An Open Spook (A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery) (3 page)

Sure enough, Maxine pulled Alison’s laptop computer out from under her coat. “All right, what am I supposed to be looking up?” she asked.

That was the very moment when all the lights in the house went out. The howling of the wind outside seemed much louder now.

“Okay,” Alison said after a moment, “things just got a little bit more difficult.”

Mr. McNamara, Alison’s lone guest for the week, arrived back from dinner in town not long after. Although Alison usually doesn’t serve food to the guests, she told me she’d invited him to eat with us because of the upcoming storm, but Mr. McNamara had declined, saying he liked the wind. And the rain, when he’d left, hadn’t started in earnest yet.

I hadn’t yet met Mr. McNamara (who insisted on being called “Mac”), so I was a little surprised to see a man in his late sixties (a few years older than I am) wearing worn jeans, a long-sleeved tie-dyed shirt and an American flag headband that kept his shoulder-length straight gray hair out of his eyes. Very Willie Nelson. Alison handed him a towel to dry his hair and face, introduced us and assured her guest that she’d taken every precaution to ensure the safety of the house and everyone in it. Also, she’d put a battery-powered heater in Mac’s bedroom. I was proud to see she was such a caring and intelligent innkeeper. The only other such unit was in Melissa’s attic bedroom.

Mac seemed completely unconcerned about his safety. He just smiled, dabbed at his eyes a bit while his clothes dripped on the kitchen floor, shrugged, said, “It’s all cool, man,” then asked if there was a policy against smoking in the house. Alison told him there was after glancing at Melissa, but again her guest seemed unperturbed. “Okeydokey,” he said. “Thought I might go back to my room and dig the storm from inside for a while. Okay if I play the harmonica?” Alison assured him that would be fine and asked him to come out and play for all of us, but he insisted he wasn’t skilled enough to play for an audience.

There were three flashlights in use at the moment, one for Alison, one for Melissa and one for me. The rest of the house was illuminated by candlelight. I offered my flashlight to Mac but he declined, saying the candles gave off a much more mellow light (it’s possible he used the word “groovy”), and then quietly walked toward his room, guided by a beam from Alison’s flashlight. She had left two candles in his room.

“What is his deal?” Maxine wondered aloud as soft harmonica music began. “Has he been in storage the past forty-five years?”

“Maxie,” Alison warned.

“What? I kind of like him.”

“Let’s get back to the subject,” Paul reminded her. “Our case.”

Clearly, with the power off, we had been forced to reconsider our plans. Alison could not, as she’d planned, give each of the ghosts a flashlight for looking inside walls and other spaces where the rest of us couldn’t go; we needed the flashlights just to get around. And there would be no Internet access until there was power, so Maxine was unable to do any research.

Even cell phone use had to be limited to absolute necessity, Alison pointed out, because we had no idea when our phones could be charged again.

“We can charge them in the car,” Melissa pointed out. “We still have chargers out there.”

Alison nodded. She always treats Melissa like an intelligent, responsible person and doesn’t talk down to her the way some people do to their children. “That’s true, but we’d be using up gas, and we don’t know if the gas stations’ power is out, too,” she explained. “Why don’t you go get the little radio so we can find out a little of what’s going on?”

Melissa ran toward the stairs with her flashlight and up toward her room, where she had a little battery-operated transistor radio that looks like a race car. “We can get the news, at least, as long as that’s working. You should have gone home when you had the chance,” Alison told me.

“I would have gone home if I’d wanted to,” I told her. “But I didn’t want to.”

“You are incorrigible,” my daughter scolded. “You can’t be corriged.”

The harmonica music had faded away by the time Maxine, almost completely invisible in the dim light of the candles, swooped down from the ceiling. “I was up on the roof,” she said. “There’s, like, all kinds of wind going on out there. I saw a whole tree fall over three houses down. It missed the house, but that blue Oldsmobile down the street has made its last run to the grocery store.”

“We won’t be able to search for the bracelet until sunlight.” Paul’s voice came from over me and to the right somewhere. I couldn’t see him at all.

“The bracelet is the least of our worries right now,” Alison said. “I hope the house is still all in one piece by morning.” Her I
could
see, and she looked extremely worried.

Her expression changed completely when Melissa’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs approaching us; she smiled bravely and looked up for her daughter. “Got the radio?” she asked.

