Ghost in the Wind Read online

  Now, Paul sort of stared at me. I’m not sure he understood that I was serious, but when Maxie dropped down through the ceiling with Everett in tow, he spoke to her and not to me. “Alison is preparing a dinner party when there’s a case to solve,” he said. He shook his head incredulously and seemed to be appealing to Maxie’s (!) common sense.

  “Uh-huh,” was the answer he got. He looked toward the ceiling but sank down into the floor and vanished.

  Maxie followed me into the den, where I started to clear one of the side tables, the one on wheels. “Hey. Doesn’t dinner get taken care of in the kitchen?” she demanded.

  “Maxie,” Everett said. “There clearly is a plan of action. Let the Ghost Lady work it out at her own pace.” There are days I want to thank the heavens for Everett, but since he’s dead, that seems somehow cruel. It’s hard to explain.

  “Have either of you guys seen a dog around the property?” I asked. “I’ve been sneezing my brains out for days and I thought I heard some howling at night.”

  Maxie, for all her posturing and attitude, is a remarkably poor liar. She looked at Everett, and even as he said, “I have not seen a dog here,” which I’m sure was true, I could tell Maxie was trying to come up with an answer that I wanted to hear.

  So I watched her as I rolled the newly cleared side table to the center of the den and opened the leaves on each side to make a dining table that we’d use tonight. I was pretty sure there was a tablecloth in the sideboard. I probably hadn’t used it since I’d moved in two years ago, but this was an occasion, right?

  “Um . . . I don’t know anything about that,” Maxie said. Her facial expression, on the other hand, was screaming, “I know all about that!”

  “Okay, Malone, you’re busted. What do you know?”

  “I just told you I don’t know anything. Is there going to be an afternoon show today? Everett wants to try out a new bit where he does a military fitness workout in midair.” This appeared to be news to Everett, who regarded Maxie with a quizzical look.

  “And how are the guests going to see that?” I asked her.

  “We haven’t worked out all the details yet.”

  “The dog, Maxie. Is there a lost dog somewhere outside? If there is, we should see if it has tags and call the owner, or get it to a vet to check out before we call a shelter. So stop stammering about how you don’t know anything and tell me what you know.”

  “Honest, I don’t know of any lost dog,” Maxie said.

  I stopped. What was she really saying? “Maxie . . .”

  “Be back for the show. Come on, Everett!” She started to drag him out through the wall and toward the shed in the back, but Paul rose back out of the basement, apparently remembering what he’d needed from her before my cavalier attitude had so offended his sense of purpose.

  “Maxie!” he said, stopping her escape attempt. “Have you got a possible location for Jeremy Bensinger yet?”

  “Jeez!” She looked disgusted. “Do I have to do everything around here?”

  “We did ask you to find him,” Paul reminded her. I wanted to get to the bottom of the dog situation, whatever it was.

  “He hasn’t left the country,” she said without referring to the laptop, which I don’t think she had with her. “He hasn’t boarded an airplane for anywhere. If you’re sure he’s not staying in his apartment, I’d look for a friend or a girlfriend or something, but you haven’t given me a name to research. Okay, so bye! Come on, Everett! I’m not waiting for you!” And she tugged on his arm again.

  Everett, who has a sense of humor that he doesn’t let show often enough, let it look like she was pulling him against his will and said, “Yes, ma’am,” as he went. But he was smiling. Either it’s true about opposites attracting or they’re not as opposite as they seem. I didn’t have time to think about that.

  So there was something going on with a dog near my house. I’d be going to pick up Melissa in an hour. That would be the time to grill—discuss it with—her. But it wouldn’t be easy; my daughter is a tough nut to crack.

  Because I am destined never to spend more than three consecutive seconds alone, Vance McTiernan wailed again. “She’s dead!” We’d forgotten that he was the grieving party here.

  “You knew her for one night forty years ago,” I told him. “You can’t be this upset.”

