Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (22 page)

Her cackle reverberated against the canvas roof of the Jeep.

I wondered what on earth I was doing with this woman.Was she a nutcase? I suspected her nonstop chatter masked a bundle of nerves.

Of course I knew the answer to my question. I was with her because Sean Marriott had been wearing one of her dresses when he died and because her name began with “M.”
M saw something.

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M saw something. M saw something
. The words repeated themselves over and over in my head as the Jeep hurtled down Cranberry Hole Road.
Meet M Mallaby beach at 9
.

“Anyway, yes,” she said, “I walked along the bay all the way to Lazy Point and the Shellfish Hatchery guys were there with this veil that had become entangled in a clam raft they were towing.

Everybody was standing around and going
ooh
and
aah
.What was a wedding veil doing floating in the bay? It was drenched but I recognized it immediately as one of mine.Then we got word that a body had been pulled out of the ocean so I called Louis Nichols on my cell phone and asked him to come and pick me up and drive me over there.”

“But how come Sean was wearing one of your wedding dresses?”

“Because he used to come over and borrow them. He liked dressing up in them. He’d go for walks through the woods in them and I’m here to tell you—he made a seriously beautiful bride.”

“When did you give him that particular dress?”

“Oh, I don’t know. About a week earlier. Wait a minute, slow down, you make a left here.”

She directed me to take a turn off Cranberry Hole Road not far from the one that led to Shotgun’s house. Like the dirt track going to Mallaby, this road ran through woods, but instead of leading to a proper driveway, it petered out into a sandy lane.We arrived at a clearing in the beach grass on which stood two beaten-up trailers.

“Here we are. Home sweet home.”

“You live
here
?” I said before I could stop myself. What was a woman like her doing living in a makeshift trailer park? “Sorry, that was rude. I just expected—”

“You just expected me to live in a fancy Hamptons home.

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Well, get real. There’s plenty of us who live out here who don’t have a bean to our name.”

“Do you own this land?”

“Not an inch of it. It belongs to the town, although I got this spot from an old fisherman I met when I first came here. He leased it. He came back from several years working on long-liners or gillnetters or draggers or whatever work he could find and discovered his little shack had fallen down, been blown over in a hurricane or something. So he took off again—but not before he’d told me I could do whatever I wanted with his spot. See, we’re on Lazy Point here—”

“We are?” I looked along the bay and recognized the inlet where I’d gone after my first visit to Shotgun.

“—and as I said, this old bayman, he doesn’t own the land.

The town does. At the end of WWII the town fathers divided the beach around here into various lots and assigned leases.You could own a house but not the land. The town kept that. And you can only sell your house, catch-22 style, to someone who already lives at Lazy Point. So when his shack fell down, the old guy didn’t really have anything.”

“So these trailers?”

“I found them, had them towed to the lot and deposited right onto the beach. I scoured all the yard sales and the dump for a mass of broken-down furniture and then I found someone to fix all of it. I talked a ship’s carpenter I knew into working for next to nothing alongside local plumbers and electricians and pretty soon I had a home. Come on in and take a look.”

She opened the door to the first trailer and it was like enter-ing another world. Right in front of us was a wood-burning stove, the chimney going out through the roof of the trailer.

There were no chairs, only benches built into the wall around a table that was nailed to the floor.

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“For when the next hurricane hits,” said Martha ominously.

In the window of the trailer overlooking the water there was a big ship’s wheel and a telescope.

“In the eyes of the town these trailers are his so I kind of wanted them to have a masculine, seafaring feel.” Martha stood behind the wheel. “See, it’s like you’re steering a ship, looking out to sea. I figured if he ever came back, he’d feel right at home.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Oh, about twenty years. He’s probably dead.” The infuriating cackle again.

“So the town could turn you out at any time?”

Her laughter subsided instantly. “You’ve got it in one,” she said. Her manic self-assurance faltered and for a second I saw a vulnerable middle-aged woman of no means whatsoever.

At the other end was a kitchen area. All the appliances were pretty basic with the exception of a giant stainless-steel fridge that dwarfed the rest of the confined space.

“Isn’t she a beaut?” said Martha. “Just got her in a sale. Now come and meet my girls.”

Did she have daughters stashed away somewhere? Cats?

The trailers stood opposite each other, leaving a sandy patio in between. There was a screened-in porch attached to the back of one trailer.

“See, I’ve got a little fridge set up out here and a grill. This is my summer living room.” She pointed to a little card table and some wrought-iron weatherproof beach furniture.There were little feminine touches here and there, window boxes with geraniums, brightly colored cushions, displays of conches and other shells.

The layout of the other trailer was weird.We walked straight into a primitive bathroom—a shower and loo behind a curtain.

To the left was Martha’s bedroom—a double bunk bed built into the wall covered with a patchwork quilt, a little rocker, and an-

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other wood-burning stove.Were they her only way of heating the place? High up, just underneath the ceiling, bookshelves ran around the walls but when I glanced up I saw they were crammed with magazines, not books. I looked closer and saw they were all back issues of
Brides
magazine. A tiny feeling of unease began to work its way around my head.

“Isn’t it great?” she said. “I can lie in bed and listen to the waves lapping away outside.”

“What about in the winter? Doesn’t it get a little bracing out here on the beach?”

Her enthusiasm evaporated in a second. “It’s a nightmare,” she conceded. “And it can be pretty terrifying. Of course it’s calmer over here on the bay side but there are times when I think the waves are going to rise up and obliterate me. The tide comes up underneath the trailers and I just sit in here and quake.”

Suddenly I realized she was in a far more precarious state than I had begun to imagine. Whatever image she tried to present to the world, by living here right on the beach she was bordering on bag lady status.

