Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (17 page)

But a search for Wilson Meyers seemed just as important. Now that Ferry knew about Wilson, he might begin an investigation, but it was just as likely the county would decide to start digging up the beach, especially the area under the Seaside Heights boardwalk, in a search for Wilson’s assumedly just-as-decomposed body. That was a bad thought on a number of fronts, not the least of which was that it wouldn’t help figure out what had happened to Big Bob. Dead, Wilson would be no help to anybody.

And last but not least on my agenda: telling my ex-husband he had until the following Tuesday to get out of my house. That would be enjoyable, certainly, but tricky, since I couldn’t let Melissa think I was kicking her father to the curb. But the fact was, with new guests arriving eight days from now, the only other place for Steven to sleep would be in my bed. And
that
was certainly not going to happen.

All of this was completely forgotten when I got home to find Maxie having a screaming fight with her mother.

I could hear it from the backyard, where I parked the Volvo, and it only got louder once I walked through the kitchen door. Some of the pots and pans (sadly underused) hanging over the center island were swinging back and forth. And I knew that although I could hear both Maxie’s and Kitty Malone’s voices, the guests in the house were getting only Kitty’s side of the argument. And since Kitty couldn’t actually see or hear Maxie, the fact that they were managing to
have
an argument was something of a wonder in itself.

Rushing through the kitchen to the den, I pushed open the swinging door and almost hit poor Francie Westen in the face as I did. Francie, looking absolutely rattled, was wringing her hands and biting her lips.

“I know I signed up for a haunted-house vacation, but this is just unpleasant!” she cried as I apologized for almost clocking her with the door and proceeded toward the library, the room where Kitty and Maxie usually had their visits, and from where the sound was emanating now.

“You just hated him from the beginning, and you weren’t ever going to change your mind!” Maxie bellowed. “You never liked any of the guys I brought home!” Then there was a long pause. Maxie must have been writing out her end of the dustup.

Halfway to the library, Don Petrone slowed my frenzied progress with a huge grin on his face. “If I’d known we were getting an extra ghost show today, I would have set up my camcorder,” he said. “Can you post a schedule from now on?”

“I’ll see about it, Don,” I told him. “Excuse me, won’t you? I’d prefer to cut this off before something gets broken. Or someone.”

“He abused you,” Kitty shouted. “He hit you for no reason. I was supposed to embrace a man who did that?”

“You hated him long before that,” I heard Maxie tell her. “You never gave him a chance.” And again, the pause.

I didn’t hear any crashes or dishes being broken, so I thanked my luck that this appeared to be strictly a verbal confrontation at the moment. I blazed past Don, still enjoying himself immensely, and noted Albert at the door to the library. I didn’t give him a chance to say anything to me, brushing by and into the library. I would have closed the door, but in a fit of stupidity while I was redesigning the house, I’d removed the library door to make it look larger and so that people would always have access to books at any time of the day or night. Another in a series of decisions I had come to regret.

The argument might have been all talk now, but that clearly had not always been the case. The room, though hardly a shambles, was certainly disheveled. Maxie had knocked books off shelves on every wall, and many of them were lying on the floor, spines cracked, pages crumpled. I’d bought every one of them used, but it was the principle of the thing.

“Okay, break it up,” I said as I entered the library. “Everybody to their corners.”

They both turned to look at me for a moment, then resumed their positions, facing off against each other, although Kitty was facing the wrong way, since she couldn’t actually tell where Maxie was.

“He stole your money, and he lied to you,” Kitty continued, as if I hadn’t entered the room and called for a halt in hostilities.

“He was my husband!” Maxie shouted back as she tapped out those exact words, in all capital letters, on the laptop—
my
laptop—she’d placed on a side table in Kitty’s line of sight.

Kitty read it, and snorted her reply. “Husband. For a long weekend? That’s not a marriage. It’s barely a one-night stand.”

Both Malone women had told me on separate occasions that they’d had a somewhat contentious relationship when Maxie was alive. But all I’d ever seen was a mother and daughter who were thrilled to have been reunited after a horrendous incident, and they’d never so much as frowned in each other’s direction before while I was there to see it.

“I wasn’t kidding,” I said, not loudly enough to be considered shouting, but loudly enough to be heard over the din. “There are guests here, and they’re watching. This. Ends. Now.”

Maxie, disregarding me, started to tap the laptop’s keys again, and I closed the cover as she typed. She gave me a positively rabid look, but I picked up the notebook and tucked it under my arm. She reached for it, but I danced out of the way, and Maxie went past me and through an armchair.

“There’ll be no more arguing now,” I said. Turning to Maxie, I added, “And if you keep up this attitude, young lady, your Internet privileges will be revoked. Is that clear?”

“On that old dinosaur?” Maxie sneered. “I’m surprised I’m not getting messages from 1998.”

Kitty, meanwhile, seemed to be composing herself, looking conscious now of me and the couple in the doorway (Francie had joined her husband), who were watching with either delight or anxiety. Or both. It was hard to tell. “I’m sorry, Alison,” Kitty said. “I got a little carried away with myself.”

“I take it the topic of conversation was Big Bob Benicio,” I said.

“You tell her—” Maxie began.

I cut her off. “I’ll decide what messages get passed back to your mother,” I told her. “So you keep a civil tongue in your head, because
I
respect her.” Sometimes having Maxie in the house gives me a glimpse into what life would be like if I’d had a second daughter. One less mature than my ten-year-old.

“You always side with her,” Maxie pouted. See what I mean?

I ignored her. “I appreciate your anger,” I told Kitty, “but this was years ago, and Maxie is, well, beyond pain these days. Isn’t it past the point of argument?”

