The Thrill of the Haunt (16 page)

“That’s it,” I said. “Now they’ve pissed me off.”

“It wasn’t me,” Cybill Hobsen said. “I have no idea why
you would think it was me.”

Despite Paul’s pleas for restraint, Mom’s reminder to act professional and Josh’s clear desire to get away somewhere and talk, I had given in to my impulse to confront Cybill in her room.

“You have been disappointed with me for not asking you to ‘cleanse’ my house of ghosts,” I reminded her through the tiny opening I could manage between my lips. “I insisted the spirits here were not dangerous, but you disagreed. This was your way of trying to prove me wrong.”

“It most certainly was not,” Cybill responded. “But if you wish, I will pack my things and find my way back home. I will, however, feel it necessary to report your conduct to Mr. Rance at Senior Plus Tours. I don’t appreciate being accused of vandalism.”

“You didn’t find a red marker in her belongings,” said Paul, floating just behind me and being an irritating purveyor of conscience. “It’s entirely possible she
didn’t
write either message.”

I forced myself to exhale and softened my voice. “I really hope you won’t do that, Cybill,” I said. “Please don’t leave.”

“I don’t know.” Now she was playing coy. “I don’t want to stay if I’m not welcome here.”

“Of course you’re welcome,” I said, wondering if I meant that even a little. “I was upset at finding graffiti on my house, and I overreacted. Can we try to go on as if this unfortunate scene hadn’t happened, please?” There are times even I am appalled at how quick I am to pander to a paying customer.

“That depends,” Cybill said.

Depends? “On what?” I asked before I could think it all the way through.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I resisted the urge to pull it out. Whoever was calling would have to wait until I’d defused this situation, the one that I had fused in the first place.

“Are you
sure
you don’t want me to cleanse the house?” she asked.

“I’m quite sure. It wasn’t any spirit that lives in this house who wrote those words, I assure you.” Even Maxie wouldn’t have done that; she had too healthy a respect for the integrity of the house. She never would have defaced it.

Cybill, predictably, looked disappointed. “I still think a quick ritual would heal the house,” she said. I didn’t know the house was sick, but I did not comment on that.

“Tell you what,” I countered. “Suppose we schedule a ceremony for Sunday night, before everyone goes home. Not one that would banish the ghosts from the house, but one that would protect it from outside entities. Can you do something like that?”

Her face brightened visibly. “I can!” she said. “I would be delighted to seal this house from outside spirits.” I made a mental note to be sure that Dad was here before the ceremony began, on the one-in-a-million chance that Cybill could actually do what she said she could.

“That would be wonderful,” I told her. “I’m so grateful.”

“I’ll begin preparing immediately,” Cybill said and went into her closet. “I might need a different robe.”

I walked out of her room and started down the stairs. I heard Paul behind me say, “You might just be successful at the hospitality business yet.”

“But not the investigation business,” I said quietly.

“You’re getting better all the time.”

“We’re nowhere on anything,” I reminded him.

“That’s usually when we do our best work.” Paul has a somewhat rosier picture of our attempts at detection than I do.

I walked downstairs, where Melissa was bringing Harry and Beth some coffee, and went back out onto the porch. Josh was still out there, closely examining the red words on the clapboard next to my front door.

“What do you think, Doctor?” I asked him. “Will the patient survive?”

“I wish it were paint,” he said. “That would be easier to remove. This might actually require something on the order of sandblasting to get down to a surface that will be free of the marker, and that would mean you’d have to repaint the whole exterior of the house.”

That sounded tedious and fairly expensive. I was not pleased, and I must have looked it. “Luckily, you have a friend in the paint business,” Josh said.

I wasn’t sure what that meant. “A friend?” I asked.

And my cell phone rang again. I pulled it out just to check and saw that the caller was Phyllis Coates at the
Harbor Haven
Chronicle
. I made a low sound in my throat. “I’m sorry,” I told Josh. “I have to take this.” He nodded, his face impassive. “Just hang on.”

