Chance of a Ghost (45 page)

That was right. Jerry and Frances had both mentioned it. “So I’m going to the New Old Thespians performance tomorrow night in Ocean Grove,” I said. I got a few odd looks, but no one said anything about my behavior. Just as well. “Maybe I’ll be able to answer some of those questions.” I looked at the clock. “But I’m not answering them now,” I told the gathered assembly. “I have a date.”

“Finally,” Mom said. “Priorities.”

*   *   *

“I can’t believe you don’t remember Color Quiz,” Josh Kaplan said.

We had agreed that we needed to be able to talk at our dinner, but we didn’t want it to be terribly expensive or fancy—that ups the tension for such a “dinner”—so we’d decided on Louie Ziana’s, a Cajun restaurant in Avon-by-the-Sea, the most hyphenated town in the Garden State.

There was the usual Zydeco music playing, but not terribly loudly, and since I have an absolute aversion to seafood, I’d checked the menu online ahead of time to ensure there would be cuisine I could enjoy. No sense sweating over entrée choices when there was an attractive guy across the table. He was dressed a little less casually than at the paint store. That is, the clothes he had on were free of splats, bits of Spackle, and dust. Which was a nice improvement.

“What the heck is Color Quiz?” I asked.

He looked up at the ceiling and harrumphed, but smiling. “When we were kids and your dad and my grandfather used to spend all their time in the back of the store, you and I would go up front where the color cards were and we’d play a game we called Color Quiz. You don’t remember? We’d pull out a color card and pretend each row was a different category. Then…”

It was rushing back into my head. “You’d ask me some crazy question that had nothing to do with paint at all!” I said. I started laughing. “You’d ask me about school or TV or something.”

“That’s right.” Josh seemed either relieved, amused or both at my recollection. “And when you got a question right, I picked a color and you asked
me
a question. But yours were always about baseball or carpentry or something.”

“I was sort of a tomboy,” I said.

He looked into my eyes a little bit more deeply than was entirely comfortable. “Not now,” he said. “I’m glad to see it.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” I answered. “I still spend a lot of days with cordless drills and ball-peen hammers.” Honesty. The best policy. Assuming you want guys to think of you wearing overalls and spitting a lot.

“A holdover from your misspent youth,” Josh commented.

“Depends on how you look at it. My dad taught me a lot of things that have proven to be very helpful now that I’m legally an adult.”

The waiter came to take our order (Josh got the blackened catfish, which put a serious crimp in his chances of getting kissed later, and I ordered the basil chicken). When the waiter retreated to the kitchen, Josh looked at me with a less playful expression. “Your dad,” he said.

Oh, yeah. The pretense for this evening was that I wanted to hear stories about Dad. Not that I minded Josh telling me what he remembered about my father, but it wasn’t necessarily the story line I was aiming at anymore.

“My dad,” I parroted back. It sounded soulful without actually offering any information. “I have to tell you—I was lying about the memoir.”

Josh looked surprised but amused. “Really,” he said. “You were really just in the store for a gallon of semigloss?”

I could feel myself blush. I’m not proud of it. “No. I want to talk about my dad, but it’s connected to a case I’m working on.”

Surprised seemed to overtake amused, but just for a quick moment. “A case?” Josh said.

Other men—most of them my ex-husband—have reacted strangely to the news I was going to impart. “Besides running the guesthouse, I also have a private-investigator’s license,” I told him. Then I waited.

Josh broke into a broad smile. “Really? A private investigator? That’s amazing!”

“It is?” Okay, he caught me by surprise.

“Yeah. Don’t you think so?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “So tell me, how can I help with your…case?”

“It’s just”—I thought about how best to phrase this—“I have some suspicions about the way my father died. And knowing more about him from the people who knew him well can help me zone in.”

Josh looked concerned. “You think there was something weird about the way your father died?”

“Well, I don’t know. Not really. I’m not suggesting a crime was committed.” I couldn’t suggest that a grumpy ghost in Josh’s store had made me suspicious or that my dad was now a ghost who was missing. When I thought about the grumpy ghost, something clenched in my stomach. I shook my head a bit to banish the thought and refocused. That kind of thing would have to at least wait until the second date. “I’m just sort of…practicing. I want to fill in some gaps, and I thought your grandfather—and you—could help.”

Josh leaned back in his chair a little bit, never taking his eyes off me, though he managed to maintain eye contact without making it seem creepy. “It’s just as well, since most of the things I remember are about you, not your dad,” he said finally. “Mostly Color Quiz. But there were plenty of times in later years, when I was going to Rutgers and helping out in the store on weekends, that your dad would come in and we’d talk.”

It wasn’t going to help me find Dad or discover what had happened to Lawrence Laurentz, but I did want to hear the details. “What did you talk about?”

Josh grinned a little guiltily. “Mostly about you.”

“Me! That couldn’t have taken very long.” The waiter came by with a pitcher of water and two bottles of beer. I grabbed mine and took a cold swig.

“You’d be surprised.” Josh actually poured his beer into a glass—something I’ve always thought just made it warm when you drank it—but didn’t drink any. “He could go on and on about you, how you were in college, what you were studying, how you were fixing up your dorm room until it was in better condition than when you moved in.” He looked amused.

“I can’t help it if the place needed spackling and painting,” I mumbled.

“I thought that was great. Then once I was out of college and in the store part-time while I was getting the MBA, I heard all about you. When you dropped out of college, he was not happy.”

I knew about that. Dad wasn’t one to keep his feelings, good or bad, to himself. “He must have been just tickled to death when I got married,” I said sarcastically. My dad had seen The Swine’s true colors long before I had.

