Ghost in the Wind (6 page)

Don't picture it. You're better off.

“Well then, let's get started!” I said, doing my best to sound enthused. When we'd first begun these performances for my guests, it had felt like a scam, presenting Paul and Maxie as scary creatures for the sake of my fledgling business. But I realized over time that the guests didn't want to be frightened. They just wanted some interaction with the unknown, with beings who had crossed to another plane of existence that nobody—not even Paul or Maxie—understands.

Hey, it's a way to make me feel better, and it's not hurting anybody.

I stood in the center of the room and took a deep breath. It wasn't because I was nervous, believe me. It's part of the act. “I'm clearing my mind,” I said. “I have to be able to concentrate so I can locate the spirits of the guesthouse.”

When I looked up, I noticed Maxie mouthing the speech along with me. Maybe we needed to freshen up the shows a little bit.

“As I clear my mind, I invite you to open your own,” I intoned, stifling another sneeze as my brain sent urgent “itch” messages. “Think of nothing at all.” (That is, by the way, impossible to do.) “Allow any possibility in your imagination to become real. Consider life and death and what changes come with each step along the continuum of existence.” No, I don't know what it means, either, but it sounds profound, doesn't it?

“I sense two presences here in this room,” I told the guests. The three women didn't appear to be especially nervous, which was good. Even with all the assurances I offer, some people are scared about being in a house with ghosts, despite having gone out of their way to pay for the privilege. The jumpy ones can get everyone else a little on edge, and then the show stops being fun for anybody.

“Yes, they're here, all right,” I continued. “And their names are Paul and Maxie.” I pretended to be exhausted by my “connection” with the ghosts, and moved back toward the door of the library. I knew what was coming and wanted to give the ghosts as much room as they needed.

“How come he always gets top billing?” Maxie asked. She knew I wouldn't answer, and it wasn't the first time the question had come up, but she has her agenda.

I felt the urge to sneeze again but I wanted to be sure the show was completely in progress before I could step into the hallway, so I put my index finger up under my nose and pushed. I learned in third grade that could suppress a sneeze and no matter what you think, it works for me.

Paul began by choosing a book—
Team of Rivals
by Doris Kearns Goodwin—and taking it off the shelf and moving it around the room. Not that impressive when you can see the ghost, but to the guests in the library, it appeared that the large
volume was flying by itself through space. Their eyes widened and their mouths opened just a little. Roberta actually stood and felt for wires holding the book up, and Paul responded by dropping the book to her eye level and opening it to the title page.

“See if she wants to read it,” he said. That's Paul's idea of a joke.

Not to be outdone, Maxie picked up an armful of paperbacks and began tossing them gently onto the laps of the guests. Tessa started just a little, then said, “How did you know I love Danielle Steel?”

“You seemed the type,” Maxie told her, but of course only I could hear her voice.

Paul, smiling slyly, took three books in his hands and started to move them around as if he were juggling. To the audience, of course, it looked as if he
was
juggling (Paul isn't anywhere near that coordinated, nor would he ever take the time it would require to learn something so frivolous, despite his literally having all the time he'd ever need), so the women broke into a round of applause when he stopped the “juggling” and stood still with the three books.

“Big deal,” Maxie said. She retaliated by buzzing around the room taking bookmarks from the side tables. (I figured a library should have bookmarks, largely because I object to people who leave books, especially paperbacks, open on flat surfaces and break their spines. And dog-earing the pages is a desecration, if you ask me. So there was quite an assortment.)

Maxie took the bookmarks and moved to an old child's toy easel I use to put up announcements for the guests. It made a perfect bulletin board now; too bright to be ignored, but didn't seem imposing or impersonal. It lent a nice touch to the cozy quality of the room.

Maxie now arranged the bookmarks on it to spell out: IS
THAT ALL YOU GOT. She tried to make a question mark at the end but found the task too difficult and left it at that.

Once the guests saw what she had written, they laughed. They didn't know where to look for the competitor—Paul—who would have to meet and exceed the challenge, but I could. And he looked just a little concerned. But then I saw him nod, presumably after having gotten an idea, and fly up to the ceiling fan, where he attempted to get it spinning on its own. Lest the guests think I had simply activated it myself, I took the opportunity, now that the show was in full swing, to head out into the hallway and indulge myself in a truly impressive sneeze.

