Chance of a Ghost (2 page)

Thank you to Dominick Finelle, the cover artist for the series who always gets the tone right and comes up with ideas I couldn’t possibly dream up, and Judith Lagerman, executive art director of The Berkley Publishing Group, who takes the awful squiggles I send and makes them look like a real book. Kudos to both of you.

And without the tireless work of my agent, Josh Getzler, and Maddie Raffel of Hannigan Salky Getzler Agency, would there even
be
a book called
Chance of a Ghost
? I tend to doubt it. Thanks for putting up with my neuroses and constant demands for attention. Thanks also to Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, who helped get the Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries to begin in my head.

There are, no doubt, many I’m inadvertently omitting, and to each of them, my sincere apologies; it was, you know, inadvertent. But to booksellers, librarians, reviewers (even the ones
who don’t like me) and especially readers, rest assured authors know that without you, we’d all be trying to find
real
jobs.

Above all, thanks to Jessica, Josh and Eve, who make my life my life. Which is almost exactly what I always hoped it would be, but never expected.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Regular readers of these books must be awfully tired of reading the same names praised effusively and thanked profusely time after time. On the other hand, you’re choosing to read the acknowledgments, so clearly it’s something you find interesting. For me, it is a necessary and pleasurable obligation. Many people work awfully hard to get my words to you in the best possible light. How could I
not
take time out to notice and appreciate their efforts?

Some very special thanks this time, to start: Maryann Wrobel, the
real
box office manager at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey, was kind enough to take me on a tour and show me how the office works. I told her I might write about fictional intrigue and murder connected to a character who had her job, and she smiled. Thank you, Maryann. The Count Basie is a beautiful place to see a show, and I hope to be there again very soon.

Those who offered advice on homemade fingerprint kits: Michael Silverling and Marianne Macdonald could not have been more helpful. The same is true of Dave Bennett, Sue Epstein, Carola Dunn, Sara Hoskinson Frommer, Carl Brookins, Theresa de Valence, Thomas B. Sawyer (my favorite name in all of crime fiction), Tony Burton and Margaret Koch. Thank you, and remind me never to commit a crime when you’re around.

Of course, thanks to the invaluable D. P. Lyle, the one and only resource to a crime fiction writer for all things medical, to teach me about arrhythmia and what kind of outlets a toaster would have to go through to electrocute someone. You can’t ask just anybody about this stuff, and I have rarely met anyone as selfless. Thank you, Doug.

Thanks, in other matters, to Linda Landrigan, Lynn Pisar, Damon Abdallah, Sue Trowbridge, Dru Ann Love (for getting the Carly Simon reference), Paul Penner, Mikie Fambro (for the ride to the airport), Matt Kaufhold and everyone who invested their money with absolutely no chance of a return in the movie
Scavengers
. You all know who you are, and so do I. Words are insufficient, but all I can offer.

There is no way I can allow you to read these acknowledgments without seeing the name Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, the incandescent editor of the Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries (and the late lamented Double Feature Mysteries), who knows every single time I’m trying to finesse something and never ever lets me get away with it. She is at least as important a factor in your enjoyment of these books as I am.

Thank you to Dominick Finelle, the cover artist for the series who always gets the tone right and comes up with ideas I couldn’t possibly dream up, and Judith Lagerman, executive art director of The Berkley Publishing Group, who takes the awful squiggles I send and makes them look like a real book. Kudos to both of you.

And without the tireless work of my agent, Josh Getzler, and Maddie Raffel of Hannigan Salky Getzler Agency, would there even
be
a book called
Chance of a Ghost
? I tend to doubt it. Thanks for putting up with my neuroses and constant demands for attention. Thanks also to Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, who helped get the Haunted Guesthouse Mysteries to begin in my head.

There are, no doubt, many I’m inadvertently omitting, and to each of them, my sincere apologies; it was, you know, inadvertent. But to booksellers, librarians, reviewers (even the ones
who don’t like me) and especially readers, rest assured authors know that without you, we’d all be trying to find
real
jobs.

Above all, thanks to Jessica, Josh and Eve, who make my life my life. Which is almost exactly what I always hoped it would be, but never expected.

The dream is not always the same; there are variables in the setting and the details. But it always begins with me, either in the house where I grew up or in the enormous
Victorian I now own as a guesthouse.

