A Wild Ghost Chase (8 page)

Keep reading for a special excerpt from E. J. Copperman’s

next Haunted Guesthouse Mystery . . .

CHANCE OF A GHOST

Available in paperback February 2013 from Berkley Prime Crime!

The dream is not always the same; there are variables in the setting and the details. But it always begins with me, either in the house where I grew up or in the enormous Victorian I now own as a guesthouse.

And my father is there.

Even in the dream, I know he’s been dead for five years and that it doesn’t make sense for him to be completing some home improvement project with me. But that doesn’t seem to matter to him, so I see no need to make it an issue.

It’s like things used to be—Dad will point out something about the job he’s doing so I’ll remember it. “See, you want to drive the screws in a little bit deeper than flush on wallboard,” he’ll say. “That way when you fill the hole with compound, you can sand it smooth, and you won’t see a screw head shining through the paint.”

We work like that for a little while, and I feel the way I always did when Dad was around—safe, protected and, above all, loved. I learn from him (although in the dream I have the feeling it’s something I already knew), and we share a chuckle over something that we’ve agreed not to tell my mother.

Then he asks me to find him a tool.

It’s not always the same tool; this is what I mean about there being variables in the dream. Sometimes he’ll ask for a pair of needle-nose pliers, and I don’t have time to wonder what possible use they might have in hanging wallboard. Other times, Dad will say that there’s a ball-peen hammer in his toolbox downstairs, and he’d really appreciate it if I would go down and find it for him.

Every time, I have this nagging feeling that I shouldn’t leave, but I don’t protest or try to get out of the task. I’m not even sure what age I’m supposed to be in the dream. I can’t tell if I’m meant to be a child or if he’s just treating me that way despite my actually being in my late thirties with a daughter about to turn eleven. Whichever it is, I never question it in the dream, just as I don’t find it strange that the house might change from one to the other at this point. If I start out in the house on Seafront Avenue and walk downstairs to find myself in my childhood home at Crest Road, the shift in location doesn’t alarm me—it always seems to make sense. I note it, but I don’t question it. It doesn’t matter where I find myself; the dream always seems to make sense while I’m in it.

This is usually where it becomes an anxiety dream. I head for Dad’s toolbox, but it never seems to be where he said I could find it. I start to wonder why he’s working upstairs without his toolbox, and why he might’ve wanted me out of the room for just a moment right now. I go from room to room, searching for the toolbox. In one version of the dream, I don’t ever find it. I search until I wake up, frustrated and strangely sad. In another version, I find the toolbox, but the tool Dad has requested doesn’t seem to be there, despite how in life Dad organized his tools very carefully and logically. But someone appears to have meddled with the tools—they’re not where they’re supposed to be—and I begin to get nervous. Dad wouldn’t treat the instruments of his profession so carelessly. I often wake up anxious after that one.

But the third version, the one I’d been having the most often lately, is the worst of all. In that one, I actually find the tool that Dad has asked for, and feeling like a proud little girl who has accomplished something she’s been trusted to do for the first time, I rush back up to deliver the prize. And here, again, there is variation in the dream. Sometimes I can’t find my way back to the room Dad was repairing. I rush through the house—or houses—frantically searching for the right door to get me back to him so I can give him the thing he needed so badly and be rewarded with a smile and a “Thanks, baby girl.” But I can’t ever find my way because the doors never seem to be in the right place, and I wake up just as I think I have finally discovered the right passageway. I’m never happy to be awake after that, and it always takes me a few minutes to shake it off.

In the really horrible version, I find my way back to the room, but Dad is gone.

I wake up in a cold sweat after that one, no matter what.

One

Tuesday

“You’re keeping something from me,” I told my mother.

