The Question of the Dead Mistress Read online

  The response came without any hesitation. The woman might have anticipated the question and prepared an answer in advance.

  “ ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,’ ” she said.

  It was possible I was talking to a homicidal maniac.

  twenty

  “Melanie Mason’s ghost talked to you about me?” Ms. Washburn sat on a very functional sofa I recognized from having once thumbed through an Ikea catalog. “She said she was going to kill me?”

  I had insisted Mike the taxicab driver take me to Ms. Washburn’s apartment after the purported voice of Melanie Mason had stopped speaking. It seemed the revelation of her favorite Beatles song had been her last communication, as we had heard nothing from her after that. Mike had said it was important to let Ms. Washburn know we were on the way because it was late in the evening and she might, as he put it, “be sleeping or something she doesn’t want us to see.”

  It was the first time I had visited Ms. Washburn’s residence. The apartment was in a complex of similar units and was a clean, simple and adequate shelter. She had moved here after divorcing her ex-husband, Simon Taylor.

  Ms. Washburn had actually asked two questions, but I chose to respond to the second exclusively, assuming my previous statement had answered the first. I shook my head. “She did not say she was going to kill you.”

  “That’s true,” Mike agreed. “She said she could kill you without coming to Samuel’s house, but she never said she was going to.”

  “That’s very comforting.” I am reasonably certain Ms. Washburn meant that comment sarcastically. I was standing next to the sofa on which she was sitting and Mike had leaned against the jamb of the nearest door, one that led to another room I could only assume was Ms. Washburn’s bedroom. That was his typical stance; he liked to stay on his feet and keep a vantage point taking in the whole room. “Why does she want to kill anyone?”

  Ms. Washburn has a penchant for asking questions about an interaction that I cannot definitely answer. It is one of the reasons I prefer to have her along on interviews. She will ask about the aspects of an issue that would not occur to me.

  “I did not ask that question, but she was quite clear in communicating that we should cease our research into Virginia Fontaine’s question,” I said. “That appeared to be the message.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mike said. “That was the message.”

  Ms. Washburn looked at my hand, which was resting on the arm of the sofa near her own. Her gaze seemed to follow up my arm to my face and when she looked at me her expression had a tinge of disappointment in it. It was not the usual smile she presents when she looks at me. I was confused.

  “Then maybe we should stop,” Ms. Washburn said.

  That suggestion added to my astonishment. Ms. Washburn had never for a moment considered backing away from a question before, even when her own safety had been threatened. Now she was saying the research into Brett Fontaine’s murder should not be continued.

  “It is never a good idea to stop because someone wants us to stop,” I said. “Surely this means we are getting close to a truth that the murderer or murderers would prefer not be disclosed.”

  Ms. Washburn withdrew her hand from the arm of the sofa. “That’s the point,” she said. “A ghost is telling us to quit the investigation. She says she’s the killer. It’s not somebody who can be caught or charged. It’s someone who has the ability to come and kill us with impunity. This isn’t like anything we’ve ever faced before, Samuel.”

  I was so stunned that I do not even know the number of seconds before I could find a way to respond. “A ghost?” I said. “You believe this was really the spirit of Melanie Mason contacting me in the cemetery? I am surprised, Ms. Washburn.”

  She turned her head so as to be facing away from me. “I know what you think, Samuel, but from the beginning of this question we’ve disagreed. I am certain there are ghosts and you’re certain there aren’t. I wish this experience had changed your mind, but apparently you won’t even believe your own eyes.”

  “We did not see anything at all,” I said. “There was nothing to believe.”

  “Your own ears, then. You heard her voice.”

  The conversation in which I was engaged was disturbing on a number of levels. First, it is always difficult when Ms. Washburn and I disagree seriously because I trust her judgment and believe she has my best interests at heart. With the new aspect of our relationship, it was additionally worrisome because now I was arguing with a woman for whom I had complex and unfamiliar feelings. But the idea that Ms. Washburn was so willing to perpetuate an unproven, unscientific, non-empirical theory like the existence of ghosts at the expense of a question we were researching was especially shocking to my system. I felt my left hand, the one not resting on the sofa, begin to move involuntarily. I tried to control the motion before Ms. Washburn, who luckily was looking in the opposite direction, could notice it.

  My next words would be pivotal in the direction of this discussion so I took great pains to choose them carefully. “I believe that what we heard in the cemetery is easily explained without the assumption that an undead spirit was talking,” I said. Before Ms. Washburn could respond I looked at Mike the taxicab driver. “Mike, you told me on the drive here that you saw something on the ground near Melanie Mason’s grave. What was it?”

  In the interest of full candor, Mike had already explained his thoughts on this subject. But I wanted Ms. Washburn to hear what he had to say from him and not me. She clearly believed that my judgment was prejudiced in the area of ghosts, and it would have been possible if there were even the slightest possibility that such beings exist.

  “It was very well hidden, I’ll give them that,” Mike answered. “But what I found was a little round disc, covered in wire mesh, that I think covered a small audio speaker. There were probably a lot of them in that area and I think they connected to a wireless transmitter of some kind that sent the sound from a remote location not too far away. There might have been cameras near the grave so they could see us, or they were close enough and had the right night vision equipment to see us in the dark.”

