Chance of a Ghost (39 page)

I really wanted to let her avoid the memory of what she found upstairs, but Paul would berate me later for not thinking like a detective and assuming that everything everyone tells you is a lie until you can prove it’s not. So I fought the temptation to cut to the chase and instead said, “So you
went inside and…” Sometimes you have to lead the witness into telling you the story.

She nodded, a little more violently than it seemed she’d intended. “I followed the sound of the water running. I called for Larry a couple of times, but of course there wasn’t any answer.” There would be no point in trying to confirm any of this with Lawrence later on; people don’t become ghosts, at least not conscious, alert ghosts, immediately after they die. Paul has told me—and we’ve confirmed it a few other times—that it takes a few days before memory and cognition kick in. So Lawrence wouldn’t know if Penny’s story was true or not.

“What did you find?” I asked.

Penny shot me a look that indicated I was being cruel, and I felt like she was right. “You know perfectly well what I
found
,” she said.

I couldn’t apologize; for all I knew, this whole story was a lie and Penny had tossed the toaster in to French-fry Lawrence while he bathed. “Did you call the police immediately?” I asked instead.

“It was obvious he was…that I couldn’t revive him myself,” she exhaled. “I dialed nine-one-one on my cell phone. It felt like hours, but I’m sure they were there very quickly, really. I did do one thing while I was there, though.”

My ears perked up. “What?” I asked.

“I turned off the water.” Penny sniffed another time or two, and took a tissue from a box on her desk. She used it.

After a few moments of sniffling, I figured I’d exhausted the information I’d get from Penny about that night, so I figured I’d switch lines of question entirely: “How come Tyra Carter thinks you won’t hire her back because of me?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Penny said. “Have you talked to Tyra?”

Does being threatened count?
“Sort of,” I said. “Do you want to hire her back?”

Penny looked like she hadn’t considered the possibility
before. “I don’t know,” she said. “Tyra was moonlighting while she worked here.”

I figured if I could help Tyra’s employment picture, I could get her to stop calling me up and saying unsettling things. “I think she’d really like to come back,” I suggested. “You might want to give it a thought.”

“Maybe,” Penny agreed. “I’ll call her.”

One less threatening figure to worry about,
I thought.

On the way to pick up Melissa, I placed a call to Murray
Feldner, who picked up on the first ring as if he’d been waiting by the phone. “Murray,” was all he said. Clearly, a man of action.

“Murray, it’s Alison Kerby.” My Bluetooth made it sound like I was driving through a car wash in a convertible with the top down.

“Hi, Alison,” Murray replied. “Do you need something? Is there gonna be snow tonight?”

“No. It’s about the bill you sent me.” The car in front of me was doing its best to break the record for slowest miles per hour in the passing lane. Pennsylvania plates. It figured.

“What about it? Did I add it up wrong?” Murray had not, if I recalled correctly, been an honors student in math. Or anything else, except maybe gym.

“Sort of,” I told him. “You charged me for plowing my driveway and my walk.”

This did not seem to make an impression on him. “Uh-huh.”

Subtlety wasn’t going to be a really powerful tool in this conversation. “It didn’t snow Tuesday night, Murray. There was nothing to plow.”

“What? What about a cow?” Clearly, the Bluetooth was working just as well on the other end. Terrific. And the slow car in front of me actually got slower.

“Not cow, Murray.
Plow
. There was nothing to
plow
.”

“When?”

“Wednesday!” I considered passing on the right, which is not technically kosher, but there was a truck with Oklahoma plates there, big enough to be carrying all of New Jersey back home, and I was boxed in. I flashed my lights at the Pennsylvania car. It slowed down more.

“I came over to your house on Wednesday, Alison. Remember?” Great. Now Murray thought I was the one who hadn’t been an honors student. Which, technically, I hadn’t, but that wasn’t the point. “Your daughter called me the night before. I have it right here in my book.”

“I know you were there, Murray. But you didn’t do anything; there was no snow. How can you charge me for plowing when there was no snow?”

Murray sounded honestly confused. “You wanted me to plow even though there was nothing on the ground?” he asked. “That would’ve damaged my plow, Alison.”

“I know! I was the one who told you that!” I honked my horn, but I’m not sure what message I was sending at that point.

“Well, then, what did you want me to do?” Murray said.

“Exactly what you did,” I answered. “You did everything right. Except then you sent me a bill for it, and that’s the part I have a problem with.” The Oklahoma truck had now passed me on the right, so I switched lanes to try to pass the Pennsylvanian.

And the second I moved, it picked up speed like a jackrabbit and disappeared ahead of me. Four more cars passed me on the left while I was stuck between Tom Joad and his load of whatever it is Oklahomans need imported.

“I’m in business, Alison. I always send a bill when I do work for somebody.”

I wondered if this conversation was taking place in some alternate universe where what Murray said made sense and
I simply needed to adjust. “You
didn’t
do any work for me, Murray. You came to my house, didn’t do anything and left. How can you charge me two hundred dollars for that?”

Once there was finally room in the left lane, I switched back. And a guy in a blue Honda Civic immediately started tailgating me. Now I was the car going too slowly in the passing lane. This was the kind of week I was having. And it was only Sunday.

But at least I seemed to be making some headway with Murray. “Ooooooh,” he said. “I see where you’re going. Okay, I can fix that.”

“Great. I knew I could count on you, Murray.” I sped up to the New Jersey speed limit, and so did the Honda tailgating me. On my right, once again, the truck from where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.

“I’ll cut it back to a hundred and fifty and send you a new bill,” Murray said. “Thanks for calling, Alison.” He hung up.

“Great. I…what?” But he was gone.

The only plus was that I was ready to pull off the highway. Of course, so was the truck from Oklahoma.

