Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (30 page)

But in the end I heard nothing because Franny wasn’t at the Stucco House when I raced over to get her, having told Dumpster to wait at the cabin. My mother opened the door and when I saw her I realized she was desperately in need of moral support.

I think up to now she had been in shock and it was starting to hit her what had happened to Phil, just when she needed to find the strength to get through the funeral.

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Lucia came rushing up and began to dab at us with a clothes brush, flicking away imaginary fluff from our dark clothes. I knew she was trying to be helpful, to offer some kind of consolation, but it felt intrusive. And when we stepped outside we found a long black funeral car had drawn up to the Stucco House ready to drive us down to the beach.

“Oh no, this is all wrong. It’ll get stuck in the sand. We’ll walk,” my mother told the driver.

She took two steps off the porch and her heels sank into the sand and then to my amazement she stopped and kicked off her shoes.

“Let’s go barefoot,” she said, “you know, like the last time.”

So I slipped my arm through hers and together we set off barefoot down the sandy trail to the beach. I sensed someone behind us and turned to see Evan Morrison.

“I’m sorry to intrude at this time,” he said, “but I understand Franny Cook is living here. I need to see her and ask her where her son is. And of course I want to pay my respects—”

I was speechless. My mother was smiling uncertainly. She had no idea who he was. And then the most surprising person came to our rescue. Scott was running down the trail toward us and when he reached Evan Morrison, he placed his palm flat against the detective’s chest and pushed him away.

“You should go,” he said, “and you should leave my stepmother alone. This is family only.”

Evan Morrison looked at me but Scott was still backing him firmly away and unless he wanted to fall flat on his back into the dunes, he had no option but to turn and leave. Scott took my mother’s other arm and the three of us continued slowly on down to the beach. I had noted the reference to his “stepmother”

and I wondered what my mother had made of that. And my mind

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was racing about Evan Morrison.
Please God, do not let him walk
over to the cabin and find Dumpster
.

It was a glorious day and tiny dots of sunshine were dancing all over the bay. I didn’t know whether to be glad about this—the sun was shining as a mark of respect for the Phillionaire—or resentful because it appeared to be taunting the gloom that pervaded a funeral.

Rufus and his surfer gang were standing around the coffin although this time they had their surfboards pointed down away from them.The tears started in my eyes and the service passed in a blur. I barely registered what was being said. I just gripped my mother’s arm, ostensibly to stop her from falling but in actual fact I know I was hanging on to her partly to hold myself up. Scott read something in a flat monotone and Rufus talked about what his father had told him of his surfing days. Louis Nichols spoke quickly about Scott and Rufus’s mother, glancing at mine from time to time, but then he went on to describe how the last few months of the Phillionaire’s life had been blessed with the joy of being with Vanessa.

“What happens now?” I whispered to my mother as the short service came to an end. “Where is he going to be buried? Is it far from here?”

“He’s not,” she whispered back. “He’s going straight to a crematorium—they wanted us to have the service there but I couldn’t face it. And then we’ll be given an urn and Rufus is going to take Scott and me out in his boat and we’ll scatter his ashes over the bay. Darling, I’m sorry”—she gripped my arm a little tighter—“there won’t be room for you in the boat. I’d rather it were you and me and Rufus but Scott has to come.”

“I understand,” I said. But I was miserable. I wanted to be there, to be part of the family, a stepsister—even though I wasn’t.

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Midway through the ceremony I had noticed a tiny dot of a figure approaching along the water line from far up the beach.

After a while I realized with a shudder that it was Martha. Was she going to jinx the funeral too? Or was she just stalking Louis Nichols? She materialized now at my side as I began what I had anticipated being a lonely walk back to the cabin from the Stucco House.

“Not going with them?” She put her arm around my shoulders as I shook my head and explained why. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll take you out in my boat another time and you can take something from his cabin and throw it in. Same thing. Do you want company now or shall I leave you alone?”

“No, please come back with me.” I didn’t want to wallow in my grief all alone. I really needed her.

“Thank you for your support,” I said. “I tend to find it awkward showing people how much I appreciate the things they do for me. I like to think I don’t need anyone but every now and then I really do and you seemed to know that without my telling you. I think that’s what I’m really grateful for.”

“Oh stop!” she said. “Just remember it’s a two-way street if it makes you feel any better. I need your help with my writing.”

“Oh,” I said, when we walked into the cabin and there was no one there. Had Dumpster got fed up with waiting and left or had Evan Morrison found him here and taken him?

“What’s up?” said Martha. “Were you expecting someone?”

I explained about Dumpster, expecting her to share my concern but to my surprise she just nodded.

“Oh, I expect Evan’s got him.”

“I don’t feel I can trust him for some reason.”

