A Wild Ghost Chase Page 4

  “Was this not the time we had agreed I would return?” the boy asked as soon as I was in his line of sight.

  Maxie dropped down out of the ceiling. “Man, the two of you are lousy at being sneaky!” she scolded. “You’re being loud enough to wake, you know, me.”

  I ignored that comment, since no one could hear us, and turned toward our young client. “Now then, Antinanco,” I said, although Alison has pointed out that “now then” is contradictory. “I’m glad to see you back.” It’s always best to start by making the subject of an interrogation feel comfortable; they are more likely to divulge useful information that way.

  But when I looked back at Maxie, I noticed she had changed her clothes—which she does at an alarming rate—into a trench coat, a wool skirt, a pair of uncomfortable-looking pumps, and both a fedora and a green visor. Clearly, she thought she was in a 1940s Edward G. Robinson film, playing the tough cop who would attempt to drag the information out of the even tougher gangster. I was relieved she hadn’t chosen to also smoke a cigar.

  “Okay, kid, spill it,” she began. “What’s the real deal on this mother of yours?”

  “Maxie . . .” I tried to admonish.

  Antinanco didn’t look either of us in the eye, but it was clear he was addressing me when he asked, “What does the woman mean?”

  “You don’t need me to get the bright lights out, do ya?” Maxie went on. I honestly don’t think she knew what she was talking about.

  I knelt down, which took some adjustment when I first took on this form, since there is nothing on which to lean for a ghost. But it made me appear to be sympathetic to the boy, and brought my face down to his level, even if he wasn’t looking at me, perhaps in an effort not to betray unguarded thoughts.

  “She means that some of what you told us about your mother does not seem plausible or accurate,” I said.

  “What do those words mean?” Antinanco asked in a small voice. I had to make an effort to remember he was only eight years old.

  “It means they don’t make sense.” I looked at the game room entrance, where Melissa stood, school backpack still strapped around her shoulders. “And if you don’t tell us all the truth, it will make it much harder for us to help you.”

  “I don’t understand,” Antinanco answered. “Everything I told you is true.”

  “You said your mother’s name was Jaci, which means ‘moon,’” I reminded him. “That is not a word in the Unami language.”

  The boy would not make eye contact—it seemed almost a reflex with him—but even without a direct look at his face, it was obvious that wheels were turning inside that little head. “My mother was not of our people,” he said. “She was taken from another nation because she was a princess and a strong hunter. My father was a very powerful leader of the nation; he could take the woman he wanted.”

  Melissa looked shocked. “He could just claim any woman he wanted?” she said. “That’s terrible.”

  “What’s terrible?” Alison said. Everyone looked up, with varying expressions of panic, though Maxie mostly looked amused. She grinned at Alison, who was standing in the hallway entrance, her forehead wrinkled in thought. “What is terrible?” she repeated.

  “The Lenni-Lenape men could take any woman they wanted for their wives,” Melissa answered, still shaken by that information. “The girl didn’t even get a choice.”

  Alison smiled with the left side of her mouth. “Times were different back then, Liss,” she said. “How did that happen to come up in conversation? Are you studying them in history now?”

  Antinanco was only a few feet in front of Alison, and not obscured by any furniture in the room. But Alison was looking directly through him at Melissa, who had walked to his side.

  “Hey,” Maxie said, but I quickly turned toward her and gave her a disapproving look. That doesn’t always work with Maxie, but this time it had the desired effect—she stopped talking.

  Alison only began seeing and hearing spirits like me after she bought this house and had . . . let’s call it an accident, involving a blow to the head. Her skills are not as developed as Melissa’s or Loretta’s, who have both been seeing ghosts all their lives. That meant she isn’t always able to detect a spirit, even one in the room with her.

  Apparently, Alison couldn’t see Antinanco.

  “Um . . . yeah,” Melissa answered her mother. “We’re studying the Native Americans who lived in this area.”

  “I thought you did that in Mr. Barnes’s class last year,” Alison said.

  Melissa shrugged. “They do stuff more than once. This year’s more detail.”

  Alison put a hand on her hip. “Something odd’s going on around here. There’s been way too much secrecy lately. What are you three plotting?”

  Antinanco looked confused, but Maxie shook her head at him slightly.

  “We’re not plotting anything,” Melissa said. “You’re being . . . what’s the word?”

  “Bananas,” Maxie suggested.

  “Paranoid,” I said, although of course I did not truly think Alison was acting that way at all. She has a certain instinctive talent for understanding things outside her usual existence. In this case, she knew something was going on, she simply couldn’t see what was literally in front of her.

  “Is this about the sleepover?” Alison asked. “Are you all trying to figure out how to get me to change my mind?”

  Melissa looked irritated and started to shake her head, but I beat her to the punch. “Yes,” I told Alison. “We’ve been discussing it. We thought perhaps there was a way to change the plan so you might feel more comfortable approving.”

  Alison regarded me for a moment and said, “Sometimes you talk like a corporate P.R. man, Paul, not a private detective.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. “So I’ve been told,” I said.

