“The hotel maid?” My mother looked at me as if wondering whether I needed a nice bowl of chicken soup and some rest. “He thinks Richard was killed by the hotel maid? What possible motivation could she have to kill him with a steam iron?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. We were in the den at the guesthouse, having been banished from the kitchen by Melissa, who was making a lasagna and could not be interrupted. My mother taught her to cook, but now the pupil had eclipsed the master. Mom didn’t seem to think that was sad. “None of the staff in the hotel would have known Richard well enough to want to kill him. He’d been there a few weeks, but mostly he was in an office or the courthouse. He didn’t stay in the hotel except at night.”
“That’s right.” Richard was standing just a few inches off the floor, legs mostly encased in a sofa whose other end boasted my husband. Luckily Josh didn’t know Richard was there and wouldn’t much have minded if he’d known. He’s so used to these one-sided conversations now that he’s become really good at figuring out what the invisible (to him) people have said. I don’t have to recap nearly as much as I used to. “I didn’t know one name aside from the evening desk clerk, whose name was . . . Sam, maybe?”
Let’s be charitable and assume that Richard’s memory lapse was due to his still being recently departed and not because he was imperious and superior. He was Paul’s brother, and Paul was neither of those things.
“Okay,” Mom said. “We can assume it wasn’t the maid unless Sam put her up to it. So where does that leave us? Why does the detective think that’s what happened?”
“Because it fits his set of facts and it’s the easiest solution that does so,” Paul said. His quiet tone bore some authority, and he was avoiding eye contact, looking mostly at the floor. “It leaves us with two murders to consider and a very large pool of suspects we have not yet interviewed.”
He was right about that. You could book a cruise ship with the number of people who could have killed Keith Johnson in the Cranbury Bog, and that was compounded by the fact that Paul had been unable so far to locate Keith on the Ghosternet. But luckily Kobielski had given us a few details we hadn’t already known about Richard’s murder, and that helped us eliminate some suspects from consideration.
“Keith Johnson’s son, Braden, has a verifiable alibi for the night you were killed, Richard,” Paul told his brother. “So do his business partner and his wife. His daughter, Erika, has an alibi, but it’s just that she was home alone. And that doesn’t take into account the possibility that the two murders were committed by at least two separate people.”
I heard some clanging of pots in the kitchen but didn’t react because Liss doesn’t like it when you assume something has gone wrong. Because it almost always hasn’t. She would no doubt be out shortly; she hates missing a conference on an investigation.
“I don’t think we should be concentrating on my situation,” Richard said. “Cassidy is still alive and needs our help. There’s very little that can be done that would make the slightest difference in my circumstances.”
I can’t say why, but that struck me as incredibly odd. “Don’t you care who killed you?” I asked him. “That’s the worst thing one person can do to another. Doesn’t it bother you to know somebody wanted you dead?”
Josh smiled a little. He loves it when I get assertive.
“I wonder about it, but it should not be the priority at the moment,” Richard answered, back as straight as a two-by-four. Or if he had one stuck down his pants. “I have literally all the time in the world after Keith Johnson’s killer is unmasked and Cassidy is out of danger.”
“I am not convinced Cassidy is in any immediate peril,” Paul said. “She has been under suspicion and out on bail for months now, and there has been no indication anyone is trying to do her harm. Investigating your murder might help us solve the other.”
“Enough,” Richard said. “I will not hear of it.” He stared at Paul.
“Very well,” my friend said.
I wasn’t standing for that. We needed to investigate Richard’s murder if we wanted to figure out the whole puzzle, and now that I was in for one investigation, both seemed only natural. Paul could curl up at Richard’s supposedly wilting gaze, but I didn’t have to. “It makes sense to do things Paul’s way,” I told Richard. “I’ve found that he really has a good plan most of the time if not all the time.” Paul did not glance in my direction.
“Really?” Richard said.
“Really,” I answered. Richard saw the look on my face and turned toward Paul.
