Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (7 page)

“I doubt it,” Paul said.

Maxie was hovering near the window, where the light coming in made her harder to see, and she sounded uncharacteristically soft and airy, to go with her appearance. “Is there something I can get you, Alison?” she asked.

I had to squint to make sure it was really Maxie over there; she almost never called me by name.

I turned from the wall I was sizing up and looked at her. “Yeah, a house with no ghosts in it,” I suggested.

Maxie didn’t even pick up on the comment, which had sounded more harsh than I’d meant it. “I mean, like a bottle of water, or some sandpaper, or something?”

“Okay, what exactly is the scam you’re trying to pull, Maxie?”

Her voice took on a slight edge, but it was obvious she was trying to control it. “I’m just trying to be
accommodating
,” she said.

So that was it—Maxie wanted to show off how cooperative she could be in the hope that it would inspire me to be the same. Good luck with that maneuver, but if I could get something out of it… “Sure, Maxie. A bottle of water sounds good. It’s hot up here.”

“Be right back,” Maxie answered, and before I got the chance to revel in her obsequiousness, she was gone.

“Okay, what’s
your
act?” I asked Paul, who still looked rather stern. He was apparently trying the opposite of Maxie’s tactic. That wouldn’t work, either, but it was considerably less enjoyable.

“I don’t have an act. I just…” He stopped when Maxie reappeared through the floor. She pulled two bottles of spring water out of the pockets of her cargo pants (the ghosts can change wardrobe whenever they like, so Maxie had made sure to “put on” something in which she could conceal objects easily).

“Here ya go,” she said in a voice so sprightly it sounded like she was in a commercial for floor wax. “Nice cold water. I even put on an extra show for a couple of the guests when I took them out of the fridge and flew them through the den.”

“Thank you,” I said. I looked back at Paul, expecting him to launch into his pitch for me to investigate Big Bob’s murder, but he stood (floated) there, not saying anything and looking irritated. It was odd.

“So?” I said to him. Maxie turned and looked, too. But Paul remained silent, making strange circles with his mouth that suggested he was trying to think of the right thing to say.

Finally, he turned to Maxie and said, “Can you give us a moment alone, please?”

I was a little surprised at that, but Maxie didn’t miss a beat. She stole a glance at me, seemed to decide this would ingratiate her with me, and nodded. “No problem. You know where to find me.” And she disappeared into the ceiling. Maxie sits out on the roof sometimes, and on other occasions, it’s absolutely anybody’s guess where she goes.

I put my hand on my hip and scowled at Paul. “I thought she’d never leave,” I said with a sarcastic edge.

“You weren’t getting it,” he protested. “I just wanted to have a word with you, and you kept avoiding me.”

“You know, if you want to ask me a favor, there are better ways to get on my good side than making a scene in front of the guests.” I started spreading joint compound on the seam between two pieces of wallboard.

“The first time I offered you a ring.” Sly English Canadian wit. With my ex-husband downstairs and an unpredictable Maxie trying to get me to investigate a murder, that was the last thing I needed.

“We’re not talking about me investigating what happened to Big Bob?” I asked.

“Of course not, although you really should do that for Maxie. No, I want to get back to what we were talking about before.” Paul grunted and floated over to where I stood, the better to look me in the eye. “I was trying to ask before if you would help me find someone.”

Once the seam is filled with compound, there’s a trick you can use: Get a damp (not wet!) sponge and lightly run it over the edges of compound, smoothing as you go. This will save you tons of sanding later. “Find someone?” I asked Paul. “Can’t you just send out a Ghostogram or whatever it is you do?”

“This is someone who’s still alive,” Paul said quietly.

I turned to look at him. His face, always serious, was bordering on sad. “Who are we talking about?” I asked.

“The woman I was going to marry,” Paul answered.

I actually stopped smoothing the joint compound and turned to look at Paul, but he had moved so close to me that I was immediately startled. “You were engaged?” I asked.