It actually turned into four consecutive sneezes, followed by massive itching in my throat, which required my making some truly horrendous noises to soothe. So I moved myself farther down the hallway to the movie room and made sounds like a lovesick sea lion for a minute or so. That, unfortunately, clogged my ears. Right after the spook show, I promised myself, I would search the house for some antihistamine, because I was surely having a reaction to
something
.

The congestion in my ears, however, was even more regrettable once I made my way back to the library. Because there in the doorway, holding an acoustic guitar and playing “Claudia” from the Jingles album
Electric Spur
(ironic because it was all acoustic music) was Vance McTiernan. And it was mesmerizing the group, wide-eyed and rapt in their attention.

It was the fulfillment of a dream for me. I literally couldn't move my feet. But I knew what I had to do: I held my nose and blew through it to clear my ears. I didn't want to miss this.

You faded out like far church bells

Your lipstick smeared and caked

You never stopped to say farewells

But left my heart to break

The consummate performer, Vance was still revising his technique, putting twists into his intonations and holding notes he hadn't held on the recording. His lovely baritone filled my ears but the guests only heard his intricate but simple guitar accompaniment. Though that was still enough to hold them all in thrall. And I, getting the whole performance, was speechless and awed.

Vance was a real pro.

He made sure to look my way as I reentered the room but did not smile through his lyrics of regret; he was either acting the song or feeling it. And at the end, he performed a special guitar run that I knew wasn't in the original arrangement to give his audience a bonus for their attention.

They let the last chord ring until the sound died completely, then burst into applause the like of which the guesthouse had never heard before. Roberta Levine and Tessa Boynton even stood to give the unseen musician the ovation he deserved. Standing was too difficult for Maureen Beckman, but she applauded the loudest.

Vance put down the guitar carefully next to one of the easy chairs. He bowed.

To me.

Then he swept through the room, making sure to make contact with each of the ladies. You can feel the presence of a ghost when he wants you to, especially, and Vance wanted them to feel it. Each one, when touched, started just a little bit and smiled a special smile; the man was a born entertainer, even in death. After a lingering smile for Maureen Beckman, Vance left the library through the wall, headed in the direction of the kitchen.

“Alison!” Tessa shouted. “That was
wonderful
!”

“Yes,” Maureen agreed. “How on earth did you do that?”

I shook my head. “I didn't. That was all ghost.”

“But it wasn't scary at all,” Roberta said. “It was lovely.”

“If you like that kind of thing,” Maxie said. She was up
near the ceiling, her face betraying her words. She was grinning the way a true convert does when a once-in-a . . . lifetime? performance has reached her heart.

But that was when I took a look around the library. Maxie's voice had attracted my eyes to the upper half of the room. She made her remark, no doubt to cover the tremble in her voice, and I'd looked up with an expectation that was not satisfied, and for reasons I couldn't have explained fully at the time, I felt very sad in a big hurry, like something very important and irrevocable had just happened.

Paul had left the room before the show was over. And he hadn't come back.

A thorough search of the house—well, kind of thorough, since it was just me doing the searching—did not lead to a sighting of our resident investigator ghost. This was not terribly unusual. Paul does like his privacy, values time spent alone, and let's face it, can vanish anytime he feels like it, so finding him when he's not in the mood to be found can be something of a challenge.

I gave up after fifteen minutes. The guests all told me how wonderful the performance had been, how glad they were to have chosen my guesthouse for their vacations this year and asked if there would be further musical extravaganzas at the rest of the spook shows (a question I could not begin to answer). I was still reeling from the experience myself and hadn't digested it completely.

After the show broke up, I straightened the library a bit and checked the movie room for my Blu-Ray copy of
Ghost
. I'd bought it at a local bookstore called Read 'Em and Keep,
which sold video and music because far too many people wanted to read 'em and then give 'em back.

Then I stood in the movie room, for once entirely alone, and sighed. I'd put it off long enough. It was time to visit Lieutenant Anita McElone. Now I felt like I owed Vance.

Now, it's not that I was afraid of McElone; I'd gotten past that phase. It wasn't even that she intimidates me—I've gotten used to it and expect that to be the case no matter how long I know her. The thing is, the lieutenant and I had recently gone through an experience that was uncomfortable for both of us: I'd sort of saved her life and she didn't know how to handle it.

Since then, she'd clammed up on me to some extent. That had to do both with our recent adventure and the fact that the previously skeptical lieutenant now completely believed in the ghosts in my house. She was still processing the information, and right now she was uncomfortable in my presence. There was a time she wouldn't have walked into my house because she was afraid; now she wouldn't come over because she saw it as a sign of her own failure. Which wasn't true at all, but go tell McElone that.

