Ghost in the Wind (7 page)

The sense of victory didn't last long. One of the cops on McElone's list had left to work in Paterson, a good hour to the north. The other told me exactly the same information that the lieutenant had. Nothing new.

He didn't know Lester, either. I was now asking everyone I met. The mental image of that forlorn ghost dragging an empty wagon and looking for Lester had gotten to me.

And I sneezed again the second I walked back into the guesthouse. This was getting tedious.

Before any of the guests could spot me (as my eyes got puffy and red), I made my way to my bathroom upstairs, opened the medicine cabinet and looked for the antihistamine.

It wasn't there. It had been so long since my last allergy attack that I'd forgotten to replenish my supply. Drag. Since I didn't want to be sneezing and wheezing tonight or on Sunday, I would have to get back out to a drugstore and pick
up the proper medication. But for now, a hot shower would clear out the sinuses and besides, I needed one.

Before I did that, though, I did a quick round of the downstairs to make sure none of my guests needed anything. Just when I thought I'd gotten a free pass to the shower, I ran into Berthe Englund walking in from the beach into the den. The glass doors in the back open right into my backyard, which leads to my beach (which technically belongs to the town of Harbor Haven, which means I have to buy beach passes for myself, my daughter and my guests every summer to go out onto property right behind my house. Welcome to New Jersey).

“Alison,” Berthe called as she walked in after wiping the sand off her feet. “Do you have a minute?”

“Sure, Berthe. How can I help?” The ancient rime of the innkeeper.

Berthe, a larger woman with a friendly smile and a lovely island lilt to her speech, walked over and met me near the door from the den to the front room. “I missed the morning ghost show and I hear there was a wonderful musical performance. Is it going to be repeated this afternoon?”

“You'll just have to come and see,” I said. The ancient rime of someone who really didn't know the answer to the question.

“I'm so sorry I missed it,” she said, shaking her head.

Great. Now having Vance McTiernan play instrumental versions (as far as the guests could tell) of his greatest hits was going to become an expected feature of my spook shows. That would be amazing—if I could guarantee it would happen.

“I'll see what I can do,” I said. Maybe I'd ask Maxie to get Everett here as a backup should Paul, Vance or both decided not to play the gig.

The gig?
Now I was talking like a musician.

Berthe then asked me for a recommendation for a surf shop; it turned out that in her youth in Bermuda, she'd been
an accomplished surfer before relocating to Highland Park to be with her (now late) husband, a professor at Rutgers University. Berthe wanted to see if she could take up the sport again now after “an interval of some years.”

I directed her to Cut Bait and Run, a local surf and deep sea fishing business that also sold athletic shoes. Ted Iacobuzio, who runs the place, was a few years behind me in high school, which is annoying. He'll always be younger than me, no matter what.

Berthe thanked me and headed to her room to change. I decided to do the same while I had the opportunity; the next spook show would be in about two hours and I had to see who would be in my lineup for the afternoon.

I took the quickest shower in recorded history and had just managed to get myself fully clothed again when Vance McTiernan emerged through the floor and asked, “So is there any progress on finding Vanessa's killer, love?”

After a very deep and not necessarily voluntary breath, I gasped, “Vance! I asked you just yesterday
not
to come into this room unannounced, right? I just came out of the shower.”

Vance, doing his “I'm-so-naughty-but-aren't-I-charming” face, put up his hands in a defensive position. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I'm not really all that dirty an old man, you know. It's just what's expected of one in my business.” He started to float backward toward the door.

“Hang on. Since you're here anyway, I wanted to ask if you might keep playing at the spook shows maybe once a day while you're here. The guests really enjoyed it.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “The guests? Not you?”

“You're fishing for compliments, aren't you? It was the highlight of my year. You know I'm a big fan.” He looked at me with the look that no doubt afforded him much success back in the day. “Of your
music
.”

“Killjoy.”

“So you'll play the gig?” I asked.

“For you, love, anything. Now, how about some suspects and their addresses?”

I sidestepped the question. “I'll tell you what I've been thinking: Doesn't it make more sense to look for Vanessa's mother, Claudia?”

It's not possible for ghosts to turn white—they're already pale enough, wispy and semi-transparent. But Vance McTiernan's reaction screamed for the ability to look ashen. His eyes bulged, his Adam's apple took a trip up and down his neck and his lips quivered.

For reasons I couldn't begin to imagine, what I'd said had scared him.

“Claudia?” Was that the best he could do?

“Yes. She might have some ideas about what happened to your daughter, no?”

Vance's tongue did a lap around his lips. “Yeah, see, the thing about that, love, is that Claud and I didn't exactly get on great in life, you know? I don't think she'd want to hear from me.”

“She wouldn't be hearing from you—you're dead. She'd be hearing from
me
.”

He shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “You're barking up the wrong tree there, I think. Just do your detective stuff without Claud, right?”

“This is ‘detective stuff.'” From the wall I heard Paul's voice, and I turned to see his lips—just his lips—protruding through the plaster. “I thought you'd asked Alison to find out what happened to your daughter. Are you sure you want her to do that?” Paul floated all the way into my room, something that—unlike Vance—he almost never did unless asked in specifically.

“Jeez, I should sell tickets today,” I said. “Everybody's coming through here. Where's Maxie?”

“She'll be here soon. Something about finding the right
shirt to wear.” Paul turned his attention back to Vance. “You don't seem that interested in finding the truth as much as punishing those involved. So is this about justice, or revenge?”

“What's the difference?”

