Night of the Living Deed (29 page)

“The knife was put through a one-dollar bill,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, because usually when you’re doing something like that, you like to use a fifty,” McElone retorted. “They hold up so much better under the magic marker.”

“You don’t think it’s significant that the knife was put right through Washington’s face?”

She made an
eh
face and said, “Not when the treasury prints over sixteen million of those suckers every single day. Now, for the time being, I wonder if there isn’t someplace you can find to stay for the next three days.”

“Why? That’s the second time you’ve told me to stay out of my own house.”

“Yeah, and look how well you listened the first time.” I’d been hoping she wouldn’t bring that up. “Isn’t it enough that someone is threatening you?”

Paul shook his head
no
.

“The threat doesn’t say they’re coming to get me
in the house
,” I reasoned lamely. “They could come after me at my mother’s, or at my friends’, or when I’m picking Melissa up from school.” Then I remembered a detail I’d forgotten to tell Paul, and figured McElone might as well hear it, too. “By the way, Mayor Bostero said something strange when she was here. She made a comment about the upstairs powder room.”

“She didn’t like the wallpaper?” McElone asked. “Hardly criminal.”

“It would be criminal to
put
wallpaper up there,” Maxie muttered.

“That’s not the point,” I said. “She commented on how it wasn’t there earlier, but she’s never been inside here before. How could she know that?”

“Just because she hasn’t been here since
you
owned the house doesn’t mean that she’s never been here at all,” McElone answered. “She could have visited when Malone or the Prestons owned the place, or she could have come over to look at it with the Realtor, Terry Wright. You’re reaching.” But Paul looked impressed, and stroked his jawline in thought, while Maxie shook her head to indicate that the mayor hadn’t come over when she’d owned the place.

“Even if she dropped by to visit her pals the Prestons, would she have gone up to their bedroom?” I asked.

“I still think you should leave for a few days,” McElone went on, ignoring me. “I want to put an officer in here to act as bait, and I can’t do that if you’re here.”

“That’s crazy,” I said, echoing what Paul was telling me. “There’s no point in having someone here if the bad guys are trailing me somewhere else.”

“All right, I’ll say it,” McElone grunted, looking more embarrassed than annoyed. “This house creeps me out.”

I felt my lips withdraw into my mouth, and I bit down on them. I think I was trying to suppress a laugh, but it’s also possible I was just stunned. “
What
?” I finally croaked out.

“You heard me,” the detective said. “I get a weird vibe off of this place, and I’ve heard stories around town about ghosts.”

Involuntarily, I turned my head to look at Paul. Maxie, who had turned on her side and was floating like Cleopatra on a barge, spat out a laugh, and I think McElone shuddered when it happened. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

“Hear what?” I felt like such a jerk, but what was I going to do—introduce everyone around?
Oh, and here are my two friends: They’re dead, and you can’t see them
. That would have gone over big.

“I thought I heard a laugh, from far away,” McElone said. Her eyes looked around the room, as if she were waiting for skeletons to stampede her or for the walls to start dripping blood.

“Must be somebody’s television,” I attempted.

McElone shook her head. “Not that laugh,” she said.

“Okay, so let me get this straight—you’re creeped out by the house, so
I
should stay away?”

Anita McElone grimaced and looked away. “Fine,” she said. “Don’t leave. But I’m not coming here again unless your body is found and they need me to say, ‘I told you so,’ as they cart you away.”

Maxie reached her hand out and the lapel on McElone’s jacket flapped. All the color drained from the detective’s face and she inhaled quickly.

“You can reach me at the station,” she said, and was out the door before I could reply.

I turned toward Maxie and put my hands on my hips.

“Oh, like you wouldn’t have done it if you could,” Maxie said.

She had me there.

Once again, my team of “experts” felt that I should high-tail it out of the house and go hide somewhere. Tony and Jeannie offered their home, but I declined. My mother suggested Melissa and I stay with her for the duration, but I wasn’t about to stop work on the house now, and staying with Mom would only make me suicidal, which would defeat the original purpose.

I thought about asking Ned, but it would have been odd to get a guy you’ve only been out with twice involved in such a conversation, and besides, he’d probably want to come stay in the house with us, if only to experience its historical legacy up close for a longer period of time. It’s disconcerting to date a man more interested in your house’s architecture than your own.

Only Melissa agreed we should stay in the house, on the flimsy reasoning that “Maxie and Paul won’t let anything happen to us.” Melissa seemed somewhat oblivious to the fact that our two roommates were deceased, but I welcomed her agreement with my decision. We stayed.

The next afternoon, Maxie took off for points unknown (but obviously nearby—maybe the attic), and Paul watched me put finishing touches on the paint job in the kitchen.

“Were you a
good
private investigator?” I asked Paul as he watched from the stove (where he was seated).

“I only had my license for about six months before . . . this happened,” he replied after a moment. “I never really got a chance to find out.”

“So that’s why you’re so intent on finding out who did this,” I speculated out loud.

Paul smiled his enigmatic smile, the one that made him look like a more muscular Clive Owen. “Well, that’s part of it,” he answered. “But the fact is, getting killed is sort of a large offense. It tends to bring out the vengeful side of a guy.”

