NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED.

Copperman, E.J.

To my brother, Charlie.

the other writer in the family.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

It would truly have been impossible for this book to exist without the incredibly talented and dedicated Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, the editor who took a wisp of an idea and helped it become an actual book, and then a much better book. My sincere thanks.

And none of that would have happened had it not been for my agent, Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, whose inexhaustible energy and belief in my work warm my heart and boggle my mind.

Special thanks to Luci Hansson Zahray, "The Poison Lady," for figuring out what would be needed to dispose of three unlucky people.

Thank you to the generous authors who read this work in an earlier form and offered kind words, many of which you'll find on these pages. The camaraderie of mystery authors is a powerful force, and one that I think is quite rare among people who could see one another as competition.

And finally, thanks to my family, my friends, those who will read this book and hopefully enjoy it. Encouragement is a powerful drug, and luckily, a legal one. It is greatly appreciated.

One.

"I don't get it, Mom. If this is our house, why are other people going to live here?" My daughter, Melissa, nine years old and already a prosecuting attorney, looked up from the baseboard near the window seat in the living room, which she was painting with a two-inch brush and a gallon can of generic semigloss white paint. Never use the expensive stuff when you're letting a fourth grader help with the painting.

"I've explained this to you before, Liss," I told her without looking down from the wall. I was trying to locate a wooden stud, and the stud finder I was using was being, as is often the case with plaster walls, inconclusive. Using a battery-operated gizmo to find a stud and failing: I tried not to dwell on its metaphorical implications for my love life.

"Other people aren't coming here to live," I continued. "They'll be coming here when they're on vacation. We're going to have a guesthouse, like a hotel. They'll pay us to stay here, near the beach. But we've got to fix up the place first."

"Mr. Barnes says these houses have history in them, and it's wrong to make them modern." Mr. Barnes was Melissa's history teacher, and at the moment, he wasn't helping.

"Mr. Barnes probably didn't mean this house. Besides, we're fixing it up the way it was meant to be. I mean, no one would want to live in the house the way it looks now, right?"

Our hulk of a turn-of-the-last-century Victorian house was not, by the standards of anyone whose age was in double digits, livable. Sure, the house had once been adorable, maybe even grand, but that was a long time ago. Now, the ancient plaster walls downstairs were peeling and, in some places, crumbling. There was a thick coat of white dust pretty much everywhere, and as far as I could tell, the heating system was devoid of, well, heat. The October chill was already starting to feel permanent in my bones.

However, it was clear that some work had been done by the previous owner, though by my decorating standards, he or she must have been demented. The living room walls had been painted bright bloodred, and the kitchen cabinets were hideous and hung so high Shaquille O'Neal would have a hard time reaching the cereal. Luckily, the upstairs walls had been patched and painted, the landscaping in the front of the house was quite lovely (although the vast backyard had been untouched), and the staircases (there were two) going upstairs had been refinished beautifully. It was a work in progress. Slow progress.

"I would live here," Melissa said, and went back to painting. That settled it, in her view.

"You do live here," I answered, not noting that there was no furniture, and that we were both sleeping on mattresses laid directly onto the floors of our respective so-called bedrooms and living out of suitcases. Why remind her of all the things we'd left in the house in Red Bank after the divorce? Melissa's father, Steven (hereafter known as The Swine), hadn't wanted the furniture, but he had wanted half the proceeds when I sold it all to help make the down payment on the house. The Swine.

Besides, now the house was a construction site, and any furniture would have been prone to disfigurement or worse while the work went on. As soon as the house was in shape, the new furniture I'd ordered (and, in some cases, collected from consignment stores) would be delivered.

I'd decided to open a guesthouse after my last job-bookkeeper at a lumberyard-hadn't worked out. Mostly, it hadn't worked out because my boss had a habit of forgetting his marriage vows when he walked over to my desk to discuss the company's finances. Luckily, there had been multiple witnesses when he'd tried to put his hands in the back pockets of my jeans, so he didn't press charges after I decked him. But I decided to sue, strictly on principle. And because the guy was a jerk.