  He regarded me with something he wanted to feel like contempt but was playing more like mild irritation. “Have you no pity?”

  “I’m not heartless, but I think this is about something else, Vance.”

  “Alison,” Paul attempted. “Please. Jeremy.”

  Vance wasn’t listening to him, either. He decided to change topics. “You know, love, what you said about me to that lady policeman really cut to the quick.”

  The tablecloth had, as might be expected, folds and wrinkles in it from the previous presidential administration, which annoyed me despite its predictability. I like using an iron as much as I like hearing from my ex-husband, invariably explaining why the child support check will be just a little late again.

  “It’s always about you, isn’t it, Vance?” I shot back. “You know, when you first showed up and told me your sad tale I thought you really were torn up about your daughter’s death and wanted only justice for her. I believed the songs you wrote—or claim you wrote—and the shows you put on. But everything you do is about making sure everybody knows what a great guy Vance McTiernan is, and that sort of cuts the nobility out of it.” I flared the tablecloth out over the table, thinking that maybe I could just put enough heavy things on it to flatten it out. But that didn’t seem terribly plausible once I got a good look. Where had I put the iron?

  “You believe that?” I wasn’t looking at Vance but he sounded legitimately hurt. “You really think I didn’t care about Nessa?”

  I exhaled. “I honestly don’t know, Vance. I just know my life was a lot less complicated when you were just a voice on an old piece of vinyl. I—”

  “No need, love,” Vance cut me off. “If that’s what you think of me, I’ll sod off.” And before I could blink, he was no longer in the room.

  “I’ll sod off”? What had that meant? Was he going off to lick his wounds or was he leaving and never coming back?

  For reasons I couldn’t quite explain, it mattered to me. Even now, with all he’d put me through and all the lies, I didn’t want to end things with Vance McTiernan on bad terms. The lyrics to “On My Own,” an early Jingles song, kept playing over in my head all of a sudden:

  Don’t leave me

  On my own

  Even now

  Not alone

  Okay, so it was an early effort, but if you’ve heard the original recording, you know how affecting the plaintive singing became in Vance’s capable throat. I called to him, not loudly, a couple of times, but there was no response.

  Suddenly, finding the right dishes for tonight didn’t seem all that urgent.

  None of the guests required anything and it seemed that I’d be left to ponder my possible (okay, probable) rudeness toward Vance and its repercussions for a while, but Paul followed as I was heading up the stairs to get another allergy pill from my bathroom medicine cabinet. I stopped on the stairs and looked at him.

  “What do you know about a dog?” I asked him.

  “What dog?” he asked back. “Is this related to the Mastrovy murder or Vanessa’s overdose?”

  “Neither. It’s related to my sneezing and watery eyes.”

  “I don’t know anything about a dog,” Paul said. “Nor should you be concentrating on that right now. We have too many suspects and not enough facts. The only person left whom we can locate is Sammi Fine, and I don’t think we’ve explored her motives enough yet. Do you have time to see her again before your dinner party?”

  “You’re going to get mad at me for having company for dinner? What have
you been up to, Sherlock? Have you figured out the green fibers?”

  Paul looked away. “I don’t have a strong theory yet.”

  “Let me know when you do,” I said, and went upstairs for some Allegra.

  But Paul, cognizant that he shouldn’t follow me, was still waiting when I came back down just a minute later. “Alison,” he said. “Please.”

  I probably rolled my eyes like Melissa. “Okay,” I told Paul. “But if I talk to Sammi again, will you leave me alone for this dinner?”

  He actually crossed his heart with his finger. “You’ll never even know I’m here,” he said.

  * * *

  Sammi Fine agreed to meet me at a Starbucks around the corner from her office. I got a bottle of water and Sammi found a double chocolate chip muffin to go with an iced latte.

  “I don’t know any more than I told you already,” she said, just picking at the muffin. Her mood was more somber than emotional now; she’d had a couple of days to absorb Bill’s death. “I spoke to the cops. They asked me all the questions. What’s left?”

