Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (26 page)

“Martha.” I hesitated, trying to hang on to my patience. So far I’d been amazed that Franny and Rufus hadn’t pressed me for gossip about Shotgun. I’d known it was only a matter of time before someone like Martha Farrell stuck her nose in. “I’d love to tell you but I really do have to keep everything confidential at this stage. I’m just starting to get some rather delicate material out of him. I really couldn’t jeopardize our relationship—”

“
You
have a relationship with him?” She jumped on it.

“A professional relationship—”

“But you’ll tell me later? When you can? We’re going to see a lot of each other.We’re virtually neighbors, I can just walk up the beach and—”

I had a mild panic attack at the thought of Martha descending on me at unexpected moments but before I could think of a tact-ful way of dissuading her, she had disappeared back to the cabin.

She reappeared almost immediately and I nearly groaned out loud.

She was carrying her manuscript.

“I saw this on the counter,” she said cheerfully. “You haven’t started it, have you?”

I opened my mouth, searching around for an excuse.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I understand. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a taste of it. I’m going to read you the first chapter.”And she positioned herself in front of me so that she was outlined against the crimson sun as it began its descent into the bay.

“You’ll see why I wanted you to read this,” she said before she began. “As soon as Franny said you were English I knew you were

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the reader I wanted. My story is about two Englishwomen in an uneven and destructive friendship”—she looked at me—“that ends in tragedy.”

I was a captive audience and all I could do was take a large slug of wine and pray that it would soon become too dark for her to see.

Which it did, but that didn’t stop her. She just carried her chair indoors and continued reading. And to my utter amazement, by that time I was hanging on her every word.

It was melodramatic but from the first page it succeeded in moving me. It was narrated in the first person from the point of view of a nervous schoolgirl whom I suspected was based on Martha herself. It described her first meeting with another girl, someone with a much stronger personality who was clearly going to dominate the “Martha” character in a powerful and twisted way. I felt a shiver run through me. Stories of female friendships were strong commercial bets for the women’s market and as I listened I had a hunch the time would come when I would be telling Genevieve about Martha.

But there was something else about Martha’s reading.The former actress in her had come to the fore and she had given it everything she had—in a British accent. And it was brilliant! I closed my eyes at one point and it could have been an English-woman sitting beside me.

“What do you think?” she said when she’d finished the first chapter.

“Martha, I think it’s spellbinding.” I was embarrassed to see her face break into a look of such pathetic gratitude that for one moment I thought she was going to leap up and embrace me.

“You’ve succeeded in carrying me right up into your story from the first page and I can’t wait to read more.”

I was so impressed that for half a second I actually contem-

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plated inviting her to join me for supper. But the last thing I wanted to do was to set a precedent and have her thinking she was going to hang out with me all the time. In any case she seemed to realize her visit had come to an end, if only for different reasons.

“I’ll leave you to get on with it,” she said, “and I’d better make a move before it gets too chilly to walk home along the beach. I didn’t bring a sweater.”

Not long after she left I happened to glance out of one of the back windows of the cabin.What I saw caused me to lean over the counter and sink my head in my hands in despair.

There were headlights halfway up the drive again. They weren’t moving, which meant someone was parked, watching.

And I was fully illuminated.There was no point pretending it was Martha come back for something she’d forgotten because she couldn’t drive.

It was the fact that someone was out there watching me that got to me. I think I would have even preferred it if they had shown themselves. Suddenly I needed to see exactly who—or what—I was up against.

And then the headlamps went out and I screamed involuntar-ily. Now the voyeur was totally invisible—and possibly creeping up on me.

I dialed 999.

Nothing happened. I waited for a voice to say “Emergency—

police, fire, or ambulance?” but there was complete silence.

Then I suddenly remembered. They didn’t dial 999 in America. It was something else. I rushed to the cupboard in the kitchen where the Phillionaire kept a set of phone books and was frantically flicking through the pages at the front when a figure went past the window.

I screamed again, grabbed a bread knife, and rushed to hide

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behind the shower curtain. It was thick and expensive and double layered so providing I kept the light off in the shower, I should be hidden from view. My heart was pounding in my chest as I waited.

And then there was a knock on the door.

What did he expect me to do? Answer the door so he could shoot me at point-blank range?

But I’d left the door open and I heard the handle being turned.

I raised the bread knife high above my head, trembling all over. But my hand was shaking so hard I dropped the knife and it clattered onto the tiles.

The curtain was yanked open and I stood face to face with Detective Evan Morrison.

He looked at the knife in my hand.

“I didn’t know who you were,” I said in a terrified squeaky voice I didn’t recognize as my own. “Someone’s been parking out there at night and watching me.”

“Really?” He sounded almost amused.

And suddenly a horrific thought popped into my head. It had been him spying on me? He had turned up at Franny’s late at night.What was there to stop him doing the same to me?

“What do you want?” I said brusquely. “What are you doing here? Have you been here before?”

“You mean have I had you under surveillance?”

From his tone of voice, I knew that one way or another that was exactly what he had been doing. Either he had been tailing me or sitting parked outside watching me, or he had told someone to keep an eye on me.

“Ma’am, I’m here to ask you some questions about Shotgun Marriott.”

“It’s a little late.” I couldn’t look him in the eye.

“And I apologize for not calling first.”

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I didn’t want him inside the Phillionaire’s special space. I didn’t want him here at all and I was nervous about him being so close to the Stucco House while Franny was there. I picked up the knife, stepped out of the shower, and walked across to the kitchen. Then I leaned against the counter and confronted him. I couldn’t bring myself to invite him to sit down.

