Ghost in the Wind Read online

  Bill’s expression suggested he’d prefer not to, but he nodded. “There’s a dressing room, sort of. Follow me.”

  He led us out of the main room and down a staircase to the basement, where players from tonight’s bands were milling around in various stages of dress, or un-. A few doors down a fairly depressing corridor was one marked Storage, and he opened that door for us to enter.

  There were already three people in the overcrowded room: the other members of Once Again, and a woman who clearly (and I mean clearly) was with the lead guitarist they called T.B. or “Teeb,” and now Bill, Liz and me. When we walked in, absolutely no one looked up. The drummer, introduced onstage as Sammi Fine, sat at a mirror taking off her stage makeup, which meant dabbing at her eyes with a cotton ball.

  “This is as private as it gets around here. So what do you want to know?” Bill leaned on the table Sammi was using and folded his arms, which I took to be a gesture of defiance. Why he needed to defy me was Bill’s business.

  “You were Vanessa McTiernan’s boyfriend, weren’t you?” I started. I tried to hold up the tote bag I was carrying, which held my voice recorder.

  “For a while, yeah.” Bill’s voice, now that I could hear him in a slightly less noisy environment, was pure Jersey Shore. That’s half I’ll-bust-you-up and half why-are-you-pickin’-on-me. I noticed Sammi look up in the mirror without turning to face us, and she was looking right at me. She didn’t care for the topic of conversation, it seemed.

  “So were you there when she died?” I asked. I looked at Liz, who was transfixed by the guitarist and his girlfriend, who had obviously been told to get a room and had chosen this one. Our luck.

  “Hell no,” Bill said. “Anybody who told you I was is a liar.”

  “Nobody told me you were,” I countered. “I’m trying to figure out what happened, and part of that is reconstructing the scene. Do you know who was there?”

  “I have no idea. So I can’t help you. Sorry.” Bill turned to look at Sammi, now angry enough at him—apparently for having a dead girlfriend—that she wasn’t returning the glance.

  “Hang on,” I told him. “Liz?”

  I looked at her; she was still gaping at the amorous couple in the back of the room. “Huh?”

  “Are you taking notes on this?” I asked her. She was, after all, supposed to be my assistant. If she wanted to bulldoze her way into this situation she could at least act the part.

  “Huh?” Liz repeated. “Oh. Yeah.” She started rummaging through her purse, presumably for a pad and pen. What were the odds she had those?

  I shook my head theatrically for Bill’s benefit. “Assistants. Can you ever get one to be efficient?” I pulled the voice recorder out of my tote bag. “Do you mind?”

  Bill Mastrovy stared at the little battery-operated device like it was a phaser set to kill. “What do you need that for?” he asked.

  “So I can transcribe it for my report later,” I said. He hadn’t asked me who my client was, which simplified my process enormously. No need to make up someone who might care how Vanessa McTiernan had died. “Now, how was Vanessa’s relationship with her father?”

  Bill puffed out his lips in a sneer of contempt. “Ooh, the famous Vance McTiernan? Front man for a band that had exactly two hits?” I could think of six, but that was me. “She never heard from the old bastard.”

  “Never?” Liz sounded scandalized.

  “Not from what Vanessa told me. The guy was dead before I met her. She said oh, maybe once every couple of years he’d get in touch to see if she still remembered he existed, but let’s be real—he considered himself a great big deal in the music business, yet he never once lifted a finger for his own daughter.” Bill rolled his eyes. “She believed in that man until she died—literally. And he let her down every time.”

  “You know he’s been dead for eight years,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, and what did she get in his will? Nothing, that’s what. If he cared so much about her, you’d think that would be the one time he’d show it since he’d have nothing to lose. Nothing.”

  “What was she like?” I asked. “I really don’t have a strong sense of Vanessa.”

