Chance of a Ghost (19 page)

“Well, what can you tell us about him?” Jeannie asked. She was standing near the door to the box office, which was a very cozy (that is, small) sort of room. The box office consisted of three windows in the lobby, through which people would receive tickets; computer terminals (one in front of each window, and a few in cubicles in the cramped area to the rear); telephones situated on each desk in the cubbyhole section; some boxes on shelves in which preordered tickets were waiting in envelopes marked with the patrons’ names and a coffeepot, out of sight of the paying customers, in a far corner by the door. This was not a recreational area.

Jeannie had apparently noticed that Penny kept dotting her nose with a tissue, had decided that she was no doubt carrying typhoid and was keeping Oliver, who looked woozy, as far away as possible. Clearly, Jeannie was not going to be a ton of help on this case.

“He was an older gentleman, probably around seventy, but he was very vital and knew a lot about theater,” Penny said, concentrating on cataloging the areas of unsold seats for the once and future Fleetwood Mac vocalist. “I think it bothered him that we didn’t do more plays and musicals here, that it’s more often concerts, you know?” She clicked onto a page advertising the Flying Karamazov Brothers.

“Was he friendly with anyone who worked here?” I pushed on. “Anyone who might have been special to him?” I had to keep the fiction of a possible inheritance alive, even while trying to find out if Lawrence had made any mortal enemies during his time at the Basie.

That distracted Penny from her web browsing. “Friendly?” she echoed, and then stifled a rueful chuckle badly. “I don’t
think Larry would condescend to be friendly with anyone who would work in such a dismal corner of show business. He clearly considered himself meant to be hobnobbing with the talent, not the staff.” She shook her head, seemingly to herself, and looked back at the computer screen. “And the fact is, we never have contact with the artists.”

“I thought you didn’t know him well,” I said quietly. Jeannie switched Oliver from her left shoulder to her right expertly, without so much of a whimper from the baby. Jeannie, however, now that her son was getting a little larger and she hadn’t worked out since before he was born, grunted a little.

Penny’s head twitched a little, uneasy at having been caught in an unguarded moment. “I didn’t,” she said in a clipped tone. “That was just the aura he gave off. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I could tell you anything else.” She stood up in an effort to signal to us that the interview was over. But I wanted a little more time, particularly since Penny seemed to want me out.

“Oops,” Jeannie said. Then she did that thing where the parent holds up the child and sniffs at his diaper, which would bother me much more if I didn’t recall doing it myself when Melissa was that age. “I’m afraid someone needs to be changed. Do you mind?” She pointed at the counter next to the coffeemaker while clearly measuring the distance visually, to ensure that Oliver wouldn’t be anywhere near anything dangerous. Then without waiting for a response, she reached for her diaper bag, conveniently hanging off the handle of Oliver’s stroller, a contraption that probably had its own area code. Jeannie had her changing mat spread out on the counter (after wiping the counter down with a disinfectant wipe) before Penny could protest or suggest she move to the ladies’ room.

I smiled at Penny with a look that said, “New mother; whatcha gonna do?” “It sounds like Mr. Laurentz wasn’t an especially popular figure while he was working here,” I
said. “Was it just his attitude, or were there some people who didn’t like him more than others?”

Penny looked like she’d bitten into a chocolate doughnut and found it tasted like fish. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,” she said.

“It’s okay. He can’t hear you.” I knew that for a fact, since Lawrence was nowhere nearby. There
was
another ghost in the room, however, one who must have been from the 1930s based on his overcoat and hat. He looked to be in his fifties and was floating along horizontally, looking as close to asleep as the dearly departed can get.

“Well, all I can say is that when the news that Larry died got back to the department, there were some people who really weren’t all that sad.” Penny blinked a couple of times and drew a breath through clenched teeth.

“Like who?” Jeannie asked as she put a new diaper on Oliver.

“Oh, I don’t want to name names,” Penny said.

Jeannie gathered Oliver from the countertop, rolled up the changing pad and then grabbed the used diaper, which she had closed up tightly. She leaned toward Penny, although not too close because the woman still had a sniffle.

“Should I just drop this in the wastebasket?” she asked.

Penny gave us three names before we left, and in thanks, Jeannie put the diaper into a biodegradable plastic bag and disposed of it in the restroom.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad having her along on the investigation, after all.

Eleven

“Why haven’t you interviewed the three theater employees
yet?” Paul asked me later that day.

Nan and Morgan Henderson, having clearly decided to hang in with me at the guesthouse, were back from their day of…I admit it, I didn’t ask. Now I was making tea in the kitchen for them. I’d put on the oven, too, because the kitchen is drafty, and I figured I’d justify it by baking something. So at the moment, I was cutting up squares of premade chocolate chip cookie dough. Paul, hovering over the center island (incidentally with his head inside the exhaust fan), saw this as a sign that I was not completely engaged in our investigation.

“I have guests to take care of,” I said very quietly—no sense in attracting the attention of said guests and once again convincing them that I was off any number of rockers. “Jeannie had to go home, and I had to come here. This is my business first, and we have an agreement about that, Paul. This place is how I keep a roof over my daughter’s
head. Any snooping has to happen when my responsibilities here are covered.”

I turned on the CD player in the kitchen to cover any further conversation and slipped in a Beatles CD.
Rubber Soul
. You can’t beat the classics.

Paul stuck out his bottom lip, but he knew he had no argument. “We agreed to that, I know,” he said. “But I’m concerned that you don’t care enough about this investigation.” I felt it was probably best not to mention how I’d sobbed myself to sleep the night before thinking about Dad, but that would certainly have indicated that I did indeed have an emotional stake in what was going on.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, figuring I could tap into Paul’s detective mind instead. “Whether we find that Laurentz/Brookman guy died of a heart problem or if he was a victim of a vicious Pop-Tarts killer, my priority is finding my father. What else should I be doing?”

