Ghost in the Wind Page 6

  But before I could respond, Paul rose through the floor and gave Vance a stare just a touch short of dagger-like. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “I have an obligation and I intend to fulfill it.”

  I’ll confess it: I was disappointed. “Um, we could do both,” I suggested.

  “I don’t think that will be an advantage,” Paul insisted. “Maxie and I have done this hundreds of times before.”

  “Yeah,” Maxie said ominously. No doubt the tedium of actually having to do something that made people happy was wearing on her.

  Vance looked at Paul for a long moment. “Another time, then,” he said, and rose up into the ceiling and through it. I tried calling after him to ask if he knew Lester but he was gone already.

  I tried to remember that my purpose when I’d gotten out of bed this morning had been to apologize to Paul for my emotional and rash behavior the night before. But I had just had the opportunity to present Vance McTiernan in concert in my own house and Paul quashed it because he had marked his territory in my library, or something.

  “What were you thinking!?” I demanded of Paul, who had the unmitigated nerve to look surprised. “Are you that insecure?”

  He didn’t have time to answer because just then, two of my guests—Roberta Levine and Maureen Beckman—arrived at the library door. Maureen, leaning on her walker, looked into the room and asked, “Isn’t this where we get to see the ghosts today?”

  Maxie swooped down from her orbit to a position about two inches from Maureen’s face. “You don’t get to see me at all,” she mocked.

  “That’s right,” I told Maureen, trying hard not to give Maxie a poisonous look (what good would poison do on a dead person?). “Please, come on in. We’ll be starting in just a minute.”

  Maureen, Roberta and Tessa Boynton came in and sat in three of the easy chairs I have for reading in the library. The fourth remained unoccupied, but I was sure that Stan Levine would not be far behind his wife. Tessa’s companion, Jesse Renfield, seemed to keep to himself—I’d only seen him once so far. He was young for the Senior Plus set, technically not a senior at all (a junior?) in his late forties. Twenty years ago, he had probably been a surfer off Sandy Hook. But he still had his hair and his teeth (at least in the sense that he held the receipts), and he seemed to know the art of keeping an older woman interested.

  Hey, anything can be an art. Jesse was an artist. Just keep in mind that not every artist is a good artist.

  My sixth guest, Berthe Englund, was out for the morning because she said it was easier to get a good Skee-Ball lane at the boardwalk if you showed up early, especially when school was in session. What made one Skee-Ball lane better than another was a question I hadn’t felt the urge to ask.

  “If you’re truly upset, Alison, I can tell Vance to come back and I’ll sit this performance out,” Paul suggested. He seemed more puzzled than upset.

  I shook my head. The guests know I frequently talk to people who technically aren’t there, but the spook shows are about their (the guests’) experience, and I was concerned with putting on a good performance. I didn’t want to be seen arguing with the “talent.”

  This group of guests had seen only one spook show the afternoon before, so there was no need to mix it up too much. We could rely on our usual staple, the “floating” objects, and move on from there. As they’d pointed out, Paul and Maxie had done these bits quite a number of times now, and could probably do them in their sleep. If they slept.

  “Let’s just wait for everyone to be here,” I said to the assembled group.

  “Stan isn’t coming this morning,” Roberta informed me. “He’s taking a nap, but he’ll be here this afternoon.”

  Maxie huffed an irritated sigh. She actually believes the guests come to the house merely to irritate her, as if it said on the brochures, “Don’t pass up your chance to annoy a dead person!” Maxie, as I’ve said, might be a tiny touch self-centered.

  “So then should we wait for Jesse?” I asked Tessa.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Tessa answered. “He’s probably just wandering around the beach. He doesn’t seem that interested in ghosts.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” Maxie volunteered. Again, I pretended she hadn’t spoken.

  Instead, I sneezed. I had stopped sneezing when I’d left the house, but now that I was back, I felt itchy and allergic again. I wondered if one of the guests was wearing a perfume that might have irritated my sinuses, or something. Mom has told me how she had to stop wearing White Shoulders when I was little because it made my eyes tear and my nose run.

  Don’t picture it. You’re better off.

  “Well then, let’s get started!” I said, doing my best to sound enthused. When we’d first begun these performances for my guests, it had felt like a scam, presenting Paul and Maxie as scary creatures for the sake of my fledgling business. But I realized over time that the guests didn’t want to be frightened. They just wanted some interaction with the unknown, with beings who had crossed to another plane of existence that nobody—not even Paul or Maxie—understands.

  Hey, it’s a way to make me feel better, and it’s not hurting anybody.

  I stood in the center of the room and took a deep breath. It wasn’t because I was nervous, believe me. It’s part of the act. “I’m clearing my mind,” I said. “I have to be able to concentrate so I can locate the spirits of the guesthouse.”

  When I looked up, I noticed Maxie mouthing the speech along with me. Maybe we needed to freshen up the shows a little bit.

