An Open Spook (A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery) (5 page)

We would probably have questioned Mac much more thoroughly, but even Paul couldn’t think of the proper follow-up question, so he finished with his coffee, which he’d barely sipped, and no one objected when he decided to go to his room to change his clothes. He said he might try to go back to sleep for a bit first. “There’s no point in trying to go outside, after all.”

Once he was easily out of earshot, Alison looked immediately up at Paul, who was pacing in a tight circle around the chandelier, hands uncharacteristically behind his back instead of stroking his goatee. This puzzle was truly getting the best of him.

“Sergeant Elliot asked us to search this house for a POW bracelet with his name on it,” he said, seemingly more to himself than anyone else. “Before we could do a proper search, it showed up on your guest’s wrist. What can we deduce from this?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer from us, which was fortunate.

“It looked like the old guy had been pulled out of bed by that lady ghost last night,” Maxine chipped in. “Do you think she was trying to get his bracelet off?”

“I don’t know,” Paul said through clenched teeth.

Melissa looked thoughtful, and also a little worried, as Paul’s agitation was pretty clear to everyone in the room. Maxine, hovering in the corner near the ceiling, chewed her lower lip and scrunched her eyes as if trying to see through the candlelight better. Alison sat down on the easy chair Mac had vacated and looked at me. “You’re going to have to teach me how to make instant coffee, Mom,” she said. “I can’t even manage that.”

“You do everything wonderfully, honey,” I told her. “I’m sure the coffee was just sitting on the shelf too long. Those expiration dates are really bogus, you know.” All of which was quite true. She smiled, but I don’t think she believed me.

“Could it be that Mac just happened to get a bracelet with Robert Elliot’s name on it?” Melissa asked. “They made lots of them, right?”

Paul shook his head. “Your grandmother says many groups did, but it’s too big a coincidence. An investigator should allow for coincidences, but never trust them.”

“Isn’t it about time you got in touch with Robert again?” Maxine asked Paul. “He can’t just leave us here in a hurricane to sort through his personal business.”

Paul’s mouth twitched. “You’re probably right, Maxie.” Without another word, he sank from the chandelier through the floor. It was an elegant move.

“He’s off to check the Ghosternet,” Alison said to herself. She stood up. “Probably time to turn on the radio and see where we stand.”

Melissa brought in the car-shaped radio and we listened to the news reports about the storm. It wasn’t encouraging. Millions were without power, and we were advised not to expect the lights to come on anytime soon. The weather forecast had improved somewhat, but power lines were down, whole homes on the shore had been destroyed by wind and water, and the winds would not die for at least another day.

Alison sighed. “I guess we can’t take down the window boards yet,” she said. “But I’ve checked on the basement, and so far we’ve been lucky; there’s only a tiny amount of water down there. We haven’t needed the sump pump yet.”

“Will the basement flood?” Melissa asked.

“If it hasn’t by now, I don’t think it will,” Alison told her. “Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Melissa said, although I’d bet that she was. “I was just wondering why it would be bad at other houses near here and not as much for us.”

“I think it’s the dunes in the back,” Alison answered. “They were built up a couple of years ago—was it when you owned the house, Maxie?”

Maxine turned abruptly, as if startled. “What? No, it was before I bought the place. They were already there. A beach erosion project, they told me when I bought it.”

“That probably kept the worst of the storm away from the house,” Alison told Melissa.

Maxine looked thoughtful. “I’m going to check on the roof,” she said, and ascended into the ceiling. That’s always been one of her favorite places to get away and think.

“That sounded like quite a branch in the backyard, Alison,” I told her.

Alison nodded. “I don’t have a chain saw, but maybe Tony will be able to come by. I hope their place is okay.”

Paul rose up from the basement and immediately told Alison, “I think I got through to Robert Elliot. He might be on his way here now.”

“You ‘think’?” Alison asked.

“It’s not a precise thing,” Paul reminded her. “It’s more like impressions, feelings, not direct communication. Sometimes I have to interpret a little.”

Since the wind seemed to be coming from the back of the house, off the ocean, Alison decided to see if the rain had abated to the point that she might take down some of the boards on the windows at the front. “We’ll need as much light as we can get while the power’s out,” she said, picking up a hammer from a toolbox she’d taken out of a hall closet. She saw Melissa head for the toolbox and held up a hand. “Hold up, young lady. Not a chance you’re going out there yet,” she said.

Melissa looked like she was going to argue, but I jumped in: “She’s right, Melissa. You don’t know how bad things are outside. If it’s too bad, Mom’s not going to stay out there, either.” And I made a point of looking at Alison with a serious expression on my face when I said it.

