The Hostess With the Ghostess Read online

  “The first thing,” he said, “is to go to Richard’s house and his office. We need to find his laptop and his case files, especially those concerning Cassidy Van Doren and Keith Johnson’s murder.”

  That was not what I’d been expecting. Usually Paul had me interview witnesses or suspects and record it so he could hear it later. Now he wanted me to go to Richard’s house?

  “If I heard correctly, Richard said his wife . . .”

  “Miriam.”

  “Yes, Miriam,” I said. “He said he wasn’t sure whether Miriam knew he was love with Cassidy Van Doren.”

  “You did indeed hear correctly,” Paul said.

  “So you want me to go to his house, meet his wife, who you did not rule out as a suspect in bludgeoning him to death in a jealous rage, and ask her for Richard’s laptop?”

  “Unless you find it at his office,” Paul said, nodding.

  “Uh-huh.” Actually, I’d been wrong. This might not have been what I was expecting, but it had a queasily familiar feel to it.

  “Is that a problem?” Paul asked.

  “Nah. I was just thinking how much like old times it all seemed.”

  He held up an index finger like a master debater about to make a devastating point. “Ah, yes,” Paul said. “But this time, I’ll be there with you the whole time.”

  “Imagine my relief.”

  He had the nerve to look surprised.

  #

  Paul volunteered to star in the morning’s spook show “for old times,” but I knew it was because I was helping on the case he was investigating and he felt obligated. Good. I made sure to include a number of the stunts he didn’t especially care for, including playing ukulele badly and answering questions from guests he considered mundane, like, “What’s it like to be dead?”

  Worse, Richard was watching the whole time. My father had also appeared on cue, not knowing Paul was available, and insisted on doing his own patented ghost tricks, like tightening the screws in the switch plates for the overhead lights and measuring the hole in the den ceiling. Again.

  “We’re going to have to get a steel beam in here, baby girl,” he said to me after his amazing tape measure trick ended.

  Since I had no desire to consider the cost of that kind of construction or to discuss my renovation plans with the four guests (everyone but Penny, who was at Stud Muffin getting breakfast), I did not answer my father and waited for the morning show’s grand finale.

  That consisted of Maxie and Paul having a “swordfight” using two umbrellas that had long given up the whole rain-fighting part of their existences and now lived strictly to amuse tourists when being wielded by dead people. Such is the nature of my inn-keeping business.

  “Someone’s going to put an eye out,” Vanessa DiSica murmured at one point. That would have been quite the feat, as neither of the umbrellas had a pointy end, and the ghosts, who had performed this little charade more than a couple of times (even if Paul was rusty), were actually much farther from each other than they would have appeared to the mortal eye. Not to mention, the umbrellas would have gone straight through them.

  Finally, as planned, Maxie “defeated” Paul by knocking his umbrella out of his hand (he threw it into an unoccupied corner of the library as the guests gasped) and held her “weapon” up as Everett had taught her to do with his parade saber. Which Maxie had lobbied about using in the swordfight game and had been roundly shouted down, especially by her husband. The guests applauded.

  “That’s it for this morning, everybody,” I said, giving them a good excuse to exit the premises. “If anyone needs a recommendation for lunch or directions anywhere, you know where to find me.” I have an agreement with some local businesses to steer some guests in their directions for a small cut of the profits the guests rack up. You call it a kickback; I call it mutual benefit.

  Nobody asked for a place to go to lunch. They’d been here a few days already and probably had some local favorites identified; Harbor Haven isn’t a very large town. But I did notice Abby Lesniak eyeing Greg Lewis as he shuffled out of the room, as usual saying nothing but smiling a little weakly at me as he went. Greg, I had been told in the paper work from Senior Plus Tours, had some problems with his feet.

