Ghost in the Wind (26 page)

“I did some digging after I got the report from the Davenport, Iowa, police. It seems Claudia Baxter Rabinowitz took on the name Judith Holbrook and moved to Iowa because she was involved in some tax fraud that involved the construction business where her son works.”

That was a lot to take in but the solution seemed simple. “So get Iowa to send her here and question her,” I said, knowing McElone would have thought of that already.

“I can't. She died of pneumonia six months ago.”

“That isn't possible,” I protested. “She was going to meet her daughter Vanessa the day she died.
Four
months ago.”

“The Iowa State Police confirmed it. She died in Davenport in March. That's all I know.”

“How is that supposed to help?” I protested.

McElone did not open her eyes. “One. Two. Three . . .”

I was out of the chair and gone by “five.”

“Dead!” Vance McTiernan looked absolutely astonished. “Claud is dead?”

“It's confirmed,” I told him. “She's definitely dead. And before you ask, she died of natural causes, for certain.”

“I can't believe it.” Vance was less substantial than usual, more transparent. I've seen that happen when ghosts are especially taken aback. “I was sure I sensed her presence here in Harbor Haven.”

“That eliminates one suspect,” Paul said. “Our next step is to find Jeremy. I need Maxie.” He looked up at the ceiling; it's possible he was doing some Ghosternet Local type of thing to summon her, but he didn't seem to get any results.

“I'm getting ready to have Josh's friends over for dinner,” I told Paul.

When my phone rang earlier and the Caller ID showed Josh's name, I wasn't expecting him to say that he'd essentially
invited A.J. and Liz to my house for dinner that night. And yet, that's what I heard.

“I figured it would be a good way for them to see you and you to see them without all the hoopla of the other evening,” he said when I expressed (perhaps inadvertently) some trepidation about the timing. “I want them to see that someone doesn't get killed in your house
every
night.” It was hard to argue with that.

“We can only hope,” I said. It was fair—I
had
said I'd invite his friends to dinner, and after Sunday night's disaster, he wanted to clear the air as soon as possible. I asked Mom and Liss if they would cook so Liz wouldn't judge me for feeding my daughter takeout, but rather for forcing her to cook my dinner.

Now, Paul sort of stared at me. I'm not sure he understood that I was serious, but when Maxie dropped down through the ceiling with Everett in tow, he spoke to her and not to me. “Alison is preparing a dinner party when there's a case to solve,” he said. He shook his head incredulously and seemed to be appealing to Maxie's (!) common sense.

“Uh-huh,” was the answer he got. He looked toward the ceiling but sank down into the floor and vanished.

Maxie followed me into the den, where I started to clear one of the side tables, the one on wheels. “Hey. Doesn't dinner get taken care of in the kitchen?” she demanded.

“Maxie,” Everett said. “There clearly is a plan of action. Let the Ghost Lady work it out at her own pace.” There are days I want to thank the heavens for Everett, but since he's dead, that seems somehow cruel. It's hard to explain.

“Have either of you guys seen a dog around the property?” I asked. “I've been sneezing my brains out for days and I thought I heard some howling at night.”

Maxie, for all her posturing and attitude, is a remarkably poor liar. She looked at Everett, and even as he said, “I have
not seen a dog here,” which I'm sure was true, I could tell Maxie was trying to come up with an answer that I wanted to hear.

So I watched her as I rolled the newly cleared side table to the center of the den and opened the leaves on each side to make a dining table that we'd use tonight. I was pretty sure there was a tablecloth in the sideboard. I probably hadn't used it since I'd moved in two years ago, but this was an occasion, right?

“Um . . . I don't know anything about that,” Maxie said. Her facial expression, on the other hand, was screaming, “I know all about that!”

“Okay, Malone, you're busted. What do you know?”

“I just told you I don't know anything. Is there going to be an afternoon show today? Everett wants to try out a new bit where he does a military fitness workout in midair.” This appeared to be news to Everett, who regarded Maxie with a quizzical look.

