An Uninvited Ghost (25 page)

“What’s so interesting about that?” I asked. “Bernice would complain about air if she didn’t have to suck some in to complain with.”

“Linda Jane wasn’t in her room when Bernice was doing the complaining,” Maxie said. “I was with her out on the front porch.”

I stared for a moment. “I’m not getting it.”

“Dolores was in the room by herself,” Paul said. “I went in to look. She was sitting on the bed, chanting, for an hour by herself. And she had surrounded herself with . . . objects.”

“Objects?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“Objects,” Maxie said. “Paul made me come up and see for myself. She had, like, every little metal triangular thing on the face of the planet, all laid out on the bed around where she was sitting.”

Little metal triangular things . . . My fingers instinctively went to the amulet around my neck. “Like this?” I asked.

Paul beamed. “Exactly. Dolores was having some kind of spiritual experience, as far as I could tell, with one of those little ghost detector devices going off right next to her bed, and her attention was so focused she didn’t even notice it.”

“What the heck was that all about?” I asked. “Dolores tried to take the amulet from me the other night, and she was fascinated with it the night—”

“The night the old lady died,” Maxie said.

I held the little silver triangle up in front of my face. “What the hell
is
this thing, anyway?” I thought aloud.

“That’s what we need to find out,” Paul said. “Maxie, fire up Alison’s laptop. We need some more research.”

Maxie did less grumbling than usual, although she insisted that we start discussing the purchase of a new MacBook if she was “going to have to keep doing this high school homework.” I had to agree with her—the laptop was old and slow—in every way but the one that counted: financially. I gave her the amulet to use as a reference in her work, and she put it in the pocket of her jeans. Somehow, putting objects in their clothing seemed to make the things less material for the ghosts, and the items could then travel through walls and such. I’d seen Scott McFarlane do that with his bandana when he left the house.

She vanished up to her attic lair, which I really had to talk to Tony about. I was starting to feel bad about taking Maxie out of the place she seemed to love so much, but I was going to need the money it would bring at some point.

“You know, it’s her birthday Wednesday,” I said to Paul after Maxie had ascended.

He looked up, perhaps thrown off by the segue. “What?”

“Wednesday. It’s Maxie’s birthday. She would have been thirty.”

“No kidding. Well, I think presents would be somehow inappropriate.” Paul was thinking about the case, and could seem a little unfeeling when he was engaged like that. “Why would Dolores be praying to triangles?”

“How would I know?” I asked him back. “None of this business makes sense. I knew Arlice Crosby for half a day while she was alive, and now I know her real name was Alice Smith and she died in my house, and she had a sister named Jane Smith who may or may not be the same Linda Jane Smith currently staying at my guesthouse, and I still have to repair the felt on the pool table.”

“What’s the felt on the pool table got to do with anything?” Paul asked.

“Nothing. I just happened to remember it. It’s on my list of things to do. So, you’re the experienced private eye. You tell me what you make of all this.”

Paul’s ego, when stroked, could grow to the size of the battleship
Missouri
. “Let’s go over the facts,” he said, playing with his goatee as he hovered over the floor. “We have a very wealthy woman, who no doubt is leaving behind a large estate but is giving most of it to charities. She has a sister—estranged, perhaps—who does not seem to be stepping forward to claim her inheritance. And she left you with an amulet that doesn’t seem to be very valuable in monetary terms, but which apparently has some significance for Dolores Santiago.”

“There’s one thing we’re forgetting,” I said.

“Just one?” Paul looked amused.

“Remember, Linda Jane told us there is another diabetic in the house, one of the guests, and that person would have to have had access to enough insulin to have killed Arlice. But if that person used all the insulin to send Arlice into an instant diabetic coma that killed her . . .”

“Then that person, being a type 1 diabetic, would need to replenish the supply of insulin for their own use,” Paul said. “That’s right. How could we have missed that?”

“I kept hoping McElone would solve the case, and I wouldn’t have to think about it,” I admitted.

“She still might. I think we need to give her a call.”

“What’s this ‘we’ stuff, kemosabe?” I grumbled. “She won’t be mad at
you
. What am I asking her now?”

