The Hostess With the Ghostess Read online

  “It’s a family thing,” Mom told him. “Did you come here looking for Paul?”

  But before he could answer, Maxie, who is not easily charmed, folded her arms. “You haven’t answered me,” she said. “How do we know you’re really Paul’s brother?”

  “I’m told we look alike,” Richard said.

  “A lot of guys look like you, pal,” Maxie said. “It’s nothing special.”

  “Maxie,” Everett said. Even though Maxie usually defers to him on issues of polite discourse, she shook her head.

  “Anybody could come in here and say he’s Paul’s brother,” she said.

  “Why would they?” Melissa asked.

  That took some of the wind out of Maxie’s sails. She stopped to think. But she wouldn’t let Richard off the hook that easily. “How did you know to look for him here?” she asked.

  Richard shook his head slightly, seemingly to himself. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ve only been . . . like this . . . for a little while, and I don’t really understand it. But I’ve been hearing voices of other—”

  “Ghosts,” Maxie said flatly. She doesn’t mind the word when it’s not used in relation to her.

  Richard nodded. “Yes. And I sort of . . . talked back with my mind.” Paul also has this ability, which I call talking on the Ghosternet. “A voice—not Paul’s—suggested that I look for him here. I was in the area anyway, so I found my way here. I gather from the way you all have reacted that my brother is not here.”

  “No,” I answered. “He hasn’t been here for a few months now. How did you . . . what brought you to this state of existence, Richard?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re a relatively young man. I assume you didn’t revert to a younger age, because Paul was only in his thirties. How did you die?” Sometimes you have to be blunt.

  Richard did not react well; he looked at the ceiling as if it held some existential answer to his situation. “I think we should focus on the issue, which is finding my brother.”

  Richard Harrison did not appear to be the kind of man who would let his emotions overwhelm him, but he said he had been dead for about a week, and that’s not a transition you get over quickly. Paul himself had once told me he’d been stuck in what would become my house for a couple of months after dying here before he’d totally accepted the fact that he was no longer on the same plane of existence as before.

  In Richard’s case, though, the outpouring of emotion was relegated to a slight widening of the eyes and a very quick intake of breath, which was then let out slowly. “I see,” he said. “Would you know where he might have gone?”

  Paul had not been specific about his plans other than to “see the world” now that he had the time, so I couldn’t tell Richard anything about his brother’s whereabouts and told him so. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We haven’t heard a word from him since he left.”

  “Is that unusual?” Richard asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s never left before.”

  Melissa stood up and walked toward Richard, stepping around Everett. Maxie’s husband (because that’s how they were referring to each other now) was standing guard a bit to my right, not really seeming like he thought there was much danger in the area. He did not hold his military rifle, which was just as well because what good would it have done? It wasn’t like Everett could threaten to kill Richard. They were both deceased. Takes the sting out of threats.

  “How can we help you, Mr. Harrison?” she asked.

  Richard looked just a little stunned. He’d clearly pictured this moment differently and was readjusting his reactions. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Maybe we can think of something together,” Dad suggested. He has never stopped fixing things. It bothers him when there’s a problem he can’t solve. “You’ve known him all your life. Where would your brother go?”

  Richard’s face didn’t exactly darken—it would have needed more color to do that—but it did sort of harden into a blank expression. “I honestly wouldn’t know,” he said. “We have not been very close for some time.”

  “Well, Paul’s been dead for five years,” Maxie helpfully mentioned.

  “Yes, but before that,” Richard told her with very little inflection.

  There was a brief awkward silence in the room. As usual, my thirteen-year-old daughter took the reins and became the most responsible adult in the room.

  “Well, we’ll have to find him,” she said simply.

  Everyone turned toward Melissa. Richard, who had appeared in my kitchen less than five minutes before, looked down at her but without the condescension so many adults have for children. “How will we do that?” he asked. He wasn’t humoring her; Liss has a way of making you believe in her.

  “You know Paul was a private investigator, right?” she asked Richard, who nodded with a questioning look on his face. “Well, he taught my mom how to be a detective, and she’ll just do what Paul would do if he were searching for a missing person.” Liss turned toward me and apparently didn’t notice the look of complete panic on my face. “Right, Mom?”

  “Sure,” I said. But my teeth were tightly clenched.

  #

  With five guests (a couple and three singles, which was slightly unusual—I usually don’t get that many singles) in the house taking up four rooms and Richard not needing much in the way of accommodations, it was agreed he would take up residence in one of the empty second-floor guest rooms for the duration of our search for his missing dead brother. And our best hope was that the deceased Paul would hear something about Richard’s search on the Ghosternet and get in touch somehow.

  That’s what life is like in my house. If you call that living.

  Once Richard was ensconced and told that we would need some privacy for a strategy session that he might find upsetting (although to be honest, Richard was dead for a week and already acting like the CEO of a medium-sized investment firm, so his emotional fragility was assumed rather than observed), we regulars at the guesthouse reconvened in the kitchen, the only room on the ground floor that would accommodate all of us even if only three were visible to the general public.

