An Uninvited Ghost (12 page)

“Interesting.” I could pretty much hear Phyllis licking her pencil and frowning. She’s an old-school newspaperwoman who doesn’t so much interview you as lets you talk and writes down what you say. So she didn’t ask another question right away, and as she might have expected, I filled the silence on my own.

“She hadn’t said anything about feeling ill beforehand,” I continued. “Arlice and I had a very nice conversation just before we went inside, and she gave me a silver amulet on a chain.” My index finger reflexively went to the amulet, still around my neck. I’d decided to keep wearing it as a memorial to Arlice.

Phyllis jumped on that. “You came into my office yesterday asking about Arlice Crosby as if you’d never met her,” she said.

“I hadn’t,” I told her.

“Yet by last night she was giving you what must have been a reasonably expensive gift?”

I defended myself. “We hit it off, I guess, when I went to visit her. I liked her, and she seemed to enjoy my company. She was very excited about coming to the séance last night, and I guess that was her way of being nice to the hostess.”

“What else? You’re holding back.” Phyllis is a terrific reader of voices.

“Look, this is off the record, or I simply won’t say it. Agreed?”

Her tone indicated she didn’t care for the conditions, but she didn’t have a choice. “Agreed,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Since last night, a few different people who were there when Arlice fell have given me different stories about someone doing something to her just at that moment. And each of the stories had someone else bothering her just as she collapsed.” I detailed the claims Melissa and Jim and Tony had made (naming no names, of course), and left out Dolores’s story entirely, since I didn’t want to start implicating a ghost while talking to Phyllis.

“That’s weird,” Phyllis said. I could hear the pencil scratching against her paper.

“I said it was off the record,” I warned her.

“I’m taking notes. I’m not going to quote you, and I’m not going to use it unless someone else corroborates, okay? Don’t tell me my business.”

“It’s just . . . it’s one thing to have a heart attack. I didn’t have any control over Arlice’s health. But if someone I have in my house did something to make her ill like that, that’s another story. That’s something I could have prevented if I’d have seen it coming.”

“How could you have seen that coming?” Phyllis asked.

“I don’t know. But it’s under my roof, and that means it’s my responsibility.”

“Uh-huh.” Again, the silence, but this time I wasn’t playing. After a while, Phyllis asked, “Any other reason to think it was anything but natural causes?”

“I guarantee you’ve already talked to the police and to the medical examiner’s office,” I said. Phyllis rather famously has a “friend” at the ME’s office, and I don’t like to think about how they worked out their arrangement. “So you tell me—
is
there any reason to think it was anything but natural causes?”

“Hey, who’s asking the questions here?”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “You’ve heard something, haven’t you?” I asked.

“I haven’t heard back from Detective McElone yet,” she admitted, “but I did talk to my friend, and he says Arlice didn’t die of a heart attack.”

“She didn’t?”

“No. She died after falling into a diabetic coma. Her insulin level was way too high.”

“Well, how does that happen? Did she inject too much before she came over?” I hadn’t seen anything like that happening, and quite frankly, had forgotten until now that Arlice was diabetic.

“No, you don’t understand. The amount of insulin in her system, to kill her that fast, would have had to have been about fifty times the normal dosage.” Phyllis let me have a moment for that to sink in.

“So Arlice overdosed? Accidentally?”

“Standing there in a room with a group of people waiting for ghosts? No, Alison. Think again. All the stories about someone bumping into Arlice and causing her to turn around. As if something stung. As if she were getting a shot.”

“Somebody killed her.”

Detective McElone called back a half hour later and very curtly requested (or more specifically,
ordered
) my presence in her office immediately. And she also made a point of telling me to “bring that TV guy with you.”

I found Trent in the kitchen, trying to talk to his breakout star, H-Bomb, who appeared to be having some sort of meltdown, pulling at her hair and actually stamping her foot when I arrived.