I interrupted to change the subject in a hurry. “Paul, I've asked Vance if, while he's here, he might continue to play songs during some of the spook shows. I hope that won't be a problem,” I said. Note that I did not ask if that was all right with him; it's my guesthouse. Paul's just the guy who haunts it.

I couldn't read his face. It's not that easy most of the time—the ghosts' faces, like the rest of them, are largely transparent. His teeth clenched but he did not look shocked. “I don't see why it would be,” he managed to spit out.

“All right!” Vance butted in. “We're playing on the same bill, mate!” He clapped Paul on the shoulder and Paul looked like he was considering decking Vance. That probably wouldn't help things much, so quickly I turned toward Vance. “As for progress in the
investigation
, I have gotten some information, but nothing I can report back to you yet. I will when I know more. Now both of you get out of my bedroom and don't come back unless invited.”

I'm sure Paul would have blushed if it had been possible. He stammered a bit, opened and closed his mouth to no coherent effect, and dropped down through the floor.

Vance, on the other hand, just shook his head and chuckled. “As you wish, madame,” he said, then simply evaporated, slowly. His eyes were the last feature to disappear. The rock star as Cheshire Cat. He was clearly going to require some supervision during his stay.

And that was why I wasn't at all disappointed when Maxie came floating down from the ceiling. She spends a lot of time on the roof and in Melissa's attic bedroom, so I can expect her to descend. Paul tends to ascend. It provides, I don't know, symmetry or something.

“Did I miss it?” she asked once in the room.

“Miss what?”

Wearing her trademark skintight jeans and a black T-shirt (this one bearing the legend “Danger, Will Robinson!”, which frankly didn't seem to have merited extra time to select), she hovered in the area of my dresser, surveying my outfit and choosing, against her usual nature, not to comment on it. “It sounded like there was gonna be a showdown between Paul and the British singer. I thought maybe they'd get in a fight.” She sounded enthused about that last part. “Did I miss it?”

“There was nothing to miss,” I told her. “We had a brief discussion about Vance playing some songs during one of the shows every day, and Paul wasn't happy about it but he didn't get mad.”

Maxie looked disappointed. “Really? He doesn't like that guy.”

“He doesn't like a lot of guys I meet,” I reminded her. Paul has an odd jealous streak and sometimes reacts badly to men in whom I show an interest. The fact that Josh had hung in for a year now was no small thing. Paul didn't exactly welcome him, but he didn't seem to dislike Josh, either. It's hard to dislike Josh, and Paul's not the type to put in the effort. “There's something I want to talk to you about.”

Maxie straightened up a little. “Whatever it is, I didn't do it,” she said.

“Nobody thinks you did anything. I need your help on something.”

Maxie floated a little closer to the ceiling. “Me? Not Paul?”

“Given Paul's mood, I think I'm better off with you.”

Maxie's hand went to her mouth, I think to suppress a laugh. “You're kidding,” she managed. Maxie thinks I hold a grudge because she dropped a bucket of wall compound on my head and started me seeing ghosts. She's not entirely wrong.

“Not even close to kidding. I want someone to keep an
eye on Vance, someone who can follow him wherever he goes.”

Maxie made a show of “getting it”: She turned her mouth into an O and nodded. “Okay. So what am I looking for?”

“I'm not sure. I just want to know if I can trust Vance or not. Can you just keep an eye on him without him knowing it?”

She gave me the “okay” sign. “Sure. Discretion is my middle name.” And she zoomed into the ceiling.

So things were looking great already. And, no, I didn't mean that sincerely.

I turned to my laptop, which was, in computer years, about three hundred years old. And it wasn't state-of-the-art back when I bought it, when I was still married to The Swine. It operated, mostly, but could not be called lightning fast. Or even disabled-snail fast.

It was slow, is what I'm saying.

Still, it was marginally better than nothing, so I figured that with a few minutes to spare, I might as well run a search for any missing men named Lester from Topeka, Kansas. (It was a distraction from what I really should have been doing, which seemed attractive at the time.) But the Internet, amazing tool that it has become, still came up dry on that one. I looked for obituaries of men named Lester (one first name, one last) in the
Capital-Journal
and found two, both from 2003. Neither was blond, either, based on the pictures, so probably not my guy.

Next, I looked up Vanessa's bandmates in Once Again. The only Samantha Fine I found in New Jersey worked in an investment firm in Red Bank, so that was no help. T.B. Condon could have been one of thirty-eight people in the New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania tristate area, none of whom at first glance was in a band or mentioned Vanessa McTiernan. William Mastrovy, the boyfriend, I saved for last. Just because McElone wouldn't give me his address didn't mean I couldn't
find it myself and then decide how much information I wanted to give to Vance, if any. The man wrote beautiful songs, but I reminded myself that he could still be dangerous. The Marquis de Sade was considered a really good writer in his day. One thing doesn't necessarily assume the other.

Since
Mastrovy
wasn't the most common name in central Jersey (or anywhere else outside of Pinsk, apparently), even someone with my level of computer “skills” could zero in on him fairly quickly. There were only two Mastrovys within a two-hundred-mile radius and one of them was named Stanislav and lived in Delaware.

The other was William. Or at least W. He lived in Asbury Park, not far from where I was sitting, although no street address was offered. But he wouldn't be hard to find. Probably. If I wanted to.

The Internet also told me that William Mastrovy was the front man for a cover band called Once Again that played local bars and clubs on the Shore. Once Again covered older groups like the Zombies, the Animals, Duran Duran and, yes, you guessed it: