It turned out that Jeannie was calling just to pass on some fairly uncontroversial news about a high school classmate of ours who had married one of our high school teachers eighteen years after graduating. And to invite herself; her husband, Tony; and their two children over for dinner the following night once she found out my mother and Melissa (mostly Melissa) would be cooking. I sort of hustled her off the phone because I needed to go upstairs and talk with Richard and, if I could find him, Paul.
Paul actually came looking for me to say that I owed him because Maxie hit the roof—or would have if she hadn’t already been sitting on it—when she heard she had to stoop to using my laptop even for a few hours while Richard toiled away on hers. He said the fury of her tantrum was similar to what Hurricane Sandy had unleashed on much of the Jersey Shore years earlier, which was actually a sort of tasteless hyperbole. There are still people trying to get their shore houses back together from Sandy.
Nonetheless, Paul agreed we should go talk to Richard about his progress and the idea that he might have been holding back part of his story for reasons unknown. We checked on the room I’d given Richard but didn’t find him there. Which was weird.
“I can’t understand why he’d go somewhere else,” Paul said. “He knows we need him to look through those files.”
“He said that he wanted a room that has a desk so he could put the laptop down on something,” I remembered. “Is it that taxing on your arms?”
Paul made a noncommittal face. “Not really. You’ll recall Maxie managed to carry you in the air for quite some distance a while back. But Richard is not used to his current state of existence and might still be operating on the same standards he had when he was alive. Which rooms have desks?” Paul has been living in my house with all my furniture for years and there are still rooms I don’t think he’s ever visited.
“My old bedroom has a little pulldown shelf on the dresser that I used as a desk,” I said. “But Penny Desmond is in that room now. You don’t think Richard would use a room that a guest has taken, do you?”
“If Penny is not there now, it’s possible,” he answered. “Richard wouldn’t concern himself with someone’s effects, but he wouldn’t want to be there working when she was present.”
But a check of Penny’s room did not locate Richard. It’s a small enough room (albeit with a private bath, which means I can charge more for it) that one glance told the story there. I stood on the outside landing with Paul and ran through the furniture inventory in my mind.
“The only actual desk desk is in Liss’s room,” I said to Paul.
He nodded and started rising toward the ceiling. “Hang on,” I said. “That’s my daughter’s room. Only I get to go up there when she’s not around. So I’ll check. And if Richard is there, that’s what I’m going to tell him.” Paul offered no protest.
There’s a dumbwaiter/elevator to Melissa’s attic bedroom that Jeannie’s husband, Tony, installed when I decided to convert the space for my daughter. But the ceiling in the hallway beneath that room still has the pulldown stairs I used when it was just an attic. I reached for the handle, pulled down the stairs, and unlocked the hinge on the panel to get inside.
Richard wasn’t there either. I found that comforting and oddly irritating. Was this ghost playing hide-and-seek with us? I climbed back down the stairs, folded them back up, and reported my lack of progress to Paul.
He looked thoughtful, and then his eyes brightened as much as they can. “Richard is my brother,” he said.
“No kidding. I have a cousin named Roberto. What’s your point?”
“Some of the thought patterns are the same. It’s genetic. We have personalities that aren’t identical, but the basis is roughly similar.” He continued this babble as he sunk into the floor.
“Where are you going?” I asked just before his mouth reached the carpet.
“The basement.”
Of course Richard was there when I arrived a minute later, panting a little from running down two flights of stairs. The basement had always been Paul’s place to do his best thinking and to get away from the chaos my house can become. I should have thought to look for his brother there first.
Richard was using a huge stereo speaker from the good old days as a rest for Maxie’s laptop computer, and the two ghost brothers were already involved in conversation when I got there.
“I believe that is something I had said when I arrived,” Richard was saying. “I was killed because I was getting too close to discovering who had actually murdered Keith Johnson.”
“You didn’t say that,” I said when I’d caught my breath. “You said that you were working on the case and then somebody killed you. I’d remember if you’d mentioned being close to making a breakthrough that might have led to your own murder.”
“Whether you said it before or not, you’re saying it now,” Paul pointed out. He’s all about getting things back on topic as long as it’s about the case. Ask him about anything else and he’ll look slightly pained, like you’re trying to divulge deeply buried emotional baggage. Is that a mixed metaphor? You can bury baggage, although the manufacturers don’t recommend it. “What had you found, and who was the murderer you had discovered?”
Richard held up a finger like a professor about to reveal an especially interesting law of physics. Assuming there is such a thing. “Well, I hadn’t discovered the actual murderer yet, but I was very close. Looking at these files just reminded me of the process.”
“Show me,” his brother said.
