Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (30 page)

“It’s…She…” Maxie pointed at me.

Mom turned toward the door and said something I couldn’t hear. She nodded her head.

And then Kitty Malone walked through the door and, looking a few feet to the left of her daughter, called out, “Maxie, you stay right here, and let’s talk this thing out.”

Twenty-seven

The ensuing pandemonium lasted a good few minutes, with Maxie coming down from the ceiling to try to embrace her mother, and Kitty seeming to feel the physical presence of her daughter. Mom walked to Melissa to comfort her and find out what the tears were about, and I rushed to Kitty with a thousand questions on the tip of my tongue.

Don and Albert simply nodded to the two ladies and went back to their game of rummy.

My biggest concern was The Swine, who, after realizing (with much prompting) that Melissa
wasn’t
crying about him, became justifiably suspicious about all the people talking to the ceiling. But then he sidled up next to me and said, “Is this a spook show?”

“Yes,” I told him, mentally thanking him for giving me the out. “Can you get Lucy out of here?”

“Where is she?” he asked.

“I have no idea. Go look.” And he was out the door.

It turned out that Mom and Kitty had just met on the doorstep, both having arrived independently. Mom was brought up to speed on Kitty’s ordeal, which she found horrifying, and having known Maxie’s mother for a grand total of forty seconds, declared that the charges were completely baseless. Mom and gray areas have met, but they’re not close.

Kitty clearly found Mom fascinating, and was especially jealous of the fact that my mother can see Maxie, but she can’t.

When the excitement died down, those of us in on the situation (minus Melissa, who was told she’d be brought up to date shortly, and took the news well, stomping up the stairs to her room in protest) reconvened in the kitchen, with Mom continuing to pass on messages from Maxie to Kitty because it was simply faster than Maxie trying to communicate directly via pad and pen. I considered getting Maxie a phone so she could text her mother.

Paul, somehow having been alerted to the situation—maybe he’d run into Melissa as she huffed by—materialized in the ceiling, head down of course, and listened very carefully, stroking his goatee fiercely throughout.

Mom, disturbed by Paul’s “less than right side up appearance,” expressed concern, but Paul deflected it, saying he was just seeing the world from a new perspective because he could. Mom’s eyes narrowed, as she was clearly having some trouble buying that story, but she turned her attention to Kitty, who said she wasn’t sure why she’d been released, but was relieved anyway.

“They never moved me to the other prison,” she told us. “They never even suggested that they were going to move me. So I was pretty much in the same place you saw me, Alison, and being treated quite well for someone they thought was a cold-blooded murderer. They sent out for Chinese food for me last night.”

That was all nice detail, but as Phyllis would have told Kitty, she was burying her lede. “But how did you get out?” I asked.

“Well, that was the strange part,” Kitty said.

“The strange part?” Maxie asked, still not looking at me when she could avoid it. “This whole thing has been insane from the beginning.”

We did not pass that comment along to Kitty, who simply continued, “Maybe two hours ago, Sergeant Packer—you didn’t get to meet him, Alison, but he was very nice—came in and told me I’d made bail. It took about an hour or so to process the paperwork and get me back into my street clothes, and they even drove me back to my house, but I knew Maxie would be worried, so I came right here.”

Everyone in the room took a moment to absorb that information. “So you paid a hundred thousand dollars in cash? Where did you get that kind of money, Kitty?” I asked, my head reeling.

Kitty examined my face for a moment, then burst out laughing. “
I
didn’t come up with the money, Alison!” she said. “Goodness, no. I’d be lucky to find 10 percent of
that
in an emergency. No, the bail came from someone else, and that’s something I wanted to ask Maxie about.” She looked up, and Maxie moved into the spot where Kitty was staring, perhaps just to feel like her mother could see her for a moment.

That’s the thing about Maxie: Just when you’re all set to hate her, she acts like the girl she was, one who died much too young, and the sympathy gene kicks into gear. It’s really annoying.

