Spouse on Haunted Hill Read online

  Praise for the National Bestselling Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries

  “A couple of demanding ghosts, a quick-witted heroine, a creaky old house and a delightful cast of characters . . . What a fun and enjoyable story!”

  —Leann Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of the Cats in Trouble Mysteries

  “Wonderful . . . A laugh-out-loud, fast-paced and charming tale.”

  —Kate Carlisle, New York Times bestselling author of the Bibliophile Mysteries

  “Fans of Charlaine Harris and Sarah Graves will relish this original, laugh-laden paranormal mystery featuring reluctant ghost whisperer Alison Kerby, a Topper for the twenty-first century.”

  —Julia Spencer-Fleming, New York Times bestselling author of Through the Evil Days

  “A cocktail of haunted humor and a killer mystery . . . Even the ghosts and their former lives are written to perfection.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A standout series.”

  —The Mystery Reader

  “When combined with the author’s trademark humor and keen writing, readers will be wishing that the novel and the series never end.”

  —Kings River Life Magazine

  “A delightful ride . . . Funny, charming and thoroughly enjoyable.”

  —Spinetingler Magazine

  “You won’t want to miss this ghostly cozy mystery, full of enough wit, charm and supernatural hijinks to keep you turning the pages well past midnight.”

  —MyShelf.com

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by E. J. Copperman

  NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED

  AN UNINVITED GHOST

  OLD HAUNTS

  CHANCE OF A GHOST

  THE THRILL OF THE HAUNT

  INSPECTOR SPECTER

  GHOST IN THE WIND

  SPOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL

  Specials

  A WILD GHOST CHASE

  AN OPEN SPOOK

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey Cohen

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the B colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698409453

  First Edition: December 2016

  Cover illustration by Dominick Finelle/The July Group; photographs: flock of birds © AlexussK/ Shutterstock # 68613040; painted background © iStockphoto/Thinkstock # 92043813n/a

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Shannon Jamieson Vazquez.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is the eighth Haunted Guesthouse novel, which blows my mind. Before this my standing record was three books in a series, achieved twice. Now I can honestly say I’ve written one more book in a series than J. K. Rowling, the only such statistic in publishing that will come out in my favor via straight-up comparison.

  Loyal readers of the series will know that I believe the writing process is one that does not consist strictly of an author in a room typing solitarily (is that a word?), if you don’t count the inevitable Muse sitting on the writer’s shoulder, which seems to me would make typing that much more difficult. Many people worked hard on this little tome before you got your hands, ears or any other body part on it, and they deserve much credit for the product you’re now, with any luck at all, about to enjoy.

  Indeed, there was a somewhat larger cast of characters involved in bringing my cast of characters to you this time. Thanks to Michelle Vega and Amanda Ng, both of whom served as editors on this book. They read over the rough—a grand understatement—draft and helped turn it into this more polished story. Such efforts are invaluable to an author. Any writer who simply wants an editor to read the work, gush over it and submit it without a comma displaced is doing him- or herself and the reader a grand disservice. Editors exist as an institution because history has proven authors can’t be trusted with their own work. If not for editors, Charles Dickens might have written A Tale of Only One City and we would have been deprived of half his brilliance.

  In this case, Ashley Polikoff worked as production editor and Dan Larsen as copy editor on this book in capacities I can’t adequately list here. Suffice it to say you’d be reading a much rougher book if they hadn’t gotten their hands on it.

  Dominic Finelle again wiped me out with his cover artwork and Judith Lagerman with her cover design. They found the essence of the book and communicated it. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, it’s worth about 86,000.

  As ever, my sincere thanks to the wizards (I’m not stealing that, J.K.; don’t take the extra-book thing to heart!) at HSG Agency, Josh Getzler and Danielle Burby especially, who keep me from going too far off the deep end and who actually keep me employed straight through the year. They are lovely people and very talented at their jobs, which is a combination you don’t get to see all that often. Thanks again to Christina Hogrebe at Jane Rotrosen Agency for getting this series to exist all those years ago.

  Readers are the people who keep a series alive and make a writer willing to shuffle over to that desk and try again. Thank you sincerely for taking Alison, Paul, Maxie, Melissa, Loretta and all the others into your minds and your hearts and letting them be themselves. It has been a privilege to send them to you every year. No writer could be more grateful.

  E. J. COPPERMAN

  DEEPEST NEW JERSEY, 2016

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries

  Berkley Prime Crime Titles by E. J. Copperman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  About The Author

  One

  “This is the end,” I said.