“It’s a great spot you’ve got here,” he said. “Belongs to Philip Abernathy, I believe. You friends with the Abernathys for long, Miss Bartholomew?”

“My mother and Philip Abernathy are partners,” I said, surprised at how easily the description of their relationship came to me now.

“Partners.” He let the word hang there for a beat as if he were slightly disgusted by the thought of it. “No one gets married anymore. Men, women, they’re all—partners.”

“Are you married?” The last thing I wanted to do was to let the conversation take a personal turn but I couldn’t resist it. And I wished he’d stop smiling. I hated people who smiled
all
the time because generally these were the insincere kind of smiles that never reached the eyes.

He held up his left hand by way of reply. No wedding ring. “So you’ve been hired by Shotgun Marriott to help him write his autobiography?”

I nodded.

“How does that work?” He leaned forward and his belly flopped over his belt, straining at the buttons of his shirt. I think what I hated most about him was that he was so
fleshy
. I remembered what Franny had said about him pushing up against her and I felt sick.

I described the process of interviewing subjects, transcribing the tapes, and roughing out a first draft that I then reworked with them. “It’s a collaborative process,” I explained, “most of the time

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anyway. Occasionally people leave it all to me, never even read the finished book, but that doesn’t happen very often.”

“When did you start work?”

“Last Saturday.”

He looked surprised. “Really? Not till then? Didn’t I see you at his house earlier?”

“That was the first time I met him. We hadn’t started on the book then.”

“But you have now?”

I nodded. I didn’t want to look at him and I didn’t want to speak to him any more than I had to.

“So is he talking about his son’s murder? What has he said about Bettina Pleshette? And what made him want to write his memoirs now, after all this time?”

It was a very good question and one that I didn’t yet have the answer to. Shotgun had said he was writing the book for Sean but why now?

“I never reveal what my subjects tell me until we’re done,” I said. “Everything that isn’t in the final book is confidential. It’s a rule of mine.”

“And anything you don’t tell me that pertains to the case will be regarded as obstruction,” he said, leaning over to put his face very close to mine. I leapt away from the counter, shaken, and backed away from him. I wanted to run away, to race out the door and down to the beach and plunge into the water. I wanted to swim out to sea following the path illuminated by what I thought must surely be a full moon. But at the same time I knew that it wouldn’t help Shotgun if I antagonized Evan Morrison. I searched frantically for the best way to handle him. I decided to take a chance that he might be susceptible to flattery. Maybe instead of revealing what I knew about Shotgun, I could merely
appear
will-

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ing and at the same time cajole Detective Morrison into telling me how his case was progressing.

“This assignment is unusual.” I gave him such a blazing fake smile that I succeeded in making him recoil a little. “Obviously the fact that his son has been murdered makes Shotgun Marriott a little different from most of my subjects. I’ll try to be as helpful as I can.”

He seemed to relax a little and took out a notebook. He asked me routine stuff: I lived in England? Where exactly? London? Oh, he’d been in London once but he hadn’t liked it much. How long had I been a writer, had I known Shotgun before taking on the job, had I known Bettina? Oh, we had the same agent? He hadn’t known that.

“So where were you the night Sean Marriott was killed?” The question shot out of his mouth like a rattle of gunfire. “Were you already in America?”

“I was still in New York,” I said and explained how I’d come out the next day for my mother and Phil’s commitment ceremony. He nodded, yes he knew about that, and he couldn’t resist a smirk. A
commitment
ceremony! “And I was at the party after the ceremony while Bettina Pleshette was . . .” I paused. I had been about to say “getting killed” but that sounded callous.

“Being sliced to pieces by an arrow?” He reached out suddenly and tapped me on my back and I jumped. “That’s where it got her. Boy, I’m telling you, she was a real mess. Viewer discretion advised. The arrow went in between the ribs and the side of the spine and that’s where you’ve got your big arteries, your aorta, and a couple of kidney arteries. If even one of those got hit she’d have been dead in less than sixty seconds.”

I was shaken by his coarse description of her injuries.The nature of his line of work probably gave him more immunity than the rest of us to having strong reactions at the sight of slaughtered

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bodies but couldn’t he at least show a little more respect when talking about them?

“So you don’t think they were killed by the same person?”

“You probably know Shotgun Marriott better than I do by now. You think he would kill his own son?”

I didn’t answer. I was too busy thinking that he had just nom-inated Shotgun as Bettina’s killer.

“So this party after the
commitment
ceremony, as you call it, where you say you were at the night Bettina Pleshette was killed, took place where exactly?”

Damn! I didn’t want to draw attention to the Stucco House.

“At Philip Abernathy’s house but around eleven his son took me over to the ocean where he was going to surf. And we saw Sean Marriott’s body being pulled out of the water.” I said this to distract him. “You might have seen me there. Of course we thought he had drowned.”

“What makes you think he didn’t?”

“It was all over the papers that he was shot,” I said innocently,

“and I was there when you brought Shotgun’s Purdey to his house and arrested him for Bettina’s murder. Shotgun’s prints were on it, I suppose, since it belonged to him. Anyone else’s?”

He ignored my question as I had assumed he would. But when he did speak again, I was stunned by what he said.

“You’re English, right? You were around when Shotgun Marriott killed that”—he hesitated—“that girl in London?”

“What?” My heart was banging against my chest again. “What makes you say
that
? He was never convicted.”

“We’ve got Sean Marriott’s laptop. Mostly it’s just full of e-mail exchanges with his boyfriend in New York, where they’re going to meet, what they’re going to do to each other when they do.” He shuddered and I prayed he wouldn’t offer any further comment. “And there was some stuff from his father. ‘Want to

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