Still, she was my best source of possible police information on Vanessa McTiernan's death, and she was the only cop I knew who treated me like an investigator, sort of. Not to mention, Phyllis had practically insisted I go see McElone, and that meant Phyllis either knew something and wanted me to go find it out for myself or didn't know something and wanted me to find out for her. That's how Phyllis operates. You eventually get what you need but you have to work for it.

Regardless, I made myself drive to the police station and McElone even let me in through the locked door to the police bullpen when the dispatcher Emily told her I was there. But she didn't look happy about it. Of course, I'm used to that; McElone has
never
looked happy when I've come to ask her about, let's say, anything.

So I started off slowly and asked if she could look for any records of a missing man named Lester from Topeka, Kansas. (I thought of it as a sort of police icebreaker.) But she just stared at me for at least a full minute, not moving a muscle, and I was unnerved enough to move on to the main event.

“A death by natural causes from four months ago?” she asked when I told her about my reason for showing up late on a Friday afternoon. “Who's your client on this one?” She stopped herself. “Wait. It's a ghosty thing, isn't it?”

“You could say that. The client is the deceased's father. Vance McTiernan.”

McElone looked at her computer screen. She normally would have gone off for five straight minutes about how a private investigator shouldn't be making the police department do all her work for her, but she probably remembered how she might not have seen her husband and children again were it not for me, so we skipped that part of the ritual on this visit. No doubt it would be back next time.

The point is, she didn't react at all.

“Vance McTiernan,” I said again.

“I heard you.” McElone punched some keys for a while and watched her screen. “So he thinks she didn't just eat the wrong thing? Is this guy maybe a little too . . . invested . . . to allow for the possibility his precious little girl could have just died for no reason?” She punched a few more keys. “Vance? With a V?”

“You never heard of Vance McTiernan?” I asked. How was that possible?

“No. Should I have?”

“The Jingles,” I said. Surely that would jog her memory.

“He writes songs for TV commercials?” Was McElone playing some sort of game only cops found amusing?

“No, the
band
. The Jingles!”
Jeez, Mom, would you get with it already? All the kids are listening to them!

“I don't know that one,” McElone said. She looked at her
screen again. “Nothing special in Vanessa McTiernan's toxicology report. She had a reaction to the soy sauce she put on her veggie lo mein. Closed up her throat and she couldn't breathe. Died of suffocation. No reason to think it was anything else.”

“I'm told there was too much soy sauce in her system,” I said.

McElone's eyes performed the second act of
Swan Lake
, then returned to their normal position. “You been talking to Phyllis again?”

“I'm afraid that's classified.”

“Mm-hmm. Yes, the ME said there was a high concentration of the stuff in her stomach, but it was consistent with someone who might have been trying to hurt herself with a known allergen that would close her throat.”

That didn't sound like information Phyllis would be anxious for me to hear. I had to dig deeper. Going back to the
Chronicle
office without new information would be admitting incompetence, and while I'm usually more than willing to do that, seeing Phyllis be smug (and
still
not tell me what I wanted to know!) would be too much.

“She knew she was allergic to soy,” I told McElone. “She wouldn't have put it on her food.”

She shrugged. “People make mistakes.”

“Not like that. Not when they know they could die.”

McElone raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she wanted to,” she said.

“Oh, come on. Suicide by veggie lo mein?”

“I did the due diligence,” she said with a little force. “There was no reason to think anybody did her in.
Murder
by veggie lo mein?”

Touché. “So was it ruled a suicide?”

She shook her head. “Not officially. The evidence wasn't conclusive. Could have been on purpose, could have been
an accident. Either way, she died from the allergic reaction.”

Time to change tactics. “Where did she die?” I asked.

“In her apartment, over on Pier Avenue. The door was unlocked,” McElone answered. “The police got a call about loud music playing over and over for two days. Apparently she had a record on—regular vinyl, an LP—on an old turntable that could repeat it, so it was playing the same side endlessly.”

“What record?” I asked.

“Something called
Enemy of the Mind
,” McElone said, scrolling down. “By—well, what do you know!”

“The Jingles,” I said. It was not a question.

“Well, that's not so unusual,” McElone suggested. “You said her dad was in this band, after all. She was just kicking back with some Chinese takeout, right?”

“How about the door being unlocked? Isn't that weird?”

McElone cocked an eyebrow. “Do you lock your front door when you're in the house?”

