Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost

HOW TO

M A R R Y

A GHOST

HOW TO

MARRY

A GHOST

O

HOPE McINTYRE

®

new york boston

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Caroline Upcher

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Mysterious Press

Hachette Book Group USA

1271 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Visit our Web site at www.mysteriouspress.com.

Mysterious Press is an imprint of Warner Books, Inc.The Mysterious Press name and logo are trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

First eBook Edition: January 2007

ISBN: 0-7595-7146-5

1. Ghostwriters—New York (State)—Long Island—Fiction.

2.Weddings—Fiction. I.Title.

For Joy Harris and Michael Brod, who met the summer I began this book, and who were married at Laurel Hollow, New York, in the presence of many friendly ghosts, the summer I finished it.

For Drew, Bumper, Tess, Seppi, Chula, Smilla, Augie, Jackson, and all the other dogs who came to visit while I was trying to write
How to Marry a Ghost
, and barked till I took them for a walk.

And in memory of Hattie and Billy who died in Devon.

For Johnny Davenport-Handley, who first introduced me to R&B

back in 1963, wherever he is.

And in memory of Crispin Meller, of Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset, born the summer of 1947, who as a young man designed and made his own guitars, and who died, much too young, just after Christmas 2004.

A U T H O R ’ S

N O T E

M
any of the places featured in this book actually exist on the East End of Long Island, including the Old Stone Market. But I hasten to add that its proprietor at the time of the writing of this book, Karen Vaucher, bears no resemblance to my character Franny Cook and that the store has always been run with considerably more efficiency and professionalism than Franny displays in
How to Marry a Ghost
.The real Old Stone Market is a welcome haven for all the residents of Barnes Landing, catering to both gourmet and simple tastes alike. My thanks go to Karen for all her help in giving me a behind-the-scenes look at how a store like hers is established.

HOW TO

M A R R Y

A GHOST

C H

1

A P T E R

P

ON THE DAY THAT MY MOTHER ALMOST COMMITTED

bigamy, the body of a man wearing a wedding dress washed up on the beach.

Maybe the use of the word “bigamy” is a little extreme but my mother
is
still married to my father. The fact that she was having a commitment ceremony rather than a wedding is neither here nor there. Actually it’s on the end of Long Island, New York, where I found myself heading on a humid September afternoon the week after Labor Day.

“What’s a commitment ceremony?” I asked her and by way of response she thrust a copy of the
New York Times Style
section into my hands.

“Here’s where I got the idea,” she said. “Look in the back.

You’ll see loads of them.”

I glanced through the announcements of marriages that had taken place, complete with photos of couples smiling at the camera. And every now and then I read about a couple that had not married but who had instead affirmed their partnership. I couldn’t help noticing that all these couples were gay.

My mother and I are British but the man with whom she intended to affirm her partnership was an American called Philip Abernathy, whom she had known for all of six months. She was committing to Philip and his portfolio of several billion dollars—

1

2
P

Hope McIntyre

I dubbed him the Phillionaire before I’d even met him—barely a year after my father had left her for a French divorcée of whom, I might add, he had quickly tired. Now he wanted my mother back. But after an initial bout of understandable depression she had surprised us all by plunging cheerfully into midlife sexual freedom with a string of aging lotharios.These days the last thing she was interested in was a reunion with my father.

I was traveling in the Phillionaire’s helicopter to the Hamptons where the ceremony was to take place. But instead of looking down at the breathtaking view below me of the breakers rolling in across the Atlantic onto a seemingly endless stretch of beach, I was sitting rigid with fear. My eyes were tight shut and my arms were wrapped around my body in what I called my security hug. The noise was deafening, otherwise I would have shouted to the pilot:
Can’t you see? We’re flying much too low. The
ground’s rushing up to meet us.We’re going to crash at any minute. I want
OUT!
Okay, I’m a big wimp, I’ll admit it, but I’m scared of flying and the closest I’d ever imagined getting to a helicopter was watching
Apocalypse Now
. On television, so I could turn the sound down when it got too scary.

On our arrival at East Hampton Airport the weather gave no indication that the day would end in tragedy, that somewhere out in the warm, inviting waters a body was drifting slowly toward the shore. It was a glorious day, the brilliant sunshine giving everything the kind of hazy gloss that fools you into thinking the quality of your life has been raised a couple of notches. And God knows, mine certainly had and I knew I should stop delving into the negative and get with the program. The Phillionaire had sent his stretch to meet me and it was parked at an angle just a short walk across the tarmac, with a chauffeur holding open the door.

This was my mother’s new American life, I realized with a jolt. I

How to Marry a Ghost

P

3

was still trying to come to terms with the fact that the new man in her life was seriously rich.

The Phillionaire’s house at the beach was a surprise. If there was anywhere a person had a chance to be conspicuous with their wealth, it was the Hamptons, but Phil’s house turned out to be north of Montauk Highway—not fashionable with the ostentatious set. Its waterfront location was not the ocean or Georgica Pond but the bay side of Napeague, midway between the Devon Yacht Club and the Cranberry Hole Road fish farm.

It was an ugly house, a complete mishmash of styles.The main part was stucco fronted by a rather formal colonnade. It had the whole bit: sweeping circular driveway, manicured lawn, shut-tered windows, balconies, turrets, a wraparound veranda with deck chairs that looked like relics from the 1920s.
It’s a mausoleum,
I thought, wondering how my mother would survive in such a miserable-looking place.

I was about go inside when my mother came roaring up the drive at terrifying speed, sitting bolt upright in a little Jeep with a line of fishing rods in holders attached to the hood. They were swaying from side to side in such a violent fashion I thought they might snap at any moment.

“Darling!” she cried leaping out of the Jeep and coming toward me. My mother always greeted me as though she were about to fling her arms around me and I fell for it every time. I moved toward her, my own arms outstretched, but at the last minute she evaded me as she always did, stepping away and leaving me flapping at her in a bereft and clumsy fashion. I could count on one hand the number of times she had actually allowed me to embrace her. After almost forty years of being her daughter I’d finally accepted that while she clearly had a problem showing it, she really did love me. Up until very recently I’d imagined that I was a real disappointment to her. I was convinced that she

4
P

Hope McIntyre

would have preferred a wildly gregarious creature like herself for a daughter, someone who had married in their twenties and given her a brood of grandchildren to chase after and use up some of her seemingly inexhaustible energy. Someone like me, who actually chose to live alone and spend more time at home than going out on the razzle, was an alien to her. Nor did she understand my choice of career as a writer. To lock yourself away in a room and write for hours on end was incomprehensible to someone who had spent years as a high-profile ad executive. But when my father deserted her, after she had given it all up to accommodate his desire to go and bury himself in the French countryside, her vulnerable side had surfaced and I was there for her. It had taken the disintegration of my parents’ marriage for the two of us to draw a little closer to each other but I was thankful for at least that one small mercy.

Now she stood before me, her skin pinpricked with beads of sweat, dressed in some kind of expensive gym gear—sleeveless tee, skintight spandex cycling shorts, and her new snow-white urchin cut half hidden by a sweatband. And she looked fabulous.

She had always been stick thin but the rather hunched and scrawny demeanor of her depressed state following my father’s departure had been replaced by a distinct firmness, slender thighs, and none of that underarm flab that is the hallmark of most middle-aged women. And yet, at sixty-two, could she even still be considered middle-aged? Was I not looking at someone bordering on an
old
-aged phenomenon?