Shelby Dunston tucked her legs beneath her the way she does and smiled brightly.
“Who is the prettiest girl you know?” she asked.
“You mean besides Nina?” I said. “Your daughter Victoria, unless Katie’s also in the room, in which case it’s a tie.”
Victoria called to me from the kitchen, “Good answer.”
“I remember when you would have said it was me,” Shelby said.
“It’s time to face facts, Shel—the years have not been kind to you.”
That’s when she threw a pillow at me.
“Stop flirting with my wife,” Bobby said.
“I just called her an ugly old crone,” I said. “How is that flirting with your wife?”
“Ugly old crone?” Shelby repeated.
Victoria stepped into the living room and knelt at the coffee table between me and her mother. She had half a dozen sections from a tangerine on a small plate and started eating them one at a time.
“Personally, Mom, I think you look fantastic,” she said.
“Thank you, honey.”
“For a woman your age.”
“There’s an old saying,” Shelby said. “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Mama ain’t happy.”
“They’re just teasing you, Shel,” Bobby said. “The truth is, if everyone looked like you do, the word ‘beauty’ would lose all its meaning.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Victoria said.
I tossed the pillow at Shelby’s smiling face; she caught it and set it in her lap.
“I wish I had said that,” I told her.
“I’m sure you will,” Bobby said. “The first chance you get.”
“Okay, Mama’s feeling a little bit better,” Shelby said. “But you still haven’t explained what you’re going to do.”
“About what?” I asked.
“About Leland Hayes. How are you going to rattle his cage?”
“There’s a line that’s been repeating over and over again in my head for at least a week now—‘there is no such things as ghosts.’”
“I would think that after everything that’s happened, you might have changed your mind.”
“That’s the thing, Shel—everything that’s happened. Kayla Janas almost convinces me, the way she led us to Ruth Nowak, her sincerity. But what I’ve learned about Hannah Braaten and her private investigators and how her business works makes me think it’s a load of BS like Bobby believes.”
“Leave me out of it,” he said.
“What? You’re wavering?”
“Robert Nowak and Molly Finnegan are in jail today. Yesterday, they weren’t.”
“Still … My involvement in all of this goofiness began because a couple of psychic mediums said that Leland Hayes would pay his son, and I don’t know who else, a hefty sum of money if they would shoot me. I can’t help but notice that no one has actually tried to do that yet. Except for maybe the guy in the red Toyota Avalon.”
“Yeah, about that,” Bobby said. “Turns out it was Frank Fogelberg’s ex-wife’s teenage lover who pulled the trigger. We have video of him snatching the Avalon from the Holiday Stationstore and a fingerprint on the back of the car’s rearview mirror. Detectives Gafford and Shipman gathered him up late this afternoon. I’m waiting to hear if he did it on his own or if she put him up to it.”
“Teenage?” Shelby asked.
“Old men date young women all the time,” Victoria said. “Why can’t old women?”
“Good point.”
“You.” Bobby pointed at his daughter. “You need to pick your friends carefully.”
“Why is it that every time someone else commits a criminal act, it’s Katie and me who get a lecture? I mean, all of our lives you’ve been doing this.”
“Wait,” I said. “You couldn’t have told me about Fogelberg when I walked through the door? You had to wait for, what, a convenient time to slip it into the conversation?”
“Suddenly I’m the town crier?” Bobby said. “I’m supposed to deliver the news?”
“If Fogelberg’s shooting was a coincidence—how often does that happen, by the way? If Fogelberg’s shooting was a coincidence, that just adds fuel to the fire. Or rather takes fuel from the fire. Is that a thing? The point is, it’s just another reason to leave Leland’s cage unrattled.”
“Do it for the money,” Shelby said.
“Hell with it.”
“The fun, then.”
“What fun? All I’ve gotten out of this adventure so far is bad dreams.”
“Bad dreams?” Victoria asked.
“It’s why your father keeps lecturing you. He doesn’t want you to do dumb things like we did.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’?” Bobby asked. He knew what I was referring to; he just wanted to move the conversation into less painful territory.
Thank you, Bobby, my inner voice said.
“The thing is,” I said, “I’m now inclined to agree with Nina that it’s all a load of hooey.”
“Where is Nina?” Victoria asked.
“At the club, where else?”
“What are you going to do?” Shelby asked.
“About Nina?”
“About Leland Hayes. You’re not just going to give up.”
“Give up what, Shel? A ghost hunt? C’mon.” I gestured toward Bobby. “Tell her.”
He shrugged in reply.
“Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible,” Victoria said. “Albert Einstein.”
“You know, there’s such a thing as being too smart for your own good,” I told her.
“No, there isn’t.”
“Besides,” Shelby said, “what do you have to lose?”
“My self-respect.”
“Phfffff.”
“Okay, letting that slide, even if I did decide to do this, I’m left with the obvious question—pretty girls aside, how do you rattle a dead man’s cage?”
“The same way you rattle the living,” Bobby said. “You threaten what’s important to them.”
Hannah Braaten seemed pleased to hear from me. Esti not so much. They agreed to meet me in the living room of their home on Mount Curve Boulevard, which was much tidier than it had been the previous time I was there. Hannah sat in a stuffed chair opposite me. She was wearing a short skirt and a tight top, and she kept crossing and uncrossing her long, shapely legs while we chatted.
Do you think she’s trying to rattle your cage? my inner voice asked.
Esti sat in a chair positioned at a ninety-degree angle from mine, giving me the unpleasant feeling that I was being outflanked. She was wearing jeans and a sweater and hardly moved at all.
Karl Anderson was nowhere to be seen.
“It seems to me that we did not part on the best of terms the last time we spoke,” Hannah said.
“I’m not entirely sure that’s going to change,” I said.
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m asking for your help.”
“Help to do what?”
“Contact Leland Hayes.”
“I told you before,” Hannah said. “I can’t just Google his name. I can’t dial him up. I need a personal attachment to draw on. Besides, haven’t you heard? I’m a phony.”
“I never said that.”
“Your friend Commander Dunston did, in no uncertain terms.”
“It’s possible he’s had a change of heart.”
“Is that because we found Ruth Nowak?”
“We didn’t find her. Kayla Janas did.”
“Are you calling me a fake again, McKenzie?”
“No, I’m calling you a journeyman ballplayer. It’s like the kid they have playing shortstop for the Minnesota Twins these days. He’s pretty good. Actually, he’s very good. But he ain’t Derek Jeter.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Hall of Fame baseball player, won four World Series rings with the Yankees. Never mind.”
You’re killing me, Hannah.
“My point is, you’re inconsistent,” I said. “From everything I’ve learned, though, you are honest. An honest woman. Except for the Leland Hayes reading. Only I think that was all about impressing the TV producer who was sitting in your audience at the time and taking notes.”
I expected an explosion of anger and denial. Instead, Hannah stared quietly at me before turning her head and staring quietly at her mother. Esti squirmed for a few moments before rising to her feet.
“It was necessary,” she said. “I told you.”
“It was not necessary,” Hannah replied. “I told you.”
“It all worked out.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“Yes, actually,” I said. “It did.”
Both women looked at me.
“It was on the Monday before the reading that you heard from the production company that they would begin immediately filming a pilot episode against the possibility of turning your life into Model Medium. You wanted to give them something dramatic, but not all of your readings are dramatic, are they? Sometimes you can’t deliver. Only this time you felt that you needed to deliver, so you hired Karl Anderson to hedge your bet.
“Anderson researched the people who were going to be in the audience and found Ryan. He quickly learned about Leland, about the robbery, about me, and about the missing money. It took him all of a half hour to get the grisly details. I know because that’s how long it took me to do the exact same thing with my own computer. It was just too good a story not to tell, a dramatic way to end your reading. How could you not use it?”
“It was all my idea,” Esti said.
“I have no doubt, but it was Hannah who did the emoting.”
“I’m embarrassed by all of this,” Hannah said.
“The thing is—you hired Anderson the day before the reading. Not the week before, not the month or the year before. Based on that and what others have told me about you and your readings, I’m willing to believe that this was a one-off.”
“Mr. Anderson doesn’t work for us anymore,” Hannah said.
As far as we know.
“Still, you need to be careful about stepping over the line,” I said. “I speak from experience, Hannah. You step over the line once, it becomes easier to step over it again.”
She nodded, yet I had no idea if she understood what I was saying or not.
“It probably would have all ended there,” I said. “Except you didn’t count on Shelby Dunston being at the reading, a dear friend of mine. Like any good actress, though, you played out the scene for your audience—the woman with the clipboard. A couple of days later, I went to see you. ’Course, you were expecting that; Shelby had warned you. That’s why you had me checked out, why you were ready with Agatha and Mr. Mosley.”
“No,” Hannah said. “They did come to talk to you. I didn’t fake that.” She took a deep breath and finished her thought with the exhale. “I don’t expect you to believe me.”