  “As I clear my mind, I invite you to open your own,” I intoned, stifling another sneeze as my brain sent urgent “itch” messages. “Think of nothing at all.” (That is, by the way, impossible to do.) “Allow any possibility in your imagination to become real. Consider life and death and what changes come with each step along the continuum of existence.” No, I don’t know what it means, either, but it sounds profound, doesn’t it?

  “I sense two presences here in this room,” I told the guests. The three women didn’t appear to be especially nervous, which was good. Even with all the assurances I offer, some people are scared about being in a house with ghosts, despite having gone out of their way to pay for the privilege. The jumpy ones can get everyone else a little on edge, and then the show stops being fun for anybody.

  “Yes, they’re here, all right,” I continued. “And their names are Paul and Maxie.” I pretended to be exhausted by my “connection” with the ghosts, and moved back toward the door of the library. I knew what was coming and wanted to give the ghosts as much room as they needed.

  “How come he always gets top billing?” Maxie asked. She knew I wouldn’t answer, and it wasn’t the first time the question had come up, but she has her agenda.

  I felt the urge to sneeze again but I wanted to be sure the show was completely in progress before I could step into the hallway, so I put my index finger up under my nose and pushed. I learned in third grade that could suppress a sneeze and no matter what you think, it works for me.

  Paul began by choosing a book—Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin—and taking it off the shelf and moving it around the room. Not that impressive when you can see the ghost, but to the guests in the library, it appeared that the large volume was flying by itself through space. Their eyes widened and their mouths opened just a little. Roberta actually stood and felt for wires holding the book up, and Paul responded by dropping the book to her eye level and opening it to the title page.

  “See if she wants to read it,” he said. That’s Paul’s idea of a joke.

  Not to be outdone, Maxie picked up an armful of paperbacks and began tossing them gently onto the laps of the guests. Tessa started just a little, then said, “How did you know I love Danielle Steel?”

  “You seemed the type,” Maxie told her, but of course only I could hear her voice.

  Paul, smiling
slyly, took three books in his hands and started to move them around as if he were juggling. To the audience, of course, it looked as if he was juggling (Paul isn’t anywhere near that coordinated, nor would he ever take the time it would require to learn something so frivolous, despite his literally having all the time he’d ever need), so the women broke into a round of applause when he stopped the “juggling” and stood still with the three books.

  “Big deal,” Maxie said. She retaliated by buzzing around the room taking bookmarks from the side tables. (I figured a library should have bookmarks, largely because I object to people who leave books, especially paperbacks, open on flat surfaces and break their spines. And dog-earing the pages is a desecration, if you ask me. So there was quite an assortment.)

  Maxie took the bookmarks and moved to an old child’s toy easel I use to put up announcements for the guests. It made a perfect bulletin board now; too bright to be ignored, but didn’t seem imposing or impersonal. It lent a nice touch to the cozy quality of the room.

  Maxie now arranged the bookmarks on it to spell out: IS THAT ALL YOU GOT. She tried to make a question mark at the end but found the task too difficult and left it at that.

  Once the guests saw what she had written, they laughed. They didn’t know where to look for the competitor—Paul—who would have to meet and exceed the challenge, but I could. And he looked just a little concerned. But then I saw him nod, presumably after having gotten an idea, and fly up to the ceiling fan, where he attempted to get it spinning on its own. Lest the guests think I had simply activated it myself, I took the opportunity, now that the show was in full swing, to head out into the hallway and indulge myself in a truly impressive sneeze.

  It actually turned into four consecutive sneezes, followed by massive itching in my throat, which required my making some truly horrendous noises to soothe. So I moved myself farther down the hallway to the movie room and made sounds like a lovesick sea lion for a minute or so. That, unfortunately, clogged my ears. Right after the spook show, I promised myself, I would search the house for some antihistamine, because I was surely having a reaction to something.

  The congestion in my ears, however, was even more regrettable once I made my way back to the library. Because there in the doorway, holding an acoustic guitar and playing “Claudia” from the Jingles album Electric Spur (ironic because it was all acoustic music) was Vance McTiernan. And it was mesmerizing the group, wide-eyed and rapt in their attention.

  It was the fulfillment of a dream for me. I literally couldn’t move my feet. But I knew what I had to do: I held my nose and blew through it to clear my ears. I didn’t want to miss this.

  You faded out like far church bells

  Your lipstick smeared and caked

  You never stopped to say farewells

  But left my heart to break

  The consummate performer, Vance was still revising his technique, putting twists into his intonations and holding notes he hadn’t held on the recording. His lovely baritone filled my ears but the guests only heard his intricate but simple guitar accompaniment. Though that was still enough to hold them all in thrall. And I, getting the whole performance, was speechless and awed.

  Vance was a real pro.

  He made sure to look my way as I reentered the room but did not smile through his lyrics of regret; he was either acting the song or feeling it. And at the end, he performed a special guitar run that I knew wasn’t in the original arrangement to give his audience a bonus for their attention.

  They let the last chord ring until the sound died completely, then burst into applause the like of which the guesthouse had never heard before. Roberta Levine and Tessa Boynton even stood to give the unseen musician the ovation he deserved. Standing was too difficult for Maureen Beckman, but she applauded the loudest.

