The Thrill of the Haunt (25 page)

I was trying desperately to think about the task at hand, about making a statement about the murders and getting Paul and Maxie to outdo themselves, if I could just get them to understand what it meant to me, if they would simply get it through their transparent heads that this was my house and my life and they were getting to be more of an impediment than a help.

It’s possible I was also thinking a little bit about Josh at that moment and letting my feelings get the better of me. It’s possible. I’m not saying for sure.

“This house is infested,” Cybill began. Swell. Now she would have my guests thinking about bedbugs in their rooms. Cybill was turning out to be an even greater threat to my business than I had anticipated, and the storm had already done enough. “There are undead spirits that have penetrated this house and endangered it.” That was simply inaccurate: Paul and Maxie weren’t undead; they were dead. That’s the opposite of undead, isn’t it? Did that mean I was undead?

I shouldn’t have let Josh walk away. I should have blurted it out. Even if he thought I was crazy, that would be better than his thinking that I didn’t trust him. Dad had been right. Maybe I should call him.

“Tonight we will find the source of this infestation,” Cybill went on. “We will root out the cracks in the foundation and seal them. We will rid ourselves of this plague and cleanse this house of its infection.”

As she spoke, Kerin Murphy and four or five of her interchangeable minions arrived at the game-room entrance. Kerin folded her arms like Mr. Clean when he encountered a grime outbreak, looked smug—her go-to expression—and gestured for her posse to fan out and man the perimeter, which they did. I wasn’t sure what Kerin had in mind, but I could be reasonably sure I wasn’t going to be crazy about it.

At least one killer in the room, and I was worried about the cast of
Mean Girls: The Previous Generation
.

Maybe I could text Josh about the ghosts and he’d come back. Was that the kind of thing you could text someone? It seemed crass, somehow.

This was Paul and Maxie’s fault, I decided. Mostly Maxie. If they hadn’t been in this house when I’d bought it, so much of my current difficulty simply wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have a PI license, certainly, and would not be involved in the investigation of two murders. Suspected killers—at least one holding firearms—would not be in the room.

Of course, I also wouldn’t have found Dad again or probably wouldn’t have reconnected with Josh after all these years, but those incidentals didn’t occur to me at just that moment. It’s funny how thoughts are influenced by circumstances, isn’t it?

Maybe
funny
isn’t the word.

Cybill lit some incense sticks and placed them in a vase I’d given her (one that I didn’t much care about) to put in the center of a card table she’d asked me to set up in the middle of the room. “This scent will repel the spirits in the house,” she said. I couldn’t say it was doing much for me, either, but Paul and Maxie, watching with some fascination, didn’t seem especially repelled. Except that Maxie started to wrinkle her nose. Paul leaned over and whispered something to her; she nodded in agreement then looked at me. Unhappily.

Cybill struck a dramatic pose: One arm bent at the elbow and drawn back, the other aimed at the ceiling as she craned her neck upward, like she was about to shoot an arrow into the sky. “This is a safe house!” she hollered. I noticed Libby Hill wince at the volume. With the candlelight in the room and the echo from the high ceiling, it did indeed create an eerie feeling. “We will tolerate no more interference from these evil beings!” She began to twirl slowly. “You are not welcome here! Be gone!”

I’d actually gotten my phone out to text Josh to come back so we could talk honestly. I had typed “sorry” and hit the Send button when my mind caught what had just been said. Wait! This didn’t sound like a spell that would keep new ghosts out!

“Cybill!” I said, breaking the mood and making everyone look at me (Melissa stared, alarmed by the tone the presentation had taken). “This is not what you promised!”

I looked up. Paul and Maxie looked positively sickly; their usual transparent pallor slightly tinged with green it seemed from where I was standing. Paul looked at me and weakly murmured, “Do something.”

“The house must be cleansed,” Cybill insisted. “The presence of these spirits is in opposition to all living beings who enter. They must be cast out.”

“Stop! Now!” I advanced on her and walked through the crowd, ignoring her astonished expression. “I’ve been very clear about this—I don’t want you to get rid of the ghosts in this house!”

Cybill turned and smiled at me and dropped her voice. “It’s okay,” she said, sotto voce. “You don’t have to put on a brave face for your business. This way, I can rid your house of these evil demons and you appear to be against it.”

“I
am
against it!”

Cybill nodded tolerantly at me. “Very good,” she whispered.

Kerin Murphy stood forward among her crowd, with the most irritating smug grin I could imagine—and I’m pretty imaginative. She folded her arms and spoke loudly enough for everyone in the game room to hear.

