Night of the Living Deed (33 page)

“That
is
why I’m really here,” I said, a little deflated. “Somebody wants me to get out of my house, or they say I’ll die.”

“And you immediately thought of me? I’m insulted.” Adam walked around his desk and stood next to me. “I didn’t think I was all that menacing a figure.” He seemed genuinely hurt.

“You’re not. Or maybe you are. I don’t know.” I wasn’t comfortable with him that close.

Then he leaned in closer. “What do you
really
want here, Alison?” he crooned.

Adam Morris just wasn’t going to get off that tactic, but I wasn’t buying. “I’m here because two people died in my house before I bought it. They were probably poisoned—on the night the planning board voted against your proposal, and in a restaurant of which you are the principal owner.”

I got the desired effect—he backed off. “And you think I poisoned them so I could buy the house?” He laughed. “How’d that work out?”

“I know why you couldn’t buy the house after Maxie died,” I told him, regaining some of my bravado. “But I’m not sure how angry you were
before
she died. Angry enough to kill her?”

Adam shook his head and walked back behind his desk. If seduction wasn’t going to work, the conversation no longer appeared to hold any interest for him. “Believe what you want to believe, Alison,” he said. “A couple of people in a restaurant drink some eye drops with their dinner, and I’m supposed to be responsible because I have a financial interest in the building? That’s a very long stretch. I’m sorry if someone’s threatening you, but it’s not me. Now, please stop interrupting my day.”

I dropped my head again, did my best to look defeated, and then slunk out of the office, dragging my feet behind me. I dropped a piece of paper on Bianca’s desk on my way out.

And the instant I made it outside, I called Detective McElone.

“He said
eye drops
,” I told Detective McElone. Again.

“I heard you. I understand the point.” She sat back in her chair and didn’t move.

I couldn’t comprehend her lack of excitement. “You never told Adam Morris that the poison used on Terry Wright was eye drops, did you?” I asked.

McElone shook her head. “You’re the only person outside the department I told, and I’m not really sure why I did that,” she said.

Still not so much as a blink on her part. “Well,
I
didn’t tell him, so that means he knew what killed Terry, and assumed it was the same poison that killed Paul and Maxie. And it wasn’t. It was acetone in their wine that killed them.”

“I know,” McElone said. “But there are so many holes in your logic that I can’t begin to tell you.”

“Holes? The man slipped up! He said something that only the killer could have known!”

McElone sighed. Having to deal with an amateur like me was a drain on her energy. She held up the ubiquitous finger to begin her count. “One: He said what he said,
if
he said it, to you, a civilian, and another suspect in the case. Two: You didn’t have a recorder on at the time, so there’s no record of what he said or didn’t say, and no proof. Three:
If
he said that, he’d be implicating himself in the murder of Terry Wright, not Maxine Malone or Paul Harrison, and we have no evidence at all of him being involved with Terry Wright. Four—”

I couldn’t stand another finger. “Enough. I get it. Are you still looking for the appointment calendar Kerin Murphy took from Terry’s office?”

“Remember that badge I asked you for last time?” The one I don’t have.

“Detective, Adam Morris might very well be threatening my life. Whether or not I have a badge . . .”

“Mr. Morris has been questioned and will be questioned again. Believe me, I don’t sit around all day and wait for you to come in with clues—we’ve been investigating.” McElone stood up in an effort to get me ready to leave. “So please, just go home, stay out of trouble, and let us do our job. Okay?”

“There are times I get the feeling you don’t like me, Detective.”

“Trust those feelings,” she said.

 

 

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Paul said.

The strangest council of war ever convened was gathered in my barren front room. Besides Paul and me, Maxie was pouting unconvincingly in one corner, while the more extant members of the brain trust—Tony, Melissa and Mom—were arranged around the room in lawn chairs. Of course, Tony couldn’t communicate with Paul or Maxie, but between Melissa, Mom and myself, we worked it out. Jeannie had outright refused to participate in “this crap about ghosts in the house,” and was upstairs, sewing new curtains for Melissa’s bedroom.

“I’m waiting for a suggestion,” I said. “We’re no closer to figuring out who’s behind all the threats, and the clock is ticking.”

“What should we be doing now?” Tony asked. “I mean, shouldn’t we be concentrating on finding that Washington thing?”

“I’m not talking to
him
,” Maxie said, and crossed her arms severely over her chest.

“That’s a good idea,” I told Tony, ignoring Maxie. “Shouldn’t the first order of business now be to find the deed? It seems to me it must be outside somewhere.”

“Why?” Melissa asked. “Because we didn’t find it in the house yet? Maybe it’s in the basement or something.”

“Or maybe it was discarded or destroyed years ago, and nobody knows it,” Mom added. “It’s even possible that there never was a deed, so there’s no chance we’ll find it.”

“Wow,” Melissa said. “You are harshin’ my mellow, Grandma.” She’d picked that one up from her friend Wendy.

Let’s just say the vibe in the room wasn’t exactly buoyant.

“All right.” Paul, at least, was trying. “You haven’t discovered the deed in all the renovations you’ve done, so the obvious places are clearly of no use to us.”

“And you and Maxie couldn’t find it by cruising around the place,” I said, just to prove that I wasn’t the only incompetent in the room. “I don’t suppose George Washington is one of the ghosts you can contact on your Ghosternet, is he?”

“His Ghoster-
what
?” Melissa asked.

“Sometimes, I can get in touch with other . . . displaced spirits,” Paul explained. He looked at Maxie, who harrumphed, and I took it that while Paul could communicate with other spirits, Maxie couldn’t. Then he turned to me, and with a certain edge, said, “No, President Washington is not on my speed dial. Any other ideas?”

