An Uninvited Ghost (8 page)

“I thought they’d just be here hanging out,” she answered. “But they brought a whole army with them.”

“Who do you think runs the camera and the sound?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “How can they be spontaneous with all these people following them around?”

I have to admit, I chuckled condescendingly. “Spontaneous? Take a look. What they’re doing now? That’s their version of
spontaneous
.”

“They’re not doing
anything
.”

“Exactly.”

She sputtered, pouted and left. Which was just as well, since Linda Jane was approaching, and it would have been hard for me to cover my conversation with someone clearly not present.

“So this is show business,” she said. “It’s like the Army—hurry up and wait.”

“Were you in the Army?” I asked her.

Linda Jane nodded. “Briefly. I was a medic, actually. But I got an honorable discharge after eight months.”

“Why? If that’s not too personal.”

“Not too personal,” she said. She pulled up the left leg on her jeans, and showed me her prosthetic limb. “Grenada—remember that one? I stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. A bomb went off. So did my leg, just below the knee.”

I had no skill set for responding to that. “Wow,” I said.

“Yeah. It makes for a hell of a conversation piece.” Linda Jane lowered her trouser leg. She waited, but I couldn’t come up with an appropriate response. “See what I mean?”

“I’m so . . . it’s just . . . that’s awful,” I finally managed.

“After all these years, I’m used to it. But I am sorry I didn’t get to serve longer.”

“You’re a hero,” I said.

She laughed. “Yeah, big hero. I was going to the mess tent for a cup of coffee. Anyway, it was a long time ago.” She gestured toward all the commotion in the front room. “This is some show you’ve booked into the place.”

“I’m starting to wonder if what the production company is paying me is worth this,” I admitted. “I hope the guests don’t find it too upsetting.”

Linda Jane laughed again. “Upsetting! Take a look. Almost every single one of them is here watching. They couldn’t be having a better time.”

“Every single one except Mr. and Mrs. Jones,” I pointed out.

“I’m pretty sure they’re having a good time, too,” she answered.

Trent Avalon, having surveyed the situation from the top of the staircase, clapped his hands loudly to silence the assembled mob in the front room. “Okay, people!” he shouted. “Let’s make some reality!”

There were actual cheers from the guests. Warren and Jim, now standing in the doorway to the den with beers in their hands (having the best of both worlds), were especially enthusiastic in their excitement. I’m pretty sure those were not their first beers of the day.

“Now, those of you who are not involved with the show,” Trent continued, “we’re happy to have you watch the filming, but please, don’t make noise while the cameras are rolling, and don’t walk in front of them. You’ll ruin the shot.”

The guests nodded their heads, happy to be part of the show business magic that was about to happen. I had a different reaction—I was seriously annoyed. How dare he order my guests to stay away from his cameras? Would the
Down the Shore
audience be so traumatized by seeing people over thirty years old? But I’d wait to talk to Trent when we could be out of earshot of . . . everyone else in Harbor Haven. Crowds of locals had begun to gather outside the house, in the vain hope of glimpsing one of these misbehaving adolescents. You had to worry for the future of civilization as we know it. Or perhaps I was overreacting.

At Trent’s first word, the four kids in the cast had ambled over to spots near the French doors that led to the backyard, probably to give the camera a better backdrop. I could see that the lights were positioned so as to avoid glaring directly into the glass. A man holding a boom microphone stood just out of camera range. A gray-haired man in a baseball cap, whom I had assumed was one of the production accountants, clapped his hands twice.

“Okay,” he shouted. “Let’s settle down, people.” Go figure; he was the director. “Roll the cameras.”

And the action began. For the sake of my own sensibility, I’m going to replace every obscenity spoken with the word
migraine
. Because that’s what I was starting to get.

“I can’t migraine believe you migraine hooked up with that migraine slut last night,” the taller, blonder girl said to the boy who was sensitive enough to actually be wearing a shirt. “After a whole week of pretending you were migraine into me.”

