Bones Behind the Wheel Read online

  So I resumed my juvenile behavior from before and left the den, heading down the hall to the movie room. Neither Paul nor Melissa made any effort at all to stop me, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. But passing the library I happened to glance through the window that looked out on the beach and saw McElone heading toward the driveway, where I knew her Harbor Haven Police Department-issued Chevy Impala (because you’d never think that was a cop car, would you?) was parked. She had no doubt stayed long enough to oversee the crew currently making my backyard uninhabitable and was heading back to her station.

  Should I go back and tell Paul? He’d want to hitch a ride with McElone to observe her day of investigating. It would be a way to get him out of the house and thereby keep me from having to hear more about the mystery of the disappearing car. But it would also mean that Paul wouldn’t be available for at the very least the morning spook show, and even with only three guests that would put me at a disadvantage.

  So was I going to put the needs of my guesthouse above the interest of my friend, however dead he might be? Could I be that selfish?

  Yeah. I could.

  I walked down to the movie room and found it almost neater than it had been before Adam and Steve had decided to spend a few hours there the evening before. These two guests were so polite they’d actually carried their own popcorn bags back to the kitchen and disposed of them. There were no stray kernels or butter stains on the floor or the loveseat they’d used. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d vacuumed the rug after leaving, but I probably would have heard that. I’d thank them later for their consideration, even when they were on holiday. (I’m not British; I just didn’t want to rhyme consideration with vacation.)

  This left me with a rather unusual conundrum: I really didn’t have to spend much time straightening up the movie room. I didn’t want to disturb Katrina or Steve if they were still in their rooms, so cleaning upstairs was sort of off the table now. I supposed I could go out for groceries now that McElone’s car wasn’t blocking mine in the driveway, but I didn’t really need very much.

  It’s not often in an innkeeper’s life that there isn’t much to do, so this was the exception rather than the rule. I decided I’d be a nice friend and go tell Paul that McElone was leaving or had left. I didn’t see her through the side window of the movie room, where the driveway is visible, but the angle was wrong to be certain.

  I had been callous about Paul’s feelings and should correct my mistake. So I walked back to the den but Paul and Melissa were gone. Liss had probably gone upstairs to finish her preparation for school. Paul had either caught up with the lieutenant or gone elsewhere to work on his investigation. He was absolutely focused when there was a mystery to solve.

  Still, in my house it’s really difficult to be alone for long even when you work at it. I was a little surprised to see Maxie descending through the ceiling in the den, wearing the trench coat she uses to conceal objects she’s carrying through walls or in this case, floors. Maxie doesn’t usually show up until minutes before the morning spook show and even then she complains about having to be active so early in the morning. The show wouldn’t start for another couple of hours.

  She was barely in the room before the trench coat vanished and I saw she was carrying her beloved laptop computer, the one she uses to do internet research when Paul is working a case or to watch television programs when he’s not.

  But she didn’t seem to be doing either at the moment. She opened the laptop and held it in midair, typing madly with her right hand and staring, as one might expect, at the wounded ceiling beam that Tony and Vic were noisily preparing to attack from the other side of the kitchen door.

  “Aren’t you in the wrong room?” I asked. “You’re doing work in the kitchen.”

  Maxie didn’t look up from her screen. “The work being done in the kitchen is going to affect the way this side looks too,” she said, her voice all business. “I have to take into account the impact on both sides. Besides, the kitchen is crowded.” Maxie sort of resents Tony for not requiting a crush she had on him a few years ago despite the fact that she moved on to Everett, a man more suited to her because he 1. wasn’t married to someone else and 2. wasn’t more alive than her. So she either stays out of the room when he’s there or makes pointed comments about him, knowing he can’t hear her. For his part, Tony is fine with Paul in the room and a little nervous when he knows Maxie is about. He’s an intelligent man.

  “You’ll have to deal with them being here,” I informed her.

  She waved a hand to declare it irrelevant. Maxie was concentrating. I hadn’t seen this side of her very often, and wondered if it was what she was like when she was working as a living designer.

  Melissa called from the front room that her ride to school was here and was out the door before I could wish her a good day. Life is so full when you’re thirteen and then you realize you really weren’t doing all that much.

  Tony opened the kitchen door and Maxie’s trench coat reappeared as she zoomed into the ceiling again. I guess she wasn’t that focused.

  “Just wanted to let you know we’re going to be bracing the ceiling with a bunch of two-by-fours,” Tony said. “It’s just inside the door, which you know, so you’re not going to have access to the kitchen for a while.”

  “How long’s a while?” I asked.

  Tony scratched his head. “I’ll know better when I get in there, but at least the rest of the day,” he answered.

  So I couldn’t use my backyard and now my kitchen. It seemed the whole property was divorcing itself from me from the back going forward. I probably moaned a little involuntarily, even though been preparing for this for weeks. “You do what you have to do,” I told him.

  “Something I think you might want to see,” Tony said. He gestured toward the kitchen. “Before the door is off limits.”

  I followed him toward my kitchen’s swinging door. Before he pushed it Tony said, “Incoming,” just to make sure we didn’t hit Vic, particularly if he was standing on a ladder.