Paul loved nothing better than to be consulted on a difficult puzzle. If Sherlock Holmes were a dead Canadian with fairly impressive musculature and an incongruous goatee, he’d be Paul. He put his hand to his chin in the characteristic pose of contemplation. Men love to be observed being natural.

“I have attempted again to contact your father and didn’t succeed,” he told me. “We need to know more about what his ghostly routine was like before this strange interruption. Have you asked your mother?”

I idly picked up a piece of cookie dough and ate it. This was because I didn’t want to look Paul in the eye, and also because cookie dough is delicious.

“I’ve never really talked to her about Dad since he died,” I said as John Lennon sang about crawling off to sleep in a bathtub. “She didn’t deal well with the way he was when he died, so weak and defeated. It wasn’t the way either of us wanted to remember him.”

“And since you’ve been able to see people like me?” Paul asked.

“We’ve never spoken about it,” I told him. I set a kitchen timer for ten minutes, in accordance with the instructions on the dough wrapper (which still had some delicious dough stuck to it, too), then picked up the cookie sheet and put it in the oven. “I used to think it was just because it was too painful for Mom.”

“And now?”

I steeled myself and faced him. “Now I think it was because she was embarrassed that Dad was continuing to have a relationship with her, but he didn’t ever get in touch with me or Melissa.”

Paul nodded slightly. “You knew your father well,” he said. “Why do you think he would choose to stay away from you and his granddaughter?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Maybe there’s something about being…Paul, do you feel any different than you did when you were alive?”

He narrowed his eyes in thought. “I’m a little less aware of physicality, of course,” he said. “I don’t worry about weather or temperature. I don’t get hungry. I’m not afraid of being hurt when I have the chance to think about it. I don’t really have a sense of presence. I don’t need to sit or lie down most of the time. I’m not really…here.”

“You’ve told me most of that before. I mean emotionally. Do you not care about things now that were really important to you before this happened to you?” I think I held my breath a little waiting for his answer.

“You’re asking me if I think your father stopped caring about you and Melissa when he died,” Paul said. He made a point of staring into my eyes.
“No.”

“Then it’s a mystery. What can I do?”

There were still eight minutes left before the cookies would be done, but the aroma of baking cookies had already permeated the room, and I was mentally dividing them up among my guests and my daughter. It’s also possible that I had one or two staked out for myself. Or three.

Paul scowled again. “You need to get past your disinclination to speak to your mother and find out how your father was spending his time previous to this incident. You need to determine if there’s a place he would go—away from most living people, I would guess—if he were really determined to disappear effectively for reasons we can’t yet understand.”

That all made sense, but there was something he wasn’t saying. “And once I find all that out, what do I do?” I asked.

This time Paul looked away to avoid my reaction. “You take Maxie there,” he said.

“Maxine?” Mom asked. “Why Maxine?”

We had assembled, once again in my kitchen, for a war council that could be held out of the earshot of Lawrence Laurentz. I’d stashed the cookies—the ones I hadn’t eaten or given to Melissa when she got home—away for after dinner, which Mom would prepare. Mom reported that the theatrical ghost wasn’t always in her house, but she couldn’t be sure when he was there and listening because he’d gotten good at moving through the walls to be out of Mom’s sight when he didn’t want to be detected.

Maxie, tickled with the idea that things would be left to her, was grinning as she hovered in the area of the stove. Paul, pretending to sit on the center island so he could be the focus of the conversation (a tactic so far turning out to be less than stellar), was doing his investigator-face thing. Melissa, home from school and not to be denied a place at the table this time, actually sat at the table.

“Because Paul can’t leave this property, and we can’t trust Lawrence as far as we can throw him, which isn’t far since we can’t actually touch him,” I explained. “It appears Dad doesn’t want to see me, so he might leave if I’m visible. So Maxie’s our best bet.”

That wasn’t easy to say. The fact was, I wasn’t crazy
about the prospect of placing all my hopes for finding Dad on Maxie, either. She wasn’t the most responsible being who ever existed, and her concept of problem solving generally had an element of improvisation to it, with the end result usually being that Maxie had no plan B. She often didn’t even have a plan A.

“Well, I don’t understand how we’re going to find him to begin with,” Mom said, avoiding the Maxie issue.

I sat down next to Melissa and put my fingers to my temples. This was an indication of thought. “First, we have to figure out what state of mind Dad might be in, why he’d want to isolate himself,” I said. “I know Dad pretty well, at least when he was alive, and I can’t figure it out. Do you have any ideas?”

Mom isn’t still when she thinks. She cooks when she thinks. Luckily, she’d brought the makings for oven-fried chicken and mashed potatoes, so she started to bread chicken legs and was silent for a few moments. Then she stopped, her fingers full of Panko bread crumbs, and turned to look at me. “Your father is not a man given to worrying about himself,” she said. “He wouldn’t hide out of fear. He wouldn’t abandon us if he didn’t have to.”

“He pretty much abandoned me and Liss.” It really just slipped out. I was as surprised to hear myself say that as Melissa, whose eyes widened.

“I asked him,” Mom answered, her face turned away from us but her voice a trifle unsteady. “He always said that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to see you; it was that he couldn’t.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I told her.

“I know,” Mom answered. “Believe me, there have been some…tense words between us, but he won’t, or can’t explain. There’s something he’s not telling me, too. He just won’t discuss it, but it’s hurting him. A lot.”