Bones Behind the Wheel

  Bones Behind the Wheel

  A HAUNTED GUESTHOUSE MYSTERY

  E. J. Copperman

  For every reader of every book I have ever written

  Acknowledgments

  Wow. Ten books in a series! It didn’t seem possible when this train started out and it didn’t seem possible after Book #8, but thanks to the crew at Crooked Lane Books we are still traveling the Haunted Guesthouse track and hope we keep going for a while to come! Special thanks to Matt Martz, Jenny Chen and Sarah Poppe for the great support.

  Thanks as ever to Dominic Finelle for the cover illustration that makes this look like a Haunted Guesthouse book and makes it look terrific! Dom has been with us every step of the way and that’s part of what lures people to the series.

  None of this would have been remotely possible without the terrific work of the gang at HSG Agency, particularly my astonishingly good agent (you can ask anybody) Josh Getzler and Jonathan Cobb. Thanks for making me a little less obscure, guys. You’re the best and your tireless efforts are never unappreciated.

  But as the dedication to this book notes, it’s all happening (and it all has happened) because of the loyal readers of the Guesthouse and a few other series under this name and another. I never forget that there’s a reader (or maybe two) out there and always feel grateful and amazed that you started off with me and are staying with me. It’s ten books so far, guys.

  Let’s see how far this train goes.

  E. J. Copperman

  Deepest New Jersey

  July, 2018

  Chapter 1

  “This is no walk on the beach.”

  Against all evidence to the contrary, I had to agree. Katrina Breslin and I were, in fact, on the sand behind my massive Victorian home/business and we were, indeed, traveling by foot, but you couldn’t possibly have mistaken what we were doing for a nice, relaxing walk on the beach.

  “We just need to get a little farther down toward the ocean and the other houses,” I suggested, pointing south. “There isn’t quite so much heavy equipment down there.”

  The state of New Jersey in its infinite wisdom (and this might be the time to remind you that the National Language of New Jersey is Sarcasm) had decided to do some—it said—necessary excavation on parts of the shore in Harbor Haven, the town where I live and run a guesthouse. The state had noted that Superstorm Sandy (we’re not allowed to call it a hurricane) had done considerable damage to the area just a few years back and erosion had also taken a toll, so bolstering the dunes was necessary, and apparently that was done by moving huge amounts of sand around in what appeared to be a completely random pattern. I didn’t see how using bulldozers and other huge machines to move sand from one place to another was going to protect anything, but oddly, I had not been consulted. I had been nice enough to let the foreman, Bill Harrelson, and his crew use my bathrooms while they were here, with the provision that they make sure to keep them clean and not abuse the privilege, which they had not. They’d been conscientious visitors.

  If I’m going to be fair—and there is no reason to expect that I will—it made sense for the work, if it was really going to be done, to take place now. November is hardly peak tourist season on the Jersey Shore, although Senior Plus Tours, the company that steers a number of guests in my direction each month, had still sent three this week. They weren’t here so much for the lovely beaches (now being bulldozed) or the amusement piers (closed for the season except, for some reason, on Thanksgiving).

  They were here for the ghosts.

  Perhaps I should explain.

  A little over four years ago, I was a newly divorced single mother who had just won a lawsuit against a previous employer whose hands hadn’t remembered his marriage vows and whose ears had been deaf to my refusals until I decked him. Sorry, until he slipped on some spilled copier toner and bumped his head on my fist. That’s what it said in the depositions.

  I decided to take charge of the changes in my life instead of letting them be imposed upon me, so I moved back to Harbor Haven, where I’d grown up, and bought the Victorian, not in spite of but because of its having far too many rooms for me and my then-nine-year-old daughter Melissa to inhabit. I wanted to own and run a guesthouse in my hometown and got a deal on the place because it needed a lot of repairs and renovation.

  In the midst of doing those—my father had been an independent contractor and had taught me how to do home repair work so I wouldn’t be taken in by contractors less scrupulous than he was—I met with an “accident” and was hit on the head with a bucket of drywall compound, which I can tell you hurt quite a bit.

  When I regained what few senses I had, I could see two people who I’d have sworn had not been there pre-bucket. As it turned out, they were Paul Harrison and Maxie Malone, and they had recently kicked the bucket in what was now my new house. They were ghosts (go figure) who wanted to know who had killed them (which, in retrospect, was probably reasonable) and wanted me to help them find out (which was not, even in retrospect).

  That’s a story told elsewhere, but suffice it to say we found Paul and Maxie’s murderer, and I think all of us expected that would propel them to some other area of the afterlife, what with the “unfinished business” on this planet completed. But no. Paul and Maxie were still here in the guesthouse four years and change later.

  We had worked out an arrangement: Paul had been a private investigator just getting started when he and Maxie had met their end (if you want to call it that), and he still wanted to investigate things. Problem was, he needed someone in the living world to go other places and ask the questions, because the vast majority of people couldn’t see or hear him and at the time he was unable to move past my property line. He has since overcome that last restriction, but only a select few, including Melissa and my mother, can see the ghosts. Liss and Mom always could and had chosen not to tell me about it because they thought I’d feel bad. That was something of a miscalculation on their part, but I will admit I probably would have at least taken my daughter to a psychotherapist if I’d heard she could see the spirits of the undead and was fine with it.