We settled the case for an amount that had seemed like a lot of money, but once I'd done the math on paper, I realized it would last Melissa and me only about two years, and even then, only if we were very frugal in our lifestyle. The alimony from The Swine wasn't much, and living in New Jersey, a state with some of the highest real-estate values-and property taxes-in the country, wasn't going to be easy on "not much."

So I'd decided the thing to do was to take the money and put it into something that could start me off in a business capable of sustaining us for years. And that was when I thought of a guesthouse.

I'd always wanted to own and run a guesthouse here in Harbor Haven, the town where I'd grown up. I liked the idea of people coming in and out, of helping them enjoy the area I loved so much, and of restoring and maintaining one of the majestic beach houses that all too often faced a wrecking ball these days. Developers are everywhere on the Jersey Shore, even in rough economic times. History was being wiped out in favor of expensive vacation condos, and I hoped I could save at least one beauty from extinction. Now, knee deep in it and feeling like I had taken on too much, I was still loving it.

The New Jersey Shore ("down the shore," to us locals), contrary to the popular notion of the state, is absolutely gorgeous, and a wildly attractive vacation destination. Harbor Haven had not yet been discovered by teenagers and families with young children, which meant there were no thrill rides, no hideous souvenir shops and no boardwalk here. (All things I had sorely lamented as a teenager, but whose absences I now considered serious advantages.) The only thing I really missed was the saltwater taffy, but you could get that in nearby Point Pleasant.

In other words, the only tourists who came to Harbor Haven were quiet and wealthy. The perfect place to open a guesthouse . . . assuming I could get the shambles around me to look like a palace in the next few weeks. My real estate agent, Terry Wright, had told me people often booked their next summer vacations right after the previous season ended, especially in November and December. If I wanted to get color brochures and Internet advertising going before people started making their summer vacation plans-and I did-I'd really need to get cracking.

I hadn't put down a drop cloth where Melissa was working because I was going to paint the rest of the wall after I'd made my repairs, and the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room was among the first things I'd decided to remove when I first saw the house. Giving Melissa woodwork to paint was going to be little help in the long term, but mostly it was a good way to keep her busy.

I went back to concentrating on the wall. If it were a modern wall, I could knock a hole in the drywall and look inside, then patch it back up, and by the time I was finished painting, nobody would ever know anything had happened. But not in this house. These walls were the original plaster, which afforded them a smooth, gorgeous effect (among many other features) I was planning to exploit for a higher per-night price. But repairing plaster is not easy, much more an art than a science, and the only people who really knew how to do it had died out at about the same time that drywall became popular. If I breached the wall by more than a small crack, I'd end up having to replace the whole wall, and that would be bad.

So, I steeled myself and let my father's voice ring in my head. "Alison," he'd say, "you know perfectly well that no contractor is going to care as much about doing it right as you will. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and just get it done." Dad had taught me everything he knew about home improvement, which was a lot. Not exactly a general contractor but more of a handyman, he'd spent decades learning about what makes houses-especially old ones-work, and he'd taught me what he knew "so you'll never have to rely on some man to do it." He was never as proud as when I'd worked at HouseCenter and was teaching some guy how to install a lock or regrout a bathtub.

It hurt a little to think of Dad; it had been four years since he'd died, but you don't stop missing someone you love-you just stop obsessing about it. When their memory comes flooding back, it still has the power to wound.

"Is this good, Mom?" Melissa roused me from my flash of depression to show me the completed baseboard. As I'd expected, there was a good slick coat of paint on about the first four inches of carpet away from the wall, and another one about four inches up above the molding (impressive, considering that it indicated multiple brush widths), but the baseboard itself was indeed freshly painted, and Melissa had done a nice, careful job for a nine-year-old.

"Very good, Liss," I answered. I took a few steps over to examine the work more closely. "You have the touch."

She beamed. Melissa is always looking for approval, and usually deserves it. "Would you do me a favor and go get the ball-peen hammer from the kitchen?" I asked her. I didn't really need the hammer, but if I'd reached over and carefully removed the two brush hairs from the baseboard while Melissa was in the room, she'd have seen it as a failure and been upset.