Phyllis sounded rushed, which isn’t the least bit unusual. “I’m just getting this, but it might help you,” she said. “There’s been no arrest yet, but I know the cops have interest in someone for Everett Sandheim’s murder.”

I immediately thought of Brenda Leskanik, Everett’s ex-wife, but I realized that was because she had the only reason I knew of to be mad at him. And she hadn’t really seemed all that mad. “Who are they looking at?” I asked Phyllis.

“Marv Winderbrook,” she said. “The owner of the Fuel Pit.”

What possible motivation could Marv have to kill a homeless man in his gas station’s men’s room? “Why?”

“Mostly because they don’t seem to have any other suspects,” Phyllis answered. “But also because Marv had applied for a restraining order to keep Everett from using the restroom at his station.”

“I think I need to talk to Marv,” I said wearily. It had been the one thing too many while I juggled two cases and a complement of guests.

“You’d better hurry,” Phyllis said. “He could be in jail by morning.”

“You think I need to go tonight?” I looked at Josh, who managed with Herculean effort not to roll his eyes at all.

“Hey, you’re the private eye,” she answered. “I just write for the local rag.” That’s Phyllis for
yes
.

In my mind’s ear, I groaned. Outwardly, I said, “You don’t happen to know where he lives, do you?”

“Right behind the station,” Phyllis said. I could hear the smile in her voice, and one day I would have to get her for that.

I disconnected the call and looked at Josh. “I really want to stay here and talk to you. You need to understand that.”

“I could come with you,” he said.

I wished he could. But if I was going back to the Fuel Pit, and I really needed to do the measurements on the bathroom window, then I needed to take another passenger with me. That could be Josh, certainly. But if there was ghostly activity in the restroom, he wouldn’t see it, and I’d be inside talking to Marv.

I needed to go with Maxie.

So reluctantly—make that
very
reluctantly—I shook my head. “This one I really need to do by myself,” I told Josh. “It’s business.”

His face closed off like it had at the restaurant. “Fine,” he said.

“Believe me, it’s not—”

“I know. It’s not that you don’t want to stay, but you can’t. And you can’t really explain why that’s the way it is, right?” He sounded sad, rather than angry.

“I don’t have time. You have to take me on faith this one last time. I want to be here. I want to talk to you. I
will
talk to you, hopefully as soon as I get back. And I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But right now I have a narrow window of opportunity, and I just don’t have the time for anything else. I don’t think you’re the kind of guy who wouldn’t be able to understand that. Are you?”

“I’m not sure,” Josh said.

That was a body blow. “You’re not?”

“No. That last sentence was so twisted I’m not sure what you’re asking me. Am I not the kind of guy who wouldn’t understand? What does that mean?” He allowed the hint of a smile to peek out from under his frown.

A small amount of hope perked me up. “Stay here,” I urged him. “Hang out with Mom and Liss if you want. As soon as I come back, we’ll talk.”

The smile faded. “I don’t think so,” Josh said. “I have to get up early. We can talk tomorrow. Right?”

I nodded. But I couldn’t say anything.

• • •

“I’m not going back in that bathroom,” Maxie insisted.

She hovered lightly over the passenger seat of the Volvo and stared at me, but I was driving and watching the road. “Nobody’s asking you to,” I told her. “I just want you to take this tape measure and get the dimensions of the window. You can do that from the outside.” I had taken a tape measure from my toolbox, and now I extended it to her. She hid it in the pocket of the trench coat she liked to wear when we were out on what she had taken to calling a “mission.”

“If there’s somebody inside, I’m not looking,” Maxie said.

“Please don’t. I don’t want somebody inside to see a flying tape measure. That’s all I need.” I turned right. The Fuel Pit was at the end of the street on my left. At this time of the evening, there was no problem finding a space to park directly across the street. “I don’t see you rushing in to check it out,” Maxie told me.

“I’m going to be in the back talking to Marv,” I reminded her. “Try not to be too loud.”

