Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (35 page)

Liss gave me a really good Melissa hug when she came in, and without saying anything, she gave me the impression that The Swine had done something especially Swine-like, making me the favored parent again. The Swine, for his part, was mostly withdrawn.

“The service at that place was terrible,” he said.

“Dad stiffed the waitress,” Melissa told me in a disgusted tone. “Just because she left the lemon out of his Diet Coke.”

“I specifically asked for it,” The Swine insisted.

“You sure did,” Liss responded. That was
my
child.

Steven sat down heavily to show how misunderstood he was, and we, being more mature, ignored him.

“How’s your evening been?” Melissa asked me.

“Nothing special,” I said.

Thirty-two

Kitty Malone showed up later that night to show us all (mostly Maxie) that she was all right. I left out much of my story until Steven and the guests were out of the room. It’s funny; I don’t have to shield my ten-year-old daughter from the truth, but my ex-husband and my adult customers (not to mention my mother, who called and got the edited version) are better off not knowing about certain things.

I had to drive to Seaside Heights to be debriefed by Detective Ferry after the spook show the next morning (Paul, at only a slight angle, wrote answers to questions and played bongo drums, while Maxie repotted a plant I was killing on the window sill), and I decided that since I was close enough, I might as well revisit Julia MacKenzie’s old address in Gilford Park and see if her landlord (who had never called me back) might be in this time.

So once Ferry finished asking me the same six questions for an hour and a half, I hopped into my Volvo and made the trip over. Along the way, I tried to come up with a plan B. If I couldn’t wrangle a current address out of the landlord, how
would
I find Julia MacKenzie, breaker of numerous hearts? I couldn’t stand to let Paul down now and possibly send him into a literal tailspin from which he might never recover.

Because for Paul, “never” is not an abstract concept.

I pulled up once again in front of the two-story house—like many of these shore homes, a little bit less than perfectly kept up—and noticed only one car in the two-car port in front. That wasn’t great news, but I hoped that it was the landlord’s car and not one belonging to his new tenant upstairs, where I’d seen the young mother having a “vacation” the last time I was here.

I was just about to get out of the car when I saw something in the passenger seat that literally made me scream, if briefly. It took me a good few seconds to catch my breath, and then I could only squeeze out the words, “What are you doing here?”

Maxie, resplendent in a pair of long black jeans (what did she care how hot it was?) and a black T-shirt that bore the legend “This Space Available,” was in the passenger seat. And when I say “in the passenger seat,” that’s what I mean. Like at home, she was not as much sitting on the seat as nestled
in
it, half obscured and half bouncing up and down. I’d never seen one of the ghosts in such an enclosed space before, but they can’t actually stay very still. They’re not
really
there.

“This is what I was trying to tell you yesterday,” she crowed. “I can move around now! Almost anywhere I want to go. I mean, I haven’t tested the limits yet, but as you can see, here I am!”

Not entirely sure I wasn’t having a bad dream, I reached over to touch Maxie and, of course, couldn’t. But that same light breeze I felt when she had hugged me was there. “How?” I managed.

“I don’t really know, but it’s been coming for a few days. You know, after I got used to the idea I couldn’t, I never tried. But when you got me mad the other day, I just went outside and kept going. After a while, I realized I wasn’t on the property anymore. So I started to explore.”

I breathed in. Oxygen is a good thing, especially when you’ve been seriously startled. “So that’s where you were when we were searching for you the other day.”

“Exactly. Isn’t it crazy?”

That was one word for it, yes. “Why are you here?”

She tossed her hair, in a gesture of freedom, I guess. “Because I can be!” she said. She rubbed her hands together. “Okay. What are we doing here?”

I hadn’t told Maxie about the Julia MacKenzie thing because Paul had seemed to want the matter to remain confidential, and frankly, the idea of Maxie teasing him about it was a little too plausible and a little too upsetting. But I just wasn’t quick enough to come up with a realistic lie to tell her, so I gave her the essentials as I understood them.

Maxie, whatever her faults (and if you have a couple of days, I could list them for you), is a smart ghost and, at heart, a good friend. She listened to Paul’s story and grasped its intellectual and emotional impacts immediately. When I was finished, she had a determined look on her face.

I got out of the furnace-like car and walked to the door of the ground-level apartment, and Maxie lifted herself out through the Volvo’s roof and hovered nearby as I rang the doorbell. As before, there was no answer. But this time, I wasn’t prepared to go away without some kind of lead, some clue, some…something. I rang the bell again.

Nothing. The car in the port was either not the landlord’s or he was purposely not coming to the door for someone he did not recognize. There was only one way to be sure.

I looked at Maxie, and tilted my head toward the door. “Would you mind?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, and vanished through the door into the apartment as I waited on the doorstep. After about a minute she reemerged and shrugged. “Nobody home,” she said. “But that guy’s a pig.”

“Messy?”

Maxie gave me a significant look. “No.”

I had hit a wall in the Julia search again, and slunk back to the car, feeling very much like I’d let a friend down the one time he’d actually asked me to do something that mattered to him. Maxie hung back; she’s not especially good at bolstering other people’s confidence. “Maybe
you
should hire a detective,” she suggested as I reached the Volvo.