“Tell her I’m listening,” Maxie told Mom, still deliberately ignoring me in the process. Okay, so she wasn’t
always
a sympathetic character.

Mom passed on the message, and Kitty said, “The bail came from Luther Mason. You remember him, don’t you, honey? Wasn’t he a member of the motorcycle gang you were involved with?”

Maxie rolled her eyes like a practiced teenager (Melissa had already perfected her technique at ten, because she’s precocious) and took the time to write “IT WASN’T A
GANG
” on the pad to show her mother. Then she said out loud, “Sure, I knew Luther. Luther’s the guy who asked her”—that was me—“to find out who killed Big Bob.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Luther Mason put up your bail? A hundred thousand dollars?”

“That’s what they told me,” Kitty said, nodding. She looked pretty surprised herself. “He didn’t even stay long enough for me to thank him. Apparently, he just showed up, paid the money and left.”

Luther? I mean, the motorcycle dealership was very impressive, but a hundred thousand dollars lying around with nothing to do? Luther never failed to explode my expectations. He must have left for Seaside Heights right after he’d seen me.

“That’s amazing,” Maxie said. She wrote on the pad for a while and then showed Kitty the message: “SEE? BIKERS ARE NOT SUCH BAD PEOPLE.”

“No,” Kitty agreed. “I guess you’re right. But I can’t imagine what made Luther suddenly show up and get me out of jail. I can’t have met him more than three times in my life. He came by just a few days ago, and that’s when I told him about you, Maxie. Why he’d come out and give all that money, it’s mystifying.”

“I know,” I told her. “Luther’s my client. I just saw him a few hours ago, but he didn’t say a word about—”

Mom cut me off before I could finish the sentence. “You saw Luther just before he bailed out Kitty?” she asked. “Did you tell him about her bail?”

“Well, yeah, but I didn’t ask him to—”

Maxie’s eyes widened. “
You
did this?” she asked me, addressing me directly for the first time since our blowup. “You got my mother out of jail?”

Paul’s eyes narrowed. I think. It was hard to tell with him in that position. He might have just been getting sleepy.

Maxie swooped down and hugged me as best she could. It was interesting how the sensation differed from when Paul had touched me; whereas he felt like a warm breeze, Maxie’s touch was closer to a paper fan on a hot summer day like today. Light, pleasant, but not really all that different than the way you felt before.

“Hang on,” I told the room. “I’m happy Kitty’s free now, but it wasn’t my doing. I don’t have the money. I didn’t ask Luther to put up the bail. This is his good deed, not mine.”

“Don’t be modest,” Mom said. She thinks I am the second brightest spot in the universe—just behind Melissa—and that everything I do is absolute perfection. Yeah, I know it sounds great, but it wears at the nerves, let me tell you.

“I’m not being modest. Look, I’ll prove it to you.” I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Luther’s number. When he answered, I began with, “You bailed Kitty out of jail! That is just so…I’m at a loss for words. It’s probably the first time I’ve been at a loss for words in years.” (Actually, it was since the moment The Swine told me about Amee, and I overcame that feeling quickly.)

I put the phone on speaker so the room could hear Luther say, “I was glad to. She didn’t deserve to be in jail, and I had the money.”

“Yeah, that’s some kind of bike shop you have there, with a hundred grand lying around in cash,” I told him.

“Cash?” Luther laughed. “I don’t have money lying around in piles, Alison. I wrote them a check that will pay through an account I have just for emergencies. I’m pretty sure Kitty’s not a flight risk, so I don’t have to worry about losing the money.”

“I’m right here,” Kitty said into the phone, louder than was necessary. “This is Kitty Malone, Luther. I can’t believe how generous you were. I really can’t thank you enough.”

Luther seemed slightly cowed by the new voice in his ear. “It’s perfectly okay, Mrs. Malone,” he said after a pause.

Kitty said, “But I have to ask—why? Why would you lay out that kind of money for someone you’ve barely met?”

