The Hostess With the Ghostess Read online

  Also available by E. J. Copperman:

  The Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries

  Spouse on Haunted Hill

  Ghost in the Wind

  Inspector Specter

  The Thrill of the Haunt

  Chance of a Ghost

  Old Haunts

  An Uninvited Ghost

  Night of the Living Deed

  The Asperger’s Mysteries

  The Question of the Absentee Father

  The Question of the Felonious Friend

  The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband

  The Question of the Missing Head

  The Mysterious Detective Mysteries

  Edited Out

  Written Off

  The Hostess With the Ghostess

  A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery

  E. J. Copperman

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by E. J. Copperman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-450-9

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-451-6

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-452-3

  Cover illustration by Dominick Finelle

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: January 2018

  Contents

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Cast of Characters

  Alison Kerby

  Innkeeper, ghost whisperer, reluctant detective

  Melissa Kerby

  Alison’s thirteen-year-old daughter

  Loretta Kerby

  Alison’s mom

  Jack Kerby

  Alison’s dad, now a ghost

  Paul Harrison

  Deceased but not completely gone detective

  Maxie Malone

  Ghost interior designer and poltergeist

  Phyllis Coates

  Editor, publisher, staff of the Harbor Haven Chronicle

  Detective Lieutenant Anita McElone

  Chief of detectives, Harbor Haven Police Department

  Everett Sandheim

  Maxie’s ghost husband, ex-military man

  Vanessa and Eduardo DiSica

  Alison’s guests

  Abigail Lesniak

  A guest with a request

  Gregory Lewis

  Guest; Abigail’s request

  Penny Desmond

  Alison’s guest

  Keith Barent Johnson

  Deceased rich guy

  Adrian Van Doren Johnson

  Keith’s wife

  Cassidy Van Doren

  Adrian’s daughter; Keith’s stepdaughter

  Braden and Erika Johnson

  Keith’s children from a previous marriage

  Hunter Evans

  Keith’s business partner

  Robin Witherspoon

  Owner of Cranbury Bog, a bed-and-breakfast

  Tom Zink

  a visiting businessman

  Chapter 1

  “Something’s missing.” I was sitting on a barstool next to the center island in my kitchen, having a conversation with five other people, two of whom were alive. More on that shortly. “It’s just not going over.”

  My daughter Melissa, one of the people who (thank goodness) is still breathing, frowned. She brushed her front teeth over her lower lip, which she calls “scratching,” and let out a long breath.

  “The spook shows just don’t have the same energy,” she said. “But I’m not sure how much the guests care.” Liss had managed to become a teenager a mere five months earlier without actually becoming exasperating—no small feat.

  And she had a point. My guests, lovely people that they were, didn’t seem to care anymore if objects flew by their heads or strange substances dripped down my walls. It just wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. But they were still coming to the place with the big sign at the front door that read, “Haunted Guesthouse.” So the whole ghost thing was probably still a draw, I thought.

  Perhaps I should explain.

  Four years ago, after freeing myself from Melissa’s father (whom I “affectionately” call the Swine whenever he’s not around, which is almost always) and settling a lawsuit (the details of which you’re better off not knowing), I returned to my hometown of Harbor Haven, New Jersey. I found a fairly dilapidated, enormous Victorian home on the beach, put tons of work and pretty much all my money into making it much less dilapidated, and opened it to those who would like to vacation on the deservedly famous Jersey Shore.

  This is where the story gets a little weird. During the renovations, I suffered a blow to the head—never mind why, because it just gets me annoyed to remember—and woke up with the ability to see and hear ghosts. Apparently this is something that runs among the women in my family. My mother and Melissa always had the knack but hadn’t told me because they didn’t want me to feel bad. Like I was going to feel bad about it.

  Anyway, once the stars cleared from my eyes, I could see two ghosts inhabiting (some would say “haunting,” but that’s something of an overstatement) my new house. Their names were Paul Harrison and Maxie Malone. We discovered how they were murdered, by whom, and why, but that didn’t seem to “complete their business” on this plane of existence. Instead they just hung around the house all day. After a while the whole ghost thing kind of loses its novelty. For them too.

  Paul had been starting a private investigation firm when he stopped being as alive as he once was and wanted to keep his admittedly transparent hand in the business. It seems that among other things, infinity can get a bit tedious if you don’t have an area of interest, and Paul didn’t want to take up philately. Problem was, the vast majority of living people couldn’t see or hear him, and at the time he couldn’t leave the boundaries of my property, so under normal circumstances—if you can call anything about this normal—he would have been able to solve only mysteries that took place in my house. The prospects were somewhat limiting.