I nodded. “McElone seemed to think I should know why she let me go right after she arrested me. You’re the detective. What’s your theory?”

He seemed to be grateful for the change of subject. “Think about it, Alison,” he said. “What was going on when she arrested you?”

I stopped detailing and stood on the ladder, thinking. “Mayor Bridget Bostero—whom I’ve decided is an idiot, by the way—and the Prestons had invited themselves in for a tour, and they were trying to humiliate me by spending most of their time looking at the great big hole in my hallway wall.”

“And that’s when the doorbell rang?”

I nodded. “Yes. I was trying to figure out what was so fascinating about the break in the plaster when McElone showed up and carted me off.”

“So,” Paul said, leading me as any good teacher would, “when you opened the door, what did Detective McElone see?”

“Me, standing there with a smear of something on my forehead, and a group of people mocking my one failure amid a sea of jobs done well.”

Paul grinned with one half of his mouth and shook his head. “You have some serious self-esteem issues, you know that? Think of it from the detective’s point of view. What did she expect to see when the door opened?”

“Me, I guess.”

“And what did she see instead?”

I pursed my lips. “Me, with everyone else behind me, looking into a hole in the wall.”

“Good. Now, I was there too, so I have my own perspective. But I’ll ask you what
you
saw. From that first second when you opened the door until she said you were under arrest, did Detective McElone’s expression change?”

Her expression?
“I don’t know. It was forever ago.”

“It was yesterday.”

“Fine. Yeah, I guess her expression changed. She looked mad.”

“And that’s when she decided to arrest you.”

“You don’t think she came here to do that?” I asked.

“It’s not what I think; it’s what
you saw
,” Paul said. He could be annoying that way.

I stopped, more to make a show of thinking than to think. But dammit, it worked. “She saw the mayor and the Prestons behind me. And she didn’t expect to see them. So she arrested me on the spot. Why?”

“Why do you think?” Paul was smiling in the way a good teacher smiles at a pupil who’s figuring out multiplication for the first time. I felt like an idiot.

“She wanted to get me out of the house. She wanted to get me away from them.” That was the only way it made sense, but it
didn’t
make sense. Why would Detective McElone care if Mayor Bostero and the Prestons were in the house? Why not just tell me whatever she wanted to tell me and leave? “Do you think she considers them, or at least one of them, suspects in your killing?” I asked Paul.

He grinned. “By George,” he said with an exaggerated British accent. “I think she’s got it.” He picked a spoon up off the table and put it in his mouth, pretending it was a pipe.

I went back to painting, but I’ll admit I was pleased at the compliment. “You’re doing much better at picking things up,” I said, referring to the spoon.

“Thank you, but Maxie is still miles ahead of me.”

“Yeah, but at least you’re nicer to me than she is,” I said.

Paul shook his head. “Maxie’s jealous of you. You have everything she wanted. And I can tell you from experience: Being dead is a very difficult thing to adjust to. I think we’re both still adjusting.”

I got back up on the ladder to reach behind the sink. “What do you mean, I have everything she wanted?”

“Well, the house of course, but mostly Melissa.”

I turned my head too quickly, and almost made a mark on the wall where I didn’t want one. I caught myself just in time. “Maxie wants Melissa?”

“That’s not what I mean. I think she always wanted to have a child, thought she’d have had plenty of time for that, and look what happened. And she does truly adore your daughter,” Paul said.

“So, great. If the killer gets me, we can all haunt the house together and raise Liss like the dead parents every child wishes for.”

“We need to mobilize about that,” Paul said. “You only have two days left.”

“The warning said three.”

“That was yesterday.” A ray of sunshine, this ghost.

“Swell. What are we going to do?” I had been trying hard not to think about my deadline, and the way that word sounded so much more literal than it ever had before.

“Well, the good thing about having a time limit is we can assume nothing will happen today or tomorrow. So first thing, Maxie and I need to step up the search for this Washington document. We can move about more easily and look into places you can’t. If all else fails, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have the actual item in your possession when the time comes.” Paul was in full private investigator mode now.

“What should I be doing?” Hey, he was the professional. More than me, anyway.

“Redouble your efforts. Detective work is about perseverance. Start with Phyllis; see if she knows anything new. And get back on the trail of that book Kerin Murphy took from Terry Wright’s office.”

I got down off the ladder and stood in the center of the room. The room was truly looking wonderful—understated, homey without being hokey, and subtle without being invisible. “I hate it when Maxie’s right,” I said.

From under the floor, without the sign of a physical presence, came the last voice I wanted to hear at that moment. “The feeling’s mutual,” Maxie said.

Phyllis Coates had her New Balance shoes up on her desk when I walked in for a cup of coffee and an exchange of information. Since I had no information Phyllis hadn’t heard, the exchange was somewhat one-sided.

Melissa, now insistent on being at every meeting with Phyllis (the two had bonded over hot chocolate), listened to what I said, even the part about the dollar knifed to my wall, without comment. But she had a pencil behind her ear, like Phyllis, and was examining the way the editor sat back in her chair.