We were walking from my car, a 1999 Volvo station wagon that had seen better days even before I’d bought it used, to Mom’s one-level “active adult” home, a structure younger than my car. I was helping Mom bring in six bags of groceries, which seemed excessive for a single woman in her early seventies. But there was the threat of snow—a lot of it—overnight, and Mom didn’t want to be caught without provisions, just in case every snow-clearing mechanism within a twenty-mile radius suddenly broke down for the next eight days and she couldn’t get out. We weren’t wasting our time, because the wind whipping around (and seemingly through) us was bringing the air temperature down to about eighteen degrees.

Welcome to the Jersey Shore during an unusually cold January.

“Don’t be silly, Alison,” Mom retorted, the scarf wrapped around her mouth muffling her words. “What makes you think there’s anything I’m not telling you?”

“It’s the way your right eye is twitching. That’s the same thing you did when you lied to me in seventh grade when my English teacher was fired for smoking dope in the faculty lounge.”

Mom unlocked her back door and we were inside and thawing out in seconds. She closed the door with her foot to stop the arctic breeze and we unburdened ourselves on the kitchen table.

“Mr. Hennity left the system because he wanted a bigger challenge and you kids were just too smart to provide it,” Mom attempted. And her right eye twitched.

“See?”

Mom started taking groceries out of the nearest bag and putting them away. I did the same, leaving out all items requiring refrigeration for Mom to organize herself. We had a system, and it went back to when I was eight years old.

“Well, I’m not hiding anything now,” she insisted. I decided to let it go. There was no sense in pushing Mom when she didn’t want to talk. She’d tell me whatever it was when she was good and ready. Besides, I had two guests back at the house, so I had to get back before this Nor’easter, forecast to be bigger than the Blizzard of ’88, began bearing down on us.

“I’m surprised you didn’t go to get your nails done today,” I said, handing her a box of All-Bran cereal, which she placed in a cabinet next to another box of All-Bran cereal. “Isn’t that a weekly thing?”

“I get that done on Tuesdays,” Mom said. “Tuesday morning.” She started separating frozen things from refrigerated things while I concentrated on dry goods like walnuts and whole-grain crackers. “I’ll probably skip this week, if we get all that snow.”

I put a container of unsweetened cocoa into her baking supplies cabinet and then turned and stopped. “Today is Tuesday, Mom.”

Mom looked positively stunned. “It is?” she asked. “You’re sure? Tuesday?”

I squinted at her in confusion. “All day,” I said.

“Oh, my,” Mom said. “I thought it was Monday! What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. A lot of people rely on their cell phones for the time now, but I like a wristwatch. I’m an old-fashioned gal. “Two thirty,” I told her. I was getting a little concerned, to tell the truth. Not because Mom had gotten the day wrong but because of the way she was overreacting to a little confusion about the day of the week. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” came the answer, too quickly to be convincing. I didn’t see if her eye twitched; she was turned away. “Would you excuse me for a minute?” She didn’t bother to wait for a reply (and rightly so—what was I going to do,
not
excuse her?) and headed toward her bedroom.

I stared after her for a long moment, wondering what the heck
that
was about, then went back to putting all room temperature groceries away.

Until I heard Mom talking to someone from behind her bedroom door.

Now that was odd, though not completely unheard of, considering that Mom can see and speak to ghosts. In the interest of full disclosure, I can see ghosts, too, and so can my ten-year-old daughter Melissa. But I’m far behind both Liss and Mom in ability and can’t see nearly as many spirits roaming the streets as they can. I’m still trying to decide whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

So Mom’s talking to someone when I was pretty sure there wasn’t anyone else (breathing) in the house wasn’t necessarily the strangest thing that could happen. But when I started to make out the words (okay, so I’m an eavesdropper—like you wouldn’t listen in if you heard your mother talking to a dead person?), the conversation itself was considerably more disturbing than I’d anticipated.

“Well, I
can’t
right now!” Mom was insisting, her voice raised in what sounded like annoyance and frustration. “Honestly, you’re like an impatient teenager!”

I hadn’t heard my mother use that tone in a very long time. At least five years, probably longer. Not since . . .

Wait a minute.

