Free Chance of a Ghost by E.J. Copperman Page A

but her grin was unmistakable.
    Mom huffed a bit, but Paul refocused her attention from Maxie’s (and my) insolence to his questioning. He seemed genuinely interested. Paul likes nothing better than an unsolved mystery. It’s one of the few things about him I find completely annoying.
    “How could Mr. Laurentz not know who threw a toaster into his bath?” he asked. “He would have seen the person enter the bathroom, surely.” Paul speaks with such lovely syntax, owing to his British/Canadian background. Or maybe he’s just really polite.
    Mom squinted, an indication that she’s concerned she’s about to say something that will be open to ridicule. I’m afraid Dad and I were rather merciless in our teasing when I was growing up, though in a loving way. Even Melissa, who is smarter than all of us and who loves her grandmother dearly, occasionally giggles at the things my mother says.
    “Lawrence said that the person who threw it was invisible,” she declared.
    In this crowd, that’s not so outrageous a statement, but I heard a stifled giggle from the game room doorway, and there stood Melissa, confirming her grandmother’s fears that what she’d said would be received with something other than complete reverence. Liss was holding the iPodtouch her father had given her a few months before as a bribe. But under her arm was her school laptop.
    “You were supposed to be in your room,” I said.
    Melissa shot a guilty glance at Maxie, who quickly shut the laptop she had, let’s face it, stolen from me. Scowling, I walked to the spook, who did not think to rise up to the ceiling to avoid me.
    “What are you doing?” I intoned.
    Maxie made a sound with her lips that indicated she was unconcerned with my authority. She opened the computer and turned the screen toward me.
    It showed Melissa’s Skype name but nothing on the main screen because Liss had closed her laptop. On the tiny screen-within-a-screen below was a picture of the game room and the assembled therein in this case, Melissa, Mom and me, because the ghosts did not register on the laptop’s web cam.
    “You Skyped this to Melissa?” I said. “When I’d sent her upstairs?”
    “Oh, grow up,” Maxie said.
    “I was worried about Grandma,” my daughter tried.
    “Go to your room,” I said.
    “Mom!”
    “Not you,” I said to my daughter. I turned toward Maxie. “You.”
    The ghost looked at my face, huffed and flew up into the ceiling.

Five

    That had been a lot to absorb, and I wasn’t feeling very absorbent at the moment. So I reminded Mom that we were expecting a great deal of snow and encouraged her to head back to her town house. I told her Paul and I would confer on the Laurentz matter and I’d get back to her after the oncoming blizzard was shoveled off my front walk and my driveway. It was already starting to get dark outside.
    Unfortunately, Paul had heard me tell her about the “conferring” and thought I actually wanted to do so as soon as Mom had left. I’d really just been trying to stall, forgetting Paul’s weakness for unsolved crimes.
    I asked Melissa to call Murray Feldner about the plowing (partly to get her to go elsewhere in the house and partly because I figured she’d guilt Murray into it) and Paul followed me into the kitchen, staying directly behind—and a little bit above—me.
    “An invisible person throwing an electric toaster into abathtub!” he marveled. “It seems impossible, but we’ve seen stranger things happen, haven’t we, Alison?”
    I ignored him in pursuit of dinner, figuring I should probably feed myself and my daughter sometime soon. The refrigerator, more fully stocked than usual, contained a loaf of bread, some eggs, milk, an actual bag of lettuce, orange juice, English muffins and one Red Delicious apple. There was some meat in the separate freezer downstairs and bacon in the meat compartment here in the fridge. In other words, I was completely ready to make breakfast. And a salad with