"Sure." She got up and ran into the kitchen. Nine-year-olds never walk; they either run like they're being chased or shuffle like they're being dragged. There is no modulated speed.

As I reached over to pull off the first brush hair, which luckily had fallen only partially on the wall (so I might leave no finger marks), I heard something heavy fall to the floor behind me. But Melissa was in the kitchen, in the other direction entirely.

I turned, but there was nothing disturbed. Well, old houses creak. Hopefully, this particular noise was not caused by something that would require skills beyond what I knew how to fix.

The first brush hair was easy, but the second one, now that I was under time pressure, would be more difficult. But I had tweezers in my shirt pocket (always be prepared), and lifted the hair gently even as Melissa called from the kitchen.

"I can't reach the hammer!"

Now, it didn't matter a bit whether I got the hammer, but that was odd, so I stood up and walked toward the kitchen.

"What do you mean, you can't . . ."

I stopped short in the doorway. Melissa was standing in the center of the (mostly) empty kitchen, cabinet doors removed and countertops missing from their spots. That was normal in our current state of repair, so it didn't bother me in the least.

But what did worry me was that every drawer in my roll-up toolbox was open, and every tool appeared to have been flung around the room. One backsaw was hanging precariously from a nail near the ceiling. Hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches and sockets pretty much covered every surface. If it's possible for a construction site to look especially messy, that was what I was staring at now. That bothered me.

"It's too high up," Melissa said, pointing at it, sitting on top of the window molding.

"Melissa, what did you do?" I launched myself into the room and started picking up tools.

"Nothing! I thought you did it."

Oh, please. "Why would I throw my tools around like this?"

"Why would I?" she asked.

"Come on, Liss. You know I didn't leave the tools like this, and there's nobody else in the house." Although I had to admit, that hammer hanging from the window was awfully high for her to manage. Did she just fling it and get lucky?

"Well, I don't know! This was how it looked when I walked in." She stuck out her bottom lip in a gesture of defiance.

I forced her to look me in the eye. "Really?" I asked.

Melissa's gaze never wavered, which was unusual. "Really," she said.

Swell. Now I was beginning to believe her. "Well, then, how . . ."

I never managed to finish the question, since I was interrupted by a loud groan of wood and what sounded like hailstones hitting the floor in the hallway just off the living room. That was followed by a loud crash. I was out the kitchen door before Melissa could even turn her head, but she still ran faster than I did. We arrived in the living room at the same moment and stopped dead in our tracks.

The very wall I'd been agonizing over now had a gaping hole at least three feet tall, right down its center. My visions of retaining the period detail and integrity of the room had been literally destroyed. I wanted to cry.

"Why did you do that?" Melissa asked.

Two.

"These walls are real plaster." Terry Wright, the unbearably upbeat real estate agent, had been especially proud of that fact when she'd shown me the house for the first time. "They don't have that bland feel that wallboard gives you. This could be a real selling point for your bed and breakfast."

"I'm not opening a bed and breakfast," I'd told her, deciding not to comment on her suggestion that people would choose whether or not to vacation here because of the walls (I came around to the idea later). "I'm opening a guesthouse. I'm not going to serve food."

"Oh," Terry said, her usually unbreakable glee momentarily dampened. "Well, that will keep more of our restaurants busy, won't it?" From zero to cheerful in less than three-point-two seconds, a new record. Terry, maybe five years older than I am, obviously took good care of herself and was at exactly her proper weight, with blonde hair and a beatific smile. It's a wonder she didn't work at Disney World.

The house was exactly what I had been looking for, but I couldn't let Terry know that. It had a real sense of dignity, but without stuffiness: three of the seven bedrooms had wood-burning fireplaces, as did the living room; the ceilings were twelve feet high; the overall feeling was one of comfort and ease. It had been built as a residence, not a vacation home, so it was insulated, and Melissa and I could live here all year long.

I'd known something about the house before I'd started searching. The people who had lived here for years, the Preston family, had had a lot of kids, the oldest of whom I'd gone to school with. They'd moved on about a year and a half ago, and there'd been another owner since then. The house seemed to have held up reasonably well overall, but while it was obvious some recent work had been done, this was no in-move-in-condition house. I'd have a lot of work to do. Which was also what I wanted (I couldn't afford a perfect house, and I would have missed the challenge), but I didn't tell Terry that, either.