“Yeah, but it’s not working. I don’t know the last time we changed the batteries.” Melissa’s voice wavered a little. The reality of the situation—being cut off, in the dark and in the middle of a massively powerful storm—was beginning to set in.

“Don’t worry, baby,” Alison assured her. “I have a lot of batteries in the fridge. I’ll tell you what—you and Grandma change out the batteries in the radio, and I’m going to go start a fire in the fireplace so we can have some light and a little heat for a while; how’s that?”

Alison didn’t wait for an answer but headed for the den, where the fireplace was. I took Melissa by the hand and brought her to the refrigerator. But I caught her hand when she reached for the handle.

“Remember, honey,” I said. “There’s no power coming to the fridge now. So we’re going to open it only when we really have to, and we’re going to be really fast about getting what we need. If the power stays off for a while, we might have to cook everything in there, but if it comes back on soon, we’ll be keeping everything inside cold. Okay?”

Melissa got a look on her face that made her so closely resemble Alison in the dim light I almost did a double take. “There’s not that much in there to cook, Grandma,” she said. “A couple of eggs, a tube of cinnamon rolls and I think some apples, maybe.” There were also the remnants of the dinner I’d cooked tonight, and some extra supplies I’d brought with me. Melissa didn’t know that yet.

“And some batteries,” I reminded her. “Ready?”

Melissa nodded, so I opened the refrigerator door and pointed the flashlight inside. She stuck her hand in like a dart and came out with a package of C batteries. I closed the door as soon as her hand cleared it. “Good job!” I said.

We had just replaced the batteries in the radio when Alison walked back into the kitchen. “That’s great!” she said when she heard the static. “Can you find the news station?”

It took a little doing, but we tuned in an all-news station from New York. The news was not at all encouraging. “Hurricane Sandy is wreaking havoc all through the area. Power is out for tens of thousands of homes on Long Island, and we’re starting to hear reports of water in lower Manhattan,” the newscaster intoned. New Yorkers. It’s all about them.

“This could be a while,” Alison said, looking at Paul.

“Indeed. I think Maxie and I should alternate keeping a watch on the outside, make sure no serious damage is done to the house if we can.”

Alison grinned what she’d call her dopey grin, her eyes filling just a little. “Thanks to both of you,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘both of you’?” Maxine asked. “I didn’t agree to that plan.” But she rose through the ceiling to take the first shift on the roof, which is one of her favorite spots anyway.

Alison looked at me. “Check your cell phone,” she said. “It’s weird that I haven’t heard from Jeannie or Tony.” Jeannie and her husband, Tony, were Alison’s closest friends. And she was right; it was unusual for them not to have called to see how she and Melissa were weathering the wind and rain, and to let us know how they and their infant son were handling the storm at their home in Lavallette.

But one look at each of our phones showed that they were both without service. “The tower must be out,” Alison said.

“There isn’t anything we can do right now,” I replied. “Come on, let’s go into the den and enjoy the fire.” We walked into the den, the largest room in the house, with its very tall and lovely wood-burning fireplace. With the windows boarded, it seemed darker than it would have otherwise, even though night had clearly fallen by now. Alison had put just two logs on the fire, though, and I saw that the pile of wood next to it was pretty paltry. She caught me giving the woodpile a doubtful look and said, “I have some more in the shed.”

“But nobody’s going outside tonight,” Melissa reminded her.

Alison hugged her daughter. “That’s right, baby. This should do us, though, and when you go to bed, we’ll take one or two of the guest blankets to keep you extra warm. Even with the ones I gave Mac, there are still plenty for us.”

“Alison,” Paul interrupted, “since we have the time, perhaps we can focus on the search we’ve undertaken on behalf of Robert Elliot.”

Alison closed her eyes for a moment in a gesture of frustration, I think. “We’re in the middle of a hurricane and we can’t really start searching until it’s light in here,” she reminded him. “What is there to talk about?”

But Paul seemed prepared for that question. “The real reason he wants to find that bracelet,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Melissa asked. “Don’t you think he wants it because his name is on it?”

“It’s possible he’s telling the truth,” Paul said, pacing in midair as he did when he was thinking through a problem. “But from what you’ve told me, Loretta, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of these bracelets distributed. Would he need to collect every single one in order to evolve to the next level?”