We all walked over to the front door to look outside. Our first post-storm look at the street was harrowing: There were dozens of branches, some very large, blocking the street. One had come down directly on top of a 1988 Chevy Monte Carlo that someone down the street had left parked in his driveway. A power line was definitely down. Alison’s across-the-street neighbor Mrs. Arbogast had lost a whole section of her picket fence. There was a telephone pole four houses down leaning at a precarious angle.

But the rain had mostly stopped, and while the wind was still blowing hard, it was nowhere near the strength it had been the night before. Alison got to work on the front windows, and the light that came in as each board came down was a relief, beginning what we knew would be a slow return to normalcy.

Paul hovered outside on the porch as Alison worked, and Melissa and I watched through the front window.

“We should have a plan for when Sergeant Elliot gets here,” Paul said, pacing with his feet buried in the front porch.

“Why are you so nervous?” Alison asked him. “We’ll get out the nice tablecloth and he won’t notice we’re serving leftovers.”

“Very funny,” Paul answered. “But this case has become very puzzling, and I’d like to have a strategy for our meeting with our client when he arrives.”

“We ask him where the heck he’s been, why he was so hot to get his hands on that bracelet and then disappeared, and whether he knows the deceased woman who was flying through my guest bedroom last night,” Alison suggested, pulling down another board. The wind grabbed the board as she brought it down and pulled it all the way to the other end of the porch. “Maybe I’ll just do every other board so we can have light, but leave some up,” Alison muttered to herself.

Melissa called through the closed window, “I don’t understand. We know the bracelet is on Mac’s arm. Why can’t we just ask him for it?”

“That’s an excellent point,” I told her.

Paul puffed out his lips and rubbed his hands together. “The real question is why Mac has the bracelet with Sergeant Elliot’s name, and why Sergeant Elliot asked us for it.”

“That’s two questions,” Alison pointed out.

Paul ignored her. “The point is, Sergeant Elliot must have known Mac has the bracelet. He asked us to find something that could only have gotten to this house with the man who wears it. Why doesn’t Sergeant Elliot just reach over and take the bracelet off Mac’s arm if he really feels that he needs it?”

“He doesn’t want Mac to know there’s a ghost following him?” Melissa suggested.

“Why not? Once he has the bracelet and moves on, it won’t matter.”

“I get that,” Alison said in answering Paul, “but clearly Sergeant Elliot needed help, or he wouldn’t have asked for it. What I’m really wondering about is whether the female ghost in Mac’s room last night was there for herself or because the sergeant wanted her to be there.” She pulled down the middle board on the last window and asked Melissa and me, “Is it lighter in there?”

“Much,” I told her. “How bad is the wind?” It’s not that I couldn’t see it, but it’s not the same thing as being outside.

Alison hung the hammer in her belt and walked inside, where she could speak in a more normal tone. “Not that bad,” she said. “I think the worst of it is over. We’ll see how long it takes for the power to come back on.”

We looked back out onto the porch to find Paul, but he was gone.

“I guess he went to ask about the lady ghost,” Melissa said.

“Ghostmail,” Alison said. I think she was still trying the word out.

Maxine returned first. She did not descend from the ceiling, as I had expected, but instead came into the kitchen from the beach side, in the back. “It’s wild out there,” she reported before anyone could ask.

Alison, noting that the water in the basement was “just a puddle, really,” had brought the portable generator upstairs and set it up just outside the kitchen window, running an extension cord to power the refrigerator for a little while.

“Did you see anyone who needs help?” Alison asked her.

“No one’s out there,” Maxine answered. “But I got a little farther in a police car up and down Route 35. Part of the boardwalk in Seaside Heights is gone. The roller coaster is in the ocean. There are houses that are completely off their foundations; some of them all the way in the road. Trees are down all over the place. Nothing’s open. It’s going to take a while to come back from this one.”

“The roller coaster?” Melissa looked upset, so I gave her a hug.

“They’ll rebuild, baby,” Alison told her.

“How’d you get back?” I asked Maxine.

Maxine smiled. “There was a really cute group of National Guardsmen coming up from the south, so I hitched a ride,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

I recounted for her how Paul was presumably trying to locate the poor lost female soul Maxine had glimpsed, and that we were expecting Sergeant Elliot to appear at any minute. Maxine looked over at the generator.

“Will that thing run my laptop?” she asked Alison.

“You mean
my
laptop, and yes, it would. Why?”

“I can do a little research on Robert Elliot if I’m connected.”

Alison considered, but shook her head. “Not without Wi-Fi,” she said. “We’d have to run the modem and the network as well as the laptop, and I can’t keep all four of those things going at once.”

“Four?” Maxine asked.

“The refrigerator. I want to run it now so I might be able to use some stuff later when it’s dark.”

Maxine made a face but said nothing. She might be impatient, but she’s not unreasonable.