“Hey, I’m here to have a good time,” the sensitive boy replied. “I can’t help it if you migraine thought I was migraine in love with you. I held your migraine hand for like ten migraine minutes in line for the roller coaster. Grow the migraine up, Tiffney.”

The tall, painfully thin (except in selected areas) blonde girl, who I had figured out was named Tiffney, advanced on him like a lion advances on pretty much anything. She raised her well-manicured nails and really, truly appeared to be preparing to scratch his eyes out. “You migraine!” she shouted. “What the migraine do you think you migraine are, like the greatest thing that ever happened to women? Let me tell you something, migraine-head. I wouldn’t migraine you if you begged me. Not if you migraine
begged
me.”

I saw Linda Jane mouth the word
wow
.

The less-tall, less-blonde girl—whose name I knew was Helen, but who preferred to be called “H-Bomb”—shuffled over until she was in camera range. Then, she walked with purpose at the taller, blonder girl. “What are you migraine screaming about?” she wanted to know. “I was trying to get some migraine sleep so I can go out tonight!” I noted that she hadn’t been anywhere near the backyard, where her “bedroom” was located, and in all likelihood couldn’t have found it without a Sherpa guide, but I didn’t say anything.

Tiffney turned on her furiously. “Why do you migraine need to go migraine out?” she demanded. “You can just migraine this migraine right here, like you did last night!”

And that’s when I became aware of the presence at my right side. A little bit over, and a little bit down. The presence that had just walked through my front door, much as she did every day around this time.

Melissa.

“You migraine migraine!” H-Bomb screamed back, and that’s when I cleared my throat as loudly as I could, and then yelled, “Excuse me! Cut! Print it!” It was the only movie talk I knew.

“What? Who was that?” The director turned around so quickly his baseball cap ended up pointed to the side, like Charlie Brown.

“Mom,” Melissa whispered, “what are you
doing
?”

“I’m handling it, Ed,” Trent said, already on his way down the stairs. He walked to me, with every eye in the room watching. “Alison, do we have a problem?” he asked.

“I don’t know if you do, but I certainly have one, Trent. I’m not going to allow that kind of language in front of my ten-year-old daughter.”

“I’ve heard those words before,” Melissa muttered. Oh yeah? That was something we’d have to discuss privately, later.

“You can’t expect our cast to be watching their every word whenever Melinda is around,” Trent said. His smile never dimmed, but his eyes were about ten degrees colder than when he’d been trying to get me to sign a contract.

“It’s Melissa, and yes, I can.”

“This is a reality show,” he said. “It’s not scripted. I can’t tell them what to say.”

“Oh, come on. This show is as real as
Scooby-Doo
. And you certainly can tell your ‘cast’ what to say when you’re creating an unhealthy environment for a fourth-grader.” My voice was getting a little bit louder. Dolores was staring at me, and I couldn’t tell whether her expression was one of admiration for my principles or aggravation over my holding up shooting.

“You can’t tell me you expected everyone in the cast of
Down the Shore
to speak PG language,” Trent tried again. “Haven’t you ever seen the show before?”

“No.”

He looked positively astonished. Surely
everyone
knew what a big deal he and his show were—no doubt critics all over the country had lauded the “raw, unvarnished” quality I’m sure they thought the show must have. Critics like anything they don’t understand.

“You’re embarrassing me,” Melissa sing-songed quietly. “What do you think he’s going to do?”

“Wait for it,” I hissed at her.

“All right,” Trent breathed, deflated. “What is it you want?”

“I don’t care what they do when my daughter isn’t in the room. After her bedtime, if your little team of degenerates wants to behave like this is nineteen seventy-nine and they’re at Studio 54, they can enjoy themselves, provided they do it out of sight of my other guests. But when Melissa is awake and in the room, they’re going to watch their language, their behavior and their choice of underwear. Or you can go find another house. Are we clear?”

Trent chewed his lower lip for a moment, then nodded. “We’re clear.”

“We
are
?” H-Bomb, having scrambled up behind Trent, looked stunned. “You mean I can’t say . . .”