I’d actually called Marv and asked if I could come over to talk, and since he knew me from being around town (I often point guests to his station, and Marv knows that), he agreed but sounded puzzled about the reason for my visit. I’d told him I was coming as a private investigator but not that I’d heard he was the prime suspect in Everett’s murder. There are things one simply doesn’t mention, darling.

“Just get the dimensions,” I reminded Maxie. “You don’t need to do any more than that.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” she assured me. And then she was gone.

I met Marv in what he called his sitting room, which was a studio apartment of sorts in what had obviously once been a garage behind the Fuel Pit. He had closed the Fuel Pit for the night. Many of the area’s gas stations are open 24/7, but Marv runs the place almost entirely by himself and isn’t on a major highway, so with the gas rationing after the storm he started closing at nine every evening and never stopped. He is a tall, thin, scrawny-looking man with an Adam’s apple that could be seen from space, but he had combed his hair and was wearing jeans and a polo shirt instead of his usual oily overalls. He was trying, and I appreciated it.

“I told the police everything I saw, and I gave them the security tapes,” he told me once I mentioned Everett’s name. “I don’t know what else I can tell you, Alison.”

“Tell me why you were requesting a restraining order against Everett,” I said. No sense in beating around the bush.

Marv waved a hand; the whole thing was irrelevant. “I wasn’t
really
going to go to court,” he said. “I just wanted a piece of paper to show Everett so he wouldn’t spend his days in my men’s room, keeping actual customers away, you know? Some days he’d just set up shop in there like it was the Waldorf. I started to feel like I should bring him room service.”

“When did that start?” I asked. “I never saw him anywhere except outside the Stud Muffin.”

“Two, maybe three months ago,” Marv estimated, his eyes rolling up as he grasped for the figure. “I’d let him go in and, you know, clean up every once in a while, but all of a sudden it was a regular thing with him, and he’d stay in there a really long time. I don’t like to think about what he might have been doing.”

Now that he brought it up, I didn’t want to think about it, either. “Still, going to the police department and filing a petition, even if you didn’t intend to go through with it, was pretty serious,” I suggested.

Marv thought about that and nodded, conceding the point. “The fact is, the last few months Everett started creeping me out,” he said.

I heard a scraping noise outside the window and looked, but there was no sign of Maxie. I wondered if she was doing something to the window that would draw attention to herself, but Marv didn’t seem to notice, so I just plowed on. “Creeping you out?” I asked.

“He started telling me he was hearing ghosts,” he said. “I mean, no offense, Alison, but that’s fairly creepy.” It was lovely how the locals respected my position in town.

I know you can’t hear my tone of voice, but that was meant sarcastically.

And to be fair, the idea of Everett hearing ghosts was doing a decent job of disturbing me, as well. Did my future include sitting outside the Stud Muffin in a series of winter coats, telling people about Paul and Maxie and asking for spare change? Best not to think about that.

“No offense taken, Marv,” I said, although I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. “Did Everett say specifically what he was hearing?”

Marv must have figured I was asking out of professional curiosity—that I wanted to compare Everett’s spectral experience with my own. That wasn’t far off the mark, but I really wanted to know if there was any indication whether Everett had been hearing
real
ghosts or if they were voices in his head that would be explained by a possible mental illness. In any event, Marv flattened out his mouth in an expression that was supposed to indicate thought and said, “He told me he was hearing ghosts. Someone he knew, he said.”

Whoa. “I guess it’s possible,” I heard myself say. It was really just a thought that came out because I hadn’t thought to guard it. “He didn’t say who?”

“Nope,” Marv answered. “You couldn’t get much from Everett, but the ghost thing makes sense, sort of. Because that door was locked from the inside, and there wasn’t no way somebody could have snuck in, stabbed Everett all those times, and then snuck out.” He considered for a moment and then looked at me. “Why don’t you just find Everett’s ghost and ask him what happened?” he asked.