“And how are the guests going to see that?” I asked her.

“We haven't worked out all the details yet.”

“The dog, Maxie. Is there a lost dog somewhere outside? If there is, we should see if it has tags and call the owner, or get it to a vet to check out before we call a shelter. So stop stammering about how you don't know anything and tell me what you know.”

“Honest, I don't know of any lost dog,” Maxie said.

I stopped. What was she really saying? “Maxie . . .”

“Be back for the show. Come on, Everett!” She started to drag him out through the wall and toward the shed in the back, but Paul rose back out of the basement, apparently remembering what he'd needed from her before my cavalier attitude had so offended his sense of purpose.

“Maxie!” he said, stopping her escape attempt. “Have you got a possible location for Jeremy Bensinger yet?”

“Jeez!” She looked disgusted. “Do I have to do
everything
around here?”

“We did ask you to find him,” Paul reminded her. I wanted to get to the bottom of the dog situation, whatever it was.

“He hasn't left the country,” she said without referring to the laptop, which I don't think she had with her. “He hasn't boarded an airplane for anywhere. If you're sure he's not staying in his apartment, I'd look for a friend or a girlfriend or something, but you haven't given me a name to research. Okay, so bye! Come
on
, Everett! I'm not waiting for you!” And she tugged on his arm again.

Everett, who has a sense of humor that he doesn't let show often enough, let it look like she was pulling him against his will and said, “Yes, ma'am,” as he went. But he was smiling. Either it's true about opposites attracting or they're not as opposite as they seem. I didn't have time to think about that.

So there was something going on with a dog near my house. I'd be going to pick up Melissa in an hour. That would be the time to grill—
discuss it with
—her. But it wouldn't be easy; my daughter is a tough nut to crack.

Because I am destined never to spend more than three consecutive seconds alone, Vance McTiernan wailed again. “She's dead!” We'd forgotten that he was the grieving party here.

“You knew her for one night forty years ago,” I told him. “You can't be this upset.”

He regarded me with something he wanted to feel like contempt but was playing more like mild irritation. “Have you no pity?”

“I'm not heartless, but I think this is about something else, Vance.”

“Alison,” Paul attempted. “Please. Jeremy.”

Vance wasn't listening to him, either. He decided to change topics. “You know, love, what you said about me to that lady policeman really cut to the quick.”

The tablecloth had, as might be expected, folds and wrinkles in it from the previous presidential administration, which annoyed me despite its predictability. I like using an iron as
much as I like hearing from my ex-husband, invariably explaining why the child support check will be just a little late again.

“It's always about you, isn't it, Vance?” I shot back. “You know, when you first showed up and told me your sad tale I thought you really were torn up about your daughter's death and wanted only justice for her. I believed the songs you wrote—or claim you wrote—and the shows you put on. But everything you do is about making sure everybody knows what a great guy Vance McTiernan is, and that sort of cuts the nobility out of it.” I flared the tablecloth out over the table, thinking that maybe I could just put enough heavy things on it to flatten it out. But that didn't seem terribly plausible once I got a good look. Where had I put the iron?

“You believe that?” I wasn't looking at Vance but he sounded legitimately hurt. “You really think I didn't care about Nessa?”

I exhaled. “I honestly don't know, Vance. I just know my life was a lot less complicated when you were just a voice on an old piece of vinyl. I—”

“No need, love,” Vance cut me off. “If that's what you think of me, I'll sod off.” And before I could blink, he was no longer in the room.

“I'll sod off”? What had that meant? Was he going off to lick his wounds or was he leaving and never coming back?

For reasons I couldn't quite explain, it mattered to me. Even now, with all he'd put me through and all the lies, I didn't want to end things with Vance McTiernan on bad terms. The lyrics to “On My Own,” an early Jingles song, kept playing over in my head all of a sudden:

Don't leave me

On my own

Even now

Not alone

Okay, so it was an early effort, but if you've heard the original recording, you know how affecting the plaintive singing became in Vance's capable throat. I called to him, not loudly, a couple of times, but there was no response.

