Home For the Haunting: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (23 page)

T
he door to the kitchen was still swinging, as though someone had just run through it.

While I called 911, Graham ran down the steps and out the back, hoping to intercept the attacker.

The front door was unlocked, so I rushed in to kneel by Monty, phone still to my ear.

Blood streamed from a head wound, but he was conscious.

“Monty! The paramedics are on their way.”

“No, cancel the call,” said Monty. “Seriously, I’m okay. Someone came up behind me and hit me. It’s a bleeder, but I’ve had worse. Then you knocked—I think you may have saved my life.”

“They didn’t say anything?”

He shook his head, then cringed. I was still on the line to the 911 operator, who fed me instructions.

“Try to lay still. You might have a concussion.” I ran into the kitchen and got a hand towel, which I told him to press gently to his wound to stanch the flow of blood. Head wounds always bleed a lot, but by and large our skulls can take a beating. Luckily for Monty. This was no little tap on the noggin.

“He says he doesn’t need the ambulance,” I told the operator. “He’s up and talking and making sense. We’ll take him to the hospital.”

I heard someone at the back door and looked up to see Graham, panting. In answer to my unspoken question, he shook his head.

“He ran into the neighbor’s yard, and I lost him. How’s Monty?”

“I’ve had worse,” said Monty.

“Did you see who it was?” we asked in unison, Graham asking Monty while I asked Graham.

“Nah, man,” groaned Monty. “He coldcocked me. I was reading
Wuthering Heights
, and someone came in here and coldcocked me from behind.”

“Did you see anything?” I asked Graham.

“I’m not sure . . . but whoever I was chasing had a walker and a three-legged cat.”

I gaped at him. He laughed and shook his head. “No, unfortunately, I couldn’t see anything more than a shadow slipping past the old shed. By the time I got down there, there was nothing. No one.”

Monty’s eyes grew huge. “Maybe it was one of the ghosts!”

“It wasn’t one of the ghosts,” I said. “Be serious.”

“They’ve been threatening me . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“The ghosts have been, like, threatening me. They sent me notes. You don’t believe me?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think they work that way.”

He pointed to a volume labeled
Notable Quotables
and asked me to take it down off the shelf and look inside. There was a square cut out of the pages, the perfect hiding place. And in it were two folded pieces of paper.

“The blue one,” said Monty.

The note was written on sky blue parchment and made up of letters cut from a magazine, kidnap-style. The letters spelled out:

Don’t tell. Or else.

“Monty, I’m pretty sure whoever sent you that note was human, not a ghost.” I thought back to the slogan of Ghost Hunting 101:
Ghosts are people, too
. Now I have to learn to be politically correct about ghosts, of all things. I rolled my eyes. “I mean, a currently viable human, as opposed to a dead one.”

He looked at me, uncomprehending. I tried again. “Ghosts don’t write notes.”

“What about spirit writing? What about the Ouija board?”

“Um, okay. True. But . . . Okay, I really don’t know whether it’s technically possible or not. But in this case, anyway, I don’t think the ghosts sent this note. It’s like a kidnap note. What is it referring to?”

“Maybe . . . something about the body?”

“Monty, tell me the truth. Were you involved in Linda’s death?”

“Not in so many words.”

“In what way, then?”

“I may have moved the body.”

“Are you kidding me?”

He shook his head glumly.

“You can’t mess with a murder scene! Where did you move her from, exactly?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it! She was down in my back bedroom, on the basement level. At first I thought she was hurt, so I went to help her. But then . . . I saw that she had, um, passed. But she was on my property, and you were on your way with a million volunteers, and I didn’t want it to be a problem. . . .” He trailed off. “I really didn’t mean . . . I was going to call the authorities; right after you all finished, I was going to call them. I just assumed she was a junkie who had wandered over from next door.”

“So you moved her from your basement floor down the hill to the shed.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“So, then, it’s true: You’re able to get around just fine. You don’t need the chair.”

Monty looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Are you
kidding
me?” I ranted. “How scummy do you have to be to cheat a community organization? All these volunteers who worked their butts off to make you a comfortable home, for no gain of their own but just to help . . .”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said Monty. “They feel so much better about themselves afterward. Really, I’m just presenting them with the opportunity to know they’ve done a good thing.”

“Oh,
please
. There are plenty of people in real need out there, Monty. These volunteers can feel good about their services to any one of them. As it is . . . if any of them find out, they’ll feel like idiots and become cynical about charity work. This is a seriously slimy thing to do.”

“Okay, okay. You’re right. It was wrong. But it has nothing to do with the body in the shed. And now I’m afraid if people find out about this, it will make me a suspect. If people think I’m capable of something like this, they might wonder about other things, too. It’s like that book by Camus.”

“You’re referencing literature now?”

“We’re big readers in my family,” said Monty, a defensive tone in his voice. “There’s nothing weird about it.”

I had trusted Monty despite my instincts, I realized, because all of his crammed bookshelves made me think he was different.

Which he was, I supposed. Different in the sense of being scum of the earth willing to rip off an organization that ran on a shoestring budget and the kindness of strangers. Which made me realize he was right: I wasn’t going to shout this to the rooftops, for fear of putting people off this sort of project altogether.

“So . . . what about Camus?” I asked, coming back to the rather esoteric subject at hand.

“You know that book,
The Stranger
. The main character is convicted of murder because people didn’t like the way he reacted to his mother’s death. People are very judgy.”