  “Okay,” his brother said from inside.

  Tony pushed on the door and swung it into the kitchen, holding it open for me. He’s old school chivalrous. But as soon as I stepped through, I could see he’d been trying to protect himself, too, from whatever reaction I might have when I saw the state of my kitchen after the Mandorisi brothers had prepared it.

  Everything was covered in clear plastic tarpaulins. They weren’t drop cloths, because they weren’t made of cloth. You could see through them but that wasn’t the point; they were thick enough to protect against the onslaught of dust and debris that would result from the partial removal of the wooden beam and its replacement with something sturdier, which Tony and I had agreed would be a steel beam.

  I had anticipated the covers because I’ve done work in homes before and I spent some time working in a home improvement superstore and a lumberyard before I bought the guesthouse. And my father had sometimes taken me to work when he was fixing people’s houses. I’d done a good deal of work on the guesthouse.

  I wasn’t prepared for the impact it would have on my emotions when I saw all the small appliances and other items I’d left out on the countertops moved to one table in the back of the room and covered in more tarps. It just so wasn’t my kitchen—and I don’t even cook. I didn’t feel like crying again but I think I did gasp. It’s never the same when it’s your house being disrupted because you know how hard you worked to get it rupted to begin with. The fact that Tony and Vic had, understandably, taken down part of the ceiling drywall to allow better access to the affected beam was not helping.

  Still, I held it together. “What did you want to show me?” I asked.

  “We found something when we were cleaning out the work area,” Tony said.

  Vic, who looked amused, was standing near the refrigerator, which was also covered in plastic. The floors were covered with paper and Tony had hung a protective barrier of plastic over the kitchen doo
r but hadn’t attached it yet because he’d wanted me to be able to walk inside. “Yeah,” Vic said. “We found something.” He sounded like a kid with a secret he was desperate to tell.

  “Okay.” I had enough going on without having to play guessing games.

  Tony understood that, so he walked to the nearest part of the kitchen counter and found a small object I couldn’t see. He picked it up and brought it to me. “This was taped to a part of the beam that was a few inches behind the wall board,” he said. “I think it might be important.”

  He handed me the object, which was a small pouch with a drawstring holding it closed. It was covered in dust as you’d expect from something that had spent any time at all inside my walls. And it was made of a velvet material, much like the one Paul had said he’d seen McElone pocket before she left.

  “Open it,” Tony said.

  That seemed a logical step. I undid the drawstring and held out my left hand. There was clearly something small and not terribly heavy inside the pouch. So I turned the pouch over and it fell onto my palm.

  What sat there appeared to be an emerald. A large emerald. Okay, a very large emerald. It was green and big. That’s what I’m saying.

  “Yup, we found something, all right,” Vic said.

  Chapter 8

  “Where was this found, exactly?” McElone wanted to know.

  Given the nature of the discovery the Mandorisi brothers had made, McElone had overcome her resistance to entering my house and was standing in what had once been my kitchen, looking up at the gaping hole in my ceiling. It was like looking behind the scenes at a theme park and seeing how the magic is made. Who wants that?

  Tony stood on the second rung of a ladder he’d set up to access the hole in the ceiling and reached his arm up to illustrate. “We were working in here just to clear out the area,” he began.

  “Please don’t touch it again,” McElone said. “That area’s probably already got more fingerprints than I’ve collected in my entire career.”

  Tony withdrew his hand in a spasm, not wanting to disobey the lieutenant. “Anyway, we were reaching in there and found that pouch.”

  “We?” McElone asked. “Which one of you found it?”

  Vic stepped forward. “I did,” he said. “I was pulling down some wallboard and felt it next to the part of the beam that the bullet didn’t splinter.” I sort of wished he hadn’t brought up the bullet, even though McElone certainly knew the details of that incident. I just didn’t think she needed a reminder just at the moment.

  “It was just sitting there?” she asked Vic.

  “No. It was taped to a piece of the beam, so the top was attached and the bottom was just sort of dangling. I didn’t know what it was so I pulled it down and that’s when we found the jewel inside.”

  McElone looked at the pouch, which was sitting on a makeshift workbench the Mandorisis had set up across two sawhorses. She put on a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and looked inside the pouch.

  “Looks like an emerald,” she said.

  What was she expecting, a lump of coal? “I told you that when I called,” I reminded her.

  “I’m saying it looks like an emerald,” the lieutenant said again. “I’ll have to find out if it’s a real one or not.” She looked at Vic. “What kind of tape was holding it up?”

  Vic shined a flashlight into the mangled remains of my ceiling. “Up there, see?” he said. “I don’t want to touch it again.”

  “You’re right not to,” McElone assured him. She took a step forward to see into the hole more clearly. “Looks like packing tape, like for shipping.”

  Vic nodded. “Yeah. The clear kind.”

  That didn’t seem to make McElone happy; her face scrunched a little but she appeared to be thinking, not annoyed. “Okay.”

  “Why would something like that be in my ceiling, lieutenant?” I thought maybe if I could get her talking she would tell me about the pouch she’d found outside in my backyard and this whole thing would start to make some sense.

