Ghost in the Wind Read online

  “Of course I’m not all right!” she wailed. “That nut was holding a knife to my throat and Alison told him to go ahead and kill me!”

  “I didn’t go quite that far,” I muttered. Josh put his arm around me and made a noise that was trying not to be a laugh.

  Suddenly the room was a beehive: Dad emerged from the front room, saying he’d found Berthe’s cell in the movie room and had texted McElone, who would no doubt be calling me any second.

  Morrie floated in from the beach side, hands on hips. “Where the hell’d you go, mate?” he admonished Vance. “I thought we was getting somewhere.”

  Melissa showed up in the doorway and assessed the scene: Paul finishing up tying Jeremy’s hands, Morrie floating over a smiling Vance, Josh holding me close and A.J. helping Liz off the floor with one hand.

  “And I thought Bruce Willis was busy,” she said.

  Twenty-eight

  When Lieutenant Anita McElone comes to my house these days, it is with less anxiety than she used to show, but no more joy. Of course, coming to deal with the aftermath of a murder isn’t often call for dancing, but McElone seems to take out her irritation on the house. She acknowledges the ghosts, but isn’t happy about it.

  “So based on the initial interrogation, what I’ve got is that your Mr. Bensinger forced soy sauce down his sister’s throat because she was going to pass on a big money contract,” she said to me while the group of us—me, Dad, Paul, Morrie, Vance, Maxie, Josh and Melissa (since A.J. and Liz had left after McElone okayed it)—sat in the movie room, having once again cut short a screening for the guests, who appeared somewhat discouragingly to be getting used to it.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “From what he was saying before you got here, he held a gun on her and made her drink it. Which is somehow even colder.”

  McElone nodded at that. “Then he followed Bill Mastrovy from his apartment to here and knifed him because Mastrovy, once he knew Jeremy had killed his sister, was going to turn him in. But he didn’t want the cops involved, so he was coming here to tell you. Is that it?”

  “That’s what I gather,” I answered. “Jeremy thought if he could hold out long enough to get the record money he could fly to some cushy country without an extradition treaty and lie on a beach. On a first album. That’s some serious crazy.”

  “Did he confess when you arrested him?” Josh asked the lieutenant. McElone shook her head. “He says you all are lying. But I paid a second call this evening to Sammi Fine and she confirms that Bill and Jeremy saw each other the day you went to the club to see Once Again. They argued about the record again and Bill was foolish enough to suggest he knew Jeremy had killed Vanessa McTiernan.”

  “Bill said he was in the apartment the day it happened,” I remembered.

  “I’m guessing he wasn’t there at the actual time of the murder,” McElone said. “He might’ve tried to stop it, and there was no sign of a struggle in the apartment. But I’m thinking he may have found her and been the one who made the anonymous 911 call.”

  “Poor Nessa,” Vance said, his face pained now. “All she wanted to do was get her music out and let her loved ones hear it.”

  “Unbelievable.” I shook my head. “I’m having a hard time getting my head around it.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not that crazy a story this time,” McElone said. “At least your ghosties didn’t have a hand in it.”

  There was considerable avoidance of eye contact in the room despite the fact that the people in question couldn’t be seen by the lieutenant anyway.

  “I guess not,” I told her. “Of course, it was Vance who first told me about Vanessa and started this all rolling.”

  McElone’s eyes went dull, like she’d heard something she’d like to un-hear. “Right,” she said. Then she said her good nights and headed for the door. “Oh, there was one thing.” She turned back and looked at me.

  “What’s that?”

  “The record company is going to pass on the album,” she said. “They decided a debut album with no chance of a follow-up was a bad business risk. Sammi said she’ll see to it that the songs get distributed for free the way Vanessa wanted.

  “You see what happens when someone tries to claim they wrote something all by themselves?” Morrie shouted at Vance.

  “Are you starting that again, you old swine?”

  There was a good deal of shouting as they left at a very high speed.

  Melissa, reminded there was school the next day, very reluctantly headed upstairs. Josh stood, telling me what I already knew—that he had to open his store early the next morning. But he kissed me nicely and then we headed for the front door.

  “A.J.’s breaking up with Liz,” he said casually when we got there.

  “What? I did all that pretending to like her and giving a murderer the wrong impression for nothing?” I pulled him close. “You owe me.”

  He was about to lean down and start paying off when I heard the sound of the dog howling again. I turned my head.