Richard began to argue the point with his younger brother (who wasn’t putting up that much of a fight, I thought) as my cell phone buzzed. I took it out to find a text message from Madame Lorraine: No sign of Paul Harrison yet. Is it possible you meant George Harrison? It was best to resist answering right away because having Madame Lorraine as an aggrieved party would probably end up with us in a witches’ duel I would undoubtedly lose, not being a witch. I stuck the phone back into my pocket, then decided to take it out again and text back: Have found Paul Harrison. Thank you for your help.
Foolishly, I thought that would end it with Madame Lorraine.
I was distracted by my father floating in through the front room and announcing that Jeannie, Tony, and their two children had arrived. He needn’t have bothered, since I immediately heard their minivan roll up the gravel driveway almost to my back door and the unpacking procedure begin.
It took a good five minutes of Paul and Richard hashing out their priorities and Paul finally acquiescing to Richard’s wishes before Jeannie was, from the sound of it, herding her brood through my kitchen, where she had undoubtedly assumed I’d be (I spend a lot of time in there for someone who doesn’t cook at all), and out the swinging door into the den.
Since it was June, there wasn’t the shedding of many layers of clothing we’d been accustomed to a few months earlier. Oliver, Jeannie’s elder child, was now a three-year-old and rushing from place to place in search of new things to discover and possibly destroy. Their daughter, Molly, who was determined not to be Oliver and so was already walking at a year old, was less steady on her feet and not as bent on causing havoc. She looked around the room; saw at least Mom, Josh, and me (I have a feeling very young children can see ghosts based on Oliver’s occasional reactions); and stopped, maybe feeling a bit overwhelmed despite having seen all of us many times before.
“Who are these people?” Richard wanted to know. “Were you expecting them?” I wasn’t sure if he was nervous about them being in the room with him or just upset about a brood of middle-class New Jerseyans descending upon him when he was trying to organize a murder investigation—or at least watch as his brother did so.
Naturally I didn’t answer him directly. Tony gets the whole ghost thing and is fairly down with it, although he is nervous around Maxie, who luckily wasn’t in the room at the moment. Maxie used to think (in the pre-Everett era) that Tony was cute, and Tony, married to my best friend and also still alive, did not respond as she might have hoped.
Jeannie, on the other hand, refuses to deal with the ghosts in any way, shape, or form. She is living under the delusion that I advertise a haunted guesthouse because I am a genius marketer (if only) and am running a brilliant scam on the people who come to my house to experience it. This despite her having seen things fly across the room, walls be destroyed, and other assorted unexplainable phenomenon. That’s Jeannie, the Napoleon of denial.
“They are friends, Richard,” Paul informed his brother. “There is no reason to be concerned.”
There were plenty of reasons to be concerned, but Jeannie and her family were none of them. I just feel it’s best to point that out.
Melissa walked out of the kitchen, from which a delicious aroma was already emanating. She surveyed the room, picked out Molly among the crowd of living and less-living entities, and walked over to pick her up. “Hi, Molly!” she cooed to the little girl. “What’s new?”
Molly, who might be able to say “Ma” on a good day, just gurgled a little and smiled at her pal.
“In any event,” Paul went on, “if we are concentrating our efforts on Keith Johnson’s death, we are going to need a police report from the Cranbury officers who first entered the scene and whatever has been generated by the Middlesex County prosecutor’s office. Are those in your files, Richard?”
Richard said they were, and Paul instructed him to wrest the laptop out of Maxie’s hands or—less likely to cause an international incident—to ask Maxie to find those files and print them out on the printer I keep in a corner of the movie room for guests who can’t completely disengage even when on vacation. Richard and Paul exited via the ceiling because Paul has had considerably more experience dealing with Maxie.
Jeannie unpacked her massive diaper bag, which had enough supplies for the baby population of Topeka, Kansas, and watched Melissa swing Molly in her arms. If it had been Oliver at that age, Jeannie would no doubt have been instructing Liss on the proper baby-swinging method approved by the American Academy of Pediatrics. In fact, I’m fairly sure she did deliver that lecture on more than one occasion. But now with a second child her parenting style had become, let’s say, more relaxed.
“She looks so cute with Molly,” she said to me. “Melissa’s going to be a great mom.”