  Abby sidled up to me just as the room had cleared out to her eye. The ghosts, of course, had not left, so Dad was actually sticking his head, flashlight in his mouth, up into the gap in my ceiling, something he’d done almost daily since the bullet hole had been made. Maxie was, to be fair, heading for the ceiling, relieved her morning obligation had been fulfilled. Maxie won’t admit to enjoying the performances and, for a rambunctious poltergeist, has an odd distaste for strangers. She prefers to be alone or with people she knows. Mostly Everett, whom she adores, and Melissa, whom she considers a younger sister.

  Paul was conferring with Richard quietly near the window, making it difficult to see either of them clearly.

  “Have you said anything yet?” Abby asked me in a stage whisper. She wasn’t cognizant of the dead people within earshot and was being careful because of those who had just left the room the conventional way.

  “To Mr. Lewis?” I said, not waiting for her exasperated nod in return. “I haven’t had the chance yet. It’s not the kind of thing you can just spring on a guy, Abby. The topic has to be broached.”

  “Broached!” She didn’t exactly shout so much as she emphasized. “Am I such a terrible person that you have to soften the man up first?”

  First, no, she wasn’t. Second, you never want to get within driving distance of insulting a guest. “Of course not,” I answered immediately. “It’s not about you at all. I’d be this way no matter who had asked me to fix them up with Mr. Lewis.” That hadn’t come out the way I’d rehearsed it.

  “I’m sorry.” Abby seemed to shrink a little bit. “I realize I’m putting you in a difficult position. But I’m really the shy type, and it scares me to have to make myself vulnerable. If you don’t want to say anything, I’ll understand.”

  Wow. My mother and Abby could have been cocaptains of the Olympic Passive-Aggressive Team. They’d probably win the gold too. I found myself assuring Abby I’d speak to Greg Lewis as soon as I had the opportunity. She smiled a beatific smile and thanked me again, confident in the knowledge that her powers to make others bend to her will had not been diminished by age. She walked out of the library.

  The conference between Paul and Richard seemed to break up as she did, as Richard simply evaporated into thin air, which seemed to be his signature way of leaving a room. Paul floated over to me. “Ready to go?” he asked.

  I looked around the room and saw seven things that needed to be cleaned or straightened. “Go where?” I asked, putting a bookmark in a hardcover novel Written Off and closing it, as the reader had left it open on a side table. We frown on breaking the spine here at the guesthouse.

  “To the offices of Filcher, Baker, and Klein,” he answered, like I knew what that was. “The law firm Richard was working for on the Cassidy Van Doren case.”

  Ugh. “Oh, do we have to, Paul?”

  He shrugged. “We can go see Richard’s wife, Miriam, first,” he offered.

  “Law firm it is,” I said. “Let me find my bag.”

  Chapter 9

  Paul regaled me with tales of Evanston, Illinois; Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Hyde Park, New York, as I drove from Harbor Haven, New Jersey, to Woodbridge, New Jersey. Woodbridge was home to the branch office for Richard’s law firm and the one he’d been loaned when he needed to consult on Cassidy Van Doren’s murder trial.

  And he was making sure to catalog his travels during the forty-minute trip to Woodbridge, no doubt as he would on the forty-minute trip home. I was glad Paul had returned, but I had to keep reminding myself of that as I drove.

  I wasn’t bored. I want to make that clear. I was not bored listening to the stories of Paul’s adventures, such as they were, because he couldn’t actually do much besides look around as he
explored America. But after a while I did want to change the subject to pretty much anything else, and luckily I knew a way to do so that wouldn’t for a moment annoy the blatherer in question.

  “Paul,” I said when there was room for a breath, “how are we going to get Richard’s laptop or his files out of his old office? I don’t have any credibility there. I’m not even sure how to identify myself when I get to the front desk.”

  Paul switched modes beautifully, like a luxury car shifting gears. He cocked his head to the right side and considered. “That, you’ll find, is the advantage of having me along from now on, Alison,” he said. “You don’t have to get anything out of Richard’s office. You just have to identify where the items are being kept and then create a distraction while I conceal them in my clothing and meet you back at the car.”

