The Thrill of the Haunt Read online

  “I don’t want to bother you if you’re . . . busy,” she said.

  I spread my hands. “Not at all. Please, tell me what you need.”

  “It’s . . . well, it’s the spirits you have in the house,” Beth said. I wasn’t crazy about the way she said it; there was far too much concern, even fear, in her voice.

  I successfully fought the impulse to look at Maxie; I couldn’t imagine any of the guests being this worried about something Paul would do. “What about them?” I asked, possibly allowing too much of an edge to creep into my voice.

  From behind me, I heard Maxie saying, “Whatever it is, it wasn’t me.”

  Whatever it was, it was definitely her.

  “Well,” Beth continued, “I don’t want to complain. I mean, we certainly knew there would be, you know, ghosts in the house when we booked the tour. And watching them interact with us every day has been really exciting.” There was definitely a but coming in this sentence.

  I decided to accelerate its arrival. “Has there been a problem, Beth?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.” She bit her lip and looked worried. “But I don’t want to get anyone in trouble or anything.”

  I stole a quick glance at Maxie, who shrugged, which could either mean, “I don’t know what she’s talking about” or “Whatever.”

  “There’s no need to worry,” I told Beth. “Just, please, sit down and tell me what’s wrong.” I gestured toward the barstools at the center island.

  Beth nodded and sat down on one of them. I took a position next to her and saw Paul hover into view at my side, seemingly interested in watching Beth’s face as she spoke.

  “I don’t worry about the presence of the spirits in the house,” Beth began. “Like I said, it’s one of the reasons we wanted to come here. But,” and there it was, “I was led to believe—that is, we were led to believe—that there was no danger involved in the tour.”

  “There isn’t,” I said. “The spirits in this house are absolutely not dangerous, I promise you.” Paul nodded, perhaps involuntarily.

  I couldn’t see Maxie behind me, but I’d have bet she was not nodding in agreement.

  “Perhaps that’s true,” Beth went on. “But I’ve seen something I consider to be considerably more disturbing, and I have to say, it probably goes beyond the parameters of what I—we—can be comfortable with.”

  Beth’s circling around whatever was bothering her threatened to take up the next two years of my life, and that would be inconvenient because I had to pick up my daughter from school in ninety minutes. “What have you seen, Beth?” I asked.

  “Well, why don’t you come with me and I’ll show you,” she suggested.

  That seemed like the quickest solution to this problem, so I nodded and followed Beth out of the kitchen and to the hallway. We walked down to the game room entrance in silence. Paul followed behind, but Maxie zoomed ahead, stopping just in front of me as we were reaching the archway that leads to the game room.

  There, on the paneling I’d labored so long (okay, I labored for an afternoon) to paint white, was a haphazardly scrawled message that appeared to be painted in blood. It read:

  “Humans must not breech these walls

  Daemons’ souls are fed

  Any humans entering

  Will surely become dead.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I can see the problem.”

  Fifteen

  It took a while to reassure Beth that the ghosts (I didn’t mention Maxie, over her protest, by name, but it was implied) had just been acting playfully and intended no one any harm. But from the way Beth was talking, I got the impression that Harry was the more frightened of the two. He had not even been brave enough to come ask me about it and was now hiding in their bedroom on the second floor. Beth went upstairs to reassure him.

  Once she was out of the room, Paul examined the message and determined that it was in fact written in red marker and not blood. That was both good news and bad news because it meant that the writer wasn’t quite as gruesome and sadistic as we might have thought, but marker would in fact be harder to wash off the wall than blood. There’s a reason they call it permanent marker.

  So I found myself going into the basement to find a roller, roller tray and the white paint I’d used on the paneling. This was a message that had to be extremely gone before any of the other guests stumbled across it.

  Paul followed me into the basement. “It wasn’t Maxie,” he said.

  “I know it wasn’t Maxie. Maxie would never use the word ‘daemons.’ Who says that?”

