Chance of a Ghost (42 page)

“Who’s Larry?” Jeannie asked while she changed Oliver into a new onesie. The woman never just let that baby be.

“The client,” I jumped in.

“Funny. She has the same name as her brother, the victim.” Honestly, I could ask Paul to float over and cut Jeannie’s hair off—he’d never do it, but still—and she wouldn’t allow that a ghost might be in the room.

“You don’t miss a trick, Jeannie,” Mom said. Jeannie was seated with her back to Mom, who exchanged an amused look with me, then chucked the baby under the chin and cooed at him a bit. Melissa, used to being the apple of her grandmother’s eye, narrowed her own in a rare display of jealousy. It reminded me never to give her a sibling. “She called me because I’d told her my daughter is a detective.”

“Oh. Sure.” Jeannie had just wanted to hear Mom say I was a detective again. She loves that. And she loves watching other people be enthralled with her son.

But Melissa was not to be denied. “Come on up to my room, Grandma,” she suggested. “I have a book I want you to see.”

Mom hesitated. A trip to Melissa’s attic lair meant either a creaky flight of pull-down stairs or a ride in the dumbwaiter Tony built to get there, which Mom will do but not happily because it makes her tired. “Why don’t you get it and bring it back down here?” she suggested. “That’s a lot of stairs for me today, honey.”

Melissa glanced almost imperceptibly at the baby, her competition, and sighed just a touch. “Okay,” she said, and headed for the stairs.

“What book does she want to show me?” my mother asked when she was gone.

“I’m sure she’ll think of something,” I said. “Just don’t read it to Oliver, whatever you do.”

Mom laughed. “Little green-eyed monster. She’s so smart!” My mother could watch Melissa drop a priceless vase off a second-story landing and would comment on her granddaughter’s good taste; that thing was so ugly. “Now, fill me in on the investigation.” I told her all I knew, and she listened carefully throughout. “I think one of our main problems is that your pal Larry isn’t telling us everything. There’s something being held back, maybe a lot, and that’s slowing us down,” I finished.

Jeannie didn’t look up. “If your client isn’t telling you what you need to know, the only thing you have left to do is threaten to pull out of the case,” she said.

“I’ve done that. She has…something I want, and if I stop investigating, I won’t get it.”

Jeannie picked Oliver up and tickled his belly, then started putting things back into her diaper bag. “If you need the money that badly, Alison, Tony and I can help you out for a little while.”

How to explain this? “It’s not money, Jean,” I said. “It’s more in the area of information.”

Tony rescued me by walking in from the hallway. “So what do we do?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m stuck.”

Just then Melissa came downstairs carrying a book called
Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers
. I’m sure she’d taken it down off her bed stand because it was the one she was currently reading.

At the same moment, Nan and Morgan Henderson walked in the front door, bringing the inevitable frigid breeze with them. They were practically giddy; Morgan helped Nan off with her coat and hung it carefully on the antique coatrack
I have by the front door. It was without question the most affectionate I’d seen him act toward her.

He gave Nan a tiny peck on the cheek at something she’d said and they wandered into the den, where every eye (except Jeannie’s, since Oliver still held all her attention) fixed on them. “Oh, hello!” Morgan baritoned into the room. “Nice to see everyone.” Now that he was wearing effective hearing aids and able to converse normally, he was the very soul of conviviality.

Introductions to Mom, Tony and Jeannie (and Oliver) were made. Paul and Maxie both looked on, amused in characteristic ways: Paul had a wry expression on his face, and Maxie seemed like she’d just had her first beer and still thought burps were funny.

“Visit another famous New Jersey crime scene today?” I asked Morgan. You always have to show enthusiasm for the guest’s interests, no matter how odd. I knew Paul loved the mental challenge of crime investigation, but Morgan seemed to revel more in being able to pass through the crime scene tape and take in the atmosphere without anyone stopping him.

“Actually, yes,” he answered with a twinkle in his eye.

Clearly, he wanted someone to ask, so it was lucky that Mom filled the void. “Which one?” she said.

It was all Morgan could do to avoid breaking out in a grin that would undoubtedly meet at the back of his head.

“The place where Lawrence Laurentz died,” he said. “And I think it’s reasonably certain he didn’t die from an electric shock in the bathtub.”

Twenty-one

“You have a very specific problem,” Tony Mandorisi said.
“I don’t think you realize how difficult this is.”

Jeannie, Tony and Oliver had been waiting for us when Melissa and I arrived at the guesthouse. Jeannie claimed to have texted me that they were coming over, but my phone had helpfully delivered the text ten minutes after their arrival. Liss went upstairs to do homework she should have done before the sleepover.

While unpacking her child, Jeannie told me she had, as I’d asked, gotten in touch with the widow of Barney Lester, the New Old Thespian who had died a while before Lawrence. Mary Lester confirmed that Barney had died of heart failure (like Lawrence) after a long illness and two heart attacks. Unlike Lawrence, he did not die in a bathtub, and there didn’t seem to be anything suspicious about it.

Tony knocked on the doorjamb of my library, lightly, with a hammer, not hard enough to make a mark, but
enough to make a sound. The sound was solid, and did not indicate anything resembling space beyond the jamb.

“Hear that?” he said. Before I could answer, he added, “That means this side is a double stud. You can see that from the positioning of the electrical outlet here in the hall and the other one inside the library, too.”

Jeannie was sitting in the den bouncing Oliver on her lap, within shouting distance but a little out of Tony’s line of sight. I could see all three of them, as well as Maxie’s lower half through the ceiling (she probably had the laptop resting on the floor in one of the upstairs bedrooms) and Paul, who was tapping his foot impatiently on the air, anxious to hear my investigative report and not Tony’s evaluation of my library doorway. But since that was the price Tony had agreed to pay for my convincing Jeannie to help out in the Laurentz investigation, Paul had to endure it.