  “A distraction? You want me to pull my skirt up like Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night so the next car will give us a lift? For one thing, I’m wearing pants.”

  “That is unquestionably not what I had in mind,” Paul said, and I wasn’t sure how to take that. “I was thinking more in terms of your asking very specific questions, the type more likely to gain attention in that office, and being, let’s say, conspicuous in your asking.”

  “You want me to shout,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t object, but ‘shout’ might be overstating it. Just make sure you’re audible beyond the one person in front of you.”

  We (that is, I) pulled the car into a parking lot my portable GPS insisted was my “destination.” At least it wasn’t my “final destination,” the way the airlines like to put it. You have to take your signs of hope where you can get them.

  It was as nondescript a building as you can imagine, glass and steel and only four stories high. Some of the parking spaces—those for employees and not visitors like me—were on the level where the ground floor should be, and the building itself was raised over the lot. It was like the offices were on stilts.

  I walked into the lobby, taking off the sunglasses I’d been wearing to drive. It was a lovely sunny June day, which meant there was enough glare to blind a person on New Jersey’s chrome-and-glass-infested highways. I put the sunglasses in my tote bag and walked toward the building’s directory.

  Filcher, Baker, and Klein, attorneys at law, was (were?) located on the second floor, which meant the third floor if you were counting the level with the cars. I’d decided I would because I had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the lobby. I walked up another flight, Paul rising effortlessly and annoyingly beside me, and was immediately confronted with the law offices, which took up the whole floor.

  It was one of those bright, busy, frantic (aren’t you glad I didn’t say bustling?) hubs of activity that might or might not actually justify itself but certainly wants you to know about it. Young people rushed from one cubicle to another with actual paper files, which was odd if you thought about it, but I didn’t. Ringed around the bullpen area were the partners’ offices, which had actual wooden doors and blinds in the windows to disassociate them from the riffraff in their outer offices.

  Right inside the front glass doors was a very welcoming reception area, settled to the left but unmistakably the first stop in a visit to the office. Behind it sat a woman of Asian descent, maybe twenty-five on a bad day, dressed more expensively than I had been at either of my weddings.

  “How may I help you?” she asked pleasantly. I thought the question was a hair presumptuous. How did she know she could help me at all?

  Paul saw the look on my face and said, “You’re not being confrontational, Alison. You’re here for a very specific, completely legitimate purpose. Project that.”

  I didn’t nod, but I did take his words to heart. Paul was right; this was his operation, and I was just the distraction. I remembered to raise my decibel level a bit. “I’m trying to find the office for Richard Harrison,” I said. I was playing it a little brassier than I’d intended, but that note was right for the character I decided I was playing.

  The young woman, whose nameplate identified her as Isabel Chang, didn’t flinch as I might have expected. But she did take a beat to answer. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of unpleasant news,” she began.

  “I know he’s dead,” I told her and a few other people in the immediate area. “I’m here to pick up some of his things. Which one’s the office he was using?” I looked around at the offices to choose one for Richard, but Paul watched Ms. Chang’s eyes, no doubt to see which way she would look reflexively.

  “And you are . . . ?” she said.

  “I’m his assistant from New York,” I said, hoping that Richard’s real assistant hadn’t come by already or wasn’t known by the local staff. “I’m boxing up his things and taking them back where they belong.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Harrison was working out of a hotel in New Brunswick during the trial,” Ms. Chang said. “He didn’t have an office on these premises.”

  “They surely put his things somewhere,” Paul said. He had, in fact, asked Richard where to look, and Richard had replied that since he had been working out of the hotel, there was no telling where his personal effects and professional materials might have ended up.

  I channeled my inner Joan Cusack in Working Girl. “He had a laptop. He had case files. They’re not in the hotel, so they must be someplace.” I was especially proud of the spin I put on that last word. Even I was a little uncomfortable with myself in the room.