“But hey!” she said, the smile returning. “It’s free and you know what? I could put up with everything if it wasn’t for the wind. Wind destroys me, it always has. It’s not just my arthritis, it’s what it does to my head. Sometimes I think I’m going to go crazy. I know it looks cozy in here but the wind always finds a way to get to me.”

“I hate the wind too,” I said. “I can’t write a word when it’s howling outside.”

“Me either,” she said, pointing to a corner, and I noticed a little laptop set up on a makeshift trestle table. I couldn’t help but admire how organized she was.

“So, time you met the girls.”

Her “girls” were her wedding dresses. They were in the other

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end of the trailer on the far side of the bathroom. A tiny portion of the area housed Martha’s own clothes in a built-in closet and a chest of drawers, while the rest of the room was given over to racks, the kind they use in garment districts to wheel clothes up and down streets. And hanging from them, encased in transpar-ent plastic covers blurring the sight of them and rendering them as lines of girlish wraiths, were wedding dresses.There must have been at least fifty and they spooked me because they looked like an assembly of reproachful brides who had been put in storage and forgotten.

“Aren’t they just the most beautiful things you have ever seen?” Martha plunged into them, unzipping the covers and fingering the lace or the satin or the silk. “So your mother got married in a short dress. Makes a change. What happened to your dad?”

“She’s still married to him.” The look on her face when I said that made me rush to explain about the Phillionaire.Then I asked her flat out. “Why do you collect wedding dresses?”

“Well, it’s a long story but, you know, there’s no smoke without fire.” She led me back outside to sit in the screened-in porch and I was relieved. I really couldn’t wait to get away from the wedding dresses. I felt they were
watching
me.

“You want some lemonade?” She took a pitcher out of the little fridge and poured me a glass. “You see, I
was
jilted a long time ago right before the wedding and it nearly destroyed me. But you know, I’m from an era when women didn’t give in to their neuroses, didn’t fall apart and start spouting a lot of self-help clap-trap like they do now.” She reached across and patted my hand to show she didn’t mean me. “So I pulled myself together and I decided I wouldn’t become bitter and twisted. I would start over and somehow I would make something out of what had happened to me. So I moved out here and all I had left was my wedding

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dress. I was an actress back then and I was working off-Broadway.

I was moving around all the time, wherever my work took me. I really didn’t have that many possessions. It was June. I went for a walk along the beach. I walked by three weddings and I thought to myself, this is big business out here.”

“You gave up acting?”

“There wasn’t much to give up. My acting career was going nowhere. I told myself,
Girl, there are three things that you do well.

You can act but that didn’t work out.You can write
—and that’s where you come in.” Another pat on my hand and I folded my arms to ward off any further attempts. “
And you can sew
. Under the bench in the trailer back there is a Singer.You’d be amazed how many girls who think they’re going to hang on to their wedding dresses forever wind up getting rid of them. The marriage goes sour, what are they going to do? They’re going to offload them onto me for a knockdown price and I’m going to remodel them into amazing gowns I can sell to gullible new brides.”

“Where’s your showroom? The beach?”

“Don’t knock it,” she said. “What better place? Most of the weddings take place there anyway. But no, you’re right. Actually I go to their houses for the fittings.”

“And Sean Marriott modeled for you? How did you meet him?”

“Hah!” She slapped her knee. “That’s a good one. I met him right here on the beach. It’s secluded down here. No one’s ever around and there were these guys, they had a ceremony like your mother’s only they were gay. I made the bride’s dress. Sean came to the ‘wedding’ and I showed him my collection. After that he borrowed dresses one at a time, at least once a month.”

“And that’s how he came to be wearing it when he was killed?”

“I wondered if maybe he was returning it to me when he was attacked? I wasn’t here. I had a big problem that night. I’d had a

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ride earlier in the day to Sag Harbor where I had an appointment with the foot doctor there. Have you ever had an ingrown toenail? It’s the worst. And then I did a little shopping; there’s a health food store where I can get the short-grain brown rice that I like. I browsed in BookHampton and I walked over the bridge to North Haven to catch the sunset. And then I did something quite unusual for me. I stuck out my thumb and hitched a ride to the Shelter Island ferry. It’s a really special place, totally un-spoiled.”

“Did you really?” I was impressed. I would never in a million years hitch a ride from a stranger. I always imagined they’d stran-gle me as soon as I got in the car.

“So I went to Shelter Island—it’s only a five-minute hop and I wandered around there as far as I could get on foot but then, of course, I couldn’t get home. I had my cell phone but I didn’t know the numbers for cabs on Shelter Island. And when I finally knocked on a door and asked for a number, there were no cabs available. No one wanted to drive as far as Lazy Point.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went and stood by the ferry until I found someone who was coming this way. I didn’t get back until nearly midnight by which time, from what I can make out, poor Sean was already floating in the bay.”

So much for
M saw something
.

“You said you lived near Mallaby? It’s close to here?”

“Just along the bay and through the woods over there.” She nodded behind her.

“So the next night—Bettina was killed very near here?”

“And I was over by the ocean watching them haul poor Sean out of the water.”

“And then? You said you were with Louis Nichols?”

“You don’t miss a trick, do you? I went home with Louis,

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spent the night there. He lives within walking distance of the Old Stone Market.”

“He brought you to the market this morning?”

She looked at me quizzically. “Yes. He did. We’re an item, as they say, only he’s not too keen to make it public. Doesn’t really like us being seen as a couple. I think he’s got a crush on Franny Cook and he never likes me cramping his style when he goes to the Old Stone Market.”

“Surely not?” I tried to make it sound as if I didn’t believe what she was saying but I recalled noting Louis Nichols’s interest in Franny at the Stone Landing Residents Association meeting, and the way he had followed her around this morning was revealing.