“Have there been any deliveries made to the house since Arlice’s death, something in a package for one of the guests, probably a refrigerated package?” Paul asked.

“No,” I shook my head. “I’d have had to sign for it if it came here, and I certainly would have heard about it from one of the regular delivery services. There hasn’t been anything.”

“In that case,” Paul said, “you need to ask Lieutenant McElone about where she found vials of insulin in the house.”

“We know where,” I reminded him. “She found some in every room.”

“She found
empty
vials in every room,” Paul corrected me. “We need to know where she found
full
vials.”

 

 

I’d had enough that night, so I didn’t call Detective Lieutenant Anita McElone until the next morning. She’d had enough, too—of me, she said—but she agreed to meet me at the Dunkin’ Donuts in town before I dropped Melissa off at school.

“You know perfectly well I’m not going to discuss private medical records with you,” McElone said, looking down at me over an iced coffee with coconut flavoring in it.

“I’m not asking you to divulge anything you got from medical records,” I said, parroting what Paul had instructed me to say. “I’m asking you to tell me about information you got from your search of my house, which you’ll recall I agreed to without a warrant.”

If a face can look sarcastic, McElone’s managed it in that moment. “Nice try,” she said. “But I had more than probable cause, I was already inside the house, and even if what you said were true, I’d owe you a grand total of nothing.”

I told her what I was thinking about the vials of insulin. What the hell, maybe playing it straight would work. “If I can figure out who the other diabetic in the house is, that person would leap to the head of the suspect list, no? It had to be someone who had quick access to a large supply of insulin. Now, who would have that much? Even a diabetic away for ten days, the longest any of my guests is staying, wouldn’t carry that many vials. Who’s going to have a large enough supply to inject Arlice with that much insulin?”

“You’re thinking out loud,” McElone said. She watched as Melissa, working seriously on a Vanilla Kreme doughnut with a Nesquik chaser, sat at the next table, reading an Amelia Bedelia book. “You’re trying to work it out all on your own. It’s not bad to ask yourself questions, but if you don’t have the answers, that means you don’t have enough information.”

I looked at my daughter, who, by the “sugar high” theory, should have been bouncing off the walls, but was calmly reading a book. I must have been doing something right with that girl.

“I don’t have enough information because you won’t tell me what I need to know,” I pointed out to the detective.

“No, you don’t have enough information because you haven’t been doing this long enough, and you don’t know what you should be looking for.” McElone took a sip of her iced coffee and grimaced a little. “The coconut never lasts to the bottom,” she lamented. She stood up and put the cup into a trash bin, and she didn’t sit back down. “You have some instincts. I wouldn’t have said that before, but I’m starting to see it. But the bottom line is: I’m a cop, you’re not, and I don’t have to tell you anything. It’s better for both of us if I don’t. I’m sorry.”

And she kept walking until she was out the door. I didn’t even try to stop her.

I looked over at Melissa. “Paul’s going to be mad at me,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Melissa put a bookmark at the page she’d been reading—she’d never dog-ear a page—and stood up, sliding her arms into her jacket. “She’s right, you know,” my daughter said.

“Who’s right about what?” I thought I was about to get a quotation from the wit and wisdom of Amelia Bedelia.

“Lieutenant McElone. She’s right about you looking for the wrong thing.”

Well, that was a stumper. “What do you mean? What should I be looking for?”

Melissa picked up her little messenger bag and slung it over her shoulder as we headed for the door. “If I were you, I’d be looking for a bunch of little plastic letters with magnets,” she said.

“Little plastic letters?” That struck a chord, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of why.

We walked to the Volvo and got in. Liss looked at me. “Don’t you remember? Scott said that whoever wanted him to scare Mrs. Crosby talked to him with little plastic letters from a kid’s set, and that they stuck to a board with magnets, and there kept being more and more. So, whoever has the letters is the person who wanted her to be scared, and probably wanted her to be dead.”

I started the car up. “You know, you’ve got something there. But why would the person”—I didn’t want to use the word
murderer
with my ten-year-old; call me old-fashioned—“still have the letters? Why not get rid of them?”