Luther let out a long breath. “You know, ma’am,” he finally sighed, “I think maybe I wanted to change your opinion of the kind of people your daughter hung out with. I knew Maxie, and I liked her. And I thought maybe because you saw how we dressed or because you watched her ride away on the back of Big Bob’s bike, you thought we were out of the Hells Angels or something. I wanted you to know that we’re decent people like anybody else. Big Bob might not have been the son-in-law you were hoping for, but he did love your daughter in his own way. I think maybe you didn’t give him a real fair break. And I wish I had said that to Maxie, too, when I had the chance.”

Kitty’s eyes welled up, and Maxie had already turned away from us, her hand to her mouth. Kitty gulped, shook her head to herself, and when I offered her the phone, she took it. “It was never about the way he looked or the bike,” she told Luther. “He hit Maxie. And that wasn’t ever going to be okay with me. You don’t get a second chance on that. Can you understand, Luther?”

“Yes, ma’am, I can,” came the answer. “I didn’t know that until Alison told me, but I do understand how you feel.”

I took the phone back from Kitty and decided to rally the troops. “Now that we’re all here,” I said, “we need to mobilize. We need to figure out how to keep Kitty out of jail, and find out who really did kill Big Bob. We need to go to…”

Paul started to gesture in my direction, so I turned toward him. He checked to see if Maxie was still looking away, gathering her thoughts, and she was. So Paul silently pulled his index finger across his throat, the universal signal for
stop
. For some reason, he didn’t want me to say any more in front of the group.

“Uh, to see if we can find some stuff out. So I’ll call you to keep you informed. Okay, Luther?” I said. I must have sounded like a lunatic who couldn’t make up her own mind.

“Um…sure,” Luther answered, sounding justifiably confused, and we ended the call.

“What do you think we should do?” Kitty asked.

“What I’d like you to do is go home and relax,” I said. “You’ve had enough of an ordeal for the time being.”

“Where are you going to be?” my mother said.

“In Levittown, Pennsylvania,” I answered, “looking for a man named Wilson Meyers. Do you know him?”

Kitty shook her head. “I heard about Wilson, but I never met him. He didn’t seem to be one of the main…people in that group.” She looked where she thought Maxie was hovering, and got a good look at the karaoke machine. Kitty did not comment.

Maxie looked over at me. And our eyes met for a second without any rancor. It was hard to know what that meant, because she almost immediately vanished.

Kitty regarded me carefully. “I’m going with you,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Leaving the state will violate your bail agreement, and Luther will lose his money.”

Kitty looked determined, but beaten on that point. She nodded. “I wouldn’t know Wilson if I saw him, anyway,” she said.

“Neither would I,” Mom said. “But I’m going anyway.
I’m
not out on bail.” She nodded conspiratorially at Kitty, who grinned.

A long argument ensued, and it turned out that Kitty Malone was almost as difficult to dissuade when she got an idea in her head as my mother.

“You and Maxine need to sit down and clear the air,” my mother said.

We were driving through White Horse, New Jersey about noon the next day on I-195, not far from the “Trenton Makes” Bridge (bearing lettering that read “Trenton Makes / The World Takes,” which harkened back to another era), which would take us into Pennsylvania. We’d be in Levittown in less than half an hour.

I had decided specifically not to call ahead to Meyer Wilson, despite Lieutenant McElone having given me a phone number taken at the time of his speeding ticket (seriously, twenty-nine?). If Wilson was hiding out from something and didn’t want to be found, calling him ahead of time would be sort of counterproductive.

On the other hand, if he wasn’t home now, what would Mom and I accomplish?

“First of all, I’m not sure Maxie actually sits down these days,” I answered her. “And the air, while certainly not clear at the moment, is breathable. Why should we have another screaming match in an attempt to explain the last one?”

I had eschewed the GPS for this trip, as it was almost all on the major highway, and Mom, MapQuest pages in hand, could navigate. Sometimes that British woman who tells me to “go straight on” when I hit the highway sounds snotty.