Night of the Living Deed (37 page)

We ate—well,
they
ate—silently for a while. I put food on my plate, and moved it around with a fork for a while. Nobody ate anything Ned had brought. Including Ned.

“Have you heard . . . Has there been . . . ?” Ned couldn’t decide how to start.

“No contact yet,” I said. “No phone call, no e-mail. I’ve been checking.” I pointed to the laptop sitting on a radiator across the room.

“How about . . . ?” His eyes lit up.

“No, we haven’t found the deed.” I scowled.

“You won’t let us look in the most likely spot,” Paul said. Of course, no one here but me heard him, and I didn’t feel it necessary to relay that message.

But for some reason, that did it. I dropped my fork, which wasn’t doing me much good anyway, and stood up. Everyone in the room stared at me with a different brand of concern on each face.

“I’ve had it,” I said. “I don’t believe anyone’s coming after me. No one can actually expect that I’ve found something that no one else has been able to locate for more than a hundred years. Killing me just for
not
finding it won’t do anyone any good. It would just expose what’s been done before. So I’m calling it quits. I’m not worrying about it anymore. There’s nothing anyone can do that can scare me now.” I started to reach for a doughnut, just to be brazen.

And just as Ned stood up and moved toward me, my phone began to ring.

“You’ve had your time,” the muffled voice from before hissed. “You need to bring the deed to McArver Cemetery now.”

“I don’t have it,” I said with as challenging a tone as I could muster. “I never found it. I don’t have a clue where it could be. So move on to your next scam, my friend. You’ll get nothing out of me.”

“Don’t roll it up or damage it,” the voice went on, not acknowledging that I’d spoken. “Bring it in exactly the state you found it.”

“I
didn’t
find it. You’re operating on a mistaken assumption. You’re being an idiot.”

Paul’s face animated. He’d caught something. I put the cell phone on speaker so he—and everyone else—could hear.

“I’m not tearing my house apart anymore,” I told the voice, just to keep it talking so Paul could hear more. “I’ve done enough damage. I need this house.”

The voice went on without a direct reply. “It’s not raining, so there’s no need for plastic sheeting, but protect the document from the wind. No damage must come to it, or you will be extremely sorry.”

“What are you going to do, poison me through the phone?” I asked. “I’m not coming.”

“You are,” the voice said, still without enough inflection to determine the gender of the speaker. “And you’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“I had until midnight. It’s only eight-fifteen.” I don’t know why, but I figured that any disagreement I could muster was worthwhile at this point. After all this anonymous wiseass had put me through, the least I could do was be an irritant.

“Yes, and wasn’t your daughter supposed to be back by eight-thirty?”

My blood temperature dropped 20 degrees. “Who are you?” I croaked.

“She looks very cute in her
Star Trek
costume,” the voice said. “But I wouldn’t have done the ears with Silly Putty; it wilts. There are latex options that would offer better results. Get the deed to me in thirty minutes, Alison. McArver Cemetery. Come alone. Don’t dare call the police, and don’t be late.” And the phone disconnected.

The first thing I did was call Detective McElone (what am I, an idiot?), who assured me she’d be discreet in staking out the cemetery, but would have plenty of backup. Paul said that it didn’t matter that the voice had told me not to call the cops; it was the smart move to make.

The second thing I did was call Melissa’s cell phone, and got no answer. Trying to control my trembling, I dialed Kerin Murphy’s cell phone number, which I’d insisted upon before she took my daughter so much as down the driveway: It, too, went straight to voice mail. I resolved to murder Kerin as soon as possible, but first, I decided to go into the basement and get the sledgehammer.

Tony, Ned and Jeannie did the same. There were enough hammers to go around. “Every wall,” I said. “No exceptions until we find it.”

“There are too many walls,” Tony said. “We don’t have time.”

“Get anything that’ll make a hole,” I instructed. Then I ran to the front door and opened it wide.

“Who wants to help the ghosts trash the house?” I yelled.

At least a half dozen kids made war whoops and joined in. Each was issued an implement of destruction and put to work.

It doesn’t take long to make a hole in a plaster wall when you don’t care how much damage you’re doing. Each time, we’d get just enough open to shine a flashlight inside. We worked in teams: As soon as a ghost and a light could fit inside, the wall was tested. Paul and Maxie were relatively discreet—it was easy to be in that crowd—and if Jeannie or Ned noticed things flying around or questions being asked to the ceiling, they just accepted it and moved on.

By the time we were done decimating the first floor, I had only twenty minutes left, and we had no deed of any kind, signed by any official of any municipality in any era. I had to leave in ten minutes to ensure an on-time arrival, and we had the whole second floor to do.

The thundering hordes went upstairs and I took in the damage we’d done. There would be no repairs now; I’d just have to take down the walls, all of them, and put up wallboard. It would take weeks, it wouldn’t look as good, and it would make my house that much less competitive in the accommodations market.

I couldn’t have cared less.

I heard the pounding on the walls from upstairs, and I hefted my sledgehammer to get upstairs and help. And then for some reason I looked across the living room and saw it, each wall demolished between studs, in a way I’d never seen it before.

The window seat. With the pressed-metal-pattern grill. Could it be?

What the hell. I had to find that deed.

I got to the window seat as quickly as I could while dragging a five-pound sledgehammer, raised it, then remembered there was a perfectly workable hinge on the top. I opened the window seat.

Nothing.

But reaching in, it seemed the bottom panel of the seat was too high. There was room underneath. A false bottom.

Without time to be dainty, I smacked the base of the window seat with the hammer, and it buckled. And when I cleared the debris away, sure enough, there it was.

A heavy wooden box.