Clearly, this was the moment she’d been waiting for.

“You see?” she said to the crowd, most of which looked perplexed. “She
is
the ghost lady!” Was that it? Kerin’s plan all along, to out me as a true believer and regain her stature in the community? It was sort of clever, in a really vile way.

I saw Libby turn to Tom and mouth, “Who’s that?”

“Not now, Kerin,” I said. I was too annoyed and, yes, panicking about losing the ghosts in my house—where was Dad?—to have time for her nonsense.

“No! Not this time! You’ve been denying and denying and making me look like a fool because you insisted the ghost thing was just for business, but I know you believe! You made
me
look like the crazy one.
You’re
the crazy one, Alison!”

Tom and Libby Hill looked fascinated, but the Rosens, in the opposite corner, seemed more unnerved; they were looking toward the hallway as if trying to figure an escape route. Dave Boffice leaned over and said something to Helen, who put her hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle. Lovely. The suspects were finding me amusing.

Cybill simply went back to chanting. “I cast out these spirits. I cast out these spirits. I cast out these spirits . . .”

Paul’s eyes widened and he actually seemed to double over in pain.

“No!” I shouted at Cybill. “Stop
now
! You’re hurting my friends!” Before Kerin, who looked positively jubilant, could bray her victory to the heavens, I turned toward her. “Fine! You want me to say it? There are two ghosts in this house, their names are Paul and Maxie, and they’ve never done you or anyone else an ounce of harm. They’ve become my friends, they watch my daughter, and they help me with my business. So what exactly is your problem, lady?”

Phyllis was in the corner, furiously taking notes. The feature article in the next
Chronicle
was a sure thing whether I liked it or not, so I decided to like it.

“You want me to say it?” I shouted to Kerin. “You want me to claim the title? Fine! I
am
the ghost lady!”

Paul grinned and straightened up. Maxie, next to him, was still doubled over, but it was with laughter.

“Oh, that was priceless!” she managed to cough out between guffaws. “I loved it!”

“What?” I was so confused I could barely move. There was a murderer, maybe two, in the room, and I was losing track of my purpose here. I really had to focus.

“It’s about time,” Paul said with satisfaction. “Do you feel better? I feel better.”

I looked at Cybill, who had stopped chanting and was watching Paul with a grin. “I think we did it,” she said to him with a wink.

“Did what?” I asked. I can be pretty dense sometimes.

“Who are you talking to?” Jeannie asked. I chose to let that go by. She’d rationalize it later.

“Your spirit friends wanted to be acknowledged,” Cybill explained. “They felt you were ashamed of them, and they had a need for you to take responsibility.”

“You mean you two . . . you three . . . you were all in on it the whole time?” Okay,
very
dense.

“I’m sorry, Alison,” Paul said. “But the point had to be made.” I made a mental note to kill him later, then realized someone had beaten me to it.

“I’m confused,” Katrina Holm said. “Is this about Joyce’s murder?” Helen Boffice’s head turned and she sat down, but I couldn’t see her face to get a reaction.

My attention was then diverted to the game-room entrance, where Josh Kaplan stood, looking a little wary. I wasn’t sure when he’d gotten there.

I had three priorities: getting Melissa out of the room, getting a picture from Katrina, and getting revenge on my resident ghosts and Cybill.

“So you see!” Kerin wasn’t off her soapbox yet. “She admits it! She likes living with these daemons!”

I stopped dead in my tracks. “Daemons?” I said out loud. “It was you! You defaced my property!”

Busted. Kerin’s eyes widened, and she tried to find a way out. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Oh no you don’t,” I told her, advancing. “You painted those crazy slogans on my house.”

“It was just a little graffiti,” she tried. “I tagged your house . . . a little.”

“It was thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, and I will be suing you.” Okay, so that was an exaggeration, but she didn’t know that.

“I did it to get even.” Kerin had clearly decided to be offensive in her defense.

Enough was enough. I glanced at the Boffices, just to be sure they weren’t going to bolt, then advanced on Kerin. “Get even for
what
? I was never trying to do anything to you, Kerin. You weren’t a significant enough presence in my life for me to think about how my friends were affecting you. So please tell me, why exactly are you so hell-bent on revenge? Because I found out about your little fling, and your husband still hasn’t forgiven you? Because you’re not the big cheese in the PTSO anymore?”

“You destroyed my life!” she spat.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You made sure that article ran in the newspaper!” Kerin countered.

“No, that was me,” Phyllis chipped in, not looking up from her notebook.

