Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts by E. J. Copperman Page B

find him, and to enjoy my very expensive air-conditioning.
    Before I could get to Paul, though, I decided to check in on the guests. I didn’t want to think—whether it was true or not—that I was neglecting them to concentrate on the investigations.
    I toured the house briefly: Nobody was in the game room, which made me wonder why I’d bothered to get the pool table a new felt top. Very few guests ever used it, although my daughter was threatening to become the next Minnesota Fats. Maybe the space would be better suited to something else. I didn’t have a license to serve alcoholic beverages; otherwise, the oak-paneled, Tiffany-lamped room would have made a lovely bar, but that was far too expensive to even consider. Yes, I had cold beer and chilled wine in the room, but I did not charge for the drinks, and I made sure no one under twenty-one (not that I ever got a guest that young) could have access to them. Melissa and best-friend Wendy or anyone else who dropped by after school would never have access. Liss knew that Paul and Maxie were watching when I wasn’t around, and she wasn’t interested, anyway.
    I already had a construction project upstairs to worry about, so the game room would remain a game room for the foreseeable future. I walked into the hallway and toward the library, a former walk-in pantry that had been turned into a sitting room by the family who lived here for decades before Maxie bought the place. I’d lined the walls with bookshelves and filled them with more than two thousand volumes, ranging from classics to the latest mass-market paperback mysteries.
    Lucy Simone was sitting there now, reading a book of Emily Dickinson poetry. She looked up and smiled when I appeared in the doorway.
    “What’s up?” I asked. “Not out enjoying the heat?”
    “I’m waiting for my friends to pick me up—they’re out renting jet skis,” she answered. “They have this idea for the afternoon. You know how you could always do something when you’re home and you never do, but once you’re on vacation, it becomes a priority? It’s sort of like that.” Wow—Lucy really was a lot younger than my usual guests. She looked tentative, suddenly, as if she wanted to ask me something but didn’t know how.
    “Something I can help you with?” I asked.
    Lucy licked her lips. “Yeah. I guess. Look, I don’t know how to say this, exactly, but I think I saw something a little odd not too long ago.”
    Something odd in my guesthouse. Who would have expected that?
    “Odd?” I asked, as if everything around here was always completely normal.
    “I was sitting here reading, maybe twenty minutes ago,” she said. “And I would swear I saw something fly by the door.”
    This is a problem when some of the guests in the house aren’t aware of the, let’s say, special nature of the house. We’d been varying the times of the “spook shows” for when Lucy was out, and that was one of the reasons I was doing a check of the house now. But it wasn’t like I hadn’t anticipated this question coming up. The trick was to limit the damage as much as possible.
    All I had to do was raise possibilities and let her decide which one to believe.
    “You saw something fly by the door,” I said calmly, sounding like I didn’t want her to think she was crazy. “What did you think you saw go by? Could it have been a leaf, or even just a change in the light from the foyer?”
    “It was a laptop computer,” Lucy said.
    Okay, this was going to be a little trickier than I might have anticipated. “A laptop computer?” I repeated, giving myself time to think.
    “Yeah. A MacBook. A real old one.” Yep, that was my laptop all right. Maxie must have been taking it upstairs to get on the Internet. She spends a lot of time on the Internet, and since her computer was confiscated by the police when she was murdered, I magnanimously allowed her to use mine. She, of course, never failed to let me know how old and out of date it was,