“Paul!” I screamed. Maxie appeared first, before I’d even gotten the whole name out of my mouth. She’d looked absolutely stricken when it appeared Melissa was in danger, and now she was practically vibrating.

“Where?” she shouted, and I pointed at the window seat. She swooped in, and came out holding the box.

Paul showed up seconds behind her, and I could hear footsteps on the staircase behind me. Ned, seeing a wooden box floating in the air by itself, made a strange sound in his throat. There were still screams and pounding from the kids upstairs.

“Open it,” Paul said.

I grabbed the box out of Maxie’s hands and put it on the floor. It certainly looked old enough—it was ornate and carved, with a symbol of an eagle on the top—and it was fairly heavy, but mostly from the weight of the box itself. Ned covered the distance across the room in perhaps a second, and was breathing heavily when he reached my side. He reached for the box.

“We don’t have time to be in awe now,” I said. “This is Melissa’s life.”

I opened the lid just enough to know we’d found what we’d been looking for. I nodded at Paul.

“Get on the Ghosternet,” I told him. “See if anybody has seen Melissa, and if she’s okay.”

“Get on the
what
?” Ned asked.

Jeannie showed up behind him. “Humor her,” she said. “She thinks Casper the Friendly Ghost lives here.”

Ned didn’t say anything, and seemed to be deciding whether to stare at me or Jeannie. He settled on me.

“I’ll get Maxie to text to Tony on Jeannie’s phone if there’s news,” Paul answered.

“How are you going to get . . .”

Paul pointed to Jeannie’s cell phone. “She leaves it lying around,” he said.

“I’ll drive,” Tony said.

“I can . . .” Ned began.

“Stay here,” I told him. “Get them to stop tearing my house up. And if you don’t hear from me in an hour . . .”

“I will,” he said.

I stood up. As I rushed for the door with Tony leading the way, Paul shouted my name, and I turned.

“I know who it is,” he said.

 

 

We were a minute or two away from the cemetery, and not a word had been spoken since we’d gotten into the truck. I’d been examining the deed, a document not quite so grand as the Declaration of Independence, but a hell of a lot fancier than a real estate contract looks today. It would have been easy to get lost in the beauty of the document, but I was, let’s say
preoccupied
, so just the sound of his voice made me jump a little. I caught my breath and said, “What do you mean, back me up?”

“I can be behind you. Be ready in case they try something. I have the gun with me.”

That didn’t make me feel even a little safer. “The voice said to come alone,” I reminded him. “I’m not taking any chances on this.”

“You called the cops.”

“Yeah, because they’re the cops. If one of the bad guys sees you loitering around a cemetery with no clear purpose, they’ll know I brought you, and Melissa’s life could be in danger. For that matter, if a police sniper sees you,
your
life will be in danger. Thanks, Tony, but no.”

“They won’t know I’m with you,” he persisted. “I can be a trick-or-treater.”

I would have laughed if my stomach hadn’t been in knots. “Dressed as a contractor in his mid-thirties?” I asked.

“I have a drop cloth in the back. I can put it over my head and be a ghost.”

“You’d be a ghost with paint spots all over it. Who goes out on Halloween as a Jackson Pollock ghost? Tony, thanks, really. But no. Drop me off and stick around so you can come if I call you, but otherwise, stay in the truck, okay?”

He nodded, and that was it.

Just before we got to the center of town, a text message came in from Jeannie’s phone, reading, “No news.” Melissa hadn’t been spotted by any ghosts.

Tony dropped me off a block from McArver Cemetery, a relatively small plot in the middle of town, behind an Episcopal church. The burial ground had been used as far back as the eighteen hundreds, and no one had been interred here in more than fifty years.

It was, to say the least, a strange place to be having this meeting on Halloween night. Or perhaps the perfect place.

My breath was coming in spurts as I approached the main gate. I didn’t see any sign of McElone or any other police officers, and I couldn’t decide if I was alarmed by that or reassured that they’d taken precautions to be so well hidden. I decided on the latter, because the thought of going in here alone was more than I could accept right now.

I held the box with the deed in it so tightly I was afraid it would shatter in my hands.

The voice hadn’t specified an area in the cemetery to meet. I checked my watch and saw that Tony had dropped me off about three minutes before the deadline. So I started in and figured I’d head for the center, from where I could get to any spot fairly quickly.

There was a rustle in some decorative shrubs behind me, but when I turned to look, there was no one there. When I turned back, a figure in a hooded black cloak stood about fifteen feet in front of me, the bright moon behind it obscuring the face. But I could easily tell who it was.

“You can take off the hood, Bridget,” I said. “I know who you are.”

Paul had been right: Mayor Bridget Bostero lowered the hood on her cloak. Her eyes weren’t angry, or even very intense. They were like the eyes on a fish—open, seeing, but completely unexpressive.

“You brought the deed?” she asked, in a tone as conversational as if she were inquiring about the health of my dog. I didn’t have a dog. If Melissa wanted a dog, I’d get her one. Just let her be all right.

“Where is my daughter?” She could have the stupid deed. I wanted Melissa.

A laugh escaped from the mayor’s mouth. “I honestly have no idea,” she said. “But when she came trick-or-treating at my house looking so adorable, and said she had to be home by eight-thirty, I pushed up the timetable. I knew that would get you here no matter what.”

Melissa wasn’t here? She wasn’t being held by people trying to blackmail me? She was safe?

“You bitch,” I hissed. “Do you have any clue what you’ve put me through?”

“I did what was necessary, Alison. If you’d cooperated before, I wouldn’t have had to do that tonight. It’s really your fault.” Bridget’s grin was a little less jovial than before.