Paul rose up from the basement. “I’m drawing a blank,” he said. “Nothing from Sergeant Elliot, and nothing about the woman Maxie saw. Has Mac come back in?”

“Not yet,” Alison told him. “He really hasn’t been anywhere but his room much at all since he came two days ago. Except for this morning when we heard the branch fall, I’ve barely spoken to him.”

“He is an odd duck,” Paul said. “But I did get one piece of information I think might be useful.”

“And what would that be?” Sergeant Robert Elliot’s voice came from the darker corner of the room, near the door to the den, and again I was taken with how wispy his presence could be.

“Sergeant,” Paul said. He gestured toward Alison and Melissa. “These are my associates, Alison and Melissa Kerby.” Melissa smiled proudly at the distinction; she loves being treated like a valued member of the team, and Paul always makes a point of doing so.

Robert nodded in their direction, then reiterated his question. “You said you had a useful piece of information. Have you got my bracelet?”

“We’re not sure,” Paul said. “We
have
seen a POW bracelet with your name on it, but it was not in this house until a few days ago. It came in on someone’s wrist.”

“Really?” I thought Robert looked considerably less surprised than he sounded, but the light from the candles in the room wasn’t great for reading a transparent ghost’s expression. “Whose wrist is it on?”

“I think you know exactly whose wrist it’s on, and I think you’ve known all along,” Paul said. “Because the woman you sent for it knew exactly whose wrist to tug on.”

There was something about that phrase—“wrist to tug on”—that triggered a connection in my mind. “Mac said his hand smelled like chicken—that ghost was using my cup of pan drippings to grease Mac’s wrist and get the bracelet off, wasn’t she?” I said to Sergeant Elliot.

The sergeant looked stunned. His mouth flapped open a few times, and then he vanished into thin air.

“That’s becoming a rude habit,” I said, even though he was already gone.

Alison squinted at Paul as if he were harder than usual to see. “What was
that
all about?” she asked. I wondered if she’d seen Sergeant Elliot at all, but she had been looking in his direction when he spoke.

Paul let out a nervous chuckle, which is sort of incongruous coming from a transparent man calf-deep in floor. “It was a gamble, and I don’t usually approve of gambles,” he said. “But I think that one paid off.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I think I might have just solved this case,” Paul said.

“Okay,” Alison told Paul. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”

“I can’t yet,” Paul answered. “The sergeant will be back, and I think we can help him, but we need to do a few things first. Where is Mac?”

“In his room,” I said. “Why?”

“Soon, someone will need to ask him to come out here,” Paul said.

Melissa began clearing dishes from the island and putting them in the sink. “Don’t wash them yet, Liss,” Alison told her. “We’ll have to boil some water first. The radio said some of the water supply is not being filtered because of the storm. We don’t know if ours is affected yet.”

“Okay.” Melissa looked up at Paul while Alison moved to fill a large pasta pot (which I’m fairly sure she never uses) with water in order to boil it for use later.

“I can knock on Mac’s door,” I said, “but he might be asleep.”

“You’ll have to wake him up,” Paul said.

Alison’s eyebrows rose. “Why don’t you do it?”

“I would, believe me, but Mac doesn’t see ghosts.”

“He’d feel a bucket of cold water if we threw it on him,” Maxine suggested. Her solutions to problems are often effective, but not always subtle. She’s always trying.

“You said before the sergeant came that you’d found something useful,” I reminded Paul. “But you didn’t say what.”

“In a minute. Alison, do you think the refrigerator has been running long enough to give Maxie a chance with the Wi-Fi network?”

Alison considered, then nodded. “We can let it go for a while; it won’t hurt anything. But there is
some
water in the basement, even if it’s not much. I want to get the extension cord down to the sump pump and maybe pump out the water so we can be ready before it gets dark.”

Paul seemed to agree; he looked at Maxine, who was already heading for Melissa’s room in the attic. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. Alison picked up a candle and headed for the door to get the things she needed for an Internet connection. Paul, pacing as if there were a floor beneath his feet, appeared to be considering options. His eyes were almost gleaming, even as they were transparent. I’d rarely seen him look so happy.

I didn’t want to disturb his train of thought, and Melissa seemed fascinated with watching him think, so I said nothing. But the facts of the situation with Sergeant Elliot and the POW bracelet were perplexing me in a way that I think escaped the others in the house. None of them understood, because none of them (aside from Mac) were old enough to have been part of the era the bracelets were made and distributed.

You weren’t supposed to take off a POW bracelet until the soldier in question was accounted for. Many people removed theirs, sadly, when it was discovered that the person whose name they wore had been confirmed as killed in action. Not nearly as many others received good news about their POWs, but there were cases of men—they were almost all men—recovered either from a prison or simply as part of a sweep of the area. It was years after the war was over for the United States before the bracelets stopped being fairly common sights on wrists all over the country.