When I finally reached Janine’s house, Melissa said good-bye to her friends as though they would be separated for years and not just until school began the next morning. Hugs were tight, tears were choked back and promises to call were made that, unlike similar ones in the adult world, would be kept.

Then she got into the car and switched conversational gears with the ease of an Indy 500 driver coasting down a suburban street. “What’s new on the case?” she asked. “Have we found out anything about the ME’s report?”

It was at that moment I decided I wanted my ten-year-old daughter—not my partner in detection—back. “Stop,” I said. “Tell me about the party.”

Melissa looked at me oddly but clearly decided to humor her mother, who was going senile before her very eyes. “Janine got an iPad for her birthday!” she began, and that was
just scratching the surface. Apparently Kate, Janine’s mother, was a closet heiress—the showering of gifts Melissa described would have set me back six months on my mortgage.

“That’s some haul,” I told her when she took a breath, no doubt anticipating her chance to describe more presents.

“Well, Janine’s kind of sad,” she answered. “Her grandpa died a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said, thinking that expensive gifts probably weren’t the best option when dealing with grief—but then again, they’re fun to get. “Want me to go and see if he’s hanging around her house?”

“I could do it myself if I knew where he was,” Liss pointed out. “If he’s a ghost now, that is.” Not everyone who passes away goes through that stage, we’d discovered.

It had never occurred to me before. “Liss, how many of your friends know you can see ghosts?” Melissa’s ability had become evident to some classmates right after we’d moved into the guesthouse, but Liss had some new friends now, and I didn’t know how much of a reputation she’d developed. It could be a potential problem, if a bunch of fifth-graders started telling their parents how my daughter can communicate with the deceased. It’s an icebreaker at PTA meetings, surely, but eventually the conversation would turn awkward.

“Just Wendy,” Melissa said. “And she won’t tell anybody. She likes it being a secret with me and her.” Wendy was trustworthy, I knew, and her mother and father were easygoing. Not so easygoing that they’d understand talking to ghosts, probably, but it made me feel better, anyway.

“Janine said her grandpa knew Grampa,” Liss added.

It was a major effort not to slam on the brakes. “What? He knew my father?” It was possible she was referring to The Swine’s father, who was still alive and disapproving of me somewhere in Atlanta, I thought. We didn’t hear from him much. Why get in touch with your own granddaughter, after all?

“Yeah,” Liss answered casually. “She said he was Grampa’s doctor. Does that make sense?”

“Possibly. He had lots of doctors, especially in the last few months,” I thought out loud. “What kind of doctor was he?”

Melissa shrugged. “I don’t know. A doctor.” Kids think all doctors are the same and can treat anything. That’s because even when they’re ten, nobody stops them from watching
House
.

We were getting near the house. “What’s Janine’s last name?” I asked.

“Markowitz,” she answered. “Did Grampa have a Dr. Markowitz?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ll ask your grandmother,” I told her. “I don’t remember a Dr. Markowitz.”

“How about Wells?” Liss said. “Her real name is Janine Wells-Markowitz, but she doesn’t really use the part from her mom.”

It took me a second to remember the name. Dr. Wells. My father’s oncologist.

The one who was actually in his hospital room when he died.

Twenty

Sunday

The box office at the Count Basie Theatre didn’t open
until noon on Sunday, so there were stops that Morgan suggested I make before I went to talk to Penny. First on the list was the
Chronicle
office, where Phyllis had texted to say she had some intelligence to convey. Even Phyllis texts these days.

“That must have been some musical,” she chuckled. “Seven people got arrested, and two of them spent the night behind bars.”

I almost spit out some of the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I’d bought for us both on the way over, to fend off her homemade brew. “A night in jail? Over a bunch of sixty-year-olds taking their clothes off for thirty seconds at the end of act one?” I’d done some research into
Hair
since I’d spoken to her last.

Phyllis nodded with a raised eyebrow while she sipped from her coffee. Black, of course. “I know it looks extreme, and it was, for the charges. Most of them paid a fine and
left. But two”—she referred to notes written on the back of a W. B. Mason receipt—“a Frances Walters and a Jerome Rasmussen, were held overnight. I guess they were more naked than everybody else or something.”

“Were the charges different for those two?”
The two New Old Thespians I already had questions about? Interesting coincidence. Or a disturbing one.

Phyllis followed the chain of her notes from the office supply receipt to a brown paper bag with a grease stain on the bottom. “Nope. Lewdness, public indecency, disorderly conduct. No resisting arrest, nothing interesting out of context.”

I chewed on the bagel I’d gotten with the coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts does many things well, but bagels do not happen to fall into that category. This was a kaiser roll with a hole in the middle. “So why did those two have to stay in a cell overnight when the others didn’t?” I wondered aloud.

“That’s something to ask Officer…Robert P. Warrell,” Phyllis answered, checking a second copy of an advertising invoice.

“Nothing to do with me. I don’t sentence them,” Officer
Robert P. Warrell told me. “I arrest them and book them, and the judge decides who has to stay behind bars.”

I’d driven directly to Monroe Township from Phyllis’s office, and luckily, Warrell, who had been the arresting officer at the performance of
Hair
, was indeed on duty this Sunday morning. Even luckier, he wasn’t out on patrol; he was finishing paperwork in the squad room and agreed to talk to me when I told the desk sergeant it was about the arrests at Cedar Crest a number of months ago. Clearly, that particular event has made an impression, since even now, mention of it provoked a decent amount of stifled laughter at police headquarters. But laughs or no, I figured it could be a motive in Lawrence Laurentz’s death, so I
was here as the private investigator asking Officer Warrell questions—or as the straight man (straight woman?) in a vaudeville act for which the officer was the unintentional comedian. It was all a question of perspective.