  “What?” Josh asked. He looked concerned and assessed my face.

  “Didn’t you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  And then it made sense.

  * * *

  Phyllis had called to do the usual follow-up once she’d heard (“on my police scanner, for goodness sake, Alison”) about the arrest at my house. I’d told her what I knew (minus Vance because that would make it too complicated), she’d admonished me a few times for not calling her immediately and we’d left it at that.

  Jeannie had called to say she’d told Tony about the coming baby and he’d reacted exactly as I’d said he would. He was now calling his family and friends to celebrate. Why she’d ever doubted he would was beyond her comprehension. She never once asked about the murder investigation. Jeannie is among the best in the world at not dealing with things that she’d prefer weren’t there.

  The next morning I rolled out the coffee and tea urns on my new cart, which I’d lugged home and assembled last night because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. It was especially early (see previous comment re: no sleep), and instead of waiting for Melissa to appear downstairs, I went up to her bedroom in the attic to wake her.

  I’d taken an allergy pill but was already tearing up by the time I hit the second step. I’d expected it, but that didn’t make the feeling any easier to handle.

  I found my daughter hanging halfway off her bed, faced away from the stairs I was climbing, as if she were looking for a stray shoe she’d shoved too hard under the bed. I climbed up to floor level and closed the staircase.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re busted. Where’s the dog?”

  “Dog?” The voice came from under the bed, where I also heard a little scratching of clawed feet. “What dog?”

  I sneezed. “That dog,” I said.

  Melissa sat up, resigned to her fate. “Oh. That dog.”

  From under the bed, a small dog, no bigger than the average beagle but clearly something in the golden retriever family, squirmed out and jumped up next to Liss. He (and it was clearly a he) snuggled up against her and tried to lick her face, but his tongue went through her cheek.

  He was a ghost.

  “Who’s your friend?” I asked my daughter. Then I sneezed again.

  “I’m calling him Bonkers,” she said. “Can I keep him?”

  “Bonkers?” My throat was scratchy and itchy at the same time. It’s not good.

  “I don’t know. That’s the fifth name I’ve given him. I couldn’t think of anything else. Can I keep him?”

  The dog ran through Melissa and off the bed. He hovered there for a second, confused, but then lowered to the floor, where he ran in a circle and then lay down. He seemed to have more connection to the material world than most of the human ghosts I’d met.

  “I don’t know,” I rasped. “Can you hear
my voice?”

  “I’ll keep him up here, Mom, I promise. And he can’t shed, or, you know, need to go out or anything. Please?”

  I decided to go in another direction. “Where’d you find him?”

  “He showed up on the beach on Friday all by himself and he looked scared,” she said. “Maxie thought we should bring him up here and make him feel secure, so she picked him up and brought him in.”

  I had figured Maxie was involved. “And you hid him from me because you figured I’d say you couldn’t keep him,” I said.

  She scrunched up her nose. “Um . . . yeah.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I think my head will be clearer outside.”

  “Can Bonkers come?”

  “That’s the idea,” I said. She coaxed the dog out with a tennis ball in the air, which he had not yet figured he could float up and get. We started down to the main floor.

  None of the guests—who would be leaving via a noon van—were up yet. Paul was in the front room when Melissa, Bonkers (oy) and I walked out toward the front door. It was impossible for Melissa to leash the dog, but of course there was no danger of him getting hit by a car and besides, he did not seem to want to leave my daughter’s side. They had bonded in only a few days. This was going to be tough.

  Paul looked guilty. “You’ve found out about Toby,” he said.

  “His name’s Bonkers now,” Melissa informed him.

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, I did,” I told Paul, “and I’m not thrilled that this was kept a secret from me.”

  “I tried to argue against it, but Maxie was . . . persuasive.” Paul looked away. Maxie can indeed be persuasive, or intimidating, depending on one’s point of view.

  Before we got outside, Vance and Morrie appeared in the hallway, floating in from the direction of the movie room. And immediately informed us they were leaving.

  “We’re getting the band together and taking it on the road,” Morrie said.

  I looked at Vance, who surprisingly had become the more reliable source of information. “We have a gig with some of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco in March,” he said.

  “March? So you’re leaving now?”

  “It’s a long walk. Look, love, I wanted to thank you for all you did and for putting up with us all this time. It wasn’t always exactly like we wanted it to be but in the end we did what we could for Nessa, yeah?”