“It was her fault!” Kerin said, but her posse was looking less convinced than before.

“Did I cheat on your husband?” I asked.

“You . . .” Kerin just trailed off. But her hands were unmistakably taking on a resemblance to talons, and that couldn’t be good.

She ran at me, but Maxie had seen that coming and picked up a tray I’d brought in to serve drinks. She held it up at the last second, and Kerin ran face-first into it. It wasn’t hard enough to do any serious damage, but I’d bet Kerin might need a consultation with a cosmetic surgeon about a deviated septum in the next few days.

“Now,
that
was a good trick,” Tom Hill said.

“Thank you,” I said to Maxie.

“What are friends for?”

This threatened to go on indefinitely, but there was a gasp from the entrance. Brenda Leskanik stood there, her face as white as a sheet. She looked like she’d just seen a ghost. And she was one of the few who hadn’t.

“Randy!” she shouted. Everyone in the room turned to look at her. Except Dave Boffice, who was directly opposite his mother and appeared to be completely stunned.

Standing next to him, Helen Boffice stared at Brenda, took off her dark sunglasses—which had seemed pretentious to me to begin with—and stared.

From across the room came another wheeze of shock, the sound of someone who had been punched in the gut. I turned to look in the direction of the sound and saw Katrina Holm looking like she’d just seen . . . you get the idea. But this time it was literal.

“Joyce?” she breathed.

Helen trembled and looked at Katrina. She made a low sound in her throat.

“That’s Joyce Kinsler,” Katrina said to no one in particular.

I wish I’d had time for my mind to soak up all that
information. That Dave Boffice was really Randy Sandheim was no surprise. And I’d suspected, once Paul had asked for a photograph of Joyce Kinsler, that she might not have been the woman I’d discovered in the kitchen of Joyce’s home. But the idea that Helen
was
Joyce, I’ll admit, threw me a little, and I wasn’t alone—everyone in the room was stunned and motionless. Okay, some of them were just confused, but the ones with context were stunned and motionless.

Then I looked at Helen’s right hand, and saw the finger she couldn’t straighten out, and I realized that every time I’d seen her, she’d covered that hand with the other. To hide the finger that Matthew Kinsler had told me his daughter had caught in a car window at a young age and cried all night about.

Holy mackerel.

But I couldn’t even say anything in time: Dave/Randy, who, as advertised, had brought a gun with him, produced it from inside his jacket. He pointed it at me, then at Katrina, then at Brenda, then, for no particular reason, at Josh. He didn’t seem able to decide who he might want to shoot should the urge arise.

From the back of the room, I heard a small protest as Mom hustled Melissa out and toward the front door, no doubt to tell McElone, who was outside, what had happened. Dave (and that’s what we’ll call him for the sake of sanity) didn’t seem to care; he let them walk out with no protest. On his part. Melissa was last heard arguing that she could defuse the situation all by herself, to no avail.

Katrina took a step forward. “I don’t understand,” she said to Helen, aka Joyce. “Why did you pretend you were dead?”

“Because she didn’t want anyone to know that the woman hanging in Joyce’s house was Helen Boffice,” I said. Okay, Paul said it, but only a select few could hear him, so I reiterated it. Now I understood why there were no pictures in Joyce Kinsler’s house after the murder—the killer(s) didn’t want anyone who entered to know that the woman who died was not Joyce. And even Matthew hadn’t seen the remains—the dead woman was already in a body bag when he had arrived at Joyce’s house. Now if only McElone could summon up the courage to come inside the “freaky” house . . .

I didn’t have to wait long. Standing in the game-room doorway, police-issued firearm held in front of her, Lieutenant Anita McElone held her gun on Dave and said, “Don’t do anything stupid. I’m a police officer.”

Dave looked at me and appeared more peeved than anything else. “I said not to bring any cops,” he snarled.

“Yeah, like I always listen to murderers,” I answered.

“I don’t understand,” Harry Rosen said to Beth. “Is this part of the show?” She looked contemplative but didn’t answer.

“I can grab the gun,” Maxie offered, but I shook my head; it was too risky.

“We’re not murderers.” Joyce seemed to want the spotlight. “It was a question of circumstance.”

“You killed you own father and your own wife, Dave,” I said, ignoring whoever she was. “How could you do that?”

Dave looked at McElone, and his eyes got meaner. “You don’t want to do anything rash, Officer,” he said.

“Lieutenant,” she corrected him. I didn’t see how that helped.