“Well, hang on. As a defense attorney, my job was not to solve the crime. My job was to prove that the accused, Cassidy Van Doren, had not committed it. So that had been the thrust of my research the whole time. But in researching the physical facts of the murder, it had become clear, as I’m certain I did tell you before”—he gave me a telling glance, but I chose not to respond—“that Cassidy could not have lifted her stepfather into the tub nor held him down long enough under the water to drown him.”
“Surely not,” Paul said. “But that does not lead to another possible killer.”
“It does when you realize that if Cassidy didn’t drown Keith, and he was still drowned, someone else might have done it,” Richard said. Surely he had missed his calling in life when he’d turned his back on the lucrative line of telling people obvious things. “So I focused on discovering exactly who could have had the strength to perform these tasks, particularly among those who might have had access to his room in the bed-and-breakfast.”
“Was it common knowledge that Keith was taking a long weekend in Cranbury?” Paul asked Richard.
“Well, he wasn’t hiding it as far as I can tell,” Richard said. “I’m not sure he went around telling everyone he knew, but it wasn’t an illicit affair with anyone. He was just taking a break at a rustic inn called the Cranbury Bog.”
That was so adorable, I wanted to adopt it. But Haunted Guesthouse had never really been my first choice for my own place. When I was planning it, I was calling it the Sea Breeze in my mind. That went out the window when I got hit with a bucket of wallboard compound.
“So who would have known he was there?” Paul asked. “Did his wife go there with him?”
“No. Adrian was at the house in Upper Saddle River. They were having new appliances installed in the kitchen, which was one of the reasons Keith wanted to be away, but his wife felt she needed to be there to supervise. Adrian is very good at supervising.”
If she were half as good at supervising as Richard’s wife, Miriam, was at being imperious, they could start a business where Miriam intimidated the contractors into dropping their rates and Adrian Johnson stood over them every step of the way through the job. Believe it or not, I think there might be a market for such a thing.
“Who was there, then?”
“Well, clearly Cassidy, since she was found with the body.” Richard seemed to be teaching a class in which Paul and I were not the brightest students. Which was a pity, seeing as how no one else was here. “But I think Keith’s business partner, Hunter Evans, had taken a room in the inn as well. The innkeeper, Robin Witherspoon, would know if he had any visitors while he was there. I was just looking into that when this happened to me.”
Paul’s eyes narrowed; that last part had sent off an alarm in his head. “Who in your firm, or anywhere else, knew your thinking on this case, Richard? Who knew what you were working on exactly?”
Richard’s head seemed to back up on his neck a little as he straightened in his faux sitting position. “Paul, if you are suggesting that anyone in my firm might have been trying to send Cassidy to jail and murdered me to accomplish that, I will have to protest on their behalf. I have found no proof of that being true, and I have looked.”
Before Paul could be cowed by his older brother, I jumped in. “Protest all you want,” I told Richard. “Who knew what you were working on?” I think Paul gave me a glance of appreciation, but I didn’t want to telegraph it to Richard by making eye contact.
Richard looked at Paul, who had asked the original question. “My assistant, Tracy Cheswick. The first chair on the case, Leonard Krantz. I imagine there are a few others in the Woodbridge office who saw some of my memos, although no one but those two were on my e-mail list.”
I looked at Paul. “That’s a lot of people.”
He nodded. “And if Richard is right about Cassidy’s life being in danger, we don’t have a great deal of time. Perhaps the first thing to do is to contact her and ask to meet.”
Again with meeting the potential murderess. Under the circumstances I supposed it was the thing to do. “It’ll be outdoors, and you’ll be there with me, Paul,” I said. “And we’re not doing it before tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Paul hates delays in a case.
“We have a spook show in twenty minutes, and then I have to pick up Melissa from school; it’s my day. And I do intend to be here and not at Cassidy Van Doren’s place when my husband gets home tonight.”
Paul put up a hand as if to stop traffic. “Fine. But call today so we can set something up for tomorrow.”
“Do you have Cassidy’s cell phone number?” I asked Richard.
He pointed toward the screen on Maxie’s laptop, which I decided was going to be returned to Maxie for the rest of the day right after the spook show. “Good.” I looked at Paul. “You can text her and ask her for the meeting.” When Paul couldn’t leave the grounds and I had to go do detective stuff, I bought him a cheap cell phone so he could text me. He can’t be heard on a phone, but he can push buttons.
“Me? Shouldn’t it be you? You’re the one she’ll be able to see.”
“I don’t want her having my cell phone number,” I said. “I don’t care if she has yours, and neither do you.” Then a thought struck me. “You don’t have your phone on you, do you, Richard?”
“I’m afraid not. I imagine it was confiscated with the rest of my effects.”
“Shame. That would have gotten a rise out of her.”
But Paul was still protesting being pressed into service. “Alison, you can call on my phone. There is no reason to do this via text message.”
I headed for the stairs out of the basement. “My house, my rules,” I told Paul.
I didn’t look back for his reaction.