I listened a moment longer, and heard Mom say, “I
know
it’s Tuesday—I just forgot! Now if you’ll just—”

I couldn’t hear well enough from the kitchen, so I crept into the hallway and started toward Mom’s bedroom door. I knew that technically I was infringing on her privacy—okay, maybe not just technically—but there was a familiar ring to this kind of argument, however one-sided, that bore further investigation.

Besides, I figured, I
am
a fledgling private investigator. If I couldn’t practice spying on my own mother, who
could
I spy on?

“I understand that you’re disappointed,” Mom said, a little more calmly. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow? It’s supposed to snow, and it’s not like you have a lot you need to do. . . .”

Now that I was closer, I could just make out another voice responding, “Loretta”—that’s Mom’s name—but it was at a much lower volume and a lower tone as well. I couldn’t make out any other words, but one thing was absolutely unmistakable: It was a male voice.

I’ll admit it—at this point, curiosity had overtaken any good judgment I might have otherwise exhibited under other circumstances. I leaned toward the bedroom door, careful not to creak a floorboard or actually come into contact with the door itself.

“All right, then,” Mom said, apparently having defused whatever situation she’d been in. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t make it too early; I want to sleep in.”

I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been for the bedroom door to then open abruptly and for Mom to be staring me in the chin (she’s shorter than I am).

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “How dare you listen in on a private conversation?”

Everything about this situation was bizarre. Usually, my mother would rather sew her own lips shut than suggest I ever did anything less than wonderful. It would have been more typical of her to compliment me on my stealth skills than berate me for being as rude as I honestly had been.

But the fact is, she wasn’t acting like herself, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why just at the moment. That was bothering me, because I could feel that there was something very personal and painful at the core of this episode, but I couldn’t place it.

“I wasn’t listening in,” I lied. “I thought you were calling me.” I tried to look around her. “Who were you talking to?”

“I was on the phone,” she answered far too quickly. “To my friend Marsha.”

“You don’t have a phone in the bedroom,” I reminded her.

“My cell phone,” she said.

It occurred to me that I wouldn’t have heard a voice over a cell phone from outside the door, but why quibble? It was important not to call Mom out on her obvious evasions, though, because I knew that would just make her clam up more.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess we’d better get those groceries put away, and then I should get going before it starts to snow.” The snow wasn’t forecast to start for some hours, but I had the uncomfortable feeling—which I’d never had before—that Mom wanted me to go.

“I don’t need help with the groceries,” Mom said, again too fast and too curt. “You go ahead. I don’t want to worry about you on the roads.”

So I did. I made sure Mom agreed to call me if she needed anything in the oncoming snowstorm and got into my trusty (and rusty) Volvo wagon. I was on the cell phone to my best friend, Jeannie, before I made it out of Mom’s development. (This is the place to note that I was using an earpiece, because New Jersey has laws prohibiting one from holding a cell phone to one’s ear while driving, and
everybody
in the state obeys that one. Okay. Maybe not
everybody
.)

“My mother’s acting strange,” I told Jeannie.

“She’s not acting,” Jeannie answered. “I love your mother, but she really
is
strange. She thinks she can talk to ghosts.”

I couldn’t really defend Mom there. Jeannie, you see, doesn’t believe in ghosts. She doesn’t believe in them despite having seen things happen that could not be explained in any way other than to assume that there is at least one being present who is not visible. She doesn’t believe in ghosts even though I’ve told her they were there, and she doesn’t believe in them despite the fact that her husband, Tony, does, and has sort of communicated with them himself. It’s a long story. I’d learned over the past fifteen months (since I started spotting spooks) that there are some people who simply aren’t going to believe in things they can’t see, even when those things were directly in front of their eyes. Jeannie could be the queen of those people.

“Well,” I said, sidestepping the whole ghost issue, “that’s not the strange part.” I told Jeannie what had happened (pretending for her sake that the voice coming from my mother’s bedroom had emanated from a live person) and asked her opinion.