  That reminded me. “Hang on,” I said. I walked to what my mother calls the telephone table despite it having no such instrument on top of it. But it does have a drawer, and I opened it and pulled out a CD in a jewel case. I held it out to Vance.

  “What’s that?” he asked, taking it. I hadn’t marked the disc at all.

  “It’s music by Vanessa McTiernan,” I said. “Find a player somewhere along the way. I think you’ll like it.”

  Vance looked like I’d handed him the key to the meaning of life. “Really,” he said quietly.

  “Really.”

  He looked at me carefully. “You’ve heard it?”

  I nodded. “I burned another copy for myself.”

  “Is she good?”

  “She’s very good.”

  Vance punched Morrie on the arm. “Come on, you old tonk,” he said. “We’ve gotta find ourselves a CD player.” They flew out through the front door and were gone without a look back.

  I sneezed again and Bonkers barked. Melissa looked like he’d pulled a gun on me. “Bonkers,” she said.

  “It’s not his fault,” I said through congestion. “Let’s go outside.”

  The front porch was better. It was chilly that morning, a preview of coming attractions for the season. I didn’t have to rake leaves yet, but that wasn’t too far in the future. Then would come the winter and that’s the slow season for us Shore businesses.

  Bonkers ran out on the lawn when Melissa walked down there. He’d have loved to chase a ball, I’d bet, but we had left it upstairs. I really wanted to tell my daughter I couldn’t possibly keep a ghost dog in the house—really a ghost puppy, judging by his size—due to my sinuses. But she looked so happy, and that’s always a problem when denying her something. I walked down the steps toward where the dog was circling my daughter.

  And that’s when I saw the ghost woman with the wagon, standing on the edge of my sidewalk.

  “You found Lester!” she said.

  It took me a moment. “The dog? Lester is a golden retriever?”

  “Sure. Light hair, short, generous mouth, right?” The woman floated a few feet closer and watched the dog with Melissa, who was confused and looking like something bad was going to happen.

  Lester ran over and let the woman pet him but then he went back and sat by Melissa.

  “I think we have to give Lester back to his friend,” I said to Liss. “She’s been looking all over for him.” Then I turned toward the woman. “Haven’t you, Claudia?”

  “Claudia!” Paul said.

  “Claudia?” Melissa asked.

  Claudia Rabinowitz looked at me and smiled. “How did you know?”

  “Vance McTiernan was here and he said he sensed you nearby. Then it was obvious that Vanessa visited with you just before she died but nobody else saw you. You were already dead. Vanessa used to stare into space and talk to herself, or so people thought. Could she see ghosts?”

  Claudia nodded. “Some. Not all. I’m not even sure she knew for a fact what she was seeing. But she saw me, and I could talk to her. It was a real blessing; we worked out our differences. If I’d stayed just a few hours longer, I might have been able to . . .”

  “You couldn’t have known,” I said. But now there was the business at hand. “Now, about Lester.”

  Liss looked like she might cry. Still, she nodded. But I noticed Lester/Bonkers wasn’t sticking to his previous mistress and appeared to favor my daughter. “I’m sorry,” Liss told the ghost. “I didn’t know he was yours.”

  Claudia held up her hand. “No. You keep him.”

  Well, there went my easy way out. “Huh?” I’m nothing if not eloquent.

  “I just found him on the road in Kansas. Been looking to leave him with a good home, where people would love him. Looks like we found it. Besides, a girl should have a dog.” She actually turned and started up the street without even consulting us.

  I had visions of allergist visits in my future.

  “Maybe I can find Vance!” I shouted after her. “He’d love to see you—Paul, can you—”

  “Please don’t,” Claudia called back. “We were never any good together.”

  “Will you be back?” I said as she shuffled off again. She answered, but was too far away for me to hear her.

  Melissa, her face a mixture of relief and confusion, turned toward me. “Can we keep him?” she asked.

  I looked at Paul and noticed Maxie, stretching her arms and yawning, floating out of the house. She noticed the dog playing in the yard, saw me and stopped in her tracks. “Uh-oh,” she said. She turned back toward the house.

  “Don’t move,” I told her. “I don’t like being lied to and kept in the dark.”

  Maxie hung her head and sing-songed like a fourth-grader, “Sorry.”

  “Mom?” Melissa was pushing the point.

  Lester ran up to me, sat at my feet and looked up into my face. Clearly, he was a born salesman.

  So that is how we adopted a ghost dog.

  That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.

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