Inspector Specter (7 page)

“We had less stuff than this in our whole house when Alison was that age,” my father said. Mom covered her mouth and pretended to cough. Luckily Jeannie didn't notice, or she would have had my mother disinfected and put Oliver in a hazmat suit.

“It's okay, Oliver,” Melissa cooed at the baby. He heard her and looked over. The crying didn't exactly stop, but it did lose some intensity as Oliver seemed to remember that person with the lilting voice. “Aw, it's okay.” Melissa reached up and tried to take Oliver from Jeannie. The baby held out his hands for a moment, but Jeannie, not seeing that gesture (I'm being diplomatic), turned the other way and walked a few steps toward the pile of baby accoutrements in the center of the room.

Tony was already on his way out the door for load number three. I remembered he had a rather large pickup truck he used for his contracting business and was suddenly glad I had a spare guest room where I could dump all of this junk (except what Oliver really appeared to want or need) once his parents were out the door and on their way to Bermuda.

“Why wasn't I told about this?” Paul asked, looking impatient. Had I not mentioned Oliver's visit to him? Was I actually obligated to do so? I mean, it was still my name on the mortgage, right?

“Don't you like kids, Paul?” My father was a fine handyman and a good businessman when he was alive, but he always said the most important role he'd ever had was being a dad.

Paul looked embarrassed. “I just . . . I don't have any particular difficulty . . . I'm concerned it will hinder our investigation.” I didn't see how having Oliver around would do much to slow down our investigation, or at least our role in the investigation, which was to wait until Paul could Ghosternet with Martin Ferry, if it ever became possible.

By the time Tony had arrived with the third load of baby gear (which included actual necessities, like a stroller and car seat), it finally occurred to me that we'd let him out into the inferno to do manual labor alone. “Melissa and I will help you with the rest,” I volunteered.

“The rest?” Jeannie scoffed, patting Oliver on the back although he'd stopped crying entirely and was eyeing Melissa over Jeannie's shoulder. “How much did you think we brought for a five-day stay?”

“Of course. How silly of me.”

What followed was a seventeen-minute tutorial on the care and feeding (particularly the feeding) of Oliver Rogers Mandorisi, who was still attached as if by Krazy Glue to his mother's left shoulder. Eleven-month-old children are not tiny infants, and you'd think Jeannie's arm at least would be a little tired, but she would not budge. Not even as she showed me how to open and close the stroller, reinforcing the impression that she was leaving her darling child with a woman who had never seen a baby before, let alone raised one to the verge of adolescence.

I let Jeannie school me because I knew it would make her feel better. And because she'd leave sooner if I didn't offer any resistance. My technique nearly backfired, though, when she finished her shpiel, gave me a sharp look and said, “You haven't asked any questions.”

“That's because you've been so thorough, dear,” my mother offered ahead of the emotional tirade I'd been planning. “There's no subject you haven't covered perfectly.” Was Mom this duplicitous every time she'd told me what a swell job I was doing? Best not to think about that.

Tony had taken time during the floor show to excuse himself and check out my handiwork in the soon-to-be home theater. “It's going well,” he reported when he returned. “The paint stripper is doing its job. You should be able to stain the paneling in a day or two.”

“Paint stripper?” Jeannie repeated, her eyes suddenly wide. “Are there going to be fumes in the house?”

I shot Tony an accusatory glare and then turned to his wife. “Don't worry,” I said. “Oliver won't ever be in the room when I'm working on the walls.”

“You're going to leave him by himself?” I love Jeannie, but since she had a baby, I have occasionally fought the urge to slap her upside the head.

“No,” Melissa said, coming to my rescue. “She's going to let me take care of Ollie sometimes.” She waggled a finger at the baby. “Right, Ollie? Right?”

Oliver, perhaps wisely, did not answer.

“And sometimes I'll be here,” Mom added, not noting that Dad would undoubtedly join her because . . . well, what's the point?

“Jean,” I said in my calmest, coolest voice, “you have to be able to trust us. Oliver is going to be very well cared for while you're gone. But
like we talked about on the phone
, you have to let us vary—just a little bit—from what he's been used to. It'll be good for him, and it'll be good for you. Now hand over your baby and scram.”

Jeannie looked stunned, but then a smile developed slowly on her face. She put Oliver down, and he immediately started crawling toward Liss, who sat down next to him and started to tickle his chin. Oliver laughed his baby laugh.

Tony seized the opportunity and said to his wife, “Let's go while we can.”

Jeannie's smile left, and her eyes got a little moist. “Now?”

“Now.” Gently.

She started toward her son, her arms spreading for a hug that would probably last until after they were scheduled to return from the cruise. “Jeannie,” Tony said, “just say good-bye.” He got down on the floor and looked at Oliver. “Bye-bye, Ollie. We'll see you soon.”