  My first order of business, this being a meeting with no written agenda, was to look at my daughter and ask in as calm a tone as I could muster, “You really think I can find a missing dead man? Why are you raising Richard’s hopes, Liss?”

  She lowered her eyebrows and didn’t make eye contact. “I didn’t want to make him sad,” she said. “He’s been through a lot.”

  “Such a sweet girl,” my mother volunteered. Mom has spent her life dedicated to the proposition that I could never do anything wrong (other than marrying the Swine, but she’s forgiven me), and that principle has been extended to one other person for the past thirteen years.

  “Do you think there was something a little guarded about that guy?” My father, examining the ceiling near the kitchen door by rising up to get close, actually stuck his head through the plaster and then came back out. “I felt like there was something he wasn’t telling you.”

  My father is—or was, depending on one’s perspective—a very trusting man, so that was something of an extreme statement from him. Mom and I exchanged a glance of concern. “What do you mean, Jack?” she asked Dad.

  “He just shows up here and says he’s looking for Paul,” Dad answered. Then he put his head through the kitchen door, and his body twisted up. No doubt he was making an assessment of a serious hole in the ceiling just above the doorway on the den side, where a bullet had dislodged a lot of plaster and done some damage to a beam some months back. Dad never tires of measuring and examining. He leaves nothing to chance in a repair. His face reappeared on our side of the door. “But he says he and Paul weren’t close, and I don’t even know if he showed up here after Paul and Maxie ended up in this house. For a funeral?” Ghosts don’t like the word died. I figure you have to be sensitive to their preferences.

  “Not every family is close,” Mom said. “B
esides, you weren’t here when that happened, Jack.” My father had spent some time avoiding my house because he felt guilty about . . . it’s a long story.

  “Maybe Paul didn’t like him,” Maxie said. “He didn’t talk about his brother much. I didn’t even know his name before today.”

  Everett doesn’t talk a lot. He prefers to stand back and observe, participating only when he feels he has something to contribute. He was floating in the “at-ease” position, not tense but never really relaxed.

  “Maybe they had some kind of falling out in life and now Richard wants to make amends,” he suggested.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Dad said. “But I could be wrong.”

  “We’re getting off the topic,” I reminded everyone. “How are we going to find Paul?”

  There was no immediate response, but I heard a car pulling around the side of the house and into the back, where there is parking space. I looked out the back door. In June the sun doesn’t go down until well after eight, so I’d forgotten how late it was.

  My husband was home.

  Josh Kaplan and I had been married four months earlier at the exact same moment as Maxie and Everett, except that the justice of the peace who married us—who also runs the local gas station and auto repair—could actually see and hear us, and not so much them. Josh and I had known each other, technically, since we were kids but hadn’t been in touch in a long time before we’d reconnected a couple of years before. I was still getting used to the idea of being a wife and having a husband, but it wasn’t an unpleasant adjustment at all. I smiled every time he walked through the door.

  Mom and Melissa looked toward the door. Dad was busy determining the integrity of the ceiling, Everett wouldn’t turn his head unless necessary, and Maxie was Maxie. She probably hadn’t heard the car door shut or the footsteps on the gravel outside because neither of those was the sound of her name.

  Josh opened the back door and stood in the doorway a moment. He looked at me first because he is a great husband and then at Melissa because they actually like each other a lot. It’s not unusual for Mom to be around because she and Liss often cook dinner for us, so he wasn’t surprised to see her either, but he also knows what house he lives in. Then he walked over and kissed me with his “there are people watching” kiss, which is very warm and makes promises to be kept later. When we separated, Josh being careful not to rub his work clothes against me, he headed toward the center island but did not sit on the barstools.

  “Who else is here?” he asked, looking up at the ceiling as if that was going to help. Josh can’t see or hear the ghosts, not even my father, whom he’s known longer than he’s known me. We actually met at the paint store in Asbury Park that Josh’s grandfather Sy owned, Madison Paints—which he sold to Josh decades later—and played together while Dad got supplies and contractor gossip from Sy.

  I gave Josh the rundown, and Liss filled him in on the drama with Richard and the spot we were in, largely thanks to her promise. She is a lovely person and only wants to help, so I couldn’t even be grumpy about that, which put something of a damper on my day. If you can’t be grumpy, what’s the point of being from New Jersey?

  Josh sat down carefully on one of the barstools. Because of the paint store, he comes home often covered in dust, smudges of wallboard compound, and flecks of paint. Normally his first move on arriving home is toward the shower, but this was a situation and he didn’t want to take the time just yet.

  “So how are you going to look for Paul?” he asked.

  There was a small tap at the kitchen door before I could answer, which was lucky since I had no idea how to find Paul on my own. If I’d had Paul to consult . . . well, then the whole enterprise would have been pointless.

  “Yes?” I called toward the door.

  As I’d suspected, one of my guests was standing outside the swinging door. “Alison,” called Vanessa DiSica, who with her husband, Eduardo, had been occupying the downstairs guest room, my largest, since Tuesday. “I don’t want to bother you.”

  I stood and walked to the door. I didn’t want to push it open for fear of hitting Vanessa in the face but got close enough to speak in a normal tone. “No trouble at all,” I said. “Come in.”