“Watch it,” I told her, and nodded toward Melissa.

“No, you can’t,” Trent assured her. “Don’t worry. We’ll put it back in when we loop the episode.”

“But it always gets bleeped,” she protested.

“So you’ll say it, then we’ll bleep it.”

“Bleep that,” H-Bomb said, then sneered in Melissa’s general direction and walked back to the group in front of the camera.

Trent fixed me in his gaze. “Happy now?” he said with only a slight edge in his voice.

“Satisfied,” I countered. You never know; there could be other unexpected snags along the way. No sense in limiting my options.

“Okay. Now, here’s what
I
want.” Trent took my arm and maneuvered me out the front door, away from the crew, the guests and Melissa. “I want you to understand that we’re paying a lot of money to use this house, and we expect a certain amount of value for what we’re spending.”

“What does
value
mean?” I asked.

Trent pointed at me, as a teacher does a student who asks an especially appropriate question. “For our purposes,
value
will mean that we have access to every part of the house, even the other guests’ rooms if we need them, assuming the guest signs a release form. We will, of course, stay away from your daughter’s room at all times.”

“You sure will,” I interjected.

He kept going, but nodded. “It also means that for the next three weeks, you will not interrupt shooting when cameras are rolling. If you have an issue, you can bring it directly to me
after
we get what we need on film. Is that clear?”

“I understand it,” I told him.

“Close enough. It also means that besides having the cast living here, the crew will be allowed in at any hour that we choose, because this show is all about things happening unexpectedly.”

The poor man—I think he actually believed that. “Uh-huh,” I said.

“And if we think something interesting is going on here at the house—like, for example, a séance—we’ll have unfettered access. Agreed?”

“You want to film the séance? That’s just a little activity for the guests. I mean, I don’t want a national TV audience to think I run a spook house.”

“That’s only a problem if real ghosts show up,” Trent said. “I told you last night, one of the reasons we chose this house was that people were saying it was haunted. We think that adds drama.”

He had no idea. “Okay,” I said. “But the séance won’t be effective with bright lights flooding the room. You’re going to have to shoot with natural light.”

Trent nodded agreement. “Absolutely. I’ll tell Ed. I think it’ll look better, anyway. I’m glad we had this talk, Alison.” He walked back into the house to relay our conversation to the director and to reassemble his cast for more “spontaneous” filming.

And I sat down on my front step and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

“This is ridiculous.”

My “favorite” guest, the indomitable (and I could think of a few other words) Bernice Antwerp, was enjoying herself in her favorite fashion—she was complaining.

I’d been walking through the front room, about to begin our séance, when Bernice, whom I’d been trying to avoid, had buttonholed me to run down a list of all the things that had been insufficient since she’d arrived. I’ll give you the summary:

Everything.

Now she was on a tear about the evening’s entertainment, which she considered a waste of her time. I bit back the temptation to suggest she lock herself away in her room like Mr. and Mrs. Jones.

“A bunch of grown people standing around pretending they’re in contact with ghosts. It’s undignified,” Bernice went on. I’d stopped listening sometime around when she’d explained that I was a bad hostess because the toilet paper in the bathrooms was rolled with the edge on the back, not the front, so her dissatisfaction with the séance was hardly cutting me to the quick, especially since she’d claimed to be one of the guests most interested in seeing ghosts to begin with.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I answered. “The tour was quite clearly advertised as a trip to a haunted guesthouse, and you have seen the way the ghosts make themselves known every day.”

She sniffed. “Simple tricks. I don’t for a moment believe there are spirits in this house.”

“Oh, but there
are
!” Dolores Santiago, the most ghost to obsessed guest, appeared behind Bernice like Paul or Maxie might, only with a less transparent body. “I’ve gotten readings on my instruments that absolutely confirm the presence of two entities in this house.” She reached into her purse. “I think I have the readouts here. . . .”

“Honestly!” Bernice exploded, and walked away. But I noticed she walked toward the den, where the séance was to be held.