And my father is there.

Even in the dream, I know he’s been dead for five years and that it doesn’t make sense for him to be completing some home improvement project with me. But that doesn’t seem to matter to him, so I see no need to make it an issue.

It’s like things used to be—Dad will point out something about the job he’s doing so I’ll remember it. “See, you want to drive the screws in a little bit deeper than flush on wallboard,” he’ll say. “That way when you fill the hole with compound, you can sand it smooth, and you won’t see a screw head shining through the paint.”

We work like that for a little while, and I feel the way I always did when Dad was around—safe, protected and, above all, loved. I learn from him (although in the dream I
have the feeling it’s something I already knew), and we share a chuckle over something that we’ve agreed not to tell my mother.

Then he asks me to find him a tool.

It’s not always the same tool; this is what I mean about there being variables in the dream. Sometimes he’ll ask for a pair of needle-nose pliers, and I don’t have time to wonder what possible use they might have in hanging wallboard. Other times, Dad will say that there’s a ball-peen hammer in his toolbox downstairs, and he’d really appreciate it if I would go down and find it for him.

Every time, I have this nagging feeling that I shouldn’t leave, but I don’t protest or try to get out of the task. I’m not even sure what age I’m supposed to be in the dream. I can’t tell if I’m meant to be a child or if he’s just treating me that way despite my actually being in my late thirties with a daughter about to turn eleven. Whichever it is, I never question it in the dream, just as I don’t find it strange that the house might change from one to the other at this point. If I start out in the house on Seafront Avenue and walk downstairs to find myself in my childhood home at Crest Road, the shift in location doesn’t alarm me—it always seems to make sense. I note it, but I don’t question it. It doesn’t matter where I find myself; the dream always seems to make sense while I’m in it.

This is usually where it becomes an anxiety dream. I head for Dad’s toolbox, but it never seems to be where he said I could find it. I start to wonder why he’s working upstairs without his toolbox, and why he might’ve wanted me out of the room for just a moment right now. I go from room to room, searching for the toolbox. In one version of the dream, I don’t ever find it. I search until I wake up, frustrated and strangely sad. In another version, I find the toolbox, but the tool Dad has requested doesn’t seem to be there, despite how in life Dad organized his tools very carefully and logically. But someone appears to
have meddled with the tools—they’re not where they’re supposed to be—and I begin to get nervous. Dad wouldn’t treat the instruments of his profession so carelessly. I often wake up anxious after that one.

But the third version, the one I’d been having the most often lately, is the worst of all. In that one, I actually find the tool that Dad has asked for, and feeling like a proud little girl who has accomplished something she’s been trusted to do for the first time, I rush back up to deliver the prize. And here, again, there is variation in the dream. Sometimes I can’t find my way back to the room Dad was repairing. I rush through the house—or houses—frantically searching for the right door to get me back to him so I can give him the thing he needed so badly and be rewarded with a smile and a “Thanks, baby girl.” But I can’t ever find my way because the doors never seem to be in the right place, and I wake up just as I think I have finally discovered the right passageway. I’m never happy to be awake after that, and it always takes me a few minutes to shake it off.

In the really horrible version, I find my way back to the room, but Dad is gone.

I wake up in a cold sweat after that one, no matter what.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

One

Tuesday

“You’re keeping something from me,” I told my mother.

We were walking from my car, a 1999 Volvo station wagon that had seen better days even before I’d bought it used, to Mom’s one-level “active adult” home, a structure younger than my car. I was helping Mom bring in six bags of groceries, which seemed excessive for a single woman in her early seventies. But there was the threat of snow—a lot of it—overnight, and Mom didn’t want to be caught without provisions, just in case every snow-clearing mechanism within a twenty-mile radius suddenly broke down for the next eight days and she couldn’t get out. We weren’t wasting our time, because the wind whipping around (and seemingly through) us was bringing the air temperature down to about eighteen degrees.

Welcome to the Jersey Shore during an unusually cold January.

“Don’t be silly, Alison,” Mom retorted, the scarf wrapped
around her mouth muffling her words. “What makes you think there’s anything I’m not telling you?”

“It’s the way your right eye is twitching. That’s the same thing you did when you lied to me in seventh grade when my English teacher was fired for smoking dope in the faculty lounge.”