“She’s got a boyfriend,” Jeannie suggested. “She doesn’t know how to tell you, and so she’s embarrassed and acting unusual.” There was the sound of a baby crying so loudly I had to pull the phone from my—that is, I had to move the earpiece away from my ear. “Sorry,” Jeannie continued. “Oliver gets cranky when I switch sides.” Jeannie’s son, Oliver, now four months old, had clearly been breast-feeding while I was talking to her.

“Thanks for that mental image,” I said. “Couldn’t you have told me he needed a pacifier?”

“Pacifiers are unsuitable substitutes for the real thing,” Jeannie said, no doubt rolling her eyes over my thickheadedness. This was not the first time we’d had such a conversation. “They make the child dependent on something that they don’t need and create a need to wean the child”—Jeannie always says “the child” when she’s dispensing parenting advice I don’t need given that I’m the one with an almost-eleven-year-old daughter—“twice later on. That just makes the child cranky and the parents frustrated.” Or was it the other way around?

“My mother,” I reminded her.

“I’m telling you. She’s found some guy and maybe they meet every Tuesday, so she had forgotten he’d be there because she thought it was Monday. And when he showed up, she got flustered and sent him away.”

“Sent him away? What, he climbed out the window? Besides, how did he get into the house to begin with?” If she wanted to play that it was a living guy, I could do that.

“Maybe he has a key,” Jeannie answered. “Maybe she’s living this secret life.” I heard gurgling on her end of the conversation. Oliver, no doubt being difficult. It’s in the genes.

“Why would he be waiting in her bedroom?” I asked. And I knew I shouldn’t have said that even as the words were coming out of my mouth. Suddenly there were new images I needed to get out of my head. “Ewwwww,” I groaned.

“Don’t judge,” Jeannie laughed.

“She’s my
mother
!”

“Where do you think you came from, the J.Crew catalog?”

“Jeannie!” I screamed. “Enough!”

It was another ten minutes to my house in Harbor Haven, the hometown I’d returned to after my divorce from a guy we’ll call “The Swine,” strictly for the sake of accuracy. No snow was falling yet, but I wasn’t crazy about the prospect of it. I had guests back at the house, my daughter was being dropped off after school by her best friend’s mom, and there were these two ghosts to manage.

Perhaps I should explain.

About a year ago, I’d bought the massive Victorian at 123 Seafront Avenue to turn into a guesthouse with money I’d gotten from divorcing The Swine and from settling a lawsuit (don’t ask). While I was renovating the place, an “accident” left me with a very bad bump on the head and the sudden ability to see the two spirits, Paul Harrison and Maxie Malone, who inhabited the house.

They’d both died in the house a few years before I bought it—Maxie was the previous owner, and Paul, the newly minted private investigator who’d been hired to find out who was threatening her if she didn’t leave the house; threats that turned out to be serious when they were both poisoned—and though it took some doing, the three of us were able to find their killer. But despite our mutual expectations that Paul and Maxie would “go into the light” or whatever once their murders were solved, nothing much seemed to have changed in that regard. So we’ve had to figure out a way to coexist.

Luckily, right around that same time, I was approached by a man named Edmund Rance, who represented a group called Senior Plus Tours, offering senior citizens vacations with an “added experience” attached. Rance had heard rumors that my guesthouse was haunted—which technically it is—and asked if we could provide evidence thereof at least twice a day in exchange for a steady supply of paying guests during the tourist season (which on the Jersey Shore is at least part of every season except winter, so I was surprised to have even two guests staying with me this week). I prevailed upon Paul, who in turn prevailed upon Maxie, to perform “spook shows,” making objects fly around the house and lately adding such touches as musical instruments “playing themselves” and strange substances (usually rubber cement, sometimes corn syrup with food coloring) “bleed” down the walls.

That’s entertainment.

But Paul exacted a price for my exploitation of the two ghosts. He’d loved being a PI in life, and even now wanted to keep his hand in investigations—apparently eternity is, in addition to other things, boring—but he’d needed someone living (i.e., me) to do the “legwork.”