  But then, I think a lot of things. “I have no idea yet,” McElone answered, “and if I did, I most likely wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Can we keep working up here?” Tony asked.

  “Not until I get a crime scene team in to look it over,” she said.

  I looked out my back window. “There’s still one on my beach,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah. I can get a couple of them in here to get fingerprints and pictures. Shouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”

  Tony grimaced a little but said nothing. I knew he had taken a serious discount on this job because it was for me, and he had scheduled today and part of tomorrow to do it as quickly as possible. Tomorrow’s work would be mostly replacing the wallboard in the ceiling, something I could do myself if he and Vic had to be elsewhere on a real paying job.

  “Lieutenant,” I said, “I appreciate that this is a crime scene and everything, but do we really even know that this stone is part of a crime? I mean, you already have half the Harbor Haven police force digging up what’s left of my backyard. These guys are working here today because they’re being nice to me, and any delay will cost them in work they could be doing for people who have actual money.”

  Lt. McElone is, at her core, a reasonable person. She has respect for people who do honest work and understands that police business in regular lives can be disruptive. She narrowed her eyes a little because I’d sort of challenged her decision, but said, “I’ll get them out of here as quickly as I can.” She looked over at Tony. “For you.”

  She turned before I could be snide and walked through the kitchen door, which took some doing around all the protective sheeting Tony had taped up (with blue gaffer’s tape if anyone was wondering) on my walls and windows. She left to go talk to the team working on the other major crime scene on my property.

  Tony looked over at me and shrugged. “I thought I was giving you good news,” he said.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “You were. It just was in this house, where everything turns weird.”

  Just to prove the point, Paul came phasing in through the wall and assessed the room. “What’s happened in here?” he asked.

  I don’t like to talk directly to the ghosts when there are “civilians” in the room, especially someone like Vic who isn’t really acquainted with the, let’s say, peculiarities of my home. So I didn’t answer Paul directly. “How long do you think you can wait to get back to work on the ceiling beam and not lose your entire week?” I asked Tony.

  Through the window I saw McElone point at the house to two of the crime scene people, who probably hadn’t had this much work all at one time in their lives. Harbor Haven doesn’t lend itself to major crimes except when a ghost comes and asks Paul to investigate … anything.

  “Maybe the best thing is for us to get out of the way and work on another job,” Tony answered. “You can text me when the cops clear out of the room and we’ll get back here as fast as we can. How’s that?” It was a polite way of saying that he was anxious to get to something that would help pay his bills.

  “That makes the most sense,” I said. “But you’ll come back as soon as I call, right?”

  Tony smiled. “As soon as we can. Don’t worry. Jeannie will kill me if you don’t get this done as fast as possible.” Vic was already packing up some of their tools behind him.

  They were gone before I could muse on the interconnection of humans and their actions toward each other, which probably would have taken a decent period of time, I realize now.

  Paul rose up through the floor just as Tony and Vic were leaving, plastic sheeting remaining in place through the room. No sense in setting that all up again when they came back. Paul likes to ruminate on his problems in the basement, away from the traffic particularly when we had more guests than I did today. He looked like he’d been thinking for a while. His hair was a little disheveled compared to his usual look, which indicated to me that he’d run his hands through it. A bree
ze really isn’t going to affect a ghost’s appearance at all, and they can’t feel it. I’ve seen Maxie wear t-shirts outside during a blizzard. Of course, I’m not sure she wouldn’t have done that when she was alive, too.

  “Is there construction going on?” Paul asked. He tends to ignore some of the more mundane details of my life, like anything that doesn’t relate to an investigation or a spook show he needs to attend.

  Before I could answer the back door opened and two police officers, a man and a woman, entered. They weren’t in uniform but instead in the jumpsuits worn by crime scene investigators and they had already equipped themselves with latex gloves. I thought it was a bit much but they have their protocols.

  “I’m Sergeant Menendez,” the woman said, showing me her badge in a folding wallet. “This is Officer Lassen. I’m told there a crime scene we need to examine?”

  “Another one?” Paul had immediately perked up when the cops walked in. He loves cops. In my house he has gotten to see and interact with them far too often for my taste, but it always invigorates him.

  “Yes,” I said to both Menendez and Paul. “Right here.” I pointed to the rather obvious crime scene. I was hoping the cops were better at their jobs than that opening gambit might have suggested.

  “I see,” Menendez said, getting close enough to do exactly that.

  “The police already examined that area.” Paul sounded a little disappointed.

  “Is this where the emerald was discovered?” Lassen asked, also closing in on the smaller of the two enormous holes that had recently been opened on my property.

  “Emerald?” Paul’s enthusiasm was rising and dropping like people on one of the serious roller coasters at Great Adventure in Jackson. He rose up to look into the bullet-caused damage to my ceiling beam, which still looked pretty sturdy despite the splintering. Maybe I should just cover it over with wallboard and forget the whole thing.

  “Yes. Lt. McElone already questioned the two contractors who found it. I wasn’t in the room at the time.”