  “I’m not changing my mind on this,” she said, looking at Melissa. “Not now. Talk to me when we don’t have plumbing issues and unexpected guests, then maybe, okay?”

  “Okay.” Melissa pretended to be disappointed.

  “Okay,” Alison echoed. “I have to go. Tony is putting in a new toilet upstairs, and Mrs. Robson wants blue towels in her room, not yellow ones.” She stopped just short of rolling her eyes.

  “Why?” Maxie asked.

  Alison was almost out the door, heading for the linen closet. “Does it matter?” she asked as she left.

  If I were able to perspire, I believe I would have wiped the sweat from my brow after Alison was gone. It was our sheer luck that she hadn’t been able to see Antinanco. Alison bristles at the idea of investigating (although I suspect she actually enjoys it deep down), and given her present circumstances would not have reacted well to another person like me in her house.

  “Antinanco,” I said, returning to our investigation before Maxie could threaten to bring out the rubber hose, “you have given us a great task to perform. But in order to do so successfully, we need help from you. We need you to give us a direction. You said your father was a very important man in the Lenni-Lenape. Maybe we can find out something about him, and that might lead us to your mother. What was your father’s name?”

  The boy’s eyes widened for a brief moment, then he seemed to recover and blinked twice. “He was called White Eyes,” he said quietly. “He was the first chief to make peace with the white people.”

  I looked to Maxie, who knew I was asking her to check out that fact, and she immediately left to find Alison’s laptop. Once Maxie vanished, Melissa walked closer to the young native boy and dropped her voice to a camp counselor type of soothing cadence. “Antinanco, do you have anything that belonged to your mother? Something we might be able to trace?” It was an excellent question. I think Melissa would make a wonderful investigator, though her mother would probably not be pleased to hear that. There are thi
ngs we keep from Alison for her own good.

  But Antinanco shook his head. “I do not have any of my mother’s possessions,” he said. “The arrowhead you hold is all I carry with me.” He pointed at me, accusing me of holding his precious memento hostage, which technically I was. “Can I have it back?”

  “I will give it back to you when we find your mother,” I reminded him. “Until then, I want to be sure I know where you are, and that you’ll keep coming back to see us.”

  “I have given my vow,” the boy said. “I will do as I said I would do.”

  “Good,” I answered. “So will I.”

  Antinanco left soon after that, vanishing out through the far wall toward the beach just as Maxie, concealing the laptop in her trench coat, dropped down from the ceiling. “There was a Lenni chief named White Eyes,” she said. “But I think the kid is lying about him being his father.”

  Maxie isn’t always as polite as she should be, but her instincts are usually sound, so that concerned me. “Why?” I asked.

  “This guy White Eyes died in 1778,” she told us.

  “That is the right time period for Antinanco,” Melissa pointed out. “It’s when he said he was alive.”

  “Yeah, but this chief signed something called the Treaty of Fort Pitt the same year he died,” Maxie said, pulling the laptop from her coat and opening it to a web page about the Lenni-Lenape. “And that was during the Revolutionary War, right?”

  “Sure,” Melissa said. “Only two years after the Declaration of Independence. The war was going on then, and they didn’t know who would win.” She was an excellent student, and despite her misgivings about the teacher dating her mother, really liked history class.

  “So why do you think this points to our client lying to us?” I asked Maxie.

  “Because the Treaty of Fort Pitt was signed at Fort Pitt,” she answered. My face must have registered my puzzlement, because she added. “Where Pittsburgh is now.”

  Now it was Melissa’s turn to look puzzled. “That’s in Pennsylvania,” she said.

  Maxie nodded. If someone other than Melissa had pointed that fact out, she might have made a cutting remark but she adores Melissa and respects her youth. “Right, and it’s the far western end of Pennsylvania, almost two hundred and seventy miles from here.”

  Melissa still looked confused, so I explained. “That’s a long way for the tribe to have walked, all the way from here to Pittsburgh. I’m willing to bet Maxie has discovered the Lenni-Lenapes from this area did not migrate that far.”

  “That’s right,” Maxie said. “The people from this area tended to go south to Delaware—in fact, ‘Unami’ is another name for Delaware—or up to New York. They didn’t go that far west. That kid is still not telling us the truth.”

  Ghosts can’t sit. That is, we don’t actually rest on objects. But the habit of sitting, lying down, crouching—all things the living do—is very difficult to break. I’ve never met a person like me who had completely lost the conventions. So I sat in what must have appeared to Melissa to be mid-air, and felt my hand stroking my beard. It helps me think.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I told them. “He wants us to find his mother, and yet he continues to give us false information. What would his motivation be?”

  “Maybe he’s confused,” Melissa suggested. “He is just a little boy, and it was a really long time ago.”

  I looked at her. “He’s barely younger than you,” I pointed out. “Do you think you would forget anything about your mom or dad? No matter how long it had been?”

  She shook her head.

  “So, why is he impeding our investigation?” I asked again. “Why not tell us the truth?”