“Somehow I think scamming a charity organization isn’t quite at the level of Camus-like existentialism. But okay. I get what you’re saying. The police know you’re scum perpetrating a fraud, they’ll look at you more closely. But like I said, if you didn’t do anything, there would be no other evidence to indicate that you were involved.”

He didn’t answer. Maybe I was being judgy, but this guy was getting on my nerves.

“Let’s get you some medical attention,” said Graham, the voice of reason. “We can work all this other stuff out later. You think you can walk at all?”

“Nah, man, I’m disabled.”

“For heaven’s sake,” I said, annoyed. “Just get up and walk. Enough with the whole ruse.”

Graham took one arm and I took the other, and we helped him stand.

“I try to keep consistent so I don’t forget and screw up in front of people.”

“Well, the gig is up, Monty. Seriously. And speaking of that—this is a pretty tight neighborhood. How’d you manage to keep this a secret?”

“The accident was real, and I did land in the hospital for weeks and had a wheelchair to get around at first. Then I thought I should just keep it up, for the reasons we just . . .” He trailed off when I glared at him. “Anyway, I’m remarkably consistent. And the truth is, most people don’t look at you that carefully when you’re in a chair. They don’t like to meet your eyes or look too close. It’s sad, really.”

We maneuvered him down the new ramp, since it was easier than the stairs, then got him into the back seat of my car.

“Listen, we have to call the inspector,” I told Monty as Graham drove us toward St. Luke’s hospital.

“I told you—she’ll blame me.”

“She’s smart,” I said. “She’ll know whether you’re telling the truth. And believe me, in a situation like this, it’s best just to come clean with what you’ve done.”

“But . . . there’s more.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“I found this other note with the body. She was holding it in her hand—I think she was planning on blackmailing me. You can’t tell where you got it from, though, okay?”

“You’re in no position to ask for any favors,” growled Graham before I got the chance.

I put my palm out, and he handed it over.

The script was feminine and erratic. It read:
I know the truth
.
Bring $50,000 tomorrow, or I’ll tell.

“What truth?”

Monty shrugged.

“When was ‘tomorrow’?”

He shrugged again. “I think maybe she was trying to blackmail me because she saw I could walk.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know her?”

“I’d seen her hanging around the Murder House once or twice. I thought she was just some junkie, but maybe she saw me. I might have forgotten to draw the shade in my bedroom or whatever.”

“Would it have been worth fifty thousand dollars to you to keep it quiet? Do you even
have
fifty thousand dollars?”

He shrugged.

I realized I kept thinking of Monty as a needy member of society, but maybe he had rolls of hundreds or stacks of gold coins stashed away in yet another fake book. He might have been defrauding countless governmental and charitable institutions, for all I knew.

I called Annette and gave her the lowdown. She said she would meet us at the emergency room.

“Oh, I’m really sorry about trapping you in the shed that time. I was just sort of freaking out. I mean, you can imagine, right? I didn’t know what you were after, what you might find. . . . The police had already looked, but I got the feeling you were seeing ghosts at the Murder House, and what if you met one in the shed and it talked to you?”

“You’re the one who pushed me in there? You really are scum in so many ways.” I fumed, looking out at the darkened streets and thinking of all those duped volunteers.

“I know. You’re right.” He held his head in his hands for a moment, then looked up at me with pleading eyes. “Don’t repossess the ramp, though, okay? Maybe somebody will need it. Somebody ‘worthy.’”

“Don’t you dare play all hangdog with me. I don’t feel sorry for you; you hear me? You should get off your keister and do something with your life. People like you make people like me feel foolish for giving our time and resources to charity, and that’s unforgivable. The only way you’re going to make it up to me, to any of us, is to turn your life around and do good deeds.”

“I’m going to. I swear. I just wanted to get my place fixed up a little so I could sell it when the prices rise.” He shook his head, to which he still held the bloody towel. “All I ever wanted was to be left alone to read. I never catch a break.”

A tiny part of me could relate. For years I’d wanted a similar thing, albeit in a Parisian garret. I had wanted to be left all alone so I could do nothing but read and feel sorry for myself. I would never have gone to such nefarious lengths to attain the dream, but part of me understood the sentiment.

“You know,” I said, “Ray mentioned he was financing a workday down at the youth center this weekend. If your wound’s not serious, you should go help, start making it up to the world.”

“Really? I will. You’ll see. This weekend, at the youth center. I’m starting to turn my life around, from now on.”

Graham and I hung around, explained everything to Annette, and waited to hear about the outcome of his injury. The X-rays showed that while Monty had sustained a serious contusion and a major lump, there was no concussion. I was glad to leave him in Annette’s hands. I wondered whether he’d be up on charges for moving Linda’s body or for fraud against the charity or disability insurance . . . but in any case, I felt confident that Annette would make the right call. And I hoped that he might provide her with some shred of information that could help her solve the case.

“You seriously think Monty’s going to show up to help at that youth center project on Saturday?” asked Graham as we left the emergency room. “I tell you what, Mel, for someone who describes herself as a misanthrope, you sure do have a lot of faith in people.”

“I doubt it, but it’s worth a try. I don’t know how he could even begin to make something like this up to society.”

“He might well have to pay the price by doing time. Fraud is serious. As is disturbing a crime scene in order to sustain that fraud.”

We walked out into the brisk night and lingered for a moment in the parking structure. I looked down at myself: encrusted in dirt, blood on my skirt, and I could only imagine what my hair was doing.