Suddenly, finding the right dishes for tonight didn't seem all that urgent.

None of the guests required anything and it seemed that I'd be left to ponder my possible (okay, probable) rudeness toward Vance and its repercussions for a while, but Paul followed as I was heading up the stairs to get another allergy pill from my bathroom medicine cabinet. I stopped on the stairs and looked at him.

“What do you know about a dog?” I asked him.

“What dog?” he asked back. “Is this related to the Mastrovy murder or Vanessa's overdose?”

“Neither. It's related to my sneezing and watery eyes.”

“I don't know anything about a dog,” Paul said. “Nor should you be concentrating on that right now. We have too many suspects and not enough facts. The only person left whom we can locate is Sammi Fine, and I don't think we've explored her motives enough yet. Do you have time to see her again before your
dinner party
?”

“You're going to get mad at me for having company for dinner? What have you been up to, Sherlock? Have you figured out the green fibers?”

Paul looked away. “I don't have a strong theory yet.”

“Let me know when you do,” I said, and went upstairs for some Allegra.

But Paul, cognizant that he shouldn't follow me, was still waiting when I came back down just a minute later. “Alison,” he said. “Please.”

I probably rolled my eyes like Melissa. “Okay,” I told Paul. “But if I talk to Sammi again, will you leave me alone for this dinner?”

He actually crossed his heart with his finger. “You'll never even know I'm here,” he said.

*   *   *

Sammi Fine agreed to meet me at a Starbucks around the corner from her office. I got a bottle of water and Sammi found a double chocolate chip muffin to go with an iced latte.

“I don't know any more than I told you already,” she said, just picking at the muffin. Her mood was more somber than emotional now; she'd had a couple of days to absorb Bill's death. “I spoke to the cops. They asked me all the questions. What's left?”

I dove in. I had just enough time to get back and pick up Liss after a short interview, so directness was key. “Where were you on Sunday night?” I asked.

She didn't react; she'd been asked by McElone before. “I was home, watching
Game of Thrones
,” she said. “Want to know who got knifed on that show? That I can tell you. And no, nobody was with me. If I was a smart killer, I'd have worked out an alibi.”

Maybe I could play one suspect against another. You can sometimes get people to say things they shouldn't if you're not asking about them. “What do you know about Vanessa's brother, Jeremy?” I asked.

“He used to come around to rehearsals and some gigs,” Sammi said. “Thought Vanessa was Joan Jett or something. Told me her staring off into space was her ‘communicating with her muse.' Seriously. I mean, she had an okay voice but he thought he was going to make millions off of her.”

“
He
was going to make millions?” Jeremy's line had been all about how Vanessa was a star-in-waiting and how cruel it was that it had been robbed from her. “How did he factor in her career?”

“He was, like, her manager or something,” Sammi told me. She picked a chocolate chip out of the muffin and ate it
somewhat daintily. “He shopped her record around and got Vinyl Records interested enough to sign her, but Vanessa was going to turn it down, Bill said.”

Turn it down?
First I was hearing about that. “Why?”

“She used to say fame and success had broken her family and she thought it destroyed her father.” Sammi took a sip of her latte, which she seemed to think was too sweet. “Said she made the music for herself and her friends. She wanted to distribute it for nothing. But Jeremy and Bill were trying to talk her out of that.”

“Jeremy and Bill? Together?”

“You didn't know this? Yeah. Jeremy produced the record, put his heart into it when all Vanessa was doing was singing. She wrote a couple of the tracks, but mostly it was Bill. Then Jeremy said
he'd
written four songs that Bill knew were his and they started to fight about it. Until then, they'd been thick as thieves, those two.”

“How about after Vanessa died?” I asked.

“I don't know. Jeremy stopped coming to the gigs and Bill and I were a thing—or at least I thought we were. Now I don't know anything. Can you ever know anything?”