With Helen being Joyce, it started to make sense. I looked up at Paul but spoke to Dave. “You married Helen for her money, didn’t you, Dave? After you changed your name and got some fake ID, you married her for her money. But she wasn’t spending it.”

“Don’t say anything,” Joyce warned Dave. I noticed that Paul’s eyes were closed tight; my guess was he was on the Ghosternet, probably trying to contact Matthew Kinsler or Helen Boffice.

So I went on: “You lived with Helen for more than five years, trying to figure out a way to get at her millions.”

“Who’s Helen?” Libby Hill had her hand raised to ask the question.

I didn’t answer her. “But then you met Joyce, and the two of you hit on a scheme.”

“Do I have to shoot you to shut you up?” Dave asked. I didn’t think he was waiting for an answer.

McElone passed the Rosens, who accommodated her by taking a step back, and still had her gun drawn, very close to Dave now. I figured I could distract him long enough for McElone to disarm him.

Paul’s eyes were open again. “I think you’ve got it, Alison,” he said.

So I kept going. “You knew about creating a new identity; you’d done it before. All you had to do was get Joyce some of Helen’s ID, and as Helen’s husband, you had the access. Then you could skim off the money you wanted. Helen had so much, it probably took her months to notice.” From out of nowhere, I felt Josh standing next to me, his shoulder just a little in front, so he could move quickly if there was shooting in the room.

And I felt really bad about not telling him there were ghosts in the house.

Joyce smiled a very unattractive smile. “You’re guessing,” she said. “You have no proof.”

“Not really.” McElone could cover Dave, but I was afraid Joyce might have a weapon, too. I had to keep talking. “There were withdrawals made from Helen’s bank accounts”—it was true I couldn’t prove that yet, but I bet McElone and the cops could—“and deposits for tens of thousands into yours, Joyce. Why would Helen give you that kind of money? Why would you show up at my door and pretend to be Helen? Actually, now that I think of it, why
did
you want me to follow Dave?”

Tony appeared on my other side, and I wondered if Dave could even see me clearly with all the square feet of people trying to help. I was getting tired of being protected.

Libby Hill took her husband’s arm, smiling, as if they were watching a really cool movie. I decided not to point out that the gun was real and probably loaded, even if it wasn’t exactly aimed with accuracy at the moment.

Jeannie, somewhere behind me, was carrying Oliver out of the room. Probably to change his diaper, but it was just as well; she didn’t seem especially scared, either.

Phyllis leaned in a little closer to hear so she could quote Dave and me later. Her hearing isn’t what it used to be. And you thought her eyes were bad.

Sure enough, Joyce produced a gun of her own from her pocket and pointed it at me. “That’s it!” she shouted. McElone, forced to choose one to aim at, stuck with Dave, to whom she was closest. Another couple of steps, and she’d be able to touch him. Dave, looking out of the corner of his eye at her, probably knew that he was not going to do well if he turned to train the gun on McElone.

“You knew Dave was going to see Helen during his lunch hours, didn’t you?” I said, trying to provoke a response that, hopefully, would not be bullet-ridden. “And you couldn’t follow him yourself, because he’d recognize your car. Were you trying to patch things up, Dave?”

Dave looked furious, and probably would have fired if McElone hadn’t been close enough to put the muzzle of her gun on the back of his neck. “Don’t,” she said. Dave’s jaw clenched a few times, but he lowered his gun. McElone took it from him carefully.

“Randy,” Brenda Leskanik moaned from across the room. “Why?”

“For the money,” I told her.

“No. Why did you change your name? Pretend to be dead? Why didn’t you let me know where you were?” She stared at her son and looked as sad as I’ve ever seen a woman look. “Why?”

“What are you doing here?” Dave groaned.

Brenda didn’t get a chance to answer because Joyce took a step toward me, still about ten feet away, and Tony and Josh closed ranks. I could barely see her over all that man.

“I’m walking out of this room,” she said. “And nobody’s going to do anything about it, right?” She didn’t look at McElone, but it was clear to whom she was speaking.

At that moment, Matthew Kinsler floated down through the ceiling, took in the scene, and gasped at the sight of his daughter. “Joyce!” he said. “Joycie, you’re alive.”

Melissa tried to look around the entrance to the game room, and I saw Mom pull her back into the hallway.

“Yes, she is,” Cybill told Matthew. “But she’s claiming to be Helen Boffice.”

“Who?” Matthew asked. “Oh. The wife.”

Joyce looked sharply at Cybill. “Who are you talking to?” she demanded.

“Thanks a heap, Cybill,” I said.

“I’m losing track of who can see whom,” Cybill answered.