  Bill smiled wistfully. “Oh, she was fun,” he said. “She could get a little spacey sometimes, just stare straight ahead and mumble to herself like she was in a trance. But that was how she was—she was completely in herself, but would let you look in to see her once in a while. She was a good soul.” Sweet, but I didn’t see how that was going to help Paul solve her murder. He’d asked me to pose the question and I had, eager to show him we were back in our normal roles.

  Paul also wanted me to ask about Vanessa’s supposed record contract. “I understand she was about to release a solo album with Vinyl Records?”

  Bill’s eyes bulged a bit and Sammi’s almost closed. Opposite reactions to the same information. “Yeah,” Bill said. “She had just signed the deal.”

  “And that didn’t have anything to do with her father’s reputation?” After all, no matter how he drove me crazy, he was Vance McTiernan.

  Bill puffed out his lips and made a rude sound. “No. It was all due to Vanessa’s voice. And her material, some of which was mine.”

  “You wrote the songs?” I asked.

  “Depends on who you talk to.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Sammi chose this moment to interrupt my interview. She turned away from the mirror and looked me in the eye. “Look. What does the music have to do with anything? Vanessa and I were never all that close but apparently she did something stupid and it killed her. What’s the big deal?”

  “The ‘big deal’ is that she was murdered,” Liz piped up. I had only met Liz two hours before, but she was climbing up my list of people to be annoyed at for the next few years. Wait. She was a friend of Josh’s and he cared if I liked her. Okay. Liz was trying to help. That was it.

  Sammi curled her lip and made a noise usually associated with other areas of the body. “Sure she was,” she said, unwrapping a piece of gum and popping it in her mouth.

  But Bill, whom I’d been watching for a reaction, certainly had one. He pulled his lips in and his eyes got wild. It wasn’t anger or shock—it was fear.

  “Murdered?” he said quietly. I’m not sure if he was talking to me or to himself.

  “There’s a very strong possibility she didn’t die accidentally,” I told him. “What can you tell me about the day she died?”

  Bill looked stunned. He was staring blankly, half at the floor and half at the air in front of the floor. He probably wasn’t seeing anything really. “What?” he muttered.

  “The day Vanessa died, Bill. Tell me what happened.”

  He seemed confused. “Nothing happened,” he said. “She died. I heard about it the next day.”

  “Yeah, I get that. What was happening before she died? Focus, Bill. What do you remember?”

  Sammi cracked her gum. Perhaps she was looking for a way to be more clichéd, and she’d found it. “For chrissakes, Bill. You weren’t there when she died, right? That’s what you told me.”

  Bill’s head was bobbing around. I was getting dizzy looking at him. I crouched down because he was still looking at the floor. Liz looked like she might sit down, considered the rug and decided against it.

  The two people making out on the couch were unaffected.

  I couldn’t really catch Bill’s gaze but at least some of me was in his line of sight. “Bill,” I said. “Is that right? You weren’t there when Vanessa died?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I need to figure it out. Tomorrow night.”

  That didn’t make tons of sense but I was about to agree when Liz once again decided to be helpful. “She can’t,” she told Bill. “She’s showing Ghost at her guesthouse tomorrow night.” In an earlier moment of delusion, I’d inv
ited Liz and A.J. to the showing. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  “Ghost?” Bill didn’t seem to be hearing everything that was being said; it was like he was listening in on a long-distance call from 1932.

  “It’s a movie,” I said. “But that doesn’t matter. Tell me now. Were you there when Vanessa McTiernan died?”

  “No. Yeah. Well, earlier. Not when she died.”

  Sammi stood up. “What?” she bleated. “You were there? You told me you’d broke up with her weeks before! We were together already!”

  “I gotta go,” Bill said. He pushed his arm out like a running back in a 1950s football movie. “I gotta go now.”

  For reasons I couldn’t begin to explain, we all backed off and cleared a path for him. He moved, still watching his own feet, all the way to the door and then out, and nobody said a word.