“I
won’t
do it!” she screamed at the harried-looking producer (sorry,
executive
producer), her black roots screaming for attention while the blonde hair hanging down in her face created a sort of bead-curtain effect in front of her eyes. “There’s no way you can make me!”

“Be reasonable,” Trent attempted, as if that phrase had ever resulted in reasonable behavior from anyone to whom it was spoken. “We’re in our second day of shooting, and we’re already behind schedule. All I’m suggesting is . . .”

“I know what you’re suggesting,” H-Bomb shot back. “You’re suggesting I let that skank Tiffney overshadow me on this show, and I’m not going to let you do it. That’s
my
spot, and I’m doing it!”

With that, she turned on her heel and walked out through the back door to her trailer, giving Trent a poisonous look.

“Hard day at the office?” I asked.

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said smiling, but the smile held no joy. “What can I do for you?”

I informed him of Detective McElone’s summoning of the two of us to her office, and Trent wiped his brow, although I didn’t see any sweat there. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll meet you outside,” he said. “I have to talk to Ed.” And without waiting for a response, he walked out to the den, where I heard him calling for the director.

Having been effectively dismissed, I went out the back door and into the Volvo, which had had a rough winter and was now happy the warm weather was back. It started up fairly easily, and I sat and listened to a Carole King CD while I waited for Trent.

He showed up ten—not five—minutes later, got into my car and started rubbing his temples with his thumb and middle finger. Then he composed himself and put on his professional smile as I drove down the driveway.

“You like the oldies, huh?” he said, pointing to the CD player as if I didn’t know where the music had been coming from.

“I like women who have a point of view,” I said. “Too many of the ones singing now have a point of view that begins and ends with their wardrobe.”

“You don’t think women can be stylish and intelligent?” Trent asked.

“Depends. Which one is H-Bomb?”

“Touché.”

Carole was especially insistent that I get up every morning with a smile on my face and show the world all the love in my heart, so I turned the music off. “What was she complaining about before?” I asked.

He chuckled, again with more annoyance than amusement. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” He didn’t wait for me to protest. “She’s concerned because she doesn’t have to work on the boardwalk at the ring toss game tonight.”

I was driving, so doing a double take seemed too reckless to consider. “How’s that?” I asked instead.

“Exactly. See, we set the cast up with jobs on the boardwalk, the idea being that we get to see how they respond to responsibility and a structured schedule.”

“Which they had when they were in high school, like, fifteen minutes ago.”

Trent looked truly amused this time. “You’d be surprised. There’s not one of them under the age of twenty-four. H-Bomb is almost thirty.”

“You’re kidding. And their idea of a job is working a fixed water-gun race at the boardwalk in Wildwood?”

“No, their idea of a job is being a great big TV star, which is why each of them signed on for the show. They think if they act outrageous enough, it’ll be their ticket to acting, or modeling, or designing their own fragrance, or something like that.”

We were about halfway to police headquarters, and I was in no rush to see McElone’s scowling face, so I was observing the local speed laws and keeping the Volvo under twenty-five miles per hour, which probably was a source of relief for my engine. “And if they act like complete and total jerks on national television, that’s going to get them a career?” I asked.

“Stranger things have happened.”

“So why is Helen so upset about not working the game tonight?” That part didn’t seem to fit in. Wouldn’t she want to avoid work and concentrate on wearing as little as possible in front of the boys?

“Ooh, careful—don’t let her ever hear you call her anything but H-Bomb,” Trent warned. “If you think that little tiff we had was something . . . Anyway. It’s not that she wanted so badly to be working the game tonight. It’s that I changed the schedule and gave her spot to Tiffney. H-Bomb thinks that means I’m favoring Tiff over her and that I’m going to give Tiff the better segments to shoot, and she’ll end up being shoved to the side.”

“So, no H-Bomb fragrance.”

“Exactly. Can’t have that.” Trent closed his eyes and leaned back.

“So why do you put up with her? Why not tell her to take a walk?”

He didn’t open his eyes to answer. “She tested the highest in last season’s focus groups. Everybody hated her. She’s my star.”