  Paul wanted me to get a private investigator license so I could help him with what he saw as his detective agency. I had discovered that some guests actually want to be in a house with ghosts and that that could help my business. So I agreed to do as Paul asked if he and Maxie would put on “spook shows” for the guests twice a day. Senior Plus provided the guests who wanted some interaction with the deceased, and I did the occasional work with Paul, which so far had not once worked out profitably for me. But we make the bargains we make and move on.

  So now I was a newly remarried single mother and innkeeper/extremely part-time private detective, walking on the beach with one of my guests who had observed that what we were doing was certainly no walk on the beach.

  Katrina looked down the beach in the direction I’d indicated. “I don’t think it’s that much better down there, Alison,” she said.

  She had a point. The earth-moving equipment was located in every location as far as the eye could see, and when you’re on the shore, you can see pretty far. There aren’t any private houses near mine because much of the beachfront has been bought up by businesses, and some of it is just municipal territory to lure the tourists, which I appreciate. The previous owners of my house (with the exception of Maxie, who had occupied the place briefly before her demise) had held fast against the commercialization of the beach, although I imagine the seven bedrooms in the house hadn’t been put there just because they’d decided to have a large family.

  “Maybe it’s just not a good idea to stroll out here,” Katrina said. You could hear the unspoken today at the end of her sentence, because she clearly knew this was
n’t getting any better before she ended her vacation and went home in three days.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told her. “The town didn’t tell us the dates they’d be working on our property specifically, so I couldn’t warn you too much in advance.”

  Katrina turned toward the guesthouse and started in that direction, so I followed her. “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to go swimming or anything.” That was fortunate, because the heavy cardigan she was wearing would no doubt have weighed her down once it was saturated. “I came to get away from my life for a while and maybe see some ghosts.” She smiled.

  Of course, Katrina and the other guests, a couple named Adam and Steve Cosgrove, had not seen and would not see Paul and Maxie. They wouldn’t see Maxie’s husband, Everett, or my father when he dropped by with my mother, who was thankfully not yet a ghost. They’d see what we wanted them to see of the results the ghosts have, which consist mainly of carefully planned objects flying by and effects (pretty cheesy ones) we put together for entertainment purposes. We never scare the guests, largely because Paul and Maxie et al. are not scary people. We’ve discovered that people are pretty much who they are, and death doesn’t change that so much as make them considerably less tangible.

  “Have you been enjoying the shows so far?” I asked. It’s always good to get feedback from a guest during the stay if you can, because if there’s something that’s bothering him or her, you can fix it rather than read it on a guest evaluation form after they leave.

  “Yeah, more than I thought I would, to tell you the truth.” Katrina stopped for a moment to regard me with an amused smile. “That Maxie is a riot.”

  It’s not the word I would have chosen—Maxie and I have a complicated relationship based on mutual irritation—but the customer is always right, and Maxie’s heart (if she still had one) was in the right place. I was pretty sure. I’d check at the Harbor Haven Cemetery.

  “She has a style,” I allowed, and started walking again toward the house, letting Katrina follow this time.

  We reached the edge of my property, and I stopped—for lack of a better word—dead in my tracks.

  The excavation being done in what was basically my backyard had been carefully described to me by the construction firm the town had hired to handle the erosion issues. It was going to take six days, I’d been told, and would inconvenience me only by having the huge bulldozers and other beasts of sand-moving parked behind my house. The actual amount of earth displaced (that was their word) this far from the ocean would be “minimal.”

  So the enormous hole now occupying about a quarter of my backyard was something of a surprise.

  It hadn’t been visible when we were approaching because of the ginormous excavator that I thought had been idly parked on the spot but now was clearly digging something out of the crater it had dug in the sand. My sand. (I can show you the deed.)

  I stood there stunned for a moment while Katrina, stopping at my side, said, “Wow.”

  No kidding.

  I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times, something I often do with sound coming out. That didn’t seem completely possible at the moment. This violation of my property was enormous and clearly going to take a while to restore. I hadn’t been this angry since any time ever that I’d seen my ex-husband, The Swine. (It’s not the name on his birth certificate, but it’s much more descriptive of the man he had become.)

  When I could start breathing normally, or close to it, again, I noticed Bill Harrelson, the foreman for my section of the project, trudging from the side of my house toward the Grand Canyon that had suddenly been deposited where a placid beach had been before. I reminded myself there was a guest present (you need to watch your language under such circumstances) and headed for him.

  “Bill,” I managed. There were so many other words that could have been.

  He held up his hands, palms out, feigning innocence. “Hang on, Alison,” he said.

  “Hang on? You told me you were parking some equipment, and now I have a bottomless pit in my backyard. You want me to hang on? I might trip and end up on the molten core of the Earth.”

  “I don’t know what happened either,” Bill protested. “I just got a text to come back here. Let me see what’s going on.”