  Ms. Washburn looked at Mike and I believed—although she has since denied it—that I saw tears in her eyes. “You too?” she said.

  “I’m just telling you what I saw.”

  “No, you’re also making guesses about transmitters and night vision equipment and hidden cameras,” Ms. Washburn said. She stood up but did not move toward either Mike or me. “That’s a level of paranoia I wouldn’t have expected from you.”

  I hardly believed Mike’s analysis was evidence of mental illness. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said, and continued to lean against the doorjamb.

  Ms. Washburn shook her head. “I’m not trying to insult you, Mike,” she said. She walked to the door and addressed him directly. “But don’t you see you’re doing the same thing to me? When you and Samuel dismiss my ideas out of hand, you’re saying I don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re not respecting my intelligence and you’re pretty much ridiculing me for thinking a different way. And that hurts.”

  Mike took a moment but did not change his expression. “Janet, in the part of Afghanistan where I was stationed most of the people believe in the jinn, kind of a genie, something you can sort of wish to and sometimes your wish will be granted. We joked about it when we were back at the base but over my three tours, I have to tell you, I saw some stuff happen that I can’t explain to this day.” He paused and took a breath. Ms. Washburn looked up at him. “So when I tell you that I saw something that could have been part of a speaker system in the ground around that grave, I’m here to tell you that’s what I saw. It’s not because I believe or don’t believe in anything. It’s because I found it in the ground.”

  Very quietly, Ms. Washburn asked, “What did you see in Afghanistan?”

  Mike’s smile was not a typical one. “Th
at’s a story for another day.”

  Ms. Washburn nodded and walked back toward me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was so upset thinking a ghost was after me personally that I took it out on you and I shouldn’t have. Please forgive me, Mike.”

  He barely twitched an eyebrow. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  Ms. Washburn smiled at Mike, turned toward me, and held out her hand, which I realized she wanted me to take. I held hers in mine gently. This was not like a business handshake. I was getting used to the gesture but did not always understand its emotional significance. This time, however, I did. Ms. Washburn was reaffirming my special status in her life. I wondered how I should feel about that and decided to think about it later when I got home. It would be quieter there.

  “Samuel,” Ms. Washburn said. “I need to apologize to you too. I’ve been cranky and I had no legitimate reason to be. Sometimes I expect more of you than I should, or expect it sooner than I should, because you’re always progressing. I can’t dictate when you’ll grow, or how. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  I honestly did not understand the supposed offense to which Ms. Washburn was alluding, nor did I understand her assertion that I was growing, as I was a mature adult. But I felt it was best to say the same thing as Mike because it had gotten a positive reaction for him. “There’s nothing to forgive,” I said.

  Ms. Washburn blew a little air out, not quite a sigh but almost a laugh. If she had done so more loudly it would have been accurate to say she had snorted. “Thank you, Samuel,” she said. “The question now is, how seriously do we take this ghost’s threat?”

  I pondered whether repeating that ghosts do not exist would be a worthwhile tactic and rejected it. Perhaps Ms. Washburn was speaking figuratively. “I think we should take any threat seriously,” I said. “Will you feel unsafe staying in your apartment tonight?”

  Mike’s eyebrows rose briefly.

  “Maybe,” Ms. Washburn said. “But I don’t have family in the area and I’m not going to let this nut job drive me into a hotel. You don’t pay me enough.”

  “Perhaps you could stay in my attic apartment for the duration of this question,” I suggested. It seemed the most logical choice available to us. “We might do best if we were in constant contact until we know what this encounter at the cemetery means.”

  This time Mike’s eyebrows rose and stayed risen. But he remained silent.

  Ms. Washburn’s eyes looked at my face carefully. “Do you know what you’re suggesting, Samuel?” she asked. “I’ve seen your apartment, and there is only one bed.”

  “There is a very comfortable sofa in the den,” I told her. “I will be glad to use that until such time as we can resume our normal arrangements.”

  “I have a cot in my place, Janet,” Mike the taxicab driver suggested.

  “I think I’ll take Samuel up on his offer, thanks,” she answered. “But I do appreciate your saying that.”

  “No big,” Mike said.

  “I’ll need to put a few things in a bag,” Ms. Washburn said. She began to walk toward Mike, who moved out of the doorway leading to her bedroom, then stopped and looked at me. “What’s our plan in the morning?” she asked.

  “I think we need to visit two police departments and one cemetery superintendent,” I said.

  twenty-one

  “I doubt anyone has been installing sophisticated electronics on our grounds without my knowledge.” Stephen Manfred, superintendent of the Hillsdale Cemetery, was a thin man in a business suit. He appeared to be roughly sixty years old but had a full head of brown hair I suspected was not currently displaying its natural color. “That kind of underground construction would require permits and those permits would have to come through me.” I assumed he meant that he had the authority to grant or seek out those government documents and not that he would pass them through his body.