“The one everybody hated is your star?”

“Welcome to my world,” Trent said.

“So why don’t
you
quit?”

He sat up and opened his eyes wide. “What? And give up show business?”

By the time we got to the police station, I’d heard as much about “reality” television as I’d ever want to. More, actually, since I didn’t want to know anything about it. But Trent no longer seemed like a shallow, uncaring slick-talker. He actually showed signs of intelligence and wit. I’d have to be very careful with him or I might find myself becoming attracted to a TV producer who was going to be here for all of three weeks. Not a great idea for a single mom. I’d gone out on exactly three dates since divorcing The Swine. I did not want to find myself mooning over a visiting TV producer who probably had no romantic interest in me anyway.

McElone looked impatient even as we arrived and treated us as though we were late for some very formal appointment she’d confirmed with us weeks before. The truth of the matter was that it had taken us almost twenty minutes to show up in her office.

“I’ve screened all the tape you shot last night,” she said to Trent after we settled into her extremely neat, but still undersized, cubicle. “And aside from some movement in one corner of the screen when Arlice Crosby fell over, there isn’t a single shot of her in the lot. How do you explain that?”

“Simple,” Trent replied. “The camera operators were instructed to keep our cast in frame at all time. We also had a camera on Alison because she was running the séance. Everyone else was focused on our cast. In fact, they were told to avoid shooting the houseguests or anyone else at all if possible.”

“Why is that?” McElone asked.

Trent shrugged. “We make television for an audience of twelve-to-twenty-four-year-olds. Do you think they’re interested in watching a bunch of people in their seventies and eighties? Besides, anyone shown on-screen has to sign a waiver, or I’d have to spend money pixelating their faces out of the scene. I wasn’t interested in getting everybody there to sign off unless it was completely necessary.”

“You didn’t know something was going to happen that you wouldn’t want to show on camera?” McElone was stretching, for sure.

Trent’s face practically inverted. “Of course not. If I knew someone was going to die right there in the room while we were talking about ghosts, don’t you think I’d have had a camera and a light on her? It’s already going to be my highest-rated show of the year.”

Television people have an interesting idea of morality. McElone turned to me. “I assume by now your network of spies have told you Mrs. Crosby did not die of natural causes.”

“Network of spies? This whole town thinks I’m a lunatic who believes there are dead people hanging out in her house. Who’s going to join my network of spies?” I crossed my arms and sat back like a petulant thirteen-year-old.

McElone blew out some air. “You know Mrs. Crosby didn’t die of a heart attack, right?”

I tilted my head and nodded in what I’ve been told is a sheepish manner, although I’ve never actually studied sheep body language. “Right.”

“So we’re considering her death a homicide, and that means someone in the room with you last night was responsible for it.” McElone stood up from her desk and put her hands on her hips. She looked at Trent. “Every witness—and the videotape—places you nowhere near Mrs. Crosby when she died,” she told him. Then she turned to me. “Has anyone in the house said anything to you that might give us a direction? Did anyone see anything they didn’t tell the police, but did tell their friendly innkeeper?”

There was no sense in holding back. “As a matter of fact, a number of people have told me they saw something, but nobody knows exactly what, and no two stories match at all.”

McElone reached into her desk drawer for a pad and pen. She seemed surprised, as if she hadn’t expected me to offer anything of note. I’d show her. “Who said something, and what did they say?” she asked, sitting back down behind her desk to take notes.

“Well, you know that Tony Mandorisi said he’d seen something change Arlice’s expression immediately preceding her death,” I started.

“Yes,” McElone agreed, nodding her head. “Mr. Mandorisi told me that last night. But he didn’t see anything that could be considered suspicious, exactly.”

“Let me finish,” I insisted. I was going to be of use to this woman if it killed me. Or she did. “Then, late last night, my daughter, Melissa, told me she’d seen one of my guests walk behind Arlice and that Arlice seemed to react, and then fell over.”