I inhaled sharply, then let it out, realizing Jeannie meant that to be a long-term compliment.
“Of course she will,” my mother piled on. “That girl will be amazing at whatever she decides to do.”
Not actually objecting to this meeting of the Melissa Kerby Admiration Society, I did try to steer the conversation back to something more present day. I looked at Tony. “Have you found me a steel beam guy for that hole in my ceiling yet?” I asked.
Tony, who hadn’t examined the gaping hole in my den as often as my father (strictly because Dad has more frequent opportunities), reflexively looked up at the spot. “It’s not that I can’t find someone to do the work,” he reminded me. “I could do it myself. The problem is that you don’t want to pay for it.”
“That’s not true,” I protested. “I don’t mind paying for the work. I just mind paying that much for the work.” The last estimate had been for four thousand dollars. I’d searched through every sofa cushion in the house and so far had $1.38.
“So we’re at a stalemate,” Tony said. “You know I’m not gouging you, Alison. I have to pay my crew. I’m not taking a dime on the job.”
“Of course I know you’re not gouging me. But you know I don’t have that much lying around, and I’m not taking out an equity loan on the place.”
Tony shrugged. We each knew the other’s reasoning. There just wasn’t anything either of us could do about it.
Paul came phasing through the den wall wearing a light windbreaker over his T-shirt. That indicated he had something small or flat hidden in his clothes. Sure enough, once in the den he looked for a spot out of Jeannie’s line of sight—not that it would have mattered, since she would have just rationalized—and pulled out a fairly thin sheaf of papers.
That was the moment Jeannie scooped Oliver off the floor and ran at top speeds for the downstairs bathroom, a move every parent of a three-year-old knows all too well. It opened up the room for conversation because Tony just lets this stuff wash off his back and he was over at the exposed beam examining the bullet damage with my father. Tony didn’t know Dad was there, but did that really matter?
Molly, I noticed, was watching the area in which Paul flew in with a delighted grin on her face.
“This is the Cranbury police report on Keith Johnson’s murder,” Paul said excitedly. “And I believe there is significant information here.” He floated himself over quickly to a side table and spread the papers out on top for me to peruse. Melissa put Molly down, a tad reluctantly, and made her way to the table to have a look. She’d been denied this long and wasn’t going to let it go one moment longer.
My cell phone buzzed. Madame Lorraine: Paul Harrison is in great pain. She says that about everybody. I didn’t answer.
“See here,” Paul said, pointing to the top form, which had been filled out by an Officer Hirway. “The cause of death was clearly drowning, but the officer notes that Cassidy Van Doren was absolutely bone dry when he and his partner arrived. For a larger man to have been held down by a woman Cassidy’s size, there would have been a good deal of splashing, you’d think. Cassidy was not showing any signs of having interacted with water. There was a small towel nearby, which Cassidy said she’d used on her hands after checking Keith for a pulse.”
“Richard said the physical evidence didn’t seem to favor Cassidy as the killer,” I reminded him. “This bears out that opinion, but it doesn’t really add anything.”
Paul was grinning broadly. He not only loved that I was engaged in the case, but he had a secret he was about to reveal that he could barely contain. The man is incorrigible.
“There was some denim fabric in the bathwater,” Melissa said. She pointed at the form.
That took some of the wind out of Paul’s sails. His grin faded to a tight smile. “Yes,” he said. “That matches up with the idea that the person who killed Keith Johnson was in the tub with him, possibly to hold his head underwater while he drowned, because Johnson was not wearing denim.”
“What about the water?” I asked just to remind them I had some part in these proceedings. When we had dealt with a drowning previously, the kind of water found in the victim’s lungs had been a productive clue.
“What about what water?” Jeannie was walking back into the room with Oliver, who was looking quite pleased with himself.
“I was asking Melissa if she had water boiling,” I said. While it’s possible—and sometimes entertaining—to let Jeannie find her own rationalizations for the ghost experiences she has, it saves an endless amount of time if I just cover for myself right on the spot, I’ve decided.