  Vanessa pushed the door toward me gingerly, no doubt concerned as I had been, but I stood back far enough that the door wouldn’t hit anyone but Dad, who wouldn’t notice. She walked into the kitchen and nodded hello to Melissa and Josh. She hadn’t seen my mother before, so introductions were made. No sense mentioning the three dead people in the room; even in a haunted guesthouse, it tends to dampen a civilian’s mood. Except the ones who find it exciting.

  “How can I help you, Vanessa?” I asked.

  “I heard some noises right above our room,” she answered. “Now, I realize this is a busy hotel”—there was no point in explaining the difference between a hotel and a guesthouse because she probably didn’t care and was just using the most familiar word—“but this sounded a little weird.”

  My mind immediately did a mental inventory of who would be in the room directly above the one Vanessa and Eduardo were sharing, and the answer didn’t really thrill me.

  “There’s nobody in that room,” Maxie said. Maxie, wary of strangers, usually keeps away from the guests except during spook shows and stays very aware of where everyone is housed so she can avoid them.

  “How were the sounds strange?” I asked, not acknowledging Maxie, although I had reached the same conclusion as she had—there was no guest in that room. My first thought had been that it was Richard moving something around, but his designated area (not that he needed much in the way of space) was at the opposite end of the house.

  “I don’t know,” Vanessa answered, which was of no help whatsoever. “It sounded like . . . stretching.”

  Melissa and I exchanged a look. “Stretching?” she asked. It seemed a reasonable question at the time.

  Vanessa nodded. “I can’t be more helpful than that. You know, like if you had a really big elastic band or one of those colored strips they use for exercising and you pulled it really hard? It sounded like that.”

  “Well, let’s check it out,” I said. I stood and picked up a flashlight from one of the drawers in the island. I have no idea what I thought I was going to do with that; the electrical power was on all over the house.

  Josh didn’t say anything, but he was right behind me as I walked out of the kitchen and toward the front room, where the stairs to the second floor are located. There was no point in telling Melissa not to follow, so he was watching out for her as well. Anything within driving distance of danger gets Josh quiet and focused; he was in protection mode. My mother, I noticed, stayed behind in the kitchen, which was actually exactly what I wanted her to do. No doubt Maxie was through the ceiling—literally—and on her way to the room in question as we approached.

  When we reached the stairway, which is directly to the right of the door to Vanessa’s room, I stopped and listened. “Do you hear it now?” I asked Vanessa, who was clearly not going to follow us upstairs and was huddled in her doorway. Again, that was fine with me.

  She shook her head. “But it was real, I promise.”

  “I have no doubt of that, Vanessa,” I assured her. “Just wait right here.”

  She did not argue.

  Sure enough, I saw Maxie floating across the hallway at the top of the stairs and making her way into the room in question, which was at the far left side of the upper corridor. That gave me a little confidence, but I still let Josh lead the charge up the stairs and kept Melissa behind me. I love Josh dearly, but if he wants to protect the little woman against something unknown, I’m not going to argue with him.

  We didn’t exactly rush up the stairs. Once at the landing, the three of us made a left turn and walked to the door in question. Josh reached over and turned the knob, but I was well aware that the door, leading to a room that was not currently occupied, would be locked. I have a skeleton key for the house that
I’m never without, so I fished it out of my pocket, pushed it into the lock, and turned the key.

  Maxie hadn’t come out, which was odd. It’s a small room. If there were something scary inside, she’d have come out to warn us. If there wasn’t, she’d come out to laugh at me for being such a coward. Maxie and I have an interesting relationship.

  The door opened into the room, so I just let go of the knob and let it swing open. My father keeps all the hinges oiled, so there was no ominous creak. Dad is a wizard with WD-40.

  Josh didn’t give me the chance to go inside first and really hadn’t had to worry about much protest on my part. I wasn’t scared, exactly. You get used to hearing noises in an old house, and when you’re inured with the idea of ghosts floating around willy-nilly, the expectation for odd noises rises a bit. But there was something about the stretching noise—which I hadn’t heard—that was a little off, and in my house when something’s a little off, that can mean pretty much anything.

  Josh walked inside, and I saw his head swivel from one side to the other. He turned and looked at me in the doorway. “I don’t see anything,” he said. “Doesn’t mean nothing’s here.” He stood to one side, leaving me a path because he was clearly convinced there wasn’t any danger present in the room.

  As it turned out, that was accurate depending on your definition of the word danger. Maxie was hovering around the ceiling, not zipping around and around the perimeter like she would have been if she were angry or excited. She looked down at me, and her mouth flattened out.

  “Nothing,” she said. “No stretching stuff I can see.”

  Melissa was literally pushing at my back, and since Maxie had given the room her seal of approval, I let my daughter squeeze by me. She stood as close to the center of the room as she could (the bed took up much of the floor space) and then looked up. “Weird,” she said.

  “What?” I asked. I didn’t see anything but Maxie in the direction Liss was looking.

  “I smell something,” my daughter answered. “Do you?”