sat down and I put the broccoli in the fridge, where it looked lonely. “I’m really not a professional investigator. I just sort of got my license on a lark.”

“But you have it,” he answered. “You can do stuff the cops aren’t going to do. Look. I knew Big Bob. I knew his ex-wife Maxie Malone, and I’d heard she bought a house in Harbor Haven. So I was going to the newspaper office to see what I could find out about Maxie when I overheard someone say you were a PI. I need a PI. It’s kismet.”

“It’s crazy, is what it is,” I countered. “You don’t know me at all. I’m not a real investigator. And I’m sorry to tell you, but I knew Maxie, I was helping her fix up this house, and she died about a year and a half ago. I bought the place out of respect for her.” (I’d used this line on people before, and preposterous though it sounds, given Maxie’s temperament, it never failed to convince people.)

This time was no exception. Luther nodded. “I found that out this morning. When I couldn’t find Maxie, I went to see her mom.”

“I know Kitty,” I told him. “So she must have told you that Maxie was dead. Why come all the way from her house in Avon to Harbor Haven when you knew that?”

Luther shrugged. “I don’t know. It threw me. Maxie was dead—she’d been murdered, like Big Bob, and not that long after him. I started to wonder if there was a connection. The only mention I could find of Maxie’s death was online, an article from the local paper here, so I came to the newspaper office to talk to the reporter, but the office was closed.”

I knew there was no connection, but explaining that without mentioning that Maxie was available for corroboration would be tricky. “Maxie’s murderer was caught,” I told Luther. “It had nothing to do with Big Bob.” Okay, maybe not so tricky.

Paul stuck his head down through the kitchen ceiling and looked confused. Glad to see him, I mouthed the name “Maxie” at him. He nodded, and vanished back up through the ceiling.

“Are you okay?” Luther asked. “Does your jaw hurt or something?”