Hannah is just trying to salvage at least some of her reputation, my inner voice said. Unless … If Anderson didn’t tell Hannah about Agatha and Mr. Mosley … Did they really come from the other side to see you?
I shook my head to dislodge the thought.
“I saw Anderson at the Minnetonka Community Education Center,” I said.
“That was my doing,” Esti said. “After the way Ryan attacked my daughter at the reading, I wanted him to watch out for her. She wasn’t supposed to know.”
“I didn’t know,” Hannah told me. “Not until you came to the house that one time. I didn’t tell you I knew Anderson because…”
“You were embarrassed,” I said.
“Yes. And a little ashamed.”
“When I told you that a second psychic medium had confirmed what you told Ryan at the reading, that surprised the hell out of you.”
“To say the least.”
“Kayla Janas is Derek Jeter. She has crazy skills, you’ve said so yourself. She was able to conjure Leland—I still don’t know how that’s done. Except Leland didn’t actually tell Ryan that he’d trade the cash for my head until after Ryan asked if that’s what Leland wanted. It was you who planted the idea in Ryan’s head, and it was Ryan who gave it to Leland through Kayla. Fortunately, Ryan’s a good guy despite everything that’s been done to him. He blew Leland off. Only I didn’t.”
“No.”
“That’s when you saw another opportunity.”
Again Hannah stared at her mother.
“A way to score more points with the production company,” I said. “Find the money. Save me from Leland Hayes. On camera. That’s why you kept Anderson on the job. That’s why you invited me to the festival in time to hear your less scrupulous pals chant my name.”
“I didn’t do that,” Hannah insisted. “I promise you I didn’t.” She turned to glare at Esti. “Mother?”
Esti shook her head vehemently. “No,” she said. “No. McKenzie, whatever you think of me, you must know I’m not so foolish as to involve so many people in a, in a…”
“Lie?” I asked.
Could that be real, too—all those psychics chanting your name? Is Leland that powerful? Maybe you should rethink this.
“In any case, finding the money, that’s what the meeting at the Dunston house was all about,” I said. “At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it. You might have your own narrative, and you’re welcome to it. Reveal it on TV. I don’t care.”
Esti sat down. She folded her hands and set them on her knees and leaned forward.
“What do you care about?” she asked.
“I want to find the money, too. Partly for Ryan’s sake. Partly for my own reasons.”
“Will Ryan agree to a reading?” Hannah asked.
“No. We had a long discussion about that last night. He wants the money found because he thinks it’ll help him move on with his life. Except he doesn’t want to have any contact with his old man ever again. Plus, he’s concerned about being seen on TV, about having his name mentioned on TV. He said his life was tough enough already without him becoming even more of a curiosity.”
“Are you willing to go on TV?” Esti asked.
“I was afraid you’d ask that question. I really don’t want to. I was hoping we could do this on the sly, and after we find the money, then you could bring in the TV people, give an interview, explain it all as dramatically as you like in front of the cameras while you hand over the cash to the insurance company.”
“No,” Esti said.
“No?”
“If you want us, if you want Hannah, to do this, then you’ll do it on our terms.”
“Mother,” Hannah said.
“I insist.”
“I could always go to Kayla Janas,” I said.
“The inexperienced twenty-year-old girl who sees dead people?”
“She’s very gifted,” Hannah said.
“She’s a child playing with matches.”
I would have been annoyed by the argument against Kayla except I had already made it in my head before I called the Braatens.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay, what?” Esti wanted to know.
“I’ll appear on TV, but only if it’s absolutely necessary.”
“It will be. You’ll need to sign some releases before we begin.”
Are you really going to let them make you a reality TV star?
“As long as it’s understood that Ryan’s name is not to be mentioned, not once,” I said. “You need to guarantee that.”
“This is all moot anyway,” Hannah said. “I cannot bring Leland Hayes over from the other side if he doesn’t want to come. Even if Ryan had agreed to cooperate, I still wouldn’t be able to make that promise.”
“Leland isn’t on the other side,” I said. “You told me yourself that you thought he was earthbound.”
“It doesn’t matter where he is. I still need someone or at least something with a personal attachment to him, and even then, what if he refuses to come through, what if he refuses to answer our questions? I’m the one who’s going to look like an idiot—like a fraud. Not you.”
“That’s where the threat comes in.”
“How do you threaten a spirit?”
“I tell him that if he doesn’t do what we ask, I’ll buy his house and burn it to the ground, let the Minneapolis Fire Department use it for practice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” I asked. “I know where the sonuvabitch lives.”