The Hostess With the Ghostess Page 4

  “If that’s startled, I’d hate to see you when you’re panicking,” I said.

  He actually adjusted the jacket he was wearing to look more formal. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. I was simply thinking very deeply and didn’t hear you walk in.”

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry?” He definitely understood the words I was saying, so I could only figure he was buying himself time. I didn’t respond. “I . . . I was thinking about finding Paul.”

  There had been something fishy about this since I’d met Richard the night before, and after spending the morning in futile pursuits, I didn’t have the patience to indulge him again. “I don’t think you were,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?” he repeated.

  “You heard me. I don’t think you were that worried about finding Paul. You’re not worried about Paul; nothing can happen to him anymore. And you never came looking for him when he was alive as far as I know. So there’s another reason you’re looking for him, and for some reason you don’t want to tell me what it is.”

  Richard floated there and stared at me for a long moment. I got the impression he was the kind of man that other people didn’t talk to disrespectfully very often. I didn’t think I had exactly done that, but I had been blunt, and some people mistake the two.

  “You’re right,” he said finally. His body—or whatever substance it is that makes up the physical form of a ghost—seemed to sag. He floated over to an easy chair and pretended to sit in it, missing by three inches and sinking into the seat. “I’m ashamed of myself and didn’t want to confess to anyone but Paul because he never judges.”

  That was true. Paul is accepting of facts only. He draws no conclusions other than what can be proved. So he doesn’t make opinions about a person’s character except by what the person does or does not do.

  “I’m not interested in judging you,” I said quietly. “But if you need help, I would like to try.”

  Richard closed his eyes. I don’t know if that makes a difference for a ghost; I could still sort of see a hint of his eye when he did it. I’ve asked Paul about that and he’s been vague, saying it’s a state of mind, which doesn’t help at all.

  As Richard seemed to gather his thoughts, I saw Maxie float down from the ceiling, wearing her usual sprayed-on jeans and black T-shirt, this one bearing the legend “I’ll Bet You Do.” She opened her mouth, no doubt about to make some hilarious (in her view) observation, but I put my finger to my lips for fear of breaking the mood and making Richard clam up again. She looked irritated but said nothing and floated down behind his chair. I assumed Richard hadn’t seen her.

  He opened his eyes again and made the noise ghosts make that sounds like letting out a breath but, obviously, isn’t. “I’ve been working for a New York firm,” he said.

  That was the big revelation? “What kind of firm?” I asked, not adding why it being based in New York City was some kind of humiliation.

  “A law firm,” Richard said, as if that should have been clear. “I am a criminal defense attorney, and I was asked by a very prestigious law firm in Manhattan to consult on a case for them. So I have been in the area for nine weeks.”

  Again, I didn’t see anything especially scandalous about the information I was being given. “It’s not like I expected you to drop in,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed like a person does when someone speaks to them in an unfamiliar language. “I wouldn’t have imagined you did,” he said.

  That wasn’t getting us anywhere, so I tried to move things forward as Maxie, a skeptical look on her face, rose up and maneuvered herself to get a better look than she could from behind the chair. Still she was not in Richard’s line of sight, and she made no sound that would alert him to her presence.

  “So how does that turn into you being a ghost now in my house looking for your brother, who was one of the original ghosts in my house?” I asked. Sometimes it just comes out like that.

  “I will explain,” Richard said. He put a little emphasis on the word explain, seeming to imply that I had somehow been keeping him from doing so. Personally I didn’t think I had. “The case I was working on involved a young woman who had been accused of killing her stepfather. The prosecution said that she had drowned him in his bathtub.”

  “Ugh,” Maxie said. Richard started again and looked up to see her just to his right and four feet in the air. “That’s pretty gross.”

  “Thanks, Maxie,” I said.

  She looked at me without guile. “You’re welcome.”

  “How long have you been here?” Richard said, sputtering a bit. In another age, he would have made a great British duke or viscount or something. In a movie he would have been played by David Niven.

  “At least five years,” Maxie said. It was accurate, but it wasn’t much help.

  “Tell me about the case,” I said to Richard, since this thread of conversation wasn’t getting us anywhere. “What’s it got to do with you looking for Paul?”

  “Don’t you see? Paul was a private investigator. He can help me discover what actually happened in the case of Cassidy Van Doren.”

  “That’s the girl who put her dad underwater?” Maxie asked.

  “I don’t believe she did,” Richard told her. “I believe the police arrested the wrong person for the murder.”

  “Why do you think that?” I asked, thinking of what Paul would ask. “What proof do you have to back up that statement?”

  “There is extensive physical evidence,” Richard insisted. “And I got to know Cassidy over the time I spent on the case. I do not believe her to be emotionally capable of murder. She disagreed with her stepfather, but she did not hate him.”

  “You weren’t there when he was alive,” I pointed out.

  “That is true, but a person does not change. I know Cassidy. Cassidy did not kill that man.”

  The way he said that man gave me a strong impression I was hoping to disprove. “Richard,” I said slowly, “were you in love with Cassidy Van Doren?”

  Richard straightened himself to the point you’d have thought there was a pool cue up his back. “I believe I still am,” he said.