I sighed. “It’s a load-bearing wall.” The wall framing the library door was one that actually helped hold up the rest of the house. Which would restrict the amount of construction we could do (or more specifically, that Tony could do) on the doorway without incurring huge expenses compensating for the lack of support. It wasn’t impossible to change—you could put a steel beam across the top of the wall from one end to the other—but that would cost thousands of dollars and be a huge construction project. I was not prepared to authorize that kind of work. “What about on the other side of the door?” I asked Tony.

He shook his head. “The other side is too close to the linen closet.” He knocked on the wall with his knuckles this time, just for show. “We couldn’t open it up more than an inch or two, and anyway, it wouldn’t really do what you want it to, which is shed more light in that room and create the illusion of more space inside.”

Paul rolled his eyes and spread his hands. “Can’t this wait?” he asked me. “We have pressing business.”

“Knock it off,” I told him, quietly enough so Tony
couldn’t hear. I tilted my head to the left toward the game room and muttered, “Meet me in my office.” Paul followed me to the game room, where I filled him in on the interviews and what Melissa had told me about Janine’s grandfather. He pursed his lips at that one.

“Why is this doctor significant?” he asked. “You’ve said before that your father had a team of physicians involved in his case.”

It was a good question. There had been something bothering me since Liss had mentioned Dr. Wells, not long after Mom had said he’d passed away. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I went on as if I’d had a workable theory. I’d have preferred to go on as if I’d had seventeen million dollars, but one does what one can.

“My mother mentioned him to me a couple of days ago, or I wouldn’t have thought it was important, either,” I admitted. “But think about it: He died at just about the exact moment my father went underground. That’s an awfully big coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but…”

“Haven’t you told me never to trust really big coincidences?” I pressed on. “Don’t you always say that there’s got to be a reason behind them, that things aren’t that random the great majority of the time?” My mind was sifting the possibilities: So Dr. Wells died. That was too bad, but it wasn’t like we were friends. So Melissa’s friend was his granddaughter. That was also a little sad, but again, not really close. What was nagging at me?

Paul sort of nodded the way guys do when you’re proving a point they don’t care for—shoulders up, mouth horizontal, eyebrow tilted. “Sure, but—”

“All this time we’ve been looking for something to investigate that would get me closer to my father, haven’t we? What makes you think this isn’t it?”

Paul waited a moment and watched my face. “Oh, is it my turn to get a word in edgewise?” he asked.

“A whole sentence, if you talk fast enough.” I spread my hands to give him the floor, which he was not touching at all. It was a symbolic gesture.

“It’s possible you’re right. There could be some connection to Dr. Wells’s death and your father’s…disappearance. But I would caution you against getting your hopes up too high.”

Well, of course he didn’t want me to assume that Dr. Wells’s death would lead me on an unobstructed path to Dad, but there was something in his voice that said there was more to it than that. “You think there is no connection?” I asked.

Paul shook his head. “You know how it works, Alison. I don’t think one way or the other about things until I have some facts to apply to the question. What I’m saying is that you’re focusing too much on the goal and not enough on the process. What’s the motive? What about this doctor would force your father into hiding or seclusion or captivity? I asked this question about Lawrence Laurentz, and we still don’t have an answer. I’ll ask it about your father: What does he have to lose?”

It was an excellent question. And one for which I had no answer.

“But what about the message on the mirror? Maybe Dr. Wells knows something about the way my father really died. Maybe he’s the one who left the messages.” I wondered if there was any way Dr. Wells, living or dead, could know where I lived now; I hadn’t seen him in five years, long before I’d bought 123 Seafront. By contrast, grasping at straws would have been decisive action.

“Let’s take a step back,” Paul said. “We don’t know who left those messages or if they contain any truth at all. We both suspect it was a ghost, but Morgan could be correct in his assumption that it was someone wearing gloves.”

“Someone who got in or out of the house, unseen, twice?” I countered. “Including into my locked bedroom and bathroom?
No, I’m sure it was a ghost. The hard part will be explaining it to Morgan once we figure it out.”

“We still have no proof,” Paul insisted.

“What
about
Lawrence, then?” I asked as a way of avoiding the fact that he had a point. “Do you believe Penny’s story about the way she discovered his body?”

Paul frowned. “Again, we have no facts other than the witness’s own statement, which is suspect. I’m more interested in what the officer told you this morning. Officer Warrell told you that Frances and Jerry were suspected of distributing illegal Viagra, and that was why they were held overnight. But so far there has been no indication there were any charges filed against them other than the ones for public lewdness that all the New Old Thespians faced.”

I giggled. “Lewdness,” I repeated. It was the word more than the thought.

He looked at me disapprovingly, and I did my best to straighten my face into a serious expression. “When Morgan and Nan return, you might want to see if he can trace any further investigation of those charges or determine why they were not pursued.”

On cue, there was the sound of the front door opening and people trundling into the guesthouse. Even back here, the rush of cold wind could be felt until the door was closed again.

But it wasn’t Nan and Morgan at the door. From the den I heard Jeannie call, “Hi, Mrs. Kerby,” and Melissa swooped in from somewhere to yell, “Grandma!”

I’d asked my mother to come watch Melissa tonight while I went out with Josh Kaplan. Whom she’d been thrilled to hear I was going out with, despite the fact that she’d never actually been to Madison Paint and didn’t remember his name. The only problem was Mom had arrived four hours early.

Paul and I walked (well, I walked and Paul did whatever it is he does) into the den. Mom was removing a scarf with
the Midas Muffler logo on it (mufflers, get it?) and a pair of gloves with the fingers cut off, like she was going to try to crack a safe.