  From upstairs, in the direction of the game room (where Maxie had been asked to try to clean up the message with a scrub brush and Mr. Clean), came, “I heard that.”

  “I’m saying, I really don’t think Maxie wrote that on the wall,” Paul reiterated.

  I got the roller tray out of my tool chest (bottom shelf, with the larger items) and looked at him. “I know,” I said. “It wasn’t Maxie. I’m inclined to believe it was Cybill trying to stir up support for her house exorcism.”

  “We have no evidence,” Paul said.

  I gathered up all my supplies, including a drop cloth to cover any spills while I repainted the wall, and headed for the stairs. “I’m not going to prosecute,” I said. “I don’t need evidence.”

  “If you’re going to accuse one of your paying guests of doing material damage to your house,” Paul reminded me as I climbed and he floated up the stairs, “you really don’t want to be wrong. You’re a businesswoman.”

  I stopped at the door to the upstairs. “I really hate it when you’re right,” I told Paul.

  He smiled. “I’m not always crazy about it myself,” he said.

  “So what do I do?”

  “Stay quiet and observe,” he said.

  “You know that’s not my strong suit.”

  “Nonetheless.”

  I went through the door and walked to the game room, paint in hand.

  • • •

  I did eventually call Josh later in the day but got his voice mail. I couldn’t help wondering if he was truly busy or if he just ignored my call out of testiness over last night. Driving Melissa home from school, I considered getting her to call him just to check but decided that was a hysterical, manipulative response. Besides, I’d have to tell Liss why she was doing that, which was enough for me to decide against it.

  As Paul had advised, I didn’t confront Cybill in the house but kept careful scrutiny on her movements, which were minimal. Mostly she stayed in her room (chanting was not infrequently heard through the door) or spent her time out in the backyard watching the waves from the dune overlooking the beach. That’s a nice peaceful way to spend a spring afternoon, and I’ve done it myself, but with Cybill it seemed somehow a little creepy, like someone waiting for a sign.

  I decided to wait until the next day to report back to Helen Boffice. Just because I’d seen her husband at the scene of Joyce Kinsler’s death (which was probably a suicide) didn’t mean I had to call Helen immediately.

  Neither did the three voice mails Helen had left me already. The police had probably already talked to Helen and Dave, for that matter. I had nothing to tell her that they couldn’t.

  I spent the evening putting a second coat on the defaced wall in the game room, with my father supervising. Melissa was upstairs doing homework, which probably meant watching television, since her homework rarely took more than half an hour because she’s a genius (A bragging mother? Moi?). Hey, even eleven-year-olds need to decompress after a day at the salt mines.

  “So you’ve got a dead homeless guy in a gas station bathroom and a dead adulteress hanging from her kitchen ceiling,” Dad was saying. “You lead an interesting life, baby girl.”

  To be honest, I figured talking to one’s deceased parent while painting over an anonymous threat that likely came from someone pretending to be a ghost was somewhat more unusual, but Dad had a point. “And yet, what I’m worried about is a guy,” I told him
. I could always talk to Dad about anything. Mom, you had to avoid certain areas. Like real life.

  “Josh from Madison Paint?” Dad considered, then pointed at my work. “Watch the drip.”

  I corrected my brush technique and told him, “The drip is the one I married.”

  “Don’t get me started. Look, as I understand it, your problem with Josh is that you like him, but you don’t trust him.”

  I stopped painting and looked at Dad. “What do you mean, I don’t trust him? I trust him fine.”

  My father folded his arms. “Then why don’t you tell him about us? Me and Maxie and Paul?”

  “Mom never told me she could see ghosts,” I said.

  “She didn’t want you to know . . .”

  “. . . because she thought I’d feel bad that I couldn’t do it. She didn’t give me the opportunity to be okay with it. Now who are we talking about not trusting?” I asked.

  “This isn’t about your mother,” Dad said. “Why aren’t you telling Josh?”