  But it got the response Paul had hoped for: just for a moment, Ms. Chang’s eyes moved toward one of the vacant offices to her left, our right. He headed in that direction immediately.

  “I’m afraid the police confiscated everything Mr. Harrison left in the hotel room,” she said, once again holding eye contact with me. “The county prosecutor’s office probably has it now.”

  I needed to buy a little time for Paul to look through the room Ms. Chang had unwittingly pointed him toward. “There were no copies of anything? No backup files in the server here? I find it hard to believe you guys in New Jersey don’t have a protocol to save things like that in case of an emergency.”

  Ms. Chang looked, as she should, offended at the idea that New Jerseyans can’t keep up with our evil overlords in the Big Apple. I had hoped that would irritate her enough to make her composure slip a little but was disappointed. “I’m sure in the New York office you have the same procedures that we do. A deceased attorney means every file is sealed. And no doubt your office has the proper forms to request access to any files you might need.”

  I was trying very hard not to look like I was watching the empty office into which Paul had vanished behind drawn blinds. He was not emerging, but then I wasn’t able to keep a constant eye on the room.

  “You want me to fill out a form?” I answered, hoping the increase in volume might alert Paul to the idea that I was running out of improv material and might need him to hurry his see-through butt out of the area. “A man is dead! I’m just trying to retrieve what he left behind so he can be remembered appropriately.” Yeah, I was running on fumes, all right.

  “You know the rules,” Ms. Chang said. “Right?”

  Uh-oh. What did that mean? “I know, but—”

  “Do you have your ID on you?” she jumped in. “Your company key card?” As if to intimidate me (which she could do easily on her own), she indicated a lanyard around her neck with a very professional swipe card hanging on it.

  “Um . . .” I was going to argue that the New York office didn’t have those, but what were the odds? “I didn’t bring it with me. Figured I wouldn’t need it to get in here.”

  “Right.” Ms. Chang looked toward a young man standing to my left, who wasn’t wearing a uniform but whose stillness gave the impression he was working as a security guard of some sort. Of course, how many sorts of security guards are there, really? “Gary, would you check with the New York office? Ms. . . .” She looked at me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

  That
was probably because I hadn’t thrown it. My job here had been to create a distraction, not to actually obtain anything. “I’m Mr. Harrison’s assistant,” I said. It sounded stupid even to me.

  “I imagine it doesn’t say that on your driver’s license,” Ms. Chang said. Gary the security guy, who frankly wasn’t all that scary in a polo shirt and blue khakis, moved a little closer in case I tried to bust my way into the law firm. I guess.

  For a Jersey girl, there is only one option when backed into a corner, and that is to exhibit righteous indignation. “Look, if you think for one second that you can tell me I’m not me because you don’t feel like going through your own computer files, I don’t have to put up with that!” I huffed. “I don’t get paid enough for this!”

  With that I turned on my (flat) heel and headed for the office door. Paul, I decided, could fend for himself, largely because no one could see him anyway. Even if someone had stumbled into the office he was searching and saw files flying around, what was going to happen to Paul? Very hard to get him arrested, but I was still quite visible, and my hands were solid enough to hold cuffs.

  “Just a moment,” I heard Ms. Chang say, and against my better judgment, I stopped and looked at her.

  “What?” I asked in my best confrontational tone, which wasn’t very good.

  “I need you to sign out,” she said, pointing to a sheet on a clipboard in her hand.

  I made a rude noise and left the office.

  I walked down the two flights of stairs and went to my battered, weathered Volvo wagon in the parking lot among the Lexus SUVs and Mercedes sedans. Hovering just over my car was Paul, arms folded, in his usual jeans and dark shirt, looking as if he’d been there for hours.

  “What took you so long?” he asked.

  “I figured while I was up there I’d file a lawsuit against somebody, but I don’t currently have an address for my ex-husband,” I said. “What do you mean, what took me so long? Why didn’t you come out and relieve me at the front desk?”