  I dove in. I had just enough time to get back and pick up Liss after a short interview, so directness was key. “Where were you on Sunday night?” I asked.

  She didn’t react; she’d been asked by McElone before. “I was home, watching Game of Thrones,” she said. “Want to know who got knifed on that show? That I can tell you. And no, nobody was with me. If I was a smart killer, I’d have worked out an alibi.”

  Maybe I could play one suspect against another. You can sometimes get people to say things they shouldn’t if you’re not asking about them. “What do you know about Vanessa’s brother, Jeremy?” I asked.

  “He used to come around to rehearsals and some gigs,” Sammi said. “Thought Vanessa was Joan Jett or something. Told me her staring off into space was her ‘communicating with her muse.’ Seriously. I mean, she had an okay voice but he thought he was going to make millions off of her.”

  “He was going to make millions?” Jeremy’s line had been all about how Vanessa was a star-in-waiting and how cruel it was that it had been robbed from her. “How did he factor in her career?”

  “He was, like, her manager or something,” Sammi told me. She picked a chocolate chip out of the muffin and ate it somewhat daintily. “He shopped her record around and got Vinyl Records interested enough to sign her, but Vanessa was going to turn it down, Bill said.”

  Turn it down? First I was hearing about that. “Why?”

  “She used to say fame and success had broken her family and she thought it destroyed her father.” Sammi took a sip of her latte, which she seemed to think was too sweet. “Said she made the music for herself and her friends. She wanted to distribute it for nothing. But Jeremy and Bill were trying to talk her out of that.”

  “Jeremy and Bill? Together?”

  “You didn’t know this? Yeah. Jeremy produced the record, put his heart into it when all Vanessa was doing was singing. She wrote a couple of the tracks, but mostly it was Bill. Then Jeremy said he’d written four songs that Bill knew were his and they started to fight about it. Until then, they’d been thick as thieves, those two.”

  “How about after Vanessa died?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Jeremy stopped coming to the gigs and Bill and I were a thing—or at least I thought we were. Now I don’t know anything. Can you ever know anything?”

  “Actually, I’m starting to think I can.” I thanked Sammi for her time and left. I had a daughter to retrieve and a report to make to Paul.

  When I picked Melissa up from school, I was feeling less allergic, but I knew that effect would last roughly until I got home. I didn’t tell Melissa about the progress in the case because I had a question for her.

  “Have you seen a dog around?”

  “Why, have you?” she responded. It was a cagey answer. Melissa loves dogs and I suspected that if I admitted that I hadn’t actually seen a dog, she’d fall back on flat-out denial.

  “No, but I’ve certainly inhaled some of one,” I told her as we drove through what we unironically referred to as Harbor Haven’s “downtown,” the two-block strip of little shops and Phyllis’s Chronicle office. “If you know about a dog living near our house, you need to tell me about it. Right now.”

  “A dog living near our house?” she repeated.

  “Don’t divert,” I warned. “I’m asking you directly. And you know we don’t lie to each other.” We’ve been very careful about that all her life. I’m proud to say I haven’t lied to my daughter for quite a while, possibly since the Santa Claus debacle of five years earlier.

  “There’s no dog I know about living on our land,” she said. There was no waver in her voice.

  Wow. That took the wind out of my suspicious sails because I trusted her. “Any other ideas why I’m sneezing and itching like this?” I’d like to make it clear that I wasn’t actually asking my daughter but stating the problem out loud, rhetorically.

  “Maybe somebody’s wearing that perfume Grandma used to use,” Melissa suggested. She’s heard the family lore and I supposed it was possible that one of the guests was wearing White Shoulders . . .

  There wasn’t much to say after that. So I told her about my various adventures. She asked me if I trusted Sammi and I said I didn’t know. Because I didn’t know. But she had seemed convincing.