“They weren’t expecting Mrs. Crosby to come to our house the night she died—it was a surprise,” Melissa reminded me. “Besides, they’re just toy letters. They’re not evidence or anything. The police don’t know about them. And the person is probably pretty sure you don’t know about them either. But if you find them, you’ll know who to be watching.”

I stole a glance at my daughter, just to make sure she was the same girl I’d had to tuck into bed the night she’d first seen
All Dogs Go to Heaven
because “it was so sad.” Well, they say kids grow up fast these days. “Are you sure they didn’t leave the letters at the house Scott was staying in?” I asked.

“No. Scott said the letters were gone the day after ‘the trick,’ remember?”

I nodded. “So, wherever the letters are, if they’re still around, that’s where the person behind the first attack brought them.”

“That’s right,” Melissa said, proud of her pupil. “Find the letters, and you find the killer.”

“I didn’t even think you were listening to the conversation I was having with the detective,” I said. “You were reading a book.”

“I was multitasking,” Melissa answered.

“You’re so smart.”

“You sound like Grandma.”

 

 

It only took a minute to stop at the High Valley Cemetery, since it was between the Dunkin’ Donuts and the house. And I told Melissa to stay in the car, so she got out and walked with me.

It wasn’t a large graveyard, but it was full of the history of Harbor Haven. The elite of the town, dating back to the eighteen hundreds, were still in residence here.

So, in a very new grave, was Arlice Crosby.

“Why do you want to see her grave?” Melissa asked.

“It’s a way of showing respect,” I told her. I didn’t tell her I still felt a little responsible for what had happened to Arlice. Okay, more than a little. “The funeral was yesterday, and all the important people in the town came. I didn’t, because I didn’t think I’d fit in. So I’m coming now. It’s the way we remember someone we liked who isn’t here anymore.”

We found the Crosby family plot, with the largest stone, a tiny version of the Washington Monument, devoted to Jeremiah Crosby, who had died seventy-eight years before I was born. Next to him was his wife Henrietta, who had outlived her husband by only a year. Various children and grandchildren were included in the plot.

The freshly dug one, just to the right of the one with a small, dignified stone reading, “Jermaine Crosby, 1929–1980,” was for Arlice. I stood there for a moment, mentally apologized to her for what had happened and asked her to drop by sometime and let us know who had killed her. Then I remembered a Jewish tradition of putting a stone on the gravestone to show that someone had been by, and did so. I knew Arlice wasn’t Jewish, but I’d forgotten to bring flowers.

Melissa looked thoughtful throughout, but didn’t say anything. I’m sure she had at least thirty questions, but she kept them to herself.

Finally, I heaved out a long breath, took her hand, and said, “Let’s go.” And we turned to walk back out to the Volvo.

As I walked toward the gate, though, I noticed a large stone in a plot about a hundred yards from Arlice’s that bore the name “SMITH.” Eight people were interred there, with dates ranging from the late eighteen hundreds to only three years earlier.

That grave, the most recent one, had a small, simple headstone, too. And it was for a woman of sixty-one years.

Her name was Jane.

“Jane Smith is a very common name,” Paul said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be Arlice Crosby’s sister.”

I couldn’t talk to him at the moment, but I nodded, acknowledging that the coincidence was pretty, you know, coincidental. But I fixed my gaze on him and very quietly dared him to dispel my suspicion.

“You want the same color?” Bobby asked.

“I want what’s cheapest,” I told him.

Bobby was a friend of Tony’s who ostensibly knew something about fixing pool tables. Tony had brought him over to give me an estimate on mine.

“Do you think it’s doable?” I asked him, hoping that Paul, currently in a sitting position in midair, would pick up on the question.

“They’re all doable,” Bobby said. He had a gut big enough to have its own nickname, but he seemed like a nice man. Tony didn’t deal with jerks when he could help it. “The question is whether it’s doable at a price that makes it worth doing, and that I don’t know yet.” He started punching keys on a BlackBerry he pulled off a holster on his belt, presumably to check on the cost of materials.