  Instead he proposed a solution: I should sit for the private investigator examination, obtain a license from the state of New Jersey, and become his “eyes, ears, and legs” among the community of those still drawing breath, particularly the ones more than a thousand yards from my living room
. He found it somewhat surprising when I balked at his suggestion, given my total lack of interest or experience in the whole investigating area.

  Hang on. There’s more. Almost at the same moment, I was approached by a company called Senior Plus Tours, a company that offered unique experiences for those over the age of fifty-five who wanted a “value-added” component to their vacations. Word had gotten out that my house had some not-so-living people in it, and apparently there are those who think that’s a good thing and want to interact with ghosts while on vacation. It seems the Haunted Mansion at Disney World just isn’t a big enough kick for some.

  The tour group would guarantee me a certain number of guests most weeks, a stream of revenue I couldn’t afford to pass up, but the promise of a supernatural experience had to be guaranteed. So knowing when I am over a barrel, I agreed to Paul’s investigator plan on the condition that he and Maxie would make their presence blatantly obvious a couple of times a day by putting on what we at the Haunted Guesthouse have come to call (affectionately, to be sure) “spook shows.” A deal was quickly struck when Paul convinced Maxie to participate. Maxie, who was a twenty-six-year-old budding interior designer when she and Paul were deprived of life, can be a tad difficult to deal with, but somehow Paul obtained her agreement, and she has missed very few spook shows in the past four years.

  So the fact that the latest round of ghostly entertainments was falling flat couldn’t be blamed entirely on Maxie. She was, in fact, now in the kitchen with me, Melissa, my mother (rounding out the alive people in the room), my deceased but still beloved father, and Maxie’s equally nonliving new husband, Everett. Maxie met Everett on one of our investigations, and they had married, sort of, in a ceremony at the guesthouse four months earlier.

  If I couldn’t blame Maxie for the problem—which is generally my first choice—we had to define exactly what was missing from the spook shows, and in this case, that was pretty easy.

  “It’s Paul,” my mother said. “I don’t like to say it, but Paul is the problem here.”

  Melissa looked down at the floor to avoid eye contact around the room, but she nodded just a little. In fact, everyone gathered in the kitchen had roughly the same reaction to what Mom had said—except Maxie, who sort of grinned a little because she loves it when the source of everyone’s consternation is not her. It’s so rare.

  “You can’t blame the guy for not being here,” my father said finally. “You told him that you were done with the deal, baby girl.”

  “I’m not blaming him,” I pointed out. “Mom is.”

  “Alison,” my mother admonished.

  What Dad had said was true. Since I’d discovered Paul and Maxie in the house when I was remodeling it, Paul had been unable to travel past the limits of my property. But four months ago, through the use of some crazy gadget he’d slapped together out of discarded electronics, Paul had used a bolt of lightning—no, really—to free himself of that limitation. I’d told him I was no longer interested in the whole investigation thing, which was a lie only in the aspect that I had never been interested in it, and freed him from his spook show obligations. He’d taken off not long after to see the world (travel being somewhat cheaper when nobody knows you’re on the plane), and we had not heard from him since.

  I understood the impulse, but not a text message or a postcard in four months? I was a little disappointed and just slightly offended, but not really. Paul and I had become close friends. In the way that one is close to a person who isn’t any longer alive but still talks to you on a day-to-day basis. My life is slightly complicated.

  Unfortunately, since his departure, I’d discovered that a good number of the guests my house attracted were still drawn to it for the promise of some supernatural contact. Maxie had agreed to keep the spook shows going because she likes to have leverage over me. Occasionally Everett would fill in for Paul because he’d seen the routines many times before while visiting Maxie. Other times Dad would take up the slack, but he was a handyman when he was alive, not a showman, and he was occasionally distracted by a slight crack in the ceiling plaster or a nail that was sticking out of the molding around the library door. He couldn’t stop himself from repairing the issue, and although the guests thought a flying hammer was sort of interesting, it didn’t really have the same pizzazz as the stuff Paul used to do. It wasn’t any one particular stunt—Paul wasn’t the most creative of performers—but he brought a zeal that was lacking these days in a way you couldn’t exactly put your finger on.

  The guests, who this week in June numbered five, had shown enthusiasm over the first couple of shows when they’d arrived on Tuesday. Now it was Thursday, and attendance was on the down side. It could mean they were exploring the area, sightseeing and shopping, but that hadn’t been the pattern the first four years we’d been open, and my concern was what had led to this emergency meeting in my kitchen.