  The immediate order of business upon arriving home was the afternoon spook show, at which I would undoubtedly have to explain to a disappointed group of guests why I had failed them yet again and was therefore unable to produce Vance for a song or two at their last official gathering. It had not been my best week as an innkeeper or an investigator.

  Liss went up to her room to drop off her backpack and prepare for the “flying girl” sequence and I went into the kitchen to prep it for the cooking she and Mom would be doing for tonight’s dinner. With Josh’s friends coming, there was no way I’d trust my own “skills” as a chef with the evening’s meal.

  And so I was the first one to find the small kitchen knife on the counter. The one that didn’t belong in my block with the other knives I didn’t use. The one with a fixed blade that was sharp on one side.

  The one that looked like the utility knife that had killed Bill Mastrovy.

  Was someone making a threat?

  I took in a strong breath and called for Vance. But he didn’t come.

  So I called Paul, and he did.

  Twenty-seven

  “How did you marinate this chicken?” Liz Seger asked.

  I had, personally, not marinated the chicken, so I turned toward Melissa, sitting very straight in her dining room chair (which was really a den chair, since this was the first time we’d used the space as a real dining room) and said, “What did you use?”

  “Well, I can’t tell everything because Grandma says it’s a secret family recipe,” Liss said as Liz’s eyes widened a bit. “But it had to marinate for at least an hour in salad dressing, lemon juice and two other ingredients, and I covered the bowl with plastic wrap to hold all the flavor in.”

  Liz’s jaw dropped. “You cooked this?” she said to Melissa. “Really?”

  Usually when an adult condescends to my daughter, I either turn my rapier wit on her (it’s usually a woman, and I’m sorry about that but it’s true) or better yet, let Melissa do so herself. But this was a special circumstance: I’d vowed against all odds to do nothing tonight but be especially nice to Liz.

  I suppose I should back up: After I found the knife on the kitchen counter, Paul appeared in a nanosecond of my shouting his name, perhaps thinking someone had already used it on me. We’d discussed the object, which I had been cool-headed enough not to touch, and he said the best thing to do was to call McElone immediately. I saw the logic in that, hit speed dial (that’s right; I have the local police lieutenant on speed dial) and told the lieutenant about my disc
overy.

  She thought the culprit was indeed sending a message, and although she felt it would be fruitless, sent a uniformed officer to very carefully pick up the knife (which she told me not to touch despite my informing her of my cool-headedness at not doing so) and bring it back for official examination.

  Other than that, McElone added, “The only thing to do is continue on as if nothing had happened. Maybe that’s how we can smoke this person out.”

  Lovely. A killer was loose in my house and the cops wanted to put me, my daughter and my guests at risk in order to “smoke this person out.” There was a flaw in the logic, and I was beginning to think it was me.

  Paul agreed with the lieutenant—he’s always taking her side—and asked what I’d had planned for the rest of the day. I told him the afternoon spook show and then dinner with Josh, A.J. and Liz. Mom had offered to take Melissa home with her after preparing the meal, leaving me with my boyfriend and his friends, but anyone who wants to get to know me had better get to know my daughter, so I declined her offer.

  Once Mom heard about the knife (from Paul), she insisted on leaving my father behind at the house “in case there’s trouble.” So although the other three adults at the table didn’t know it, the dining room was getting pretty crowded, since Paul, Maxie and Dad were all present. I’d given Paul a pass on his promise to stay away during the dinner because, you know, killer loose in the house and all that. Paul looked interested, Dad looked concerned and Maxie was moving things around behind A.J. and Liz just to annoy me and amuse Melissa.

  “Yes,” Melissa told Liz. “I’ve been learning cooking from my grandmother for a while now.” She gave me a funny look, which translated into why aren’t you using your rapier wit on her? Or something to that effect.

  “From your grandmother?” Liz said, pushing the point. “Not your mom?”

  Josh put down his water glass and motioned toward his plate. “It’s really delicious, Melissa. Thank you for cooking tonight.” Definite boyfriend points there.