Matthew’s face darkened as he watched the scene and heard his daughter’s voice. “What happened to you, Joycie?” he wondered aloud.

“It’s your father,” I told her. “He’s here, and he’s worried about you.”

“I should have known better than to get involved in this ghosty stuff,” McElone said. “Somebody killed Everett Sandheim and Helen Boffice.” She looked at Joyce. “And I’m starting to suspect someone here who’s actually
alive
.”

“Don’t look at me,” Marv said. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

Suddenly, I knew why Marv was there. “You got the report from the sewer guy, didn’t you?” I asked him.

“Yeah. You were right—Mickey came by and took a look. Sure enough, he found something.”

“Don’t say it yet,” I suggested. “Let’s see who can guess.” I turned toward Joyce. “What do you think might have shown up in the sewer line behind the Fuel Pit?” I asked her.

Finally, her voice: “How on earth would I know?”

“Because you put it there. You stabbed Everett eighty-six times, and then you made sure that the weapon disappeared, didn’t you?” I made a point of watching Joyce’s face closely as I said it.

She smiled, ever so slightly.

“I did nothing of the sort,” she said.

“But you did. On the advice of a friend, I measured the window at the Fuel Pit’s men’s room.” I gave Paul a quick glance, and he nodded. “Randy here couldn’t have made it out that way, even if he walked inside with Everett leading him. Brenda couldn’t have possibly done it. But you, with that little slim frame, you would have fit.”

The smile evaporated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Joyce said.

I ignored her protest. “The door was locked from the inside. The window was the only way out, and you were the only one whose hips would make it out that little window. I have a witness who saw Everett talking to a woman just before he went off and died. And after he was stabbed eighty-eight times with a small blade, that knife disappeared. Until it surfaced in Marv’s sewer line. There’s an easy way to dispose of a small weapon in a bathroom, isn’t there? But even a tiny penknife can stop up a sewer line, Joyce. Didn’t you know that?”

“I did not stab Everett eighty-eight times,” she insisted.

“No? How many, then?” That was McElone.

“You did it, Joyce,” I said. Josh stood close again, seeming to sense that there would be danger. “You killed Everett first—why, because he knew your husband, Dave, was really his son, Randy?” Joyce remained silent, and she hadn’t even been read her rights yet. “But Helen must have found out what you were doing, because she moved out of the house with Dave and went back to her mother’s place and was repairing the storm damage. But then Dave started going over there. Why, Dave? Because if you reconciled, you could have access to her money? That hadn’t worked before.”

Dave looked up with an odd smile on his face, a cold one. McElone was securing zip strips to his hands, which were gun-free and behind his back. “I signed a prenup,” he said. “I couldn’t get a dime of her money if we got divorced.”

Matthew looked at me sadly. If he’d been alive, he would have had tears in his eyes. “Did she really do it?” he asked. “Why?”

“A good question,” I responded, having given up all pretense. Tom Hill looked up where he expected I’d been looking, and instead of making eye contact with Matthew, he looked directly at Maxie without knowing it. Which was just as well. Maxie’s current T-shirt read simply, “What?” But her style of wearing it might have made Tom’s wife, Libby, slightly anxious.

“Do you see this?” Kerin Murphy preached to her invited crowd, who were looking downright confused. “She talks to people who aren’t there! Just like Everett did! She’s just as crazy as he was!”

And then it all made sense.

I ignored Kerin, since that was what annoyed her most, and looked at Joyce. “That was it. Everett recognized his son. Brenda didn’t know Randy was alive, did you, Brenda?”

Brenda’s neck tensed, but she shook her head.

“Randy wasn’t expecting to run into his father, but he did,” I continued. “And Everett started talking about it. Dave was worried that if anyone believed his father, he could be exposed. He knew Everett was spending too much time in the Fuel Pit restroom and that there were security cameras at the door, but not in the back. He was too big, so he sent you, Joyce. With a little knife that could be easily disposed of.”

“There’s no proof,” Joyce reiterated. She couldn’t get too close to me. She was small enough that Josh or Tony might have been able to wrestle the gun out of her hand. But it would have been dangerous in such a crowded room.

“There is. Brenda knows her son. And Randy had warrants out on him for distributing narcotics. He knew people who could get fake IDs, so he could appropriate an identity if he needed one. He needed one.”

“That’s right,” McElone told me. “I checked the records on David Boffice. He died when he was four days old. You look a lot older than that, sir,” she said to Randy. “You went off a cliff with your Harley, and everybody thought you were dead.”