  “Seriously?” I blinked a couple of times and went back to my second coat. “This is not your normal off-the-rack situation. He’ll think I’m nuts. And to tell you the truth, I’m not sure he’ll be wrong.” Maybe everything since that bucket of wallboard compound hit me in the head had been a hallucination. I’d just been dreaming all this time.

  “If you don’t trust him to believe you about seeing ghosts, you don’t trust him, baby girl,” my father said.

  “How do you trust somebody with a story like that?” I asked. “No sane person would believe it.”

  My father considered me for a moment. “Let me ask you this,” he said. “If you were still married, would you tell your husband what was going on?”

  “Did Mom tell you she could see ghosts before you died?” If you don’t have an answer, turn the tables on your questioner.

  Dad’s eyes got a bit sad. “As a matter of fact, she did,” he said.

  That put a damper on the conversation, so I painted silently for a minute or two.

  Dad changed the subject. “Now, what are you thinking about this room?” He could always make me feel better by talking about the nuts and bolts of old buildings like the one I own.

  I finished covering over the disturbing message on my wall, which would now be slightly whiter than the others in the room. Dad said he’d think about uses for the room but would head for Mom’s house now. He seemed concerned about me, in a loving way. It made me feel bad that I was making him worry, so now my day was complete. I went back to thinking about the two cases I had agreed to investigate (I know I said I was off the job, but you didn’t think I meant it, did you?). Paul and Maxie were not anywhere in the immediate vicinity, so I could ruminate. And not call Josh. Or I could go upstairs and watch TV with my daughter . . . nah. Had to have a plan for tomorrow.

  The Boffice matter seemed to be completely out of my hands now, I decided as I straightened up the library. The police were handling Joyce’s death, something I had not been asked to do.

  So the focus should now be on Everett’s murder, I decided. The pictures Paul had examined hadn’t given us much to go with, so tomorrow would be a day of getting in touch with the homeless veteran’s ex-wife and family members as best I could, especially trying to find the son Maxie couldn’t yet locate. There had to be a reason someone cared enough to want Everett dead, but at the moment, there wasn’t one suggesting itself too plainly. Or at all.

  But Josh was nagging at my mind. Was Dad right about my not trusting him? Could I trust that anyone would believe the truth about my life these days? Why wasn’t Josh calling me back (and why did I sound like I was back in junior high school)?

  My phone rang in my pocket, and I pulled it out, hoping Josh had gotten my psychic signals. Nope. Another call from Helen Boffice. I couldn’t duck her forever. Besides, she was undoubtedly calling to fire me from her case, which was fine with me. I picked up.

  “Helen, I’m so glad you called. I don’t know if you’ve heard what happened.” I was in fact sure she had, but I was covering.

  Her voice cut me off before I could say any more, and it sounded . . . what was that tone? Irritated? Impatient? Angry? “I heard, all right,” she hissed. Her voice was low, making me think Dave might be nearby and Helen was concealing the conversation. “The police just left. I’m just hoping you got some pictures in the past couple of days that will accomplish the goal we set forth.” The goal we set forth? Who talks like that?

  “I couldn’t get photos,” I said slowly. “Mostly because Dave went to the mall for lunch one day and to visit your mother the next. When he drove to Joyce Kinsler’s house today, she was already dead.”

  “My mother?” Helen asked. Could she have chosen a smaller point to pick up on from what I’d told her? Next she’d be asking me what he’d had for lunch at the mall.

  “Yes. He visited her yesterday. They seem to get along well.” I was speculating, but there hadn’t been loud shouting, and Margaret O’Toole had given Dave a peck on the cheek when he left.

  Helen didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Listen,” she finally said, her voice now hard as marble, “I want you to find out who killed Joyce Kinsler. The police seem to think I might have done it, and that’s impossible. I need to know if it was Dave. Find out everything you can that might point to him.”

  “Helen,” I said, “I’m not sure I can—”

  “I’ll double your fee.”

  She hung up and did not pick up when I called her back.