I didn’t answer. I knew Maxie was trying to help, and having established this new level of détente between us, being snide or yelling at her would have been counterproductive. Besides, I was feeling too dejected.

But then, from upstairs, I heard a voice shouting, “Jason! I told you to put the milk away when you’re done with it!” And I stopped dead in my tracks.

I recognized that voice.

Walking over from the car toward the far side of the house, I once again had to shade my eyes to look up at the second-floor deck, where a woman in a sensible two-piece bathing suit was calling in toward the apartment upstairs. “And put your bowl in the sink, please!” she added.

Man, I could be stupid sometimes. I called up to the woman. “Excuse me?”

She stopped and looked down at me. It was slightly later in the day than the last time I’d come by, so the sun wasn’t directly in my face, and this time I could see her far better. She was not heavy, but not stick thin. Her hair was brown, not black or blonde. I couldn’t really tell from here, but I was willing to bet her eyes were brown and very deep for a man to look into. And she had lied to me about leaving as soon as she’d heard Julia MacKenzie’s name.

“Can I help you?” she asked, recognizing me too late.

“The jig is up,” I told her, despite my not knowing what a jig was or why it’s better for it to be down. “You might as well let me come up there to talk, Julia.”

“Do you have any idea what it’s like being a single mother trying to date?” Julia MacKenzie asked me. Before I had a chance to tell her that, yes, I did, she added, “Men don’t want to know about your kid. They don’t want to know about the kid’s father. They don’t want to think you’ve ever been with anybody else. They want to think they’re the center of your life.” She shrugged. “So I let them think they were.”

“How many of them?” I asked after a gulp of iced tea. If it was 95 degrees downstairs, it was a 100 easy up here on the deck, with no shade at all.

Maxie, hovering over a lawn chair with her legs crossed, seemed fascinated. She stared at Julia and actually emulated a few of her movements, drinking from a straw and turning her head to talk to her son, Jason, a spirited four-year-old currently splashing in a wading pool a few feet away. It was like Maxie was trying some of Julia’s mannerisms on for size, deciding what to keep and what to discard.

Once I had recognized Julia’s voice as the woman I’d spoken to in this same spot before, it had all made sense. She’d told me, during our previous conversation, that she and her family—her preschool son, as it turned out—were leaving the next day. And yet, here she was. That meant she hadn’t told me the truth, and there was only one reason for her to do that.

I’d told her I was there representing a man who had worried about her after she’d vanished, but I refused to give her a name. She might have heard that Paul was deceased; the news had been in at least one newspaper at the time, and the story had gotten even more media after the murderer had been found. Frankly, Julia hadn’t seemed all that interested in which man was concerned. They tended, she said, to all blur together in her mind.

Julia’s eyes were indeed deep and soulful but also, from my point of view, a little dreamy and unfocused. “I don’t know. It depended on the day or the week. For a while, there were only two, and then at one point as many as five. It was easy to find men who would be interested in the girl I pretended to be. What was hard was finding a reliable rotation of babysitters.”

“I don’t get it,” I told Julia. “You could have told at least
one
of these men about Jason.
One
of them might have been perfectly fine with a woman who had a child. Why not look for that one, instead of trying to charm all those other guys?”

Julia lit up a cigarette and blew some smoke in the direction away from her son. “You had to know Jason’s father. Hell,
I
should have known him. We hooked up for one stinkin’ night, and when I call to tell him I’m going to have his child, he tells me he took precautions so this had to be my fault. So I had the baby, and after I got my figure back, I decided I’d get guys to take me out to nice places and buy me nice things, and I’d give them what they wanted, which was the idea that this girl they thought I was could find them fascinating. It worked for a while.”

“But then you stopped. Pretended to move away. Changed your last name to Lamont. Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Lamont is Jason’s father’s name; would you believe it? But it was easier to disappear and not have to talk to all those guys anymore. At the time, it was because Jason was having problems in nursery school, and I needed to be around more, so I couldn’t go out at night so much,” she said. “And I didn’t have money for new clothes all the time, stuff like that. I’m working at his preschool now as a teacher, and you don’t make much.” She stubbed out the cigarette, which was less than half smoked.

“But the fact of the matter, now that I can look back a little, is that I got tired of it. Of them. All the men—they’d believe anything you told them. Anything. And they’d get so
attached
. One of them was going to ask me to marry him, I was pretty sure. Then I never heard from him again.”

I had to fight the impulse to grab her by the throat and tell her what she’d done to more than one man, but fight it I did. “Which one wanted you to marry him?” I asked as casually as possible, with Maxie making significant eye contact.

Julia looked up to one side, thinking. “The teacher? No. It might have been the blond one, or the one with the goatee.” She shook her head, trying to knock the memories loose. “Honest, after a while they all just sort of become the same.”

We talked a few more minutes, but I wanted to leave as soon as I could. And take a shower, preferably. But I had another trip to make.

“Where are we going?” Maxie asked me when we got into the car (only one of us through the usual “open the door” method).

“Levittown, Pennsylvania,” I answered.

Thirty-three