  After a long moment, Sammi spit her gum out on the floor and stormed out, but she didn’t call after Bill and she didn’t seem to be following him. She just left.

  Liz looked at me. “Was that a good interrogation?” she asked.

  * * *

  “What did you think of A.J. and Liz?” Josh asked later.

  Liz and I had maneuvered our way back to the table while the new band was playing, and looks all around had concluded that staying to hear the show would be a poor idea. We didn’t even sit down. Josh and A.J. stood up and we left to the comfort of the outside, where it was cooler and, thankfully, much, much, quieter.

  It was a relatively late night for someone who got up around dawn every day to prepare for guests and someone else who got up around the same time to open a paint store, so we said our goodnights to Liz and A.J. in the parking lot and now I was driving Josh home.

  “What did you say?” I asked. I was stalling for time because I was driving at night and because I’d actually been thinking about Bill Mastrovy and Sammi Fine, not about how I was going to sugarcoat the fact that Liz was something of a pain and that I’d barely talked to A.J.

  If Bill Mastrovy really had been present around the time Vanessa McTiernan died, it opened up vast new possibilities that I was sure Paul would explain to me. But even a detective like me—not that there are any detectives like me, which I mean in an anything but arrogant fashion—could muddle over some of the implications of what he’d said.

  Vanessa had died from a reaction to soy sauce, but there was no other food in her digestive tract when she suffocated. She knew she was severely allergic to soy products and would never have willingly eaten any on her own. Would she?

  Now I could put Bill Mastrovy, the man with whom Vanessa had just ended a relationship, in the room the day she died. But he’d looked genuinely freaked out at the prospect that Vanessa had been murdered, like it had never occurred to him before. If he was the killer, he was an awfully good actor as well. The point is, I believed him.

  And that was a problem.

  “I said, what did you think of A.J. and Liz?” Josh repeated. Oh, yeah.

  “Well, I really didn’t get a chance to talk to them that much,” I said. “The music was so loud.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What, uh-oh?”

  “You don’t like them,” Josh said. He sat back in the passenger seat and closed his eyes for a moment. “I was afraid of that.”

  “You’re rushing to judgment.” I was hoping to traverse the remaining three miles in about six seconds, but that would probably mean points on my driver’s license. “All I’m saying is that this wasn’t the best environment for me to get to know them. I’ll see them tomorrow at the guesthouse.”

  “You’ll be in a room with your whole family, only some of whom I can see, and all your guests,” Josh pointed out. “And you’ll be showing a movie. Somehow I don’t think you’re going to have tons of time for my friends tomorrow, either.”

  This was a little touchy. Josh hadn’t introduced me to many of his friends. He’s in the store for twelve hours a day, six days a week. I live at my work and have to be available to my guests at any hour of the day or night, literally. It hasn’t left a lot of time for us to collect a posse.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was preoccupied with talking to Bill Mastrovy tonight. I probably should have said it was a bad night but we never seem to have a good night and I wasn’t even sure until we got there whether or not they were just part of our cover story. Look. I have one night free next week and I suggested to Liz that they come for dinner.” The thought of subjecting myself to Liz’s barrage of questions wasn’t a terribly appetizing prospect, but the thought of disappointing Josh was worse.

  He looked at me without turning his head, like he wanted me to see him looking amused. “You sure?” he said.

  The look on his face was enough. “I’m sure,” I said. But between you and me, I wasn’t the least bit sure.

  Still, the rest of the drive—which lasted six minutes—was not at all tense. We talked about the music mostly from this afternoon at my house, which Josh agreed was awesome (and that was even without the benefit of hearing the vocals) and had some not-awkward silences. I’d worry about dealing with Liz tomorrow. I dropped Josh off, then headed home.

  I hadn’t expected the guesthouse to be entirely quiet when I got back—it was a Saturday night and I’d left instructions with Mom to either bring out the karaoke machine The Swine had foisted upon me a while back or to have a ghost Q&A if Paul and Maxie were willing to float still for it.

