Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (25 page)

I looked at the outer walls. If there had been a break-in, it came from outside (“Well,
duh
,” I heard Melissa say in my head). “Can you reach the windows?” I asked Jeannie.

“When I was
unencumbered
, maybe,” she answered. “Not so much now. Why?”

“I want to see if there are scratch marks where somebody broke in carefully.”

“Well, wouldn’t the marks be on the outside?” Jeannie asked.

Wise guy. “Yes, but there might be something in here, too. We’re here, so let’s look. We can look outside later.”

We spent the next ten minutes trying to raise ourselves (more specifically, myself; I wasn’t risking Jeannie on an egg crate) to the level of the basement windows. Finally, standing on an egg crate placed on an ottoman, I could stand at eye level with the windowsill. Of course, there was no mark here, and only five more windows to check from this precarious perch.

“Do you want me to go outside and look?” Jeannie asked.

“No, I want you in here to call nine-one-one when I fall and break an important bone or two,” I told her. “Look around the basement. Find the toolbox where they found the wrench.”

Jeannie started to move around the basement, index finger curled and touching her upper lip, the International Sign of Jeannie Thinking. It wasn’t going to take long; the room was wonderfully organized, so there weren’t many little nooks into which something could have been secreted.

“The cops didn’t have to disturb anything down here, either,” she said, thinking out loud. I didn’t answer. “So it had to be out in plain sight.”

“Do you think they took the whole toolbox?” I asked, setting up under the second window.

“Why do that? It seems like someone was practically putting up neon signs with arrows that said, ‘Here’s the murder weapon.’ It’s not like they think someone killed him with a roll of electrical tape.” Jeannie had a point.

“No, but they didn’t know it was a wrench, did they?” I stood up on my wobbly contraption again, testing it carefully before putting my full weight on the inverted egg crate. Why hadn’t it occurred to me to look for a ladder in this basement? There had to be one. “I mean, they knew it was a heavy metal object. Could have been anything.”

“We’re dealing with cops who had been really carefully led here,” Jeannie said. “I think they knew exactly what they were looking for, and found it in the first two minutes of looking.”

“So how come you haven’t found the toolbox yet?” I asked.

“Just check the damn windows.”

I looked at the frame of each window around the basement, and found no scrapes, no missing paint, no broken glass, nothing that would indicate a break-in. It was one of the few times in my life I’ve been disappointed to see that things were in perfect order. Come to think of it, it was one of the few times in my life I’ve
seen
things in perfect order. My life tends to be slightly messier than Kitty’s.

Except Kitty was in jail. Had to keep that in mind, and go on looking.

Jeannie was somewhat luckier in her search. She simply opened the door on a storage cabinet, and found a small metal toolbox with three pull-out drawers. I climbed down off my shaky perch to examine it with her.

“Should we wear gloves, or something?” Jeannie asked. “There are some gardening gloves over there.” She pointed toward a small bucket that Kitty clearly used in the garden, with a tiny spade and a pair of gloves inside it, looking clean enough to eat with.

“We’re not committing a crime,” I reminded her. “If the cops had wanted to confiscate this stuff, it would be gone now.”

The toolbox was, as I now expected, very well organized. Kitty didn’t own a lot of tools, but the screwdrivers were all kept in one spot, the one hammer in another, the tapes (electrical, masking, painter’s) together, paint brushes, roller sleeves…

. . . and wrenches.

There wasn’t a wrench set, like the one my considerably more massive toolbox (on wheels, with nine drawers and two doors) in the guesthouse contained. There were exactly three wrenches: a three-sixteenths, a small adjustable and a larger, maybe six-inch, adjustable wrench.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” I asked Jeannie. “Your husband’s a contractor. Why is this wrong?”

She looked at me. “I don’t know. I work for an insurance company. If you want me to call Tony and ask him…” She reached for her cell phone.

I shook my head. “No. Here’s the problem; she already had two adjustable wrenches, both sized for the kind of problems a homeowner would encounter. The one that the cops took out of here had to be much,
much
larger to do lethal damage to Big Bob’s skull.”

Jeannie picked up on my vibe. “So…why would she need a wrench that big? Why would she have had it in the first place?”

“And, more than that,” I said, “where would she have put it in this toolbox? The wrench area is much too small to accommodate it.”

Jeannie pointed at one of the small storage areas on the bottom. “It would fit in there,” she suggested.

“Yeah, but this is Kitty we’re talking about. This is her toolbox. I’ve never seen such a neat, organized toolbox in my life. If that’s where the wrenches went, that would be where
all
the wrenches went, or she’d move them all to keep them together.”

She thought about that and nodded slowly. “This is an even more obvious plant than we thought.” She stopped, thought and shook her head. “Those cops are really dumb.”

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. “That’s the thing,” I said. “I really don’t think they are.” I dialed Alex Hayward’s number.

Twenty-two

Alex promised to look into what I was saying, and informed me that Kitty Malone had not yet been moved to the county jail. She said the prosecutor and the Seaside Heights police wouldn’t give her a satisfactory explanation for her client’s continued stay at the small holding facility down the shore, but she wasn’t complaining about not moving Kitty into a larger, scarier jail. She said she’d call me the next day.

Maxie was not exactly buoyed by the news that her mom was still in a small barred room, and although I hadn’t exactly expected a ticker-tape parade in my honor, I had hoped that the fact that Kitty was still in a Seaside Heights cell and not the county lockup would be considered something approximating “good news.”

Not so much.

“Why couldn’t you get her out of jail?” she wailed at me the instant I walked through the front door. Maxie had apparently been eavesdropping on a phone call I’d made to Melissa on the way back from dropping Jeannie at her house in Lavallette. “My mom didn’t kill Big Bob! What’s she still doing behind bars?”

