An Uninvited Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page B

days.
    “It gets damn lonely in that house sometimes,” Scott said. “I finally said yes just to keep the contact.”
    “Couldn’t you have come here and talked to Maxie and Paul?” Melissa asked. A ten-year-old girl truly values a good playdate.
    “I don’t always know where other people like me are located,” Scott told her. “And it’s hard for me to find my way around.” Melissa nodded.
    “So you agreed to play this prank,” I said to get Scott back on topic. “What was it you had to do?”
    “It took four days of messages to tell me the whole thing,” he answered. “I was supposed to go to an abandoned hotel here in Harbor Haven.”
    “Probably the Ocean Wharf,” Maxie said. She had done considerable research into the area before buying the house I now owned. And Scott’s story must have truly captured her attention, because she was even forgetting to be detached and snide.
    “On the day I was summoned, I would arrive in the ballroom of the hotel, and I’d find some . . . they called them ‘props,’ for me to use. A long coat, a hat, an eye patch and a sash with a sheath for a plastic sword.”
    I put my hand over my mouth to avoid laughing. “So they did want you to play pirate?” I asked. The red bandana nodded, and it occurred to me it would have been helpful in the role.
    “Apparently,” Scott replied. “And I’d wait there until a certain time, when the woman who was, I guess, the target would show up, and I’d rattle the sword and do some ghost stuff. Billow the drapes, throw things around. I’m guessing they figured she couldn’t see me, but she could see the props, so that would be enough to scare her.”
    “Why did they want to scare an old lady?” Melissa asked.
    “I have no idea,” Scott said. “It was just supposed to be a joke. Just a joke.” His voice sounded sorrowful.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “The big finale, the thing that was supposed to put a capper on the gag, was that I’d pull out this plastic sword and wave it around, then act like I was going to cut her head off. But something was wrong.”
    “What?” Mom asked.
    “The sword felt too heavy. The handle was cheap, and it might have been wooden—it wasn’t metal, but it wasn’t plastic. And when I swung it . . .” His voice trailed off. Then Scott continued. “When I swung it, it felt like I hit something. And I heard—damn it—I heard something hit the floor. It sounded like a body.”
    There was silence in the room, but I was confused. “Well, why didn’t you just look to see what you’d done?” I asked. “Was it so dark in the room that . . .”
    Then I noticed the horrified looks of the others in the room. “Alison . . .” Mom began.
    “Mr. McFarlane is blind,” Melissa told me.
    “Oh,” I said.

Three
    After that, the conversation sort of deteriorated. I was doing my best to turn down Scott McFarlane’s request, but it’s hard to say no to a blind dead man. I mean, what else could go wrong for the guy?
    Scott explained that he had been blinded by an accident with acid while working at a printing press in the early part of the twentieth century and had lived the last thirty years of his life without sight. When he died, he’d assumed that his sight would be restored, but was disappointed to find out that was not the case.
    “Instead, I was in a run-down house on the New Jersey shore, blind as a bat and completely out of my element,” he went on to say. “It’s taken me a while to get used to it, but you never really stop hoping that something will change.”
    I looked at Maxie, who had been depressed after we’d discovered her killer, because she’d assumed that solving her murder meant she would be moving on to another level of existence. She puffed out her lips a little, not realizing I was watching, and sighed quietly. Paul suddenly looked even more impassioned than before.
    “I just need to know if I killed that poor old woman,” Scott said. “I heard someone