Melissa looked into the fire; it was always fascinating to watch the flames, but I think she was considering. “Maybe his . . . What’s the word, when it’s the thing that’s how you look at stuff?”

“Perspective,” Alison offered.

“Yeah, perspective. Maybe his perspective is different after all these years. Maybe it changed when he died. Did yours change, Paul?” Melissa can be very direct. Paul doesn’t like to be reminded that he’s no longer alive, but this time it didn’t seem to bother him because it was in service of his case.

“Yes, in some ways,” he answered, stroking his beard. “There are some things I don’t care very much about anymore, like the clothes I’m wearing or who’s elected to office. I do still keep track of the football scores.” When Paul says “football,” he means “soccer.” He was born in England and grew up in Canada. “But that’s more a way of passing the time now.”

“Did you care less about the people you knew?” Alison asked. I knew that when she first “discovered” Paul and Maxine, she’d asked if there was anyone he wanted her to contact, and Paul had declined. But later, he had asked her to find a woman he’d been especially fond of when he was alive, just to see if she was all right. That ended up being quite a story.

“I don’t think so,” Paul said after a moment. “The ones I cared about were still on my mind, although it’s possible I’ve forgotten some and don’t know it. But Robert Elliot has been a ghost for more than forty years. How is this relevant to his wanting to find the POW bracelet?”

“It raises questions,” Alison asked. “Why did Robert wait all these years to look for this one bracelet? Why is
this
the one that makes all the difference?”

Paul nodded, digesting the question. As he thought, probably without noticing, he lowered throught the air to floor level. “You’re doing better and better as an investigator, Alison,” he said, as if the rest of us didn’t know that already. “I wouldn’t have thought to ask that.”

“I don’t understand,” Melissa said, getting closer to the fire. “Sergeant Elliot asked us to find the bracelet. Does it matter why he wants it?”

Paul’s eyes, difficult to see in this light, seemed squinted. He paced more quickly, an action made all the more strange by the fact that he was up to his ankles in floor. “Not necessarily,” he said. “But Robert has all the same abilities as Maxie and me. He could have searched this house from top to bottom anytime he wanted to in the past forty years. Why haven’t we seen him before? Why didn’t he find the bracelet himself?”

“What reason would he have to lie to us?” I asked.

“A good question indeed,” Paul said.

We had no time to ponder it because there was a loud crash from somewhere inside the house. Alison leapt up at the first sound. “Was that a window?” she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. She ran toward the main entrance room, the area where the sound seemed to have come from.

Melissa and I followed immediately, but as it turned out Paul beat us all to the front room. “I think it came from there,” he said, pointing toward the largest guest bedroom Alison has in the house, the one with its own private bath just off the stairwell up to the second floor.

“That’s Mac’s room,” Alison said. “Paul . . .” But Paul was already heading toward the door.

He was stopped there by Maxine, who must have heard the noise from outside and come directly down through the room. She emerged through the door to Mac’s room holding up her hands. “He’s okay,” she said. “He fell out of bed.”

“Oh my!” I said. “But he’s all right?”

Maxine assured us Mac was unharmed. Alison knocked on his door anyway, since he couldn’t have been aware anyone had checked on him. Mac called out that he was all right, but that it would be best if Alison didn’t come in, since he was, as he put it, “dressed for bed.”

“You don’t want to know,” Maxine said. “And he’s right: Don’t go in.”

“All right, Mac,” Alison said through the door. “Call me if you need me.”

As we headed back into the den and toward the fire (the only warm spot we could reach right now), Paul, who seemed suspicious of the incident, asked Maxine for a full report.

“He was lying next to the bed,” she said as we reached the fire. The ghosts, of course, didn’t care about temperature, but Alison, Melissa and I huddled by the fire and threw blankets around ourselves. “Luckily, his sheet covered up most of his bottom half.”

“What position was he in?” Paul asked, his eyes narrowed. He expected a certain answer, I could tell, though I couldn’t imagine what.

“Uh, the candle was blown out, so I couldn’t see much, but it looked like he’d landed on his left side. He didn’t seem hurt.” Maxine had her eyes closed to think. I often wonder if the ghosts can see through their eyelids, which are somewhat transparent, but this didn’t seem the moment to ask.