  Ms. Washburn, Manfred, and I were walking from the path where Mike had parked his taxicab the night before toward the headstone marking Melanie Mason’s grave. Mike had given me instructions regarding the locations where I should seek out the wire mesh indicators that audio speakers were being used in the area. It would still be difficult to find such small mechanisms under full-grown and groomed grass.

  “I expect that the people who did this did not ask you for permission.” We reached the gravesite. I knelt in the spot I thought I’d seen Mike do the same the previous night. Very carefully I ran my right hand over the grass, bending back the blades so the soil beneath could be seen. Initially I did not see the type of mechanism Mike had described. “I believe the necessary electronics are small and wireless, making them fairly easy to install surreptitiously.”

  Ms. Washburn did not kneel beside me to look, which was certainly acceptable. This was a very delicate search. Having two people do it might actually make the task more difficult. She stood with Manfred to my left and behind me.

  “To get any decent level of sound quality, wouldn’t that kind of thing be awfully expensive?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter because the things aren’t there,” Manfred insisted. “There’s no paperwork on it at all.”

  “It would be a relatively high-end system, yes,” I told Ms. Washburn as I meticulously moved my hand slowly over the grass and watched its progress. “I imagine the people who did this had a decent amount of money to spend and are hoping to do better.”

  “You think this is all about money?” Ms. Washburn said.

  “Most killings, even robberies gone wrong in the street, are about money or domestic issues,” I said without citing the statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that had helped me form that understanding. “William Klein’s death might have been an accident or it might have been about his wife, but Brett Fontaine’s was almost certainly about money. Ah!”

  My fingers felt the small disc before I saw it. It was as Mike had said: round, flat, and covered in the kind of wire mesh one sees on a microphone head. It couldn’t have been more than four centimeters in diameter and it was planted flush with the ground. No one who wasn’t searching for the mechanism would have made note of it. I mentally noted Mike’s ability to observe and notice things. I had asked him to join the staff at Questions Answered (although it would have been difficult to find the funds to pay him a salary in addition to Ms. Washburn’s and my own) but Mike preferred driving his taxicab, saying he enjoyed the rides and never knew what the next day would bring.

  I pulled lightly on the disc but it was difficult for my fingers to close on its sides because it had embedded itself very snugly in the plot of earth. I did manage to pull on it successfully after seven attempts and it was not hard to extract the disc—and what was under it—from the ground.

  “What’s that?” Manfred asked. He sounded shocked.

  I stood and extended my hand for him and Ms. Washburn to see the mechanism. Underneath the disc I had pulled from the ground was a short wire which no doubt acted as the sensor for the audio signal being sent from a remote location nearby. “It is a receiver and an amplifier,” I said. “Someone broadcast a voice to this gravesite from an area near here.”

  Ms. Washburn turned to look behind her, which appears to be the natural impulse for someone who feels she is being watched. “Where?” she asked.

  “It is difficult to say at this moment,” I told her. “I will have to do some research to determine the range of a device like this one.” I looked toward Manfred. “Is there Wi-Fi access in the cemetery?”

  “Of course not,” he answered. “This is not a coffee shop.”

  “But your office is less than three hundred yards away,” I noted. “Do you have Wi-Fi there?”

  “Sure.”

  “They could be transmitting through that signal,” I mused aloud.

  “It can’t be,” Manfred insisted. “There’s no authorization.”

  “I believe whoeve
r planted this device installed others as well,” I said. I knelt again and began a search approximately one foot to the left of the area where I had discovered the disc. “In my opinion they are in violation of your regulations, Mr. Manfred.”

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. His head was shaking at the very thought. The fact that a man had been murdered did not seem as astonishing to him as an infraction of his cemetery’s stated rules.

  Within twenty-three minutes I had located four more devices identical to the one I had first unearthed. I left them in their positions so as not to alarm the people who had made such an elaborate effort to convince us—and no doubt others—that Melanie Mason was speaking from another realm of existence. One of the devices was embedded in a tree behind the gravestone. I assumed there were a number of others in the immediate vicinity that I did not uncover, as the sound the night before was not localized. It had not seemed to emanate strictly from beneath my feet.

  Ms. Washburn and I returned to the cemetery office with Manfred, thanked him for his time, and got back into Ms. Washburn’s Kia Spectra to begin the next leg of our day’s travels. I sat beside her as she drove and this time in the car her silence seemed more distant than usual; it was not simply about paying attention to the road. In fact, once I had to point out to Ms. Washburn that a traffic light had changed its signal from red to green.

  When we were stopped in a similar situation I asked, “Is something bothering you, Ms. Washburn?” It is not usually my habit to start a conversation in the car but her expression was somewhat troublesome to me. It seemed like she was preoccupied with a topic other than safety behind the wheel.

  “I’m okay, Samuel.” The light illuminated green and she began to drive again.

  I said nothing more until Ms. Washburn had parked the Kia Spectra in the parking lot of the Union Police Department. Detective Monroe, when we’d telephoned, had flatly refused to see us so we bypassed that part of our planned agenda and went directly to the authorities who would have records of the automobile accident that claimed Melanie Mason’s life.