“Do you think it could be hidden in the walls?” Tony asked. He was scared, I could tell. Which scared me.

“In the walls?” I asked.

“Yeah. You said it was probably hidden while this house was being built. The owners knew it would increase in value, let’s say, and didn’t want anyone to come looking for it. Could they have closed it up inside a wall somewhere?”

I looked at Paul. “Wouldn’t you have seen it, flying through walls the way you do?”

“I’ve told you, Alison: Dark is dark for us, too. And we can’t carry solid objects, like flashlights, through walls.”

“Why would they do that, anyway?” I asked. “Then the people who hid it would never be able to retrieve the deed.”

“Unless they put in a marker, or a secret door to get in,” Tony said. “It’s possible to put in hinges that nobody can see.”

“Was it possible a hundred years ago?”

“Sure,” he insisted.

“How would we find them?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow at me. “The problem is, they’re
hidden
.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Paul said.

I let out a long breath. The fact that finding this object might actually save my life was not making it easier for me to think about where it might be. I put my head down and massaged my temples.

“Might the history teacher know something about where a thing like that could have been hidden back then?” my mother wanted to know. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Among the things I’d neglected to tell my mother was that Ned had been acting really strangely about the deed, and I was trying not to bring up the topic when he was around. This didn’t seem the time to mention it.

“He doesn’t know where it is,” I mumbled.

“Suppose you find the deed,” Tony said. “How do you get in touch with this person? Have you been given instructions?”

“Good point,” Paul answered. “There’s no point in threatening violence if there’s no mechanism in place to assure you’ll get what you’re after.”

“They said there’d be ‘more instructions at the proper time,’ whatever that means,” I said.

I didn’t like the idea of all this talk of violence in front of Melissa, whose eyes were spinning just a little bit. “Don’t worry,” I said to her quietly. “I’ll be fine. It’s just talk.”

“Oh, I was just thinking about my English quiz,” she lied.

“Is it possible to make a fake document?” I asked Paul and Tony. “Does anybody really know what this thing looks like? Suppose we give them something that looks old and has a facsimile of Washington’s signature on it. That couldn’t be too hard to do. Does Kinko’s make phony historical documents?”

“I don’t think you want to take that kind of chance,” Paul said quietly, and after the translation interval, Tony nodded in agreement.

“Well, I don’t know what else to do!” I hadn’t intended to shout, but the situation was starting to get to me. “We can try to figure out who killed you two, but the reality is, whoever did it wants the deed, and they want it tomorrow night. We have to find the deed, but I don’t know where else to look.”

“What about the yard?” Melissa asked. “At school, we buried a time capsule with a notebook and a CD of songs somebody burned and a picture of our class so that people millions of years in the future could dig it up and see what we were like,” she explained. “Don’t you think they might have done that with the deed?”

And a child shall lead them.

The five grown-up faces in the room, both alive and not so much, all shot up at once (Mom shot up a little slower). That threw Melissa off her game.

“I guess it’s a stupid idea,” she said.

“You couldn’t
have
a stupid idea,” her grandmother told her.

“Let’s get some shovels,” Jeannie said. We all turned to see her in the doorway, finished curtains in hand.

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said.

“I don’t. I think you’re all nuts. But somebody really is threatening you, and if it’s because of this deed, we need to find it. Now. Where are the shovels?”

“There are some in the shed,” I told her. “But where do we look? There’s two acres of land out there.”

“Didn’t the Prestons say they’d done some digging back there?” Paul asked, stroking his chin. “Wasn’t David Preston complaining about all the excavation Madeline had made him do?”

He was right. “Maybe the Prestons weren’t just gardening,” I speculated. “Maybe they were . . .”

“Looking for something,” Tony finished.

We were on our way out the back door before anyone could say anything else. Paul took the early lead, since he didn’t have to worry about walls or doors or anything.

But he had to wait for us once he was outside, because he wasn’t yet able to pick up a shovel and dig.

Tony, however, was taken aback by the amount of dirt flying through the air. Maxie, as usual, was showing off.

An hour later, we assessed the situation. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Paul said.

My backyard was going to need some serious landscaping help. Between Maxie, who had taken the lightest shovel; Tony, who had insisted on the most lethal-looking and heaviest; and I (just a regular shovel), we had made, by my count, seventeen holes in the ground, from just barely beneath the surface of the grass to, in one case, Tony hitting something he thought was a wooden box that turned out to be a vintage glass bottle of Coca-Cola. Melissa, Mom and Jeannie (who always seemed to be looking away when a shovel with no visible human behind it broke ground) had taken over whenever I got tired. Maxie never got tired. Neither did Tony.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Melissa said. She seemed near tears—it had been her idea to dig.

I dropped down to my knees and looked her in the eye. “It’s not your fault, Liss. This was a really good idea.” I gave her a tight hug, and she relaxed a little in my arms. I stood, and held her hand.

“The problem is, we don’t know where to dig,” Maxie said. She wiped something resembling sweat from her brow. I had no idea that dead people could overwork.

“No kidding, Captain Obvious,” I told her. “How does that help solve the problem?”

“You know, you’re mean to me,” Maxie said, but she didn’t skulk off like she might have under less serious circumstances.

“Sorry,” I said, and suddenly, I meant it.

Maxie didn’t answer, and then she was gone. She didn’t leave; she was just gone. They can do that.

“I
said
I was sorry,” I grumbled after her.