  “Oh, boy,” Maxie said.

  “This is going to be a long story,” I said. “I’m getting myself a cup of coffee.”

  #

  I needed to sit back and be prepared to listen to a story that I probably didn’t want to hear. So I poured myself some coffee from an urn I have on a cart in the den. Melissa and I wheel that out in the morning so the guests can have coffee or tea as they like. It’s the closest I come to offering food in the guesthouse. This is not a B and B. It’s just a B.

  The quietest space in the house, even when the den is empty, is the little room off the hallway from the den to the movie room that I use as a library. We have more than a thousand books on the shelves and three chairs, each with a side table, a lamp, and bookmarks. We do not dog-ear in the guesthouse. So that’s where I headed, dragging ghosts behind me like a train on a wedding dress (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I did not wear either time).

  I settled myself into a nicely stuffed chair by the window, prompting Richard to take up a position about halfway between the floor and the ceiling, just to the left of the door. Maxie, more used to the surroundings, did her usual thing of getting horizontal like she’s on Cleopatra’s barge, hovering just under the crown molding.

  “Okay,” I said to Richard, “tell me what happened.”

  “I had been working on Cassidy’s defense and had just made a breakthrough,” Richard began. “The case was complex. Cassidy had a very difficult relationship with her stepfather, Keith Barent Johnson, and they had been publicly estranged for some months. So when she was found in the bathroom next to his drowned body in the tub, suspicion had naturally gravitated toward her.”

  “Naturally,” I echoed. It meant nothing but was a verbal form of punctuation. It gave him a moment to compose himse
lf, although Richard did not need it. He was born composed, like a Mozart prelude.

  “What breakthrough?” Maxie asked. “The girl’s in the bathroom while her stepdad is all, you know, taking a bath? He drowns? What breakthrough could you make?”

  “Keith Johnson was not taking a bath when he drowned,” Richard said, shaking his head to emphasize the point. “He was fully clothed when Cassidy discovered his body.”

  Wait. “Discovered?” I said. “That’s the story? She discovered his body after he was already dead?”

  Richard nodded. It showed his neck worked in both directions. “It is not simply the story. It is what happened. Keith Johnson was a man over six feet tall weighing more than two hundred pounds. Cassidy could never have lifted him into a bathtub on her own, and he would no doubt have been able to overpower her if she’d threatened him.”

  “That seems like your defense right there,” I pointed out.

  “I thought so myself,” Richard said. “The previous attorney thought we needed to prove that Cassidy had no motive to kill Keith because he said the prosecution would be able to disprove my argument.”

  “That she couldn’t lift a two-hundred-pound guy?” Maxie asked. “How big is this Cassidy Van Doren?”

  “She stands five foot three and weighs one hundred eighteen pounds,” Richard said. “She lacks the upper-body strength to lift that much weight, particularly if the person involved was struggling against being put in the water, as the physical evidence suggests.”

  Just at that moment, I saw a small head (attached to a small body) appear in the library doorway. Abigail Lesniak, one of the Senior Plus Tours guests, had looked into the room, and while the conversation had been largely inaudible from her perspective, it was entirely possible she’d heard me speak to someone who wasn’t there.

  That’s the advantage of advertising as a haunted guesthouse. The guests don’t even blink when something like that happens.

  “Am I interrupting?” Abby asked from the doorway. She was a little shy of eighty and very slight but always cheerful, a quality I would like very much to learn at some point in my life. It would be such an asset in the accommodation business.

  “Not at all, Abby,” I said. “Come on in. Is there something I can do for you?”

  “This is an intrusion,” Richard protested. “I have important information to impart.”

  “I was just looking for a good book to take with me today,” Abby answered, not having heard Richard at all. I have developed impeccable ghost-ignoring skills, so she never knew there had been any protest to her entering. “I’m going to sit on the boardwalk, and I thought I’d like to take a novel with me.”

  “By all means,” I said. “Take your time.”

  Abby walked into the room tentatively, holding her arms a little higher than a person walking normally might. “I don’t want to upset anyone who’s here,” she said, looking at the ceiling. In this case, she was correct in pointing her gaze upward for Maxie, but her direction was way off. Everybody looks up when they think ghosts are in the room. They can be anywhere, people. Trust me.

  “You’re not upsetting anyone,” I told her. “Feel free.”

  “I disagree,” Richard said. “I would like to proceed.”

  “So who’s stopping you?” Maxie asked him.

  Richard started to respond, rose about a foot higher, looked down at Abby, and nodded slightly. “Good point.” He turned his attention back toward me. “As I was saying, it was almost impossible to prove physically that Cassidy could have placed Keith in the tub, or that she could have held him underwater long enough to drown him.”

  I gave Maxie a glance Abby couldn’t see to signal to her that she should do my talking for me. It’s not so much that I can’t talk to the ghosts in front of my guests (try saying that three times fast!) because they are aware Maxie and sometimes Everett are there, but it becomes a distraction, and having a conversation the guest can only half hear seems sort of rude.