“Not now,” I singsonged to her as I walked through the living room, where Mrs. Spassky was watching the flat-screen TV the
Down the Shore
production crew had left hanging from one of my hundred-year-old crossbeams. “I have to talk to Paul.”

“Captain Inversion is up in the attic, being all girly about how nobody should see him like this,” Maxie scoffed. “Like somebody besides us could see him. What’s he going to do for you?”

“Not me; it’s what he’s going to do for Kitty,” I said in a conversational voice.

“Oh,” Mrs. Spassky said, looking around on the floor. “Do you have a cat?”

“No, Mrs. Spassky. Just a ghost.”

She nodded and went back to CNN. Apparently, a Hollywood starlet had entered rehab for the third time, and the news anchor had the gall to look as if she was surprised.

Francie Westen, fanning herself despite the completely effective air-conditioning in the room, stopped me on my way toward the backyard, which I could see through the French doors at the rear of the den. Steven was out there talking to Lucy Simone, and Melissa was nowhere in sight despite it being late enough in the day that her chambermaid duties would certainly have been fulfilled by now. She was on her own, which made me start thinking of my ex as The Swine again. “The brochure mentioned direct contact with the spirits in the house,” Francie said with a confrontational tone. “I’m leaving in a few days, and so far, all I’ve seen is stuff flying around the house. When do I get to talk to a ghost?”

“You’re talking to one now, lady,” Maxie said. I gave her a very quick disapproving look, and she twisted her mouth into a sneer and vanished into the ceiling.

We had experimented with the idea of a “séance” in the house when the first guests had arrived a few months before, and the results were, let’s say, something I’d rather not have replicated. But part of the Senior Plus deal was that the guests who wanted a conference with those beyond the grave would have the opportunity. I had cut back, therefore, on the spooky accoutrements involved with the “séance” and scheduled a few daytime sit-downs during which I would field questions for Paul and Maxie. It was sort of like
The View
, but with dead people.

“We’ll be doing that tomorrow at nine thirty, Francie,” I told her. “Have your questions ready.”

But Francie continued to frown. “I was hoping for something a little more…personal,” she said.

That stopped me, even as Lucy was laughing at something “witty” The Swine had said to her. “In what way?” I asked Francie. This was sounding just a bit kinky.

“Like a one-on-one discussion. Something I could tell the folks back home about. ‘I got to talk to a ghost,’ you know. That sort of thing.”

I wasn’t sure I was getting this. “Well, you
will
get to talk to a ghost,” I said. “Tomorrow, at nine thirty.”

“No, I’ll get to talk to
you
,” Francie countered. “How do I know there’s a ghost present? How do I know you’re not making up any answers you want?”

Oh. That. “Not to worry, Francie. I guarantee you, there’s no way you’ll walk out of that room thinking you didn’t talk to a ghost. Trust me.”

Francie puckered up her lips, like she didn’t want to trust me at all. “Okay,” she said, drawing the word out a few feet. “But remember—”

“I know. A personal experience.” I nodded. I’d gotten this before. Some guests didn’t just want to see ghosts; they wanted the ghosts to think that they, the guests, were the most fascinating people on the planet. It’s sort of interesting to watch.

I managed to break free from Francie and walk out through the French doors into the backyard. The Swine and Lucy were standing at one end of the yard, closest to the slope that led down to the beach. They were facing the ocean, and my ex-husband swept his arm in a gesture of…something. I wasn’t that close yet.

When I got closer, I could hear him saying, “They’ll all be able to better their financial future, with only a tiny investment, really the price of a cup of coffee a day.”

“Not that many lower-income people spend four bucks on a latte every day,” I said, from behind him. They both turned to face me, and The Swine lowered his arm, as he was finished envisioning things. “If they did,” I continued, “they’d have fourteen hundred and sixty dollars a year. Do you think poor people can afford to invest fourteen hundred and sixty dollars a year?”

“Alison,” he said, as if he was surprised it was me. “Of course I don’t expect low-income people to invest that kind of money. It was just an expression.”

“I have another expression for you,” I said. “Where’s our daughter?” Then I looked toward Lucy. “Hi, Lucy.” She was a guest, after all.

“Hi, Alison.” Lucy was quick on the pickup.

“Wendy called and asked if Melissa wanted to go with her to shop for…something, and then your mother said she’d pick her up at Wendy’s and bring back some dinner,” The Swine answered. “They should be back in a half hour or so. Why? Is something wrong?”

“Of course not. May I speak with you for a minute?” I gestured toward the house. “You don’t mind, do you, Lucy?”

“Mind what?” Smart as a whip, that one.

Steven walked inside with me to the kitchen, where the air-conditioning isn’t quite as efficient, but still better than the sweltering July heat. I put my hand on my hip and shook my head in the general direction of my ex-husband.

“I asked you to see to it that Lucy was out of the house during the spook shows,” I told him. “I didn’t ask you to adopt her.”

“What’s this about?” he demanded. “You can’t be jealous, can you?”

“I’m not jealous; I’m annoyed. You got rid of your own daughter so you could dazzle Princess Jasmine with your financial prowess.”

The Swine looked at me sideways, like I would make more sense if he could use just his good eye. He spoke slowly and lowered his voice for emphasis on how controlled he was being.

“Wendy’s mother called,” he said. “She asked if Melissa could go with them to the mall, and then Melissa asked your mother to pick her up so they could get something for dinner. Melissa wanted to go. She asked me if it was all right, and I said yes. Now. Which part of that indicates that I was trying to get rid of my daughter?”

Have you ever been so frustrated in an argument that you couldn’t speak because you
knew
you were right, but you couldn’t
prove
it? I had seen this movie before, and I knew how it ended. But everything Steven said made perfect sense in context, and there was absolutely no counterargument I could make that would make a difference.