Oliver, at the sound of his name, turned his attention from Melissa to his father. “Da.” Then he looked back at Melissa and smiled.

Tony stood up and turned toward Jeannie. “See?” he said.

Jeannie, her heart ripped from her chest despite being about to go on a cruise to a lovely island with her adoring husband, bit her lower lip and sniffed. She sat down next to Oliver and Melissa.

“Bye-bye, baby. Mommy's going to come back real soon. Okay? Promise.”

Oliver looked at her with a confused expression. Those were a lot of words to take in.

“Bye-bye, honey,” Jeannie repeated.

Oliver seemed to consider that, then smiled. “Bah,” he said.

“That's ‘bye,'” Tony translated for us, like we didn't already know.

“Bye-bye,” Jeannie repeated. She sniffed again. Then she swooped down, clutched her son (who looked astonished) into her arms and kissed his forehead until I thought there might be a permanent indentation of her lips.

I took her by the arm and helped her up off the floor. Then, still holding her arm, I led her to Tony, who took her hand and headed toward the door, Jeannie still twisted to look at Oliver. “Bye-bye, sweetie,” she said once again.

Oliver looked at Melissa and said, “Bah.” Then he reached for an Oscar the Grouch puppet lying near him. He held it out to Melissa, who put it on her hand.

She took on a deep voice and said, “Bye-bye, Mommy.”

“Bah,” Oliver noted.

Tony managed to get Jeannie out of the room before she dissolved into what I was sure would be a flood of tears. I hoped he would manage to get her to stop while the ship was still at least north of Virginia.

Everybody who could breathe gave a sigh of relief when we heard the truck pull out of the driveway. Oliver, although he'd been here many times before, decided to case the joint, and started crawling around the perimeter of the den. Since it is the largest room in the house, that promised to take a while, which was fine with me.

Liss said she'd watch Oliver, and Dad decided to stay with her as a messenger (if needed) while Mom and I sorted Mt. Baby Stuff and stored the unessential items (i.e., ninety percent of the cache) in an unused guest room on the second floor. Paul followed behind us.

“Why didn't you tell me the child would be staying with us?” he asked again. “A little advance notice might have been helpful, that's all.”

“Paul, you're not going to get anywhere sounding like my ex-husband,” I told him. “Can you think of anything else we should be doing for Lieutenant McElone? In particular, things that aren't the least bit dangerous?”

“Once Maxie can research the claims I heard . . .” Paul hovered in the air for a moment. Oh, yeah. Maxie.

I reached for my phone. “I'm calling Kitty right now,” I said.

From above and behind me, a shrill, piercing voice. “You promised you
wouldn't
!” I hadn't promised anything, actually, but Maxie had asked me not to call her mother. To Maxie, her asking was the same as me promising.

Everybody turned, and sure enough, there was Maxie, just below the ten-foot ceiling, wearing her trademark sprayed-on jeans and a black T-shirt with the legend “Don't You Wish” emblazoned on the front. We stared at her for a good few seconds. Maxie stared right back.

“What?” she asked.

There wasn't time to argue with Maxie, which was just as well; it's a frustrating waste of time that usually gives me a headache. Besides, I'd already gone through the routine of “what's with your mom” followed by Maxie leaving in a huff twice. They say third time's the charm, but Melissa would miss Maxie if she left and didn't come back.

I probably would, too. After a couple of years.

Luckily (depending on one's point of view), we had work to discuss. I shrugged off any concerns about Maxie's mother—for now—and took advantage of the fact that our chief research specialist had returned. “We need you to do some work,” I told Maxie. “Lieutenant McElone needs us to help her.”

“I don't know,” Maxie said, playing with her hair and spinning in a small circle near the ceiling. “I don't think the lady cop likes me.”

“She doesn't believe you exist,” I pointed out.

“Still.”

“The lieutenant has hired us to help her on a case,” Paul told his ghostly counterpart. “Whether she likes you is irrelevant.” Paul is a very nice man and an intelligent one, but his reliance on logic and the call of duty when talking to Maxie (or me, for that matter) is usually ill advised. Neither of us signed on willingly to be in the detective business.

“Roger that,” Maxie said. She floated up into the ceiling, presumably in search of the stone-knives-and-bearskins-era MacBook I'd inadvertently donated to her. McElone had confiscated Maxie's much cooler laptop as evidence and then never given it back, seeing as how it was evidence in two murders. Kitty, after Maxie had prevailed upon her, had requested the return of her daughter's property, and had been entangled in red tape (something about possible appeals by the killer) for two years now.