  “So you’re saying the lawyer you were working with was actually trying to set her up for the murder?” Maxie said. I knew I was in trouble when a green visor appeared on her head; Maxie was doing her 1940s noir woman, a character she thinks sounds tough but went out with Gloria Grahame.

  “I was wondering if I might talk to you about Mr. Lewis,” Abby said. Gregory Lewis was one of the other singles visiting this week, a quiet widower in his late sixties who had not said much but appeared to enjoy the spook shows the most of the current crop.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Richard told Maxie as I listened to Abigail. “I have no evidence that anything was untoward, but I know the defense should have been more vigorous, and I don’t know why it wasn’t. When I tried to suggest there was another possibility and we should explore the idea, I was told the investigators were on it and I’d be informed when and if they found anything.”

  “What about Mr. Lewis?” I asked Abby. “Is he doing something to bother you?” The groups of guests are put together randomly based on who books a tour for which week. You get who you get, basically, and that means not everyone always gets along. There have been outright arguments and guests who refused to be in a room at the same time. I don’t have gray hairs yet, but give me a couple of weeks.

  “Oh, no!” Abby said, horrified she’d given me the wrong impression. “He hasn’t said or done anything wrong at all! I don’t want you to think that!”

  Okay, so I wouldn’t think that. “Then what would you like to know?” I asked.

  “But they never told you anything,” Maxie prompted Richard.

  “No. I attempted to contact the lead investigator, but he never returned a call or an e-mail.”

  “Do you know if he’s looking for anyone?” Abby asked.

  Looking for anyone? Was someone else missing? How many people did I have to find now? “I don’t understand,” I said with great honesty.

  “Sounds fishy to me,” Maxie said, which threw me until I realized she was talking to Richard.

  “I was wondering if you knew whether Mr. Lewis was . . . interested in anyone.”

  Aha. So that was it—Abby was searching for romance and had set her sights on Gregory Lewis. “I’m sorry, Abby, but I don’t really have any idea. It’s not the kind of thing I usually ask my guests.”

  That was true, and it would have been even truer with Mr. Lewis. He wasn’t effusive and didn’t ask me much of anything at all. He was a very average-looking man, but apparently Abby had seen something in him she found interesting.

  “To me as well,” said Richard. “And after what happened to me, I believe there is a more urgent concern.” He looked at me. “That’s why it’s very important that we find Paul. We need an investigator.”

  “She has a private eye license, remember?” Maxie said while indicating me, which I could have done without.

  “Oh, dear,” Abby said. She frowned, lost in thought, then brightened up again. “Perhaps there is something you can do for me, in that case.”

  “I was aware of that,” Richard said. He didn’t avert his gaze from me even as I dealt with Abby. “I’m sure you understand I would like to discuss this with my brother. I don’t mean to offend, but it’s not just Keith’s murder I’m concerned about.” He hadn’t offended; I would gladly dump the case on Paul if I could muster the investigational skills to find Paul.

  “What can I do for you, Abby?” I asked.

  “You can ask Mr. Lewis if he finds me attractive.”

  “What other murder is there, Rich?” Maxie wanted to know.

  “There’s mine,” Richard said.

  Chapter 5

  I had tried very hard to convince Abigail Lesniak that it wasn’t within an innkeeper’s purview to arrange romantic liaisons between her guests, but Abby looked so sad and seemed so hopeful about Gregory Lewis that, while I stopped short of promising to fix them up on a date, I did reluctantly agree to try to gauge his interest surreptitiously. In other words, I’d do my best to find ways to pu
t off having to act on it for three more days and hope it all blew over.

  I always have a plan. It’s not always a good plan, but it’s a plan.

  Abby was placated and off to do some souvenir shopping for her nephew, who she said was twenty-eight. Luckily she did not ask me for a recommendation in that area. I’d probably have sent her to the vape shop near the boardwalk.

  Now I could turn my attention to Richard. “Your murder?” I said. “Somebody killed you too?”

  “That is my best assessment,” Paul’s brother said. “My memory of my last day is still fairly hazy. Will that improve?” He looked at Maxie.

  “Yeah, but it’ll take time. A week, maybe two. With me, it took around four months. But you do get it all back eventually.” Maxie has a way of being lighthearted and ominous at the same time.

  “That is not a great help now.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Tell us what you do remember.”

  Richard’s face got a little dreamier as he thought back to the time when he was alive. I noticed he shared a trait with his brother: when he wasn’t thinking about his posture, he tended to tilt a little bit to the left.

  “I was in my hotel room in New Brunswick,” he began, and I immediately cut him off.

  “I thought you said the law firm you were working with was in New York.”

  Richard focused a little bit more and became slightly more vertical. “Yes, it is. But the murder case was in Middlesex County here in New Jersey. I was staying in a hotel on Livingston Avenue while the case was being heard in the county courthouse a couple of blocks away.”

  “So Cassidy was charged here in Jersey, and that’s where Keith Johnson was murdered?” I knew that was the only possible explanation, but it changed my perspective on the matter severely, and I was adjusting.

  “Yes. Johnson died in a bed-and-breakfast in Cranbury Township. He lived in Upper Saddle River and had an apartment on the Upper East Side.” Clearly Keith Johnson had been a very upper kind of guy.