“Well, I was going to ask her,” he said. “Just before I took the job guarding Maxie, I bought the ring I showed you, and once the assignment was over, I was going to ask. I was carrying it around in my pocket for days. And, well, you know what happened.” Paul and Maxie had been murdered his second day on the job as her bodyguard, something Maxie rarely let Paul forget. This raised the stakes on his pain a good deal, I thought.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything before?” I asked. “I told you I’d get in touch with anyone you wanted, to let them know you were…the way you are. You didn’t even want me to contact your brother in Canada.”

Paul’s gaze was so intense it was hard to look at him long. But going back to spreading joint compound seemed sort of rude now, like I’d be insinuating his problem was trivial. He closed his eyes a moment, which helped in an odd way.

“At first, I thought it was best to try to forget her,” Paul said. He turned his face away from me. “I figured I was gone and she needed to move on with her life, and I should do my best to stay out of it. That seemed like the thing to do.”

“So what changed your mind?”

“It’s just short of two years since all this happened,” he answered. “And things have changed, surely. I’m accustomed to my current state of being; I’ve accepted that there is no returning. But there’s something that feels…unfinished about the way I left Julia. Like I hurt her unnecessarily.”

I didn’t understand that. “It’s not your fault you died,” I told Paul.

“I know.” There was something in his voice. It sounded like Maxie had before, when she’d found out that Big Bob had died.

My ex-husband was downstairs. Maxie’s had been found buried under the sand in Seaside Heights. Paul wanted to locate his ex-girlfriend. It was “Revisit Your Failed Relationship Week” at 123 Seafront Avenue. No doubt Mrs. Fischer and Mrs. Spassky would soon be visited by boyfriends they’d dumped in 1956.

“When you’re alive, the idea that you need closure in a relationship seems normal,” Paul went on. “People understand that they need to make peace with what has happened and continue their lives. But what happened to Maxie and me…It takes a while to absorb exactly how permanent it all is. And now, I just want to know that she’s all right. I want to see if she’s moved on.”

“Will you be able to handle it if she has?” I asked.

“I’d like to think so,” he said. “It might be harder on me if she hasn’t.”

The seam between the two pieces of wallboard was going to be smooth. I might have to do a touch of sanding when everything was dry, but not much. And that was good, because I hate sanding.

“Okay, I’ll try to find your…Julia for you,” I told Paul.

He lowered his head. “Thank you.”

“It’s what friends do for each other,” I said.

Paul turned back to face me. His eyes didn’t look any different than they usually did, and his semitransparent appearance didn’t allow for tons of color to come through, so I didn’t know if they were red. But he looked like he’d been through an emotional ringer. He coughed theatrically, and looked me in the eye.

“If you do it for me, you’re going to have to do it for Maxie, too,” he said.

“I know.”

Six

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I work in Harbor Haven.” Detective Lieutenant Anita McElone (rhymes with
macaroni
) sat behind her immaculate desk in the squad room of the Harbor Haven Police Department, which is to say the entire department minus the chief’s office. Even on a Sunday morning, she was all business. “This is a murder that took place in Seaside Heights. Why would I know anything about it?”

“Because you’re a detective, and you have a natural curiosity about something that happened so close to home,” I told her. “You’d know about it because you get the dispatches from the county prosecutor’s major-crimes division, probably in an e-mail on your desktop right now. And I’m figuring you’d know about it because, well, you’re the only cop I know. How am I doing so far?”

McElone and I have an unusual relationship. I respect her professionally, and she thinks I’m a lunatic. So far, it’s been a workable enough arrangement, but it has had some hairy moments. We don’t talk about those much. In fact, we don’t talk about anything much if we can help it. But my private-investigator’s license had gotten me in the door, and I figured if I was going to look into Big Bob’s death, talking to an actual cop might not be a bad place to start.