  Vance put down the guitar carefully next to one of the easy chairs. He bowed.

  To me.

  Then he swept through the room, making sure to make contact with each of the ladies. You can feel the presence of a ghost when he wants you to, especially, and Vance wanted them to feel it. Each one, when touched, started just a little bit and smiled a special smile; the man was a born entertainer, even in death. After a lingering smile for Maureen Beckman, Vance left the library through the wall, headed in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Alison!” Tessa shouted. “That was wonderful!”

  “Yes,” Maureen agreed. “How on earth did you do that?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t. That was all ghost.”

  “But it wasn’t scary at all,” Roberta said. “It was lovely.”

  “If you like that kind of thing,” Maxie said. She was up near the ceiling, her face betraying her words. She was grinning the way a true convert does when a once-in-a . . . lifetime? performance has reached her heart.

  But that was when I took a look around the library. Maxie’s voice had attracted my eyes to the upper half of the room. She made her remark, no doubt to cover the tremble in her voice, and I’d looked up with an expectation that was not satisfied, and for reasons I couldn’t have explained fully at the time, I felt very sad in a big hurry, like something very important and irrevocable had just happened.

  Paul had left the room before the show was over. And he hadn’t come back.

  Six

  A thorough search of the house—well, kind of thorough, since it was just me doing the searching—did not lead to a sighting of our resident investigator ghost. This was not terribly unusual. Paul does like his privacy, values time spent alone, and let’s face it, can vanish anytime he feels like it, so finding him when he’s not in the mood to be found can be something of a challenge.

  I gave up after fifteen minutes. The guests all told me how wonderful the performance had been, how glad they were to have chosen my guesthouse for their vacations this year and asked if there would be further musical extravaganzas at the rest of the spook shows (a question I could not begin to answer). I was still reeling from the experience myself and hadn’t digested it completely.

  After the show broke up, I straightened the library a bit and checked the movie room for my Blu-Ray copy of Ghost. I’d bought it at a local bookstore called Read ’Em and Keep, which sold video and music because far too many people wanted to read ’em and then give ’em back.

  Then I stood in the movie room, for once entirely alone, and sighed. I’d put it off long enough. It was time to visit Lieutenant Anita McElone. Now I felt like I owed Vance.

  Now, it’s not that I was afraid of McElone; I’d gotten past that phase. It wasn’t even that she intimidates me—I’ve gotten used to it and expect that to be the case no matter how long I know her. The thing is, the lieutenant and I had recently gone through an experience that was uncomfortable for both of us: I’d sort of saved her life and she didn’t know how to handle it.

  Since then, she’d clammed up on me to some extent. That had to do both with our recent adventure and the fact that the previously skeptical lieutenant now completely believed in the ghosts in my house. She was still processing the information, and right now she was uncomfortable in my presence. There was a time she wouldn’t have walked into my house because she was afraid; now she wouldn’t come over because she saw it as a sign of her own failure. Which wasn’t true at all, but go tell McElone that.

  Still, she was my best source of possible police information on Vanessa McTiernan’s death, and she was the only cop I knew who treated me like an investigator, sort of. Not to mention, Phyllis had practically insisted I go see McElone, and that meant Phyllis either knew something and wanted me to go find it out for myself or didn’t know something and wanted me to find out for her. That’s how Phyllis operates. You eventually get what you need but you have to work for it.

  Regardless, I made myself drive to the police station and McElone even let me in through the locked door to the police bullpen when the dispatcher Emily told
her I was there. But she didn’t look happy about it. Of course, I’m used to that; McElone has never looked happy when I’ve come to ask her about, let’s say, anything.

  So I started off slowly and asked if she could look for any records of a missing man named Lester from Topeka, Kansas. (I thought of it as a sort of police icebreaker.) But she just stared at me for at least a full minute, not moving a muscle, and I was unnerved enough to move on to the main event.

  “A death by natural causes from four months ago?” she asked when I told her about my reason for showing up late on a Friday afternoon. “Who’s your client on this one?” She stopped herself. “Wait. It’s a ghosty thing, isn’t it?”

  “You could say that. The client is the deceased’s father. Vance McTiernan.”

  McElone looked at her computer screen. She normally would have gone off for five straight minutes about how a private investigator shouldn’t be making the police department do all her work for her, but she probably remembered how she might not have seen her husband and children again were it not for me, so we skipped that part of the ritual on this visit. No doubt it would be back next time.

  The point is, she didn’t react at all.

  “Vance McTiernan,” I said again.

  “I heard you.” McElone punched some keys for a while and watched her screen. “So he thinks she didn’t just eat the wrong thing? Is this guy maybe a little too . . . invested . . . to allow for the possibility his precious little girl could have just died for no reason?” She punched a few more keys. “Vance? With a V?”

  “You never heard of Vance McTiernan?” I asked. How was that possible?

  “No. Should I have?”

  “The Jingles,” I said. Surely that would jog her memory.