  “Maybe I could add things they’d find interesting.” Everett had been a mentally ill homeless man when I knew him alive. Now that he was a ghost, he’d reverted to a previous version of himself, when he was a military man in his twenties. That was the man Maxie had fallen in love with, and he is always trying to be useful. “I could do drills with my rifle. I’ve done it before.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I stood up and walked to the fridge because that’s what I do when I’m thinking. And when I’m not thinking. “I don’t blame you, Everett, and I’m really grateful you and Dad are filling in. Maybe it’s just the idea of the shows that isn’t fresh and right anymore. Maybe we need some other kind of ghost thing to do. I don’t like to scare people, but—”

  I heard something like shoes scraping on the hardwood floor in the den, just outside the kitchen, and turned even as I reached for the orange juice. Was that one of the guests? I don’t serve food at the guesthouse, and they tend not to come into the kitchen, although I never suggest they shouldn’t.

  “But what?” Maxie wanted to know.

  I ignored her, which had become my default reaction. “Can I help you?” I called out into the den, but there was no answer. I put the orange juice back and closed the fridge.

  My mother saw my face, which must have been registering concern, and said, “Jack.” My father, with more than a lifetime of experience with her, understood exactly and floated (sort of—it’s more propulsive than that but not at all like walking) toward the swinging door that separates the kitchen and the den.

  Before he could get there, though, the door opened, and I gasped a little. For part of a second, I thought the answer to the very problem we had been discussing was solved. The tall, thin frame; the light-brown hair, just a little tousled from indifferent care; the almost completely transparent body . . .

  “Paul?” Melissa said. Then she shook her head, having realized as I had that this was not our absent friend.

  But whoever this ghost was looked up at the name. “You know Paul?” he said with a bit of a British accent. Paul Harrison was Canadian and had been born in England, but his accent was more Toronto than Manchester. This was clearly not him, although there were similarities.

  This man was older than Paul, for one thing. I’d say he was in his late forties, whereas Paul was thirty-two years old forever. And he—the new ghost—didn’t have Paul’s signature goatee, which he’d stroke when thinking about a case. This guy was clean shaven. Paul always wore jeans and a succession of turtleneck sweaters. This man was in a business suit.

  “We know Paul,” I told him even as I felt Maxie and Everett close ranks behind me. They are serious about protection, and we didn’t know this ghost’s intentions yet. “I guess you do too.”

  The ghost nodded somberly. “I am his brother,” he said.

  I hate to admit it, but my first thought was, I wonder if he’d do some spook shows.

  Chapter 2

  It took a moment to shake off that feeling. “You’re Paul’s brother?” I said, despite having clearly heard him make that exact statement. Sometimes you just ne
ed a second.

  “Yes.” Well, that was informative.

  Maxie hopped over my head to hover in front of me. It was a welcome gesture, seeing as how the other way she would have reached that position would have been to walk through me, and I’m not crazy about that. “How do we know?” she asked.

  That seemed to puzzle the new ghost. He stopped moving forward and regarded her through a pair of glasses he produced from his breast pocket. You wouldn’t think a dead person would need spectacles, but we’d actually met one who’d been blind, so throw the rulebook out the window and welcome to my corner of the next life.

  “How do you know what?” he asked.

  “How do we know you’re really Paul’s brother?”

  The ghost considered that. “Because I am.” It was clear we were going to get tons of information out of this guy.

  “Come in,” Melissa said, gesturing to the new ghost, who was still partially stuck in the door. A guest in the den wouldn’t have seen him but might have noticed attention in that area. Best not to take chances. “I’m Melissa Kerby, and this is my mom, my grandmother, and my grandfather.” She gestured as she went. “Our friends are Maxie and Everett. Who are you?”

  That girl has a future in diplomacy if she doesn’t decide to become a federal prosecutor or president of the United States. Or all three, now that I think of it.

  The ghost moved all the way into the kitchen and smiled at Melissa in a friendly way, which is all I ask. He did not bow exactly but held up his head and then lowered it in more than a nod and less than a salaam. “I am Richard Harrison,” he said. “It is very nice to meet you.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Harrison,” my mother said. “I’m Loretta, and this is Jack.” I guess she didn’t want Richard to be calling them Grandma and Grandpa, which was reasonable.

  “You can all see me,” he said in wonder. “How is that possible?”