Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts Read Online Free PDF Page A

like we mingle with everyone who does, either. Do you want me to see if I can locate him?” Paul has the ability to connect mentally, or something, with other ghosts. He and I call it the “Ghosternet,” but it doesn’t always work. For instance, he hadn’t reported any luck communicating with my father, and although my mother apparently sees Dad on a semiregular basis, she’d been no help to me in that area either.
    “Try, would you?” Maxie said. She still looked shaken but was becoming herself again. “I’d like to know what happened to him.”
    “As soon as I get a moment alone,” Paul told her.
    “You’re a ghost,” I said. “You can have a moment alone whenever you want.”
    “You and I still need to talk,” he said.
    “I need to go tend to my child and my ex-husband before they work out a deal where he doesn’t have to pay for his room,” I told him. “We can talk later.”
    “Alison…”
    But I was already on the pull-down stairs. I needed to get past the embarrassing moment I’d had with Paul when he extended the jewelry box, and to be brutally honest, I didn’t want to leave Steven and Melissa alone long enough for her to start liking her dad better than me.
    Now, by any analysis, Paul could have certainly followed me downstairs. He can, after all, levitate and move through solid objects, so it wouldn’t be at all a stretch to say he could easily have beaten me to the ground floor. But he didn’t. Maybe he understood that I needed a little time to regroup.
    So I made it to the front room without any interference and found The Swine there, apparently holding court with some of the guests. He was sitting on the sofa with Don Petrone, a seventyish gentleman of impeccable manners and tailoring, wearing a tie and blazer even in this heat, while Lucy Simone, a rare non–Senior Plus guest, was sitting on the facing easy chair. Lucy, an attractive woman in her early forties, was gazing at The Swine with a smitten look. I could relate—it was easy to fall for Steven when he wanted you to do so.
    Both guests, in fact, were listening to Steven with something approaching rapture.
    Melissa, surprisingly, was nowhere to be seen. I’d have thought nothing could tear her away from her father. (I later discovered that she’d run back to her room to excitedly text her BFF Wendy about her dad being “back home.”)
    He, of course, was grinning from ear to ear and gesticulating with enthusiasm. “So we check into the honeymoon suite, and Alison goes to take a shower,” he was saying. “I want to make the atmosphere as romantic as possible, but I can’t think of what to do. And I remember seeing movies where they spread rose petals in a path leading up to the bed. Now, I don’t know where you go to get rose petals, but then I see the hotel has provided us with a bouquet of, waddaya know, roses right there on the table. And I figure they won’t mind if I borrow a few. But here’s the thing…”
    “The hotel left a bouquet of roses for you?” Lucy asked. “I haven’t seen so much as one flower since I checked in here.” Perfect; now they were comparing my humble little guesthouse to a four-star hotel.
    Wait a minute—I’d been so caught up in Steven’s story that it hadn’t occurred to me it was a new one. I didn’t remember any rose-petal story associated with our honeymoon. In fact, our honeymoon had been essentially an overnight stay in a local motel because Steven had needed to be at work the following day at the investment firm that would, eventually, steal his soul.
    I sidled up behind the couch and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “This story isn’t about us,” I hissed. “You’ve got the wrong honeymoon.”
    He ignored me and addressed his audience. “Well, Lucy, I’m willing to bet we spent a great deal more per night at that hotel than you’re spending here, and we didn’t get many of the extra touches that a guesthouse like this can offer.”
    “Well, there are