“Look, if you're going to be logical about it I don't see how we're going to get anywhere with this,” I replied. “Vance says his daughter wouldn't use soy sauce, and it makes sense to me. He says somebody killed her and he wants to know why.”

The lieutenant stared at her screen. “Says here Vance McTiernan died eight years ago,” she said.

“And?”

McElone closed her eyes tightly. “I'm in no position to tell you that's crazy,” she admitted. “But I can't go to my captain and tell him I want to reopen a death by natural causes because the victim's dead father says his little girl wouldn't do such a thing. Can't you ask the girl herself? Since she's . . . gone?”

I shook my head. “It appears she didn't become a ghost.”

McElone scowled. “That's inconvenient,” she said.

“Do you have anything in there about a boyfriend?” I asked. “Bandmates? She was in a band.”

The lieutenant's mouth twitched a bit, and as she punched keys she mumbled something about how she believed herself to be mentally ill for even bothering. But she did, and after a few moments her mouth twitched again.

“She was in a band. Something called Once Again. Three other members: Samantha Fine, a drummer, William Mastrovy, the bass player and lead singer, and a guy named T.B. Condon, guitars. The only one with a record was Mastrovy.”

That was interesting. “A record?” I said.

“Well, he's not exactly squeaky clean but there's nothing here to indicate a history of violence,” she said. “Some dealing, just weed. Nothing huge. An outstanding warrant for his arrest nobody is bothering to enforce because the paperwork would be more trouble than he is on the street. Not even a traffic ticket. But the other band members said Vanessa had just broken up with Mastrovy. So maybe that's why she went the soy sauce route.”

“Mastrovy was her boyfriend and she'd just dumped him? You didn't think that was worth checking out?”

McElone put her hands flat on her desk. “You come in here months after the fact and tell me the dead father of a woman who died of an allergic reaction says she was murdered and you want to tell me how I should have done my job?” She had a point. I knew McElone was a good cop and a thorough one.

I backed off. “Is there an address for the Mastrovy guy? The other two band members? Vance would like me to find them.”

McElone's eyes narrowed. “Really. This is going about as far as I'm willing to go. The dead woman's dead father wants to find people he thinks might have been involved in his little angel's death? So he can get his ghosty revenge? And you want me to provide the coordinates? I don't think so.”

“It's not like that,” I said, although I thought it might have been exactly like that.

“I'm not giving you the address,” she said. I didn't ask again. I know that tone. And I respect McElone enough to accept her decisions on professional issues. I nodded. “Fair enough. Anything you
can
tell me?”

“Well, we talked to the kid from the restaurant but Vanessa didn't get delivery; she picked it up from Ming Garden, on Surf Boulevard,” the lieutenant said without checking her screen again.

“You were at the scene,” I reminded her. “You don't give up that easy most of the time.”

She put on an innocent look that didn't suit her. “There was no reason to dig any deeper,” she said. “The doctor did the autopsy, found the cause. The lo mein was still in her living room on the coffee table. Nothing left to ask about.”

That was awfully pat. “You don't think it's fishy that a woman who knew she had the allergy ate exactly the thing that would kill her?” That was what had been bothering me. Vance had a point: Why
hadn't
McElone looked into Vanessa's death more closely?

“Not really,” the lieutenant said. “The uniforms came in, saw the scene. They didn't know what killed her and she was alone, so they called me, I looked, didn't see any evidence of violence and waited for the ME's report. That sewed it up.”

“Not too clean? Not like someone wanted them to find her just like that? She put on her dad's record on auto-repeat and then committed suicide via Asian food? It's just too staged.”

McElone shrugged. “I've never seen you as a conspiracy theorist before,” she said. “This kind of thing happens. Not all the time, but it happens. The woman was unfortunate and it's sad. I'm sorry your dead friend lost his daughter, but it doesn't have to be a murder just because he doesn't want to face it.”

I wasn't listening anymore. “Who are the cops?”

“What cops?”

“The uniforms. The officers who found Vanessa's body. Who are they? I want to talk to them.”

She made a “yeah, sure” face. “I don't think so.”

“It's on the police report, right? That's a matter of public record, isn't it?” I stuck my hand out. “Let's have a printout, please. I'm a citizen and I'm exercising my right to know.”

McElone sighed but she hit print on her screen and pointed toward the door. “You can pick it up on your way out. And I'll tell you something.”

I turned back toward her. “What?”

She did not smile, did not twinkle her eye at me. In fact, she didn't make eye contact, looking at documents on her desk. “You're better at this than you used to be,” she said.

There are small victories in life. You have to savor them.