But if Sergeant Elliot’s fate had never been confirmed, that meant Mac was technically right in keeping the bracelet on his wrist all these years; he was in fact honoring the sergeant’s memory as he understood it.

I knew a number of people who had taken off the bracelets without really confirming that it was time to do so. Having seen so many ghosts over the years, I’d been squeamish about giving mine up, and even when I did decide not to wear it every day, I had never really put it away for good.

So the question that I couldn’t quite articulate yet was about the bracelet itself. The only way Mac’s bracelet would stand between Sergeant Elliot and the next level of his existence (if his claim that the bracelet and the person named on it were linked somehow) would be if Mac had the only bracelet with Sergeant Elliot’s name on it. That seemed impossible—there were many bracelets made with each POW or MIA soldier’s name imprinted on them.

I was about to ask Paul about it when Alison returned to the kitchen, carrying the small box that connected to the Internet. “I hope the towers are up and running,” she said.

“The Internet doesn’t work like a cell phone, Mom,” Melissa informed her as Alison unplugged the refrigerator from the generator and plugged in the network.

Maxine came down from the ceiling in her trench coat, from which she immediately pulled the old MacBook Alison had reluctantly given Maxine to do research on and had rarely seen since. Maxine’s clothing immediately reverted to her usual jeans and a black T-shirt whose legend read, “Yes?”

“What am I looking up?” she asked Paul as she hovered over the center island.

“First, find out anything you can about Barbara Litton, Sergeant Elliot’s ex-fiancée,” Paul told her. “I have a theory, but no evidence yet to support it. That’s your job, Maxie, but if I’m right, it won’t take you long.”

She didn’t respond; she just started clacking away on the keys. “This thing won’t hold a charge for more than a minute,” she told Alison, pointing to the laptop. “Can I plug in?”

Alison plugged the power cord into the generator and handed the other end up to Maxine, who rose a few inches as Alison extended her arm. “Very funny,” Alison said.

“What?”

Maxine grinned as she reached down to take the cord and plug it into the laptop, then began clicking keys again. She seemed very engrossed, so I took the opportunity to mention my confusion about the POW bracelet to Paul.

He listened very carefully, as he always does, and made a pyramid of his fingers under his nose. “Couldn’t it be simply that Mac just kept wearing the bracelet out of nostalgia?” he asked when I was through. “He seems . . . unusually loyal to that period in time.”

“Maybe, but why does that one bracelet make so much difference to Sergeant Elliot?”

“It’s a good question.”

Maxine snapped her fingers above our heads. “Ha!” she shouted. “This is interesting. I looked up Barbara Litton. And guess what?”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Paul doesn’t often show off, but I suppose this time he couldn’t resist.

Maxine looked stunned, and a little annoyed at having the spotlight taken off of her. “That’s right,” she said. “She died three years ago.”

“I don’t understand,” Melissa chimed in. “How did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” Paul said. “I suspected. There’s a difference. When I tried to send out a general message and mentioned her name, two people got back to me saying they knew a ghost named Barbara Litton, but couldn’t be sure if it was the same one.”

“That was the interesting information you’d gotten,” Alison said. Paul nodded.

“But I don’t understand,” Melissa said. “Even if Sergeant Elliot’s girlfriend died three years ago, he’s been a ghost for forty years. What does it have to with the bracelet?”

“You’re so smart,” I said to my granddaughter.

“Well, maybe this starts to explain it,” Maxine answered, perhaps trying to get a little bit of the credit she thought she deserved for discovering that Barbara Litton was dead. “I tried to find a POW bracelet with Sergeant Elliot’s name on it online. I looked on eBay and a few other sources—it’s not hard to find them now, and they’re really pretty cheap.”

“It’s truly frightening what you can find out,” Alison told Maxine.

“You have no idea.”

“But you couldn’t find one for Sergeant Elliot,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Maxine or to myself; the fog was starting to lift in my head.

“No,” Maxine answered. “And there were plenty with other names on them.”

But before anyone could respond, I began to understand. And I started to think about the chicken.

When I first saw Sergeant Robert Elliot, he was attempting to steal a roast chicken that he couldn’t eat from a pan in Alison’s kitchen. And his explanation, that he was taking it to some homeless friends, was clearly a lie. Later, Mac had found the measuring cup of chicken gravy in his room, even as he’d been pulled from his bed by the wrist that held the bracelet.

“I think the bracelet on Mac’s arm might really be the last one with Sergeant Elliot’s name on it,” I told Paul. “And as long as there’s one on a wrist somewhere, the sergeant is stranded.”