  I was mostly talking to myself. It was one of those things you say to yourself when t
hings aren’t exactly going your way, and they weren’t going mine right now. I was standing just short of the security line at Newark Liberty International Airport (the longest name for an airport in the continental United States, but that’s just a guess) where at any moment—I had been told—my daughter, Melissa, now thirteen but no less sensible than she ever had been, would be returned to me after having been held captive against my will for almost a whole week.

  Okay, she’d been visiting her father in Los Angeles during a school break that took into account all presidential holidays and the remainder of a week, but to me that was the equivalent of kidnapping. Sure, Liss had been willing to go visit Steven, but that didn’t make it the right thing to do. He had not been given (in my mind) the nickname The Swine without some cause.

  “What’s the end?” Maxie Malone, to my right, was watching up the corridor as I was, despite my urging that she head on down past security and see what was holding Melissa up. Maxie could do that because very few people could see her.

  She was dead. More on that in a minute.

  “The end of my patience,” I said into the little Bluetooth device I wore on my ear so I could talk to Maxie without people thinking I needed psychiatric observation. “She was supposed to be back here three hours ago.”

  “It was snowing,” Maxie reminded me as if I didn’t know that. “You’re lucky she’s coming home today at all. They almost closed the airport.”

  Since when was Maxie the Weather Channel? “That’s not the point,” I explained through semiclenched teeth. “The point is that I was supposed to have my daughter back at two and it is now five fifteen. That is worse than two.”

  “You’re overreacting,” said Maxie.

  I looked around for a kettle and a pot to see what color they each might think the other was. Oddly I found none.

  “So she’s a little late. You know how the airlines are.” Maxie had once told me she’d never been in an airplane in her life. Maxie had been murdered at the age of twenty-eight and now existed—lived would be inaccurate—in my huge Victorian guesthouse back in Harbor Haven, New Jersey, roughly an hour’s drive from here when it wasn’t snowing.

  “It’s not the airlines. It’s Liss’s father. He probably made it snow so I wouldn’t get her back.”

  Maxie rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue. I gave her a sharp look, which drew a quick glance from the TSA guard at one of the fluoroscope machines. Great. Now they’d think I was a hijacker because I was trying to glare significantly at one of my resident ghosts.

  Perhaps I should explain.

  After divorcing The Swine I had taken some money from the settlement—okay, all the money from the settlement—and some from a lawsuit I’d settled with an ex-employer with wandering hands and bought the big house in Harbor Haven, the town where I’d grown up. While restoring the house with an eye toward opening it to tourists, I’d taken a bucket of wallboard compound to the head (Maxie to this day swears she wasn’t responsible), and once I’d come to had seen two people in my house I had not known were there.

  Maxie was one of them. Paul Harrison, the aspiring private detective who had been Maxie’s bodyguard for the last twelve hours of her life, was the other. The reason I hadn’t seen them before was that almost nobody could see them—they were ghosts.

  It seemed seeing ghosts ran in my family. My mother and Melissa apparently had the ability since birth, which they told me about only after I’d been clonked on the head and thought I was having dangerous hallucinations. This was the dynamic in my clan.

  Paul and Maxie had been murdered in my new house and oddly were not happy about that, so they’d insisted I find out who had done the murdering. We eventually did sort that out, the perpetrator was now in prison and would be for quite some time and I figured the two ghosts would move out and let me have my guesthouse on the Jersey Shore.

  No such luck.

  At first neither of the ghosts was able to move beyond my property line, which was the beach in the back of the house, the street in front of the house and some nebulous line between houses on either side. Eventually Maxie spontaneously developed the ability to travel, but Paul was still housebound and grumpy about it. He was a lovely guy, but he tended to take things like being cooped up in one house for all eternity personally.

  “Why don’t you go up and see if she’s in yet?” I suggested to Maxie. “They’re not going to arrest you for breaking security.”

  “Will you calm down?” she said. “I miss Melissa, too, but you don’t see me getting all antsy.”

  It was true. Maxie considered herself something of a big sister to my daughter, and Liss adored the brassy ghost, particularly since Maxie loves nothing better than to annoy me to the point of distraction, which Melissa considers hilarious. Even so, I was anxious to see my daughter after a week away. Five years to college. There was a thought I didn’t want to have.

  “I just—” I began.

  Maxie rose toward the ceiling to get a better viewpoint. “They’re coming out,” she reported.