“No, you don’t have to boil the noodles for lasagna,” Liss answered. Not only is she able to help me gloss over something for Jeannie, but she also likes to teach me things about cooking. It’s adorable, as if I’ll ever use the information she gives me.
Oliver toddled off to play with some toys Tony had laid out on the floor across the den. It’s the largest room in the house and has the most playing space on the floor. Molly, not yet certain of her walking skills, sort of cruised after him, holding herself up on various pieces of furniture. I’d gotten a few of Melissa’s old toys from the basement and left them—cleaned, of course—near where Jeannie had set up the kids’ area. They headed for Liss’s toys because they were not familiar.
“In any event, the denim fibers found in the water is interesting,” Paul continued. He was on a roll and not to be denied. I pretended I wasn’t listening to him as my mother sat in one of the closer armchairs claiming to be “tiring out.” She wanted to listen to Paul without being blatant about it too. Josh even sat in a facing chair to make it look good. “Where did it come from, and whose property was it? If Cassidy Van Doren did just find the body of her stepfather, she was fully dressed when the police arrived, so it would appear someone else had clearly been in the room.”
Jeannie started in on some story about her job at an insurance company, about how her boss was ridiculous, and Josh, who at least could hear her, nodded dutifully. I just love that man.
Melissa smothered a small laugh.
Luckily my father was there and could talk to Paul. “So whose jeans were they? Were they a particular brand or something?”
“No, we weren’t that lucky.” Paul was pleased to have someone paying him attention even when he knew those of us still using oxygen couldn’t do that. “We don’t know anything about the denim except that it was there; the county lab isn’t that well equipped. They could have been bought in any clothing store.”
“Seems to me it’s likely a woman,” my father said. “The only male suspect you have is the business partner who was with him in the hotel, and I bet he wears a business suit to bed. Those business guys are like that.”
“That’s very good, Jack,” Paul said.
My mother gave Dad a proud smile when Jeannie thought Mom was looking at a poster I have hanging on the wall of a pair of flip-flops left on the beach. It’s a classy place, my guesthouse.
“I don’t think we can find out anything else about the fibers, but the county investigator report should show if there was makeup or aftershave in the water,” Paul, that master of mirth, answered. “That’s something we’ll have to get Maxie working on.”
On cue, Maxie and Everett dropped down through the ceiling. She was in her usual outfit of skintight jeans and a black T-shirt, this one bearing the legend, “LEGEND.”
“Where’s my computer?” she demanded. “I was supposed to get it back.”
I glanced at Paul, noted Jeannie was still bending Josh’s ear, and moved over to the table where he’d spread out the printed documents. Paul knew I’d have to be very quiet so he moved down toward me to hear.
“I thought Richard was giving that back to Maxie when he was done printing out the police report,” I whispered.
“That was my understanding.” Paul was whispering too for no logical reason. “I’ll find him.” He moved through the wall and vanished.
“This is getting inconvenient,” Maxie said. “I need that laptop or I can’t keep up with Grey’s Anatomy.” Well, at least she had a good reason.
“We’re working on it,” I hissed, maybe too loudly because Jeannie looked up.
Paul phased back through the ceiling this time, Richard close behind him. “I understand there is some question about the whereabouts of the laptop computer,” Richard said.
“Damn right,” Maxie shot back. “You were supposed to give it back to me and you didn’t.”
“I did. I left it for you on the table in the room I was using, as we agreed.”
Maxie had originally suggested Richard leave the laptop in Melissa’s room when he was finished with it (which would be okay because Melissa had given permission), but he had been adamant about not going into “the little girl’s bedroom” and said she could come get it at the appropriate time. I was guessing now that hadn’t gone as expected.
“Well, it’s not there,” Maxie insisted.
“Yes, I’ve seen that. I went with you and looked. I know it isn’t there. But it was when I left the room.”
Maxie fixed me with a glare. “My laptop is missing,” she said.
“That’s not all,” Mom said with a dry rasp in her voice. “Look.” She pointed. We looked.
On the opposite wall, right next to my America’s National Parks calendar, was a piece of paper with very bold print in a very large font reading, DON’T LOOK FOR ME.
And it was being held up on the wall by one of my thicker kitchen knives.