  But I was surprised to find every light in the house on, and every guest in the den. It looked like the place had been buzzing while we were out. I wasn’t all that concerned that Melissa was still awake, since it wasn’t a school night, but I was a little peeved that the Levines were teaching her to play poker. At least she was winning. Too bad they weren’t playing for money.

  Berthe and Jesse were watching the poker game, Tessa was playing, and Maureen, bless her, was sitting by herself with her e-reader. A whole library full of books and she was never away from her e-reader.

  Mom was standing behind Liss eyeing the cards, and Dad, floating near the ceiling, was looking at everybody else’s hand. If they were cheating for their granddaughter, they’d get a serious talking to from her mother. That’s me.

  None of that would have seemed terribly out of place, but Paul and Maxie were both at the door the second I walked in.

  “Something’s got to be done,” Paul was babbling as I took in the scene. “This investigation is being jeopardized.”

  “Since when do you care?” Maxie countered. “Until tonight you didn’t even want to hear about who killed Vanessa.”

  “What are you two talking about?” I was trying to keep my tone light so the guests would be in on the idea that the ghosts were there but not concerned about their presence. Even people who come willingly to a haunted guesthouse are skittish around spooks who seem upset.

  I hadn’t even been able to fully brief Paul before Berthe chose that moment to walk into the den and must have assessed our faces. “Is something wrong?” she asked. I handed Paul the voice recorder, which he stashed in his pocket to make it vanish. He sunk into the basement.

  “I’ll be back,” he said. He didn’t even have the good taste to do an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.

  I stood up, back in hostess mode. “No, not at all, Berthe,” I said. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Alison, I don’t want to complain, truly. I’ve loved all the little shows and everything that goes on here at the hotel.” You can tell them a million times it’s a guesthouse; they’ll call it what they want and you’ll agree because the customer is always paying. “And the musical performances have been lovely.”

  “But?” I said.

  “But when it gets a little later in the evening, even nice music is something that can be, well, too much. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Music?” I ask
ed Berthe. “What music is that?”

  Vance was out somewhere and I was pretty sure John Lennon hadn’t come back already.

  “Well, it sounds like it’s coming from the library to me.”

  There was nothing to do but go and look. Maxie came along as I followed Berthe to the library. Berthe led the way, in case I’d forgotten where the rooms were in my own house.

  Sure enough, when we got there, a ukulele was (to Berthe’s eyes) playing itself in one of the armchairs. And making quite a lovely sound, although I couldn’t really recognize the tune.

  Sitting in the armchair, playing the uke, was a ghost who looked to be in his seventies, though quite fit for a person who had passed away. His longish gray hair was pulled back in the requisite aging hippie ponytail, and his eyes sparkled as much as a ghost’s can when he saw us walk in. He stopped playing.

  “I swear I heard it a second ago,” Berthe said. She shook her head and walked out, mumbling something about a hearing test.

  “Ah, good!” the ghost shouted. He had a fairly thick Cockney accent, so understanding him was going to be a challenge, I could see. Hear. You know. “The music brought ya in! Glad to see it. Which one of you is the innkeeper?”

  He didn’t seem especially dangerous, but that didn’t mean anything. Still, I was the proprietor of the place, and with all the musicians passing through here lately, it didn’t seem too risky to admit to it, so I did. “Alison Kerby,” I said. “And you?” I asked, though I was pretty sure that even with the wrinkles, I knew the face.

  “I’m Morrie Chrichton.”

  “The bass player for the Jingles?” I asked. I was a little jaded after meeting Vance McTiernan and John Lennon, but hey, not bad.

  “The same. I heard through the grapevine that Vance McTiernan’s been through here lately. I was hoping you might direct me toward where old Vance might be keeping himself.”

  “He’s not here now,” I told him truthfully. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’d like to strangle the old swine with me bare hands,” Morrie said, still smiling.

  “You’re too late,” Maxie said.