  Maxie bit her lower lip. “Maybe he doesn’t really want us to find his mom,” she said.

  My tongue ran over my upper teeth, but there was no moisture. There never is. “Then why would he have started this?” I said, mostly to myself. It was just as well, because neither Maxie nor Melissa answered me.

  The Indian woman I’d seen in the library was, I decided, my best bet. The problem was a linguistic one, a communications question more than anything else. There had to be some way to get through to her if I saw her again.

  There were questions that normally would be Alison’s assignment in a case like this, but I did not reconsider keeping her out of the loop. There had to be another way to attack the problem.

  I turned toward Melissa. “I think we need reinforcements,” I said. She looked at me without comprehension; there are times I forget she’s not yet eleven years old. “We need to bring in the big guns,” I clarified.

  Melissa grinned. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and pushed a speed dial button.

  “Hello, Grandma?” she said.

  5

  Loretta Kerby is an interesting blend. On the one hand, she seems like a very standard older lady, interested in her family, some television, a little local charity work in her active adult community, and her friends. On the other hand, most of her friends are ghosts. She told me once that she’s been aware of spirits for as long as she can remember, and she is indeed the best person at interacting with the deceased who I have ever seen.

  Loretta arrived the next day when Alison was out having a brief lunch with her friend Jeannie at a local café, The Stud Muffin, and Melissa was at school.

  “So this Eagle of the Sun boy is playing a little fast and loose with the truth?” Loretta asked after I filled her in on the situation more completely than Melissa had been able to do in their brief telephone conversation. “Why would he do that?” she asked as she loaded up Alison’s refrigerator with home-cooked food she’d brought over in the backpack she carries (Alison teases her that it makes her look like a student, but Loretta’s contention is that the backpack is extremely useful and keeps her hands free).

  “I have no idea,” I told her. “I think our best bet is to contact the spirit of the woman I found in the library yesterday, but I need to be able to speak Unami in order to communicate. At least I assume so—for all I know, she was speaking Navajo.”

  “So naturally you called me in,” Loretta said, closing the refrigerator with a satisfied smile on her face.

  Maxie, who was hovering by the ceiling fan and letting the blades rotate through her midsection (“It sort of tickles”), grinned. She adores Loretta. “The first thing a man always thinks of is to get a woman to help,” she suggested.

  Disregarding the feminist issue she was trying to raise, I turned my attention to Loretta. “I do think you can help, if you’d like,” I told her. “Normally, I would ask Alison to be my legs on this one, but I don’t think that would be a good idea at the moment.”

  Loretta shook her head violently, but smiled. “No. She’s got a lot on her plate right now,” she agreed. “Let’s not complicate matters. What would you like me to do, Paul?”

  I outlined my plan for her benefit, beginning with a visit to the local police station, and admitted it was not terribly detailed. “While you’re out there doing what you can do, and if you can make some phone calls”—we ghosts are not audible on telephones—“I will do my best to locate someone who can speak the necessary language, and I’ll also try to find the woman who was here before, since without her, it doesn’t matter if I have a translator. Do you think you can help?”

  Loretta looked determined, as she always does. “I can try,” she said.

  “Try what?” Alison appeared in the kitchen door. “What are you doing here, Mom?”

  “I came by to stock you up on real food,” Loretta informed her. That part was technically true. “You can’t order in every night.” Normally, Loretta would never criticize Alison on virtually any subject, but she does seem somehow insulted that her daughter never cooks; perhaps Loretta considers it the sign of a failure on her part to teach Alison properly.


  “I really can, but I agree I shouldn’t,” Alison admitted. “But I’m going to be hip-deep in grout for the rest of the afternoon. Thanks for bringing food.” She went to the refrigerator and opened the door. “Oh boy, brisket.”

  “Among other things,” Loretta pointed out. “You need to feed my granddaughter something other than pizza and Chinese takeout.”

  “I get it, I get it,” Alison said. “I surrender. So, what were you talking about when I came in?”

  “Paul was asking me to ask a friend of mine—someone like him—a question the next time I see him, and I said I would.” That wasn’t technically true, but it was plausible, and Alison nodded.

  “What friend?”

  “His name is Larry,” Loretta answered. “You don’t know him.”

  Alison looked at me. “What do you need to know from Larry?” she asked.

  Before I could stammer and give away the deception, Maxie insinuated herself between Alison and myself. “Aren’t you going to give in on this sleepover for Melissa?” she interjected. “The poor girl never gets to have any friends over.”

  “What are you, her agent?” Alison asked. I gave Maxie a grateful look for distracting Alison from her previous train of thought. “She’ll have a sleepover when I can handle it. And keep in mind, most of the reason I’m not crazy about the idea is because of you.”

  “Me?” Maxie fired back. “What did I do?’

  “Half the time I’m not even sure,” Alison told her. “That’s one of the things that keeps me up at night.”

  Maxie was preparing to perpetuate the argument, less to give me cover than because she was enjoying herself, as I sank through the floorboards into the basement. It was time to try once again to raise someone who could help us with finding Antinanco’s mother.