Chapter Fifteen

Jerry McHale was about as different from Saul Pasternak as he could be. He was at least three inches shy of six feet, carried a comfortable amount of padding around his middle—although it was somewhat disguised by his colorful Hawaiian shirt—and his dark hair still had more pepper than steel-gray salt. Where Saul's face was long and angular, Jerry's was full and round. One thing they had in common though—the kindness in their eyes, although Jerry's were sky blue to Saul's deep brown.

He met me on the library's front steps and shook my hand warmly. "You must be Maz. Taryn told me all about you."

I smiled crookedly. "About how many margaritas it takes before I'm under the table?"

He chuckled, a warm, welcoming sound, and I felt a pang of envy for his former patients. His bedside manner must have been epic. "Not a bit." He pulled a set of keys out of his dad-jeans pocket and unlocked the door. "I understand you're interested in the man who lived in your house."

"Both of them, actually." I followed him into an airlock-type vestibule, a pair of glass doors separating us from the library proper, with big bulletin boards on the walls to either side, although the one on the left was completely bare and the one on the right only sported a notice for somebody selling a mountain bike, a signup sheet for a book club with no takers, and a faded poster for the Ghost Halloween parade, dated over three years in the past. Jerry noticed me looking at it and sighed.

"I probably should take that down, but it's from the last time we staged the parade. A bit of nostalgia if you like."

"Why was it the last?" I asked as he led me through the doors and into the library. It wasn't a large building, but it was a decent size. Wide rather than deep, with alcoves clearly labeled for children's and YA books, as well as tables and padded chairs arranged to break up the rows of shelves. I inhaled deeply. Damn , I loved the smell of books.

He set the keys on the circulation counter gently, as though he didn't want to break the silence. "It was the last because nobody came."

I stopped inhaling eau de books and stared at him. "Nobody came to the parade?"

"Well, Ghost residents came. But it used to be a three-day festival. Portland has Bigfoot and Beyond. McMinnville has their UFO Fest. Ghost was trying to do something similar with Ghost Days, but interest had been waning for several years as we went longer and longer without an actual haunting."

Well, those days are gone . But I kept my mouth shut about that for the moment.

"First we scaled back to two days, then one, then just the parade. But when the university started staging their Oktoberfest at the same time, we lost even that small amount of interest, so we pulled the plug."

I glanced over my shoulder at the poster. It actually looked like it could be a fun event, but I thought they'd made a mistake by scaling back. They should have gone the other way and made it bigger, splashier, spookier, with or without actual spooks. But nobody had asked me and I was here for another reason.

"Mr. McHale—"

"Jerry, please. You'll find that nobody in Ghost stands on ceremony."

"Jerry, then. Saul told you why I'm here, and I hope you don't think I'm being presumptuous, but you conducted Avi Felder's autopsy, didn't you?"

He nodded. "Call it a postmortem examination rather than an autopsy. I was a backup ME with the county at the time. I wouldn't have chosen to do the exam on a friend, but there wasn't anyone else available. Plus, as Avi was Jewish, we couldn't delay before the burial. He didn't have any family living, but Oren made his wishes known."

"Saul said Oren never came back to town after Avi's death. Not even for the funeral?"

"He tried, but he couldn't get a flight. We held off on the ceremony as long as we could, but…" Jerry sighed and shook his head. "This way."

Jerry bustled over to a horseshoe-shaped desk under a suspended Reference sign and sat in the swivel chair behind it. He gestured to one of the rolling chairs in front of a bank of old-style VDT monitors. "Grab one of those and make yourself comfortable."

I pulled one over and settled down while he reached under the desk and pulled out a post-bound archival scrapbook that was big enough to hold an entire newspaper page.

"There's not a lot," he said, flipping carefully through the heavy black pages with their polypropylene protectors. "An account of the party. The obituary. My report, of course, wasn't released to the press." He chuckled, shaking his head. "The press. The Boos News , our weekly paper— Don't look at me like that. I didn't name it."

I dialed back my seriously? expression. "Sorry."

"Yes. Well. It wasn't what you'd call Pulitzer-level journalism back then, although Nitya, the new editor, is doing their best to raise the standards." He squinted at the page before muttering a curse and pulling a pair of half-moon cheaters out of his shirt pocket and perching them on his nose. "Anyway, Avi died on a Saturday and the paper publishes on Wednesday, so there's an article about the upcoming party in the previous week's issue, and the obituary and details about the event the week afterward. But I could swear there was something…" He scanned the next page, and a smile lit his face, "Aha! There it is. A letter to the editor." He glanced up at me over his glasses. "The paper doesn't get many of those, but the next month, they did. An anonymous one, at that. Hinting that Avi's death might have been the result of foul play."

I straightened in the uncomfortable chair. "Foul play? Did they say why they suspected it? Who they suspected?"

He waggled one hand. "Indirectly. Although they didn't accuse him in so many words, they did hint that Oren was the only person who materially gained from Avi's death."

I was outraged on Uncle Oren's behalf, despite having never met him. "He wasn't even here!"

"Ah." He tapped one finger on the article and leaned forward with a conspiratorial whisper. "Hit men."

I snorted a laugh, something that always made Greg roll his eyes. "Hit men? In Ghost ?"

"Well, let's say individuals who are willing to do unsavory tasks for a price."

"That could apply to the guys who muck out stables," I muttered.

"I didn't say it was at all likely. Only that this particular correspondent—" He flipped the page, then another. "—who surfaced at least twice a year from that point forward, was doing their best to raise suspicions. After all, if Oren had been involved in Avi's death, he wouldn't have been able to benefit by it."

I sat back and crossed my arms. "Let's ignore the wack jobs for the moment. You examined him at the scene. What did you see? What do you think?"

Jerry pursed his lips, fingers laced over his belly as he squinted at the ceiling. "Avi had been in generally good spirits during the party, considering his disappointment and perhaps anger at Oren's absence. I caught the occasional expression on his face that, as a physician, told me he was experiencing discomfort, but as you know, physical and emotional discomfort can express themselves in the same ways. So other than asking him if he felt all right—which he assured me he did—I didn't press the matter." His gaze dropped to mine. "Something I've regretted to this day."

I murmured something vaguely reassuring, and Jerry smiled tightly.

"After he fell, I determined that the fall and the contusion on his forehead were not significant enough to be fatal. However, when palpating his scalp, I found a raised lump the circumference of a golf ball just above his hairline at the base of his skull. I believe he'd struck his head at some point within the previous seventy-two hours, resulting in bleeding in the brain."

"Subdural hematoma."

"Exactly. But as his advanced directive and cultural/religious customs prohibited autopsy, since it was clear doing so wouldn't provide any service to the living, I was only able to conduct non-invasive examinations. These confirmed what I'd suspected, but gave no additional information, and since there was no evidence of a crime—Avi himself had never mentioned hitting his head, although Ricky said he'd seen him taking ibuprofen for some kind of pain—there was no reason to countermand his wishes."

"Do you think it was an accident?"

"It's a possibility."

I tilted my head, lifting an eyebrow. "Do you think there are other possibilities?"

He met my gaze. "The back of his head obviously came into contact with a heavy object, applied with some force, at some point before the party. In hindsight, I sincerely doubt that level of impact could have occurred accidentally."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning"—Jerry's expression hardened—"some asshole bashed him on the head."