Kitty appeared determined to show me that Maxie came by her stubborn petulance naturally. “Some things transcend time, Alison,” she said. “I don’t hate people. I try to see the good in everyone. But that man violated every possible notion of decency, and he made an enemy of me for life.”

“Apparently even longer than that,” I pointed out. “He’s dead.”

Kitty nodded. “True,” she agreed. “But if there’s one thing I’m learning, it’s that dying doesn’t make people change their personalities.” She searched the ceiling for a sign of her daughter, as if she could tell whether or not Maxie was there.

Maxie took the bait. “Big Bob wasn’t perfect, but he saw me for who I was, and not who he wanted me to be,” she told her mother, and I chose to forward that message along. I did not see the point in adding, “Unlike
some people
,” as Maxie did.

“He let you be who it was easiest for you to be,” Kitty countered. “You never had to try. And when you did try, when you wanted to buy this house and begin a career in home design and real estate, he was nowhere to be found.”

“I hadn’t seen him in almost a year!” Maxie countered. “You saw to that.”

“All right, that’s fair,” her mother said. “But he borrowed money from you when you were together, and he never paid it back.”

Maxie fingered the cameo around her neck. “
You
didn’t help me buy the house,” she said to her mother, ignoring the acknowledgment she’d just gotten that Big Bob couldn’t have helped. “You didn’t talk to me for months when I signed the mortgage.”

Kitty shook her head sadly. “No, but I made sure to sell it to someone who cared when I had to execute your will,” she said in a whisper.

They stood there (well, Maxie floated, but it was the same principle) for a full minute. I didn’t have any idea what either was thinking, but I knew this argument wasn’t ever going to be over. There was no way to resolve it. Maxie was dead, but still in communication with her mother. Big Bob was just as gone—maybe more, because Paul hadn’t been able to raise him on the Ghosternet. There couldn’t be a resolution, because life doesn’t end on a schedule. It ends in the middle, every time.

Finally, Maxie broke through her melancholic stupor. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said through me to Kitty. “You never wanted to give Big Bob a break, and now you don’t have to. You have things exactly the way you want them.”

I doubt she meant that the way it sounded. Sometimes Maxie forgets—or refuses to accept—the fact that she is dead. But she didn’t bother to rephrase her statement, and I failed, in my role of interpreter, to edit it for her.

“Is that what you think?” Kitty gasped. “Is that really what you think? You think I don’t wake up every morning in a good mood, and then remember that you’re not here anymore? You think it doesn’t bother me that you’ll never get to finish anything you started, that all your promise was wasted? That you’ll never be able to have a daughter you love as much as I love you? Is that what you think?”

She had built herself up to an obvious state of agitation, and Maxie hovered in the air staring at her mother. She either wouldn’t or couldn’t answer.

“If that’s what you think, Maxie, I believe I won’t be coming back for a while. You can say what you want, but I’ve done everything that I thought I could for you. And as for your ‘Big Bob,’ well, for my money, he deserved everything he got, and more.”

With that, Kitty turned on her heel and marched out of the library. Francie and Albert stood by at each side of the door, like a military guard.

Maxie’s lips pulled into her mouth and she whimpered a bit, then vanished entirely, something she rarely does. Usually she huffs out of a room through a wall or another person just for effect. But now, she just evaporated.

“You put on some show,” Francie said after a moment. “The flying books? How did you do that?”

I didn’t have time to respond, because my ex-husband appeared in the doorway behind her. He pointed toward the front door, where assumedly Kitty was currently leaving.

“I don’t know who that was,” he said, “but you could hear her all over the house, and it sure sounded like she was confessing to something.”

Fifteen

Dinner that night was sort of a distracted affair.

Steven insisted on taking Melissa and me to a restaurant while the guests were out getting their dinners. This necessitated us eating on the early side, since Don Petrone and the two sisters especially were early-bird-special enthusiasts, and I wanted to be sure we were back for the evening, in case someone in the house needed something from the hostess (that’s me).

So we trekked out at an ungodly hour to Trees, a new restaurant in Harbor Haven meant to appeal to the upscale crowd without the whole “money” thing that put off the rest of us. In keeping with its name, Trees made sure to pile on the ambiance: There were pictures of trees on the wallpaper, the menus, the plates, the window shades and the ceiling tiles, and there were actual twenty-foot palm trees growing in the restaurant, requiring ceilings so high that the noise level in the place approached that of the third tier at Yankee Stadium during a playoff game. Each tree in each framed picture on each tree-adorned wall was identified by genus and species. The waitstaff was required, we discovered, to point out various trees in the decor and explain their significance. We had been treated to a dissertation on the mighty larch when ordering appetizers and drinks, and now I was bracing myself for the moment when the server (whose name was Eric, and he’d be taking care of us tonight) would reappear to discuss the California redwood while taking our dinner orders.

Trees, despite its name, was not a vegetarian restaurant and was in fact named for its owner, Richard Tree. The spelling of the name of the restaurant was based on the apparent new rule in the English language that apostrophes should be used only when they are not needed, and never used when they are. It’s a new linguistic age.

Mentally, I gave the whole enterprise six months, and wondered to where the palms might be transplanted when the lease ran out.

“Does Phyllis really think I’m ready to start delivering the
Chronicle
?” Melissa was asking when a leaf blew across my plate. I had to make her repeat what she’d asked because of the high volume (see above re: high ceilings).

“I don’t care if Phyllis thinks so or no.
I
don’t think you’re ready yet to be riding your bike all around Harbor Haven at five in the morning, so you’re not doing it,” I replied. This issue was a nonstarter with me. Besides, I was trying to figure out why Kitty Malone had been so uncharacteristically hostile regarding her deceased ex-son-in-law. Was it the one incident from years ago? That was enough for many, surely, but Kitty’s personality was usually so easygoing that it was hard to reconcile that kind of polar-opposite reaction.