I blinked a few times, stunned by Maxie's quick decision to be reasonable, since being reasonable is usually her seventh course of action. “Did you see that?” I asked Paul. “She just said, ‘Okay,' and went off to help.”

Paul's eyes registered wonder. “She didn't say, ‘Okay.' She said, ‘Roger that.'”

My mother looked at me and shook her head. “You know, sometimes you don't give that girl enough credit,” she said. “Maxine has a good heart.”

“Maybe so, but it's still attached to her mouth,” I said. “Which one of us is your daughter, anyway?”

“You are,” Mom agreed. “But it's not a competition.”

“That's what you think.”

Paul was (intelligently) ignoring this exchange, but he stared up into the ceiling with a puzzled expression on his face. “Odd,” he said, probably not meaning for us to hear it.

“What's odd?”

He took a moment, then looked down at me, as he had risen very close to the ceiling himself. “Where's Maxie?”

I felt my eyes narrow. “What do you mean? You saw her go,” I reminded him. “You heard her agree to help.”

“Agreed, but we never told her what it was she needed to research.”

That was true. Mom and I exchanged a look, and then Mom said, “I'm not braving that dumbwaiter. You go. I'll check on Melissa and Oliver.” And before I could reply, she was on her way back down the stairs.

“I guess we're headed up,” I told Paul.

“Meet you there. I'm making a stop.”

I nodded my acknowledgment and headed toward the pull-down stairs to the attic, which Tony and I had renovated into a spacious bedroom for Melissa. It both kept her out of the guest traffic and gave her a bigger, more personal space than she'd had when we first moved in.

Tony had later rigged up a dumbwaiter for Liss to get in and out of her room without climbing another set of rickety stairs, but I don't like to use it. I feel like that's Liss's space, so the pull-down stairs, which lock on the inside and out for security, are my preferred route to her room.

When I'd gotten to the point above the floor where just my eyes were high enough to be considered inside the room, I stopped on the stairs, flabbergasted at what I saw.

Maxie, dressed in a sensible (even for someone who was
not
Maxie) but beautiful navy blue dress, floated in front of the full-length mirror I'd hung on a far wall. Maxie swirled in midair, turning her head each time in an apparent effort to see how the dress looked in the back. She was studying the mirror intently, but there was no reflection in the glass.

“It looks lovely,” I said as I climbed up the last couple of stairs. “Even in the back.”

Maxie jumped at the sound of my voice. And when Maxie jumps, she travels. Her top half ended up outside the house on the roof, so I couldn't see her face until she descended a few moments later looking embarrassed.

“You never heard of knocking?” she demanded.

“You really are stuck at the emotional age of sixteen, aren't you?” I asked. Maxie was twenty-eight when she died but still had some growing up to do. “What's the problem? I said the dress was lovely, and you look good in it.”

Maxie immediately changed back into her standard jeans and black T-shirt. This one read, “Don't Go Away Mad. Just Go Away.” “You scared me,” she said, though she kept twirling.

“That's a role reversal. What's up?”

“Up? Nothing's up. What makes you think something's up? What's up with
you
all of a sudden?” I'd seen Maxie in a lot of moods, most of which I found annoying. But I'd never seen her jumpy before. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

“Sorry. I've just never seen you in a dress before.”

“Well, I'm
allowed
.”

“Nobody's saying otherwise. You looked nice.”

She stopped twirling and looked at me. “You really think so?”

“Definitely. I didn't mean to startle you.”

Paul chose that moment to rise up through the floor. He wasn't looking at either Maxie or me; as soon as he could reach into his pocket, he turned his attention to the object he pulled out.

It was the bare-bones prepaid cellular phone I'd gotten him for the times when I'm out of the house and he needs to communicate with me for a case. He can't be heard on the phone, but he is able to text. He stared at it with serious concentration. His fine motor skills are much better than when we first met, but he still needs to think about what he's doing in order to work with objects in the material world.

“Your mother says Oliver is taking a nap,” he told me without looking up. “Melissa is watching him sleep.”

“Thanks. What are you doing? Returning phone calls?” I caught myself. “Sorry.”

Paul looked up. “Why?”

“Forget it.”

Maxie, who normally would've leapt on the opportunity to point out my rudeness, had now changed into another dress, a black, tight, short number that, if she were visible to the general public, might cause cardiac problems in some more vulnerable men. She was back at the mirror looking at nothing.

“I'm texting you, Alison. See if you receive what I'm sending,” Paul said, punching some more keys on the phone. It wasn't painful to watch him interact with physical objects like it used to be, but he was definitely not in Melissa's weight class when it came to texting. My daughter could send the complete text of
The Brothers Karamazov
in less time than it took you to read this paragraph.

Soon enough, my phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket and checked for Paul's text, which read, astoundingly, “Text.”

“Wow,” I said. “That's impressive. Next you'll tell me I can send my voice through this magic box as well.”

“That's very amusing,” he said. “Now consider that my phone has no battery in it.”

That was strange. “Did you lose the battery?” I asked.

“No. You're missing the point. I was able to generate the power needed to send that text message myself. I sent you a text from a
dead
cell phone.”

Ignoring the irony of a dead man using a dead phone, I started to see the point he was trying to make. “How is that possible?” I said.

“I have a theory,” Paul said, as Maxie changed into an off-the-shoulder number in cobalt blue. “It has long been observed that it is impossible to destroy energy. The physical body might deteriorate, even disintegrate, but energy is not destructible. Many people believe that the essence of a living being, the soul, is composed of energy.”

“So even though you're dead, your energy lives on, is that it?”

He pointed at me like a teacher whose student is starting to catch on. “I've been working with the proposition that our bodies, those of Maxie and me and other people like us, are actually made of the energy that we carried with us when we were alive. Our physical bodies are gone, but the energy remains in a purer form. So I can send a text message without a battery because I am, essentially, made of energy.”

That was as far as my mind could go; I had to ask, “So what's that got to do with Detective Ferry and his murder?”

Paul had a confused expression. “Nothing. What made you think it was related?”

“When we're on a case, you almost never think about anything else,” I noted. “What's gotten you on this energy stuff all of a sudden, when there's a crime to be solved?”

Paul frowned. “Until Detective Ferry does or does not materialize in some form, there's nothing I can do about his case,” he said. “However, the implications of this theory are enormous.”

“How so?”

“Don't you see? If I can find a way to harness and control my energy, I might be able to evolve past this existence and on to the next level.”

That knocked me for a loop. While I knew that Paul and Maxie were intrigued by the idea of other planes of existence, especially when we'd witnessed some other ghosts presumably advance to . . . whatever comes next, without any of us really understanding what was happening, and I recognized that Paul seemed mildly envious of those other ghosts, I'd thought we'd settled into a comfortable setup in the guesthouse. “You mean you want to leave?” My voice sounded a little squeaky.

Paul looked up from the cell phone and examined my face. “Well, certainly,” he said. “I don't mean to offend you, Alison, but becoming the next . . . thing is natural. It seems like what we
should
want, don't you think?”

“I don't want to go anywhere,” Maxie chipped in, now back to wearing her more typical ensemble of jeans and a T-shirt, this one currently reading “Restore the Shore.” “Things are good here.” She looked at me. “Which dress did I look best in?”

“The first one. See?” I turned toward Paul. “Things are good here. Why do you want to go?” This was suddenly becoming a very disturbing conversation for me.

Paul's eyes indicated he was talking to a crazy lady. “I don't sincerely believe anything is going to happen very soon, Alison. There's no need to be upset.”

And yet for reasons I couldn't adequately understand, I
was
upset. Paul had become such a stable and reliable presence in the house over the two years I'd lived here, I couldn't imagine what it would be like without him to confer with.

“Is it so bad staying here?” I asked. Yeah, I was being selfish. News of the day: I'm not perfect.

Paul looked at me carefully and curled his lip. “Yeah. It's a misery,” he said. “I hate every minute of it.”

I was devastated. I couldn't think. “Really?”

“Of course not!” Paul replied hurriedly. “I was being sarcastic.”

“You're not from New Jersey, Paul,” I informed him. “You don't pull off sarcasm successfully.”

Paul, perhaps trying to shift the mood, looked over at Maxie. “What have you found out?” he asked her.

Maxie stared at him blankly. “What are you talking about?” she said. Maxie's a lot of things—I could give you a list—but clueless isn't normally one of them.

“You came up here to do research on Detective Ferry,” he reminded her. “Then Alison came up to give you specific areas in which we need questions answered.” His voice betrayed some bewilderment; surely Maxie knew all this already.

I didn't mention that in my astonishment at finding Maxie acting like she was on
Say Yes to the Dress
, I had forgotten to pass on the instructions.

“Oh,” Maxie said. “Yeah. I'll get right on that.” She looked at me. “What was I looking for, again?”

Paul's eyes, usually on the smallish side, widened to the size of half dollars, or whatever the equivalent currency is in Canada. “You
haven't
been researching the case?” he asked incredulously. “What have you been doing up here?”

I decided to talk over him to defuse any situation that might have otherwise arisen. “You know how the ghost Paul talked to earlier said Detective Ferry was a dirty cop working for the local mob?” I said, condensing madly. “We want to see if there's any evidence—bank records, incriminating e-mails, notes in his personnel file, for example—that can confirm or deny that.”