  Immediately I started to jockey for position, but so did every other person waiting for a loved one (or maybe someone they didn’t even like) to walk down the corridor. This area could see as many as three flights arrive at once, so even in this weather it was fairly crowded with New Jerseyans, and there’s nothing we like better than nudging each other out of the way.

  Unfortunately many of the New Jerseyans (don’t ever call us “Jersey-ites”) in front of me were tall, or at least tall enough that I couldn’t see Melissa—or anything except the somewhat hairy neck of the guy in front of me—as the ex-passengers approached. “Do you see her?” I asked Maxie.

  Maxie started to giggle, and that was always a bad sign.

  “Yeah,” she managed to squeak out.

  “Why is that funny?”

  The hairy neck in front of me wasn’t laughing. Neither was anyone else in line. That let out the possibility that Jon Stewart had disembarked here or that a group of chimpanzees in flight attendant uniforms were juggling on their way out of the tunnel. Because chimps are funny.

  “You’ll see,” Maxie chuckled, and then she rose higher either so that I’d have to yell to talk to her or so she could see better. There were no hairy-necked ghosts hovering near the ceiling, although one rather distinguished elderly gentleman dressed for a flight in 1974 was hip-deep in the floor of the terminal. He checked his watch as if time was actually a consideration of his.

  I didn’t have time, I’m saying, to assess Maxie’s proclamation before my very own Melissa, who seemed taller after being gone only a week, squeezed her way through the crowd (practically hip-checking Hairy Neck) and gave me a measured but affectionate hug.

  “Where’s Josh?” she asked. That was the kind of greeting I got from my daughter. A lot of girls would have said, “Mom! I missed you so much! Thank goodness I don’t live with that demon full-time!” But no. I got a thirteen-year-old asking where my boyfriend of two years might be.

  “He couldn’t make it tonight; he has to shovel out in front of his store.” Josh Kaplan owned Madison Paints, an independent store in Asbury Park. “The town issues summonses if you don’t shovel. But hey, don’t worry, he managed to send your next favorite adult.” I gave Liss a consolation hug with my right arm.

  “I thought that was me,” said a voice I knew too well. A voice that I couldn’t be hearing. A voice I absolutely didn’t want to be hearing.

  “Don’t make me play favorites, Dad,” said my daughter.

  Sure enough, standing just to the left (mine, not his) of Hairy Neck was my ex-husband, Steven Rendell.

  The Swine.

  “What are you doing here?” I sort of growled as Maxie, guffawing her way down from the ceiling, pointed at me.

  “You should see your face!” she gloated. Melissa shot Maxie a look to indicate she was taking the gag too far. Maxie
didn’t notice, or that was what she wanted us to think.

  “Nice welcome,” Steven said. “Can’t I come out and visit once in a while?”

  “No.”

  Melissa dragged her carry-on-size bag with the one sort of shaky wheel, and started toward the exit. “Come on,” she said, I think to Maxie. The ghost nodded and floated on behind her.

  “I just wanted to come out and see you for a couple of days,” my ex continued as if I hadn’t made it clear that was a bad idea. “Do you have a room empty?”

  It was February and the tourist trade down the shore (as real Jerseyans call the coastline) was not exactly booming. I had a grand total of three guests at the moment and none scheduled for the following week.

  “We’re all full up,” I told Steven.

  “Good for you!” The Swine liked to pretend that any business success I might have would be a complete surprise, because he thought I didn’t actually know what I was doing. Yeah, I only had three guests. February. Shore. Remember? “You have somewhere you can stash me, right?”

  I noticed he was walking slowly, more so than I remembered, but then, maybe age was starting to catch up with him. Steven had to be in his early forties by now, because I was in my late thirties. “Not really,” I said. “Why not catch a flight back out to California while you can and save the cost of a hotel?”

  “Ally.” Steven knew for a fact that I absolutely hated being called “Ally.” I gave him a look. “Sorry. Alison. Can you just wait up a second?”

  Melissa (and by extension Maxie) already had a ten-yard lead on us. “Steven, I haven’t seen our daughter—my daughter—in a week. Why would I hang back with you, when I didn’t want to see you at all?” It seemed a logical question. The Swine had left us when Melissa was only eight, and he had done so to go live the Southern California lifestyle (which as far as I could tell was like New Jersey but with less gluten) with a woman named . . . Bambi? Barbie? That was four women ago, so I couldn’t really remember.