  Okay, so I could hang on. For a minute. Tops.

  Bill walked to the side of the extractor, whose arm was extended deep into the crater. Katrina looked over at me. “Good thing it’s not the summer, huh?” she said.

  Now, I liked Katrina. Truly. She had seemed, in the short time I’d known her, to be a very nice and level-headed person. So I made a concerted effort not to scream at her. I’m a good hostess.

  “Yes,” I said. It wasn’t terribly original, but it avoided snarling. That was something.

  “I mean, it would really have hurt your business then, I’m guessing,” Katrina continued. She was clearly operating under the assumption that I had not understood her point.

  “Yup.” I saw Bill talking earnestly with the extractor operator and then, shaking his head, walking around to the front of the big machine and looking down into the pit, which was something I didn’t think you were supposed to do unless you were in a Vincent Price movie. And even then it generally didn’t turn out all that well for the person leaning over the edge.

  “Because a lot of people come here for the beach.” Katrina, no doubt spurred on by my terseness, was now explaining the appeal of the Jersey Shore to me. I needed to let her off the hook but I was busy watching Bill, who didn’t exactly recoil from what he saw in the hole but did seem to move back a couple of feet instinctively. “You know, not just for the ghosts.”

  “I know, Katrina. Sorry, but I have to see if there’s a problem. Excuse me, okay?” Like most people, I did not wait for a response and walked past Katrina toward Bill, who took what appeared to be another incredulous look down into the gaping hole (whose repair bill I was already mentally sending to the state) and then stood up straight again, a look on his face that indicated wonder and some unease.

  “What’s the problem, Bill?” I asked. As I walked to his side, I could see more of the crater and the arm of the excavator digging into it. The machine had clearly unearthed material other than sand, material its operator hadn’t been expecting, because the claw appeared to be dragging something out of the ground. Something metal and large.

  Bill wheeled to face me, a sign that he hadn’t known I was lurking behind him. “Alison!” I gave him a moment—that was certainly my name, and I didn’t see any reason to dispute it. “There’s something down there.”

  “Yeah, I get that. What is it and why did your guys start digging here? I’m not on the list for major excavation.” The lawsuit I was planning could lead to another renovation of the guesthouse, maybe add an outdoor swimming pool. Because there are, believe it or not, some strange people who like to come to the beach and then swim in a pool. I know.

  “One of the guys had a divining rod and read some metal vibrations,” Bill said. “He thought it might be a rare coin or something.”

  I glanced down toward the tremendous maw they’d opened up but didn’t get any closer. I have this thing about not falling into bottomless pits. “That’s bigger than a coin.”

  “Yeah. It’s a Continental.”

  Of course it was. What was a Continental? “A what?”

  “A Continental.” He saw the confusion in my eyes. “A Lincoln Continental.”

  I confess; it took me a second. “It’s a car?”

  Bill nodded fervently. “Yeah. By the look of it, I’d say midseventies, maybe. A Continental sedan. Green.”

  Well, the color made all the difference. “What’s it doing down there?” I asked. It seemed like a logical question. Forget that Bill’s crew had been scavenging for change on my beach like some tinfoil hat prospector and they’d chose to dig for a quarter with a shovel the size of, well, a Lincoln Continental. “Why is there a car buried in my backyard?”

  He sp
read out his hands, palms out. “I wish I knew. But …”

  I didn’t hear what he said next because the man operating the excavator decided to start it up. You sort of get used to the noise from the construction equipment after a day or … never … but usually you’re not as close to the big machines as I was right now. The scoop on the front of the rig moved, down, digging under the frame of what I guessed was the car’s rear end. Bill motioned me away from the pit, and I was happy to walk back in the direction of the ocean, whose roar was considerably more soothing than that of the Caterpillar equipment causing yet more damage to property that was described in detail in my deed.

  Katrina, whom I’d left perhaps fifty feet away, was watching the earth-moving machine quite closely with an expression on her face indicating she’d seen something incredibly wondrous. It’s not that I get to see tremendous trucks carve out part of my property every day, but her look was more in the area of having seen a genie create a palace of gold using some straw and a used fez.

  Then I realized she was taking in the spectacle that was Bill Harrelson.

  Bill wasn’t really my type, but that was okay because I was married and needed only one man in my type. But to Katrina, Bill was clearly a type in and of himself. I considered standing back but remembered I wanted an explanation about the vintage sedan now being brought out of my property, so I stopped as soon as I thought speech would be plausible and looked at Bill.

  “But what?” I said.

  Luckily Bill wasn’t in the mood to play coy. He’d been shaken by what he’d seen in the hole, and now it was coming out to be seen by all. So he had to come clean right away. “There’s something inside the Continental, I’m pretty sure,” he said.

  I didn’t like the way he said the word something, but I didn’t get to ask right away because Katrina, stars in her eyes, was nudging me in the side. “I haven’t been introduced,” she said.

  She would continue to not be introduced for a moment, though. I didn’t like Bill’s ominous tone. “What’s in the car?” I asked him.