Josh, in the act of taking a sip of beer, almost lost it through his nose when he snorted a laugh. I chuckled as he mopped himself up. “That’s your fault,” he said. “I think the happiest I ever saw your father was the day he told me you were getting divorced.”

I put a lot of attention into not rolling my eyes. “I’ll bet. But not happier than when my daughter was born, I’ll bet.”

Josh shook his head. “No. Not happier than then. He was crazy about his granddaughter.”

“And she was crazy about him.” Liss was five when Dad died, and just old enough to understand what it meant. I remembered how, when I broke the news to her that morning, she looked angry and said, “I don’t like this at all.” That’s all she said that whole day.

Out of nowhere, Josh got a funny look in his eye and said, “You know, there are days—and I wouldn’t say this to anyone else—when I’m in the back of the store, and I’d swear I still could hear your father kibitzing with my grandfather and the other regulars by the coffeemaker.”

That’s just what I was hoping
, I thought. My expression must have given something away, because Josh suddenly looked at me with concern. “Really?” I covered out loud. “You thought you heard him?”

“No, not really,” he answered. “It’s an expression, Alison. I mean, sometimes it just feels like he should be there, you know?”

Apparently it doesn’t take long to blacken a catfish, because the server soon appeared by our tableside with the entrées, and conversation was once again interrupted while we ogled our dinners and tucked in just a bit—I’d realized I had barely eaten all day, and the chicken was wonderful.

When Josh and I came up for air, I had decided the best thing to do was downplay my previous lapse of control when he’d mentioned my father’s presence—or perceived presence—in the paint store. Didn’t want to alarm Josh, especially if he later had the good sense to eat a mint or four following that catfish.

“I sort of feel like Dad’s around sometimes myself,” I began, not getting into my desire to see him more often. “It’s sort of a comfort mechanism, I guess.”

“He was
so
alive
when he was alive,” Josh said. “I loved talking to him. But mostly, he loved talking about you, and I was happy to listen.”

We gazed rather stupidly at each other for a few seconds. “You’re not wealthy, are you?” I asked finally. “Because then you’d be too perfect, and that would ruin everything.”

Josh smiled with the left side of his mouth. It approached adorable. I might have to push a couple of mints on him of my own volition. “I half own a paint store, Alison,” he said. “The word ‘wealthy’ isn’t even in my vocabulary. But I would like to see this guesthouse of yours. Sounds like you’ve made quite an investment there.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “What time do you close the store tomorrow?”

“Mondays we close at five.”

“Perfect,” I said. “I’ll give you my address. Come pick me up at six thirty.”

He looked quite pleased. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“To watch a bunch of senior citizens perform
Peter Pan
,” I said.

Twenty-three

Josh and I parted in the parking lot at Louie Ziana’s. We’d
driven here separately, which I was starting to regret now that we were standing in a well-lit parking lot next to a county highway. Not exactly a secluded spot.

“I’m glad we did this,” he said when we got to my car (the parking lot equivalent of dropping me off at my front door). “We were out of touch for too long.”

I sort of wished he’d stopped at “I’m glad we did this,” frankly, because now I wasn’t sure if this was a date or a reunion of old friends. “I’m glad we did, too,” I replied. I didn’t add anything after that because I was afraid it would be as much a mood breaker as what Josh had tried.

“Tomorrow at
Peter Pan
, then,” he said. He looked away, and it took me a moment to realize he was actually awkward. Which made him seem that much more engaging.

I decided to act rather than react and moved closer to him, opening my arms. He seemed to understand and spread
his arms as well. We sort of walked into an embrace, which was nice.

But it was also somehow confusing. This was the kind of thing two old friends might do at the end of an evening. How could I define this, if only in my own mind?

We held the hug for a very enjoyably long moment. When I felt that he was going to let go first, I decided this was the time to establish what
I’d
thought we’d been doing. I’d been careful to hand him some mints the restaurant had in a cup on the way out, and he’d been smart enough to use them. So I closed my eyes and reached up just a bit to kiss him.

And ended up kissing him on the nose. Probably should have rethought that “closing my eyes” strategy.

Josh looked startled, then amused. Quietly, he said, “Want to try that again?” He didn’t wait for an answer as he leaned over and kissed me.

Now, I’m not going to say that trumpets went off in my head or that I felt a tingle up my spine or any of the other clichés you might be accustomed to. Suffice it to say it was a very satisfactory (and nonfishy) kiss.

Until the moment that I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“Whoa!” Maxie said. “Must have been a good dinner!”

Josh probably thought I was insane. That’s what any man would think of someone who broke up a very satisfactory kiss, blew out air like a drowning swimmer, whirled around to look at
nothing
and then, remembering what she must have looked like, turned back toward him, smiling an anemic smile and obviously trying to think of something to say.

“Are you all right?” he asked with real concern. “Did I overstep…”

“No!” I exhaled. “That was
so
not your fault!” I fought the urge to glare at Maxie, whom I’d spotted sitting on the roof of my Volvo. She was laughing hysterically, and now floated to a spot over Josh’s shoulder where she could make
eye contact with me. I had to fight the urge to glare at her even more. “I thought I heard something over my shoulder. I’m
so
sorry.”

Josh proved he had great potential by looking, once again, less like someone about to call for security assistance and more like someone who was witnessing a very entertaining spectacle. “Don’t worry about it. Maybe we’ll give it another try after
Peter Pan
tomorrow night. How’s that?”

I looked around the parking lot. “You mean you don’t think this is a properly romantic spot?” I asked.

“It lacks a certain…ambience. And it’s twelve degrees outside. Tomorrow.” He touched me on the cheek and then turned as I unlocked the car door. Maybe if I pulled away fast enough I could leave Maxie stranded here. It’d probably take her a few days to walk back to Harbor Haven. Or if I were really lucky, she’d get lost.