I put on a pensive face and stroked my chin a little. "Well, I don't know . . ." I began.

Melissa, behind me, practically burst out of her skin. "Come on, Mom!" she bleated. "This is exactly what you've been talking about!" The girl had a lot to learn about negotiation.

I turned to look at her. "Not exactly," I said, and made significant eye contact.

My daughter, enthusiastic but astute, nodded, looked around the room, and tilted her head. "Yeah," she said. "The fireplace does look kind of crooked."

Damn! It actually did. I hadn't noticed that. Would I be able to repair it, or would it become "part of the charm of the place"?

"Oh, I don't think so! I think it's darling," Terry said. Her voice, directed at Melissa, dripped condescension and syrupy child-speak. "It looks fine to me."

"Is there any way to find out if the fireplace has been maintained properly?" I asked. Show doubt; maybe bring down the price a little.

"It'll all come out in the home inspection, but I'll check my file. I have two copies of everything on my computer," Terry said. She was so organized I had to fight the urge to punch her.

"I'm not sure," I said, back in my scorched-earth-negotiator mode. "I'm a little spooked by the fact that the house has been on the market for eleven months."

Terry waved a hand to dismiss that fact, and her voice took on a false confidentiality. "Everything's staying on the market for months these days," she said. "It's the economy." Uh-huh. "I'm telling you, with seven bedrooms, four baths and that kitchen, this is the place for a bed and breakfast."

I looked at Melissa, who rolled her eyes. Then she stared off into the distance, as if something really interesting were suspended from the ceiling. "Somebody died here," she said in a faraway voice.

I sighed a little. Melissa does that kind of thing sometimes when she thinks she can put one over on a grown-up. She doesn't like it when she's talked to as if being a kid equals being stupid.

"Knock it off," I hissed at her.

"Actually, someone did sort of die in the house," Terry said. I tried not to imagine what "sort of" dying could mean. Terry was doing her best not to stammer, but the effort was clearly difficult. "The previous owner of the house passed away here last June."

Of course, I already knew about that; it was why the house was for sale. Terry had mentioned it as a sales point ("the estate is really motivated to sell") when we'd first met at her office.

"I'm okay, Mom," Melissa said, noticing the way I was looking at her, and tried to wink. But she can't wink just yet, so to Terry, I'm sure it looked like a grimace of pain. I could use that.

"I think maybe we'll go home and think about it," I told Terry.

"They'll drop the price another ten thousand," she said immediately.

Really? "Make it twenty," I countered.

"Done."

"I'll have my lawyer call you," I told her, and took Melissa, who had given up on her audition for a seance and resumed her normal expression, by the hand. I needed to get back to the car before I had my inevitable panic attack.

Terry looked positively triumphant when we left. Maybe I should have held out for a thirty-thousand-dollar reduction.

But I hadn't walked into this transaction blind. I'd done my research: Even in a down economy, a house on the Jersey Shore could more than pay for itself as a vacation rental, and one that allowed for five sets of guests at once (seven bedrooms minus one each for me and Melissa) meant I could make enough in a decent summer to pay for the rest of the year and put some money away for Melissa's education.

"You bought Patty Preston's house?" Jeannie Rogers asked in a disbelieving whisper on the phone. Jeannie, my best friend since the sixth grade, was talking quietly because she was at work. "Isn't that kind of creepy?"

"What's creepy is that you still think of it as Patty Preston's house, despite the fact that neither of us had ever set foot in the place before I went to ask about buying it, and besides, I hear she lives in Colorado now."

"You have no appreciation for the past," Jeannie said.

"If I had no appreciation for the past, I wouldn't be buying a house that's over a hundred years old," I pointed out. "I'd bulldoze it and get myself a McGuesthouse."

"No, you wouldn't," Melissa said, her eyes wide. "Mr. Barnes says . . ."

I put my hand over the phone. "Nobody's knocking the house down," I told her. Then I took my hand off the phone and said to Jeannie, "You know I'd do it."