“You have a client on this, or is that little B and B of yours not keeping you busy enough?” McElone likes to prod me, because she knows my guesthouse is not a bed and breakfast. I don’t serve breakfast, though I do provide coffee and directions to a local diner that gives my guests a discount. It’s win-win, really. No one wants to eat my cooking. Even the broccoli I bought yesterday and then totally ignored was well on its way to becoming compost.

I was ready with a true answer, for once. “I have a client. Luther Mason, a friend of the deceased, wants me to find out what happened to Big Bob.” I’d called Luther and told him I’d changed my mind about the investigation, and he had agreed to (hell, he’d practically rejoiced over) paying me my “usual fee.” As if I had a usual fee. My first official client had been a ghost.

McElone raised an eyebrow. “Big Bob?”

“The victim, Robert Benicio. He and Luther used to ride together.”

The eyebrow came down, and the eyelids dropped to half mast. “They used to ride together,” she repeated slowly.

“On their hogs,” I said.

I think the detective actually chuckled a bit. “So, out of the entire world of private detectives, an old biker pal of the victim decided to come to the owner of an adorable Victorian on the beach to find out who murdered his pal?”

Well, that wasn’t very nice. “Yeah,” I said defiantly, or at least petulantly, pushing aside my own doubts. “You got a problem with that?”

McElone ignored the question. “So how come ol’ Luther decided you’re the PI for him?”

“How come you’re the one asking all the questions?”

“Hey, I get paid whether I talk to you or not. I’ve got a B and E right here on my desk I could be looking into right now.” McElone was such a ham that she actually leaned back and laced her fingers behind her head. “So are you going to explain yourself, or am I going to try to find out who busted into an expensive house during tourist season and stole only a DVD player? Not even Blu-Ray?”

I groaned, more inwardly than audibly, I like to think. “What was the question?”

“What made Big Bob’s biker buddy decide to pick your name out of the Yellow Pages?”

“He said he overheard a conversation between me and Phyllis Coates about my investigator’s license, and thought I’d be the right person for the job,” I told her. “He said it was kismet.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you mean, ‘uh-huh’?”

“Let’s say a friend of yours disappeared one day, and then resurfaced, literally, in Seaside Heights two years later with a great big bash in the back of the head. You hear some ladies on the street talking, and one of them says she has a PI license. Is that how you’d pick a person to discover the culprit and lay your friend’s memory to rest?” McElone’s point was not lost on me; I’d been asking myself the same question since Luther had approached me at the greengrocer. Which reminded me to make a mental note to do something with that broccoli tonight.

“All right, there’s more, but you’re not going to like it,” I told her. I was being completely honest with the lieutenant. The next part of the story was not going to be her favorite.

McElone could see it coming; her eyes took on a feral quality, and she sat back in her chair as if pushed. “This isn’t going to be another one of your ghost stories, is it?” she asked quietly.

I nodded. “I’m afraid so. See, Big Bob was married—very briefly—to Maxie Malone. Now you’ll remember—”

She cut me off. “Maxine Malone was the woman who owned the Victorian immediately before you. The one you said showed up in your house as a ghost and told you she was murdered.”

“Well, you arrested the killer, didn’t you? After the department had filed the two deaths away as suicides for a year.” I’ll admit it; that was designed just a little to get under McElone’s skin.

“You know that happened before I got here,” she said. Good. It had worked.

“Well, Maxie and Big Bob had a quick Vegas wedding—and got divorced a couple of days later. But Luther said that just before he disappeared,” I told her, “Big Bob had been planning to come to Harbor Haven to find Maxie, maybe reconcile with her. That’s why Luther said he came here, to see if he could find out something about Maxie’s death.”

McElone, in full cop mode now, was already tapping something out on her computer keyboard, no doubt calling up the file on Maxie’s and Paul’s murders, or the dispatch she’d gotten from the county on Big Bob’s. “You don’t think the same killer who got Malone and—what was it, Harrison?—also killed Big Bob, do you?”