  Sixteen

  “I haven’t heard from Everett for five years,” said Brenda Leskanik late the next morning. We were sitting on a deck overlooking Route 18 North in Old Bridge. Brenda, when I called, had said there wasn’t much to tell but agreed to talk to me if I came to her, which I was happy to do. But she didn’t want to meet in her home. “A public place,” she’d said. “Everett is a touchy subject.”

  The restaurant where we’d met, Bernardo’s Slice of Heaven, was normally a pizza place with a little twist of new cuisine. But in the late mornings and afternoons, Bernardo’s was essentially a coffee shop, and the patio (really a rooftop) was the outdoor seating area, where she and I were sipping coffees. I was avoiding the thought of a chocolate chip muffin that had been calling to me at the counter when we ordered. The urge to go back downstairs and rescue it from its captivity was strong.

  I had decided, after not mentioning the call from Helen to anyone in the house and sleeping on it for a night, that I was under no obligation to follow up on her demand that I investigate Joyce Kinsler’s death. Helen hadn’t hired me for that, and I hadn’t accepted the case. I didn’t have to do it. It felt great.

  “Did you know what had happened to him?” I asked. “About his homelessness?”

  “I knew,” she said flatly. Brenda was a woman in her forties who had never been beautiful but had a look that elicited respect first. She wasn’t severe, didn’t intimidate, but her military training certainly came through in her every word and gesture. “At first I tried to help out, you know, find out where he was and offer to give him some money, but he wouldn’t take it. Said it was bad enough he couldn’t give me child support.”

  “I heard you left the Army because you were pregnant,” I said. “They don’t require that, do they?”

  Brenda shook her head, but she clearly wasn’t happy about the question. “No, they can’t do that,” she said. “They just make it clear that it’ll be so much more difficult to raise a baby if you’re in the service, and then they let you make the choice. I made the choice to leave. Frankly, I was ready to get out anyway.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Not everyone is a career soldier. I got into it to pay for college, and when I got out, I had enough money for that. I also had a husband and a son. I ended up working a job and studying at night, but I never got to see my son. Left school without the BA, but I had an associate’s degree and that was enough to get me onto a management track at one of the chain s
tores at the mall. Got me and Randy health benefits, things the Army didn’t offer after I got out.”

  “Randy is your son?” I asked.

  Brenda closed her eyes for a moment. “Randy was my son. He passed away seven years ago.”

  Why hadn’t Maxie found that? She’d said something was odd about Randy’s records, but she couldn’t figure out what. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Brenda shook her head. “There’s no way you could have known. Randy developed a drug problem in high school, left home, didn’t want to have anything to do with us.”

  “What happened?”

  “Drugs,” she said, “then a motorcycle accident. He ended up at the bottom of a ravine near an offshoot of the Passaic River. The bike was so smashed, they could’ve fit it into the trunk of a car. A small car.”

  Brenda looked so shaken, I didn’t have the heart to ask more. “It must be incredibly hard for you.”

  She sniffed a little but looked at me with clear eyes. “The fact is, it’s not that much different than when he left. Sometimes I have to remind myself of what happened.”

  “What happened to split you and Everett up?” I asked, changing the subject. “You and he met in the Army. He must have been impressive enough for you to marry him. How did he end up homeless?”

  “Everett was very impressive when I met him,” Brenda told me. “He wasn’t like the other guys in our outfit. Didn’t come across as all kinds of macho frat boy when everybody knew we were all scared to death every single day. He was a real human being, you know? Just happened to be carrying a rifle and dressed in uniform. That made an impression on me over there.”

  “It wasn’t the same when you got back?” The wind was picking up, but it didn’t look like it would rain anytime soon. The breeze on the rooftop actually felt good, and the smell from the kitchen, where no doubt more chocolate chip muffins were being baked, was quite wonderful.

  “No,” Brenda said. “It wasn’t the same. Well, that’s not true. It was the same—or he was the same—for a while. He was still Everett. He still treated me like a person and not a different species. That happens in the service, you know, women are sized up on the first pass, and they’re either the ones guys want or, you know, not. Everett wasn’t ever like that. He always related to me as Brenda.”