“You can’t?” She was surprised. “Because he’s new around here? Why would that bother you? You are too. But you haven’t come from the South Bronx like he did. He must think he’s died

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and gone to heaven working out here in the Hamptons. It’s a far cry from patrolling the public housing projects he started out with, all those dealers lurking in stairwells, watching the action in the streets for hours on end, crouched on a tar rooftop till he could barely move, finding dead junkies in burned-out houses.”

“He was a narc? Sounds like you’ve talked to him quite a bit.”

“He was a narc. I talked to him quite a bit,” she repeated. “Last night, as a matter of fact. He came by the trailers and we walked on the beach.”

“Why did he come to see you? He’d questioned you before now, surely?”

“Of course he had. With me living so close to where the killings took place, he wanted to know if I’d seen or heard anything.”

“And had you?”

“Well no, but then I remembered that I’d seen something the night
before
Sean Marriott was killed. I saw him walking through the woods with a shotgun.”

M saw Sean w/shotgun in woods night before Sean killed
. Bettina had meant Sean was with the Purdey
shotgun,
not with his father, Shotgun, as I had assumed. And this “M” wasn’t Martin, it was Martha.

“And you told Bettina this?”

She looked at me as if I were crazy. “
Bettina?
I didn’t know Bettina. No, I followed Sean because it was such a strange sight.

He was the least likely person to use a shotgun. I wanted to see where he was going with it and he went straight to this little blind Dumpster’s got set up in the woods, the place he goes when he hunts deer. Sean left the shotgun inside—for Dumpster, I guess.”

“Shotgun told me they were friends,” I said. “In fact he said that when he saw the Purdey was missing from Sean’s room, he

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figured Sean must have loaned it to Dumpster. But surely you’re not suggesting that Dumpster killed Sean?”

“Actually, I am. By accident,” said Martha. “And the real tragedy is that he probably did it with Sean’s own gun. He saw a shadow in the woods and he thought it was Bettina.”

“But he knew Bettina wasn’t coming. He told me he overheard Shotgun talking to her on the phone, telling her not to come.”

“But he told you that
afterwards,
right? He could have been lying. Maybe he didn’t know Bettina wasn’t coming and he was waiting in the woods for her.”

“But why would he be waiting for her?”

“To kill her, for Shotgun. Evan Morrison and I worked it all out as we were walking along the beach. Here’s what happened.

Are you okay, by the way? I didn’t plan on coming over here and getting into this. I’m supposed to be consoling you and—”

I nodded yes, I was fine—although I was a little shocked to realize I hadn’t thought of the Phillionaire for several minutes.

“Shotgun Marriott wants to get rid of Bettina because she knows something about what happened to that groupie in London. Sean’s mother as good as told him that his father killed the girl. Shotgun is scared Bettina either knows what happened or she’ll uncover the truth as she digs into his past for the book. But he doesn’t want another murder on his hands so he talks Dumpster into killing her for him. Sean left the first murder weapon in Dumpster’s blind and the second, Dumpster’s bow and arrow, were found in that construction pit. It doesn’t look good for the kid.”

I didn’t say anything because as much as I tried to dismiss it, it was beginning to sound like a plausible scenario. Dumpster had as good as admitted to me that he had been lying about his whereabouts on both nights. He had told me he had been at Mal-

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laby but he hadn’t been at the house—which meant he
was
out in the woods. Had he been lying about his bow and arrow being stolen from his truck? Had the meeting with Bettina in fact taken place? Was Shotgun covering up for him, or was he covering up for Shotgun—or both?

“I’m with Evan Morrison on this,” said Martha. “His theory is the only one that pans out.There’s no one else around here with a likely motive for killing Bettina.Whether he actually pulled the trigger or not, Shotgun did it.”

“Did what?” said a voice behind me and Martha gasped.

She had gone very pale. She was on her feet and moving past me out the door before I could say anything.

Shotgun looked after her, puzzled.

“Look, if it’s not a good time? I just wanted to come and tell you how sorry I am about Philip Abernathy. For you I mean. I didn’t know him. But that woman who just rushed out of here, I think I’ve seen her somewhere before. Who was she? And what am I supposed to have done?”

He was looking immaculate in freshly pressed linen pants and a crisp white shirt. His only concession to the fact that he was in a beach environment was a pair of rope-soled espadrilles in a virulent shade of purple. Didn’t he ever wear beat-up shorts and sneakers like the rest of us? What was the point of living at the beach if you didn’t get down and dirty in the sand once in a while? He appeared more formally dressed than I was and I had just been to a funeral.

“We’ve just had Phil’s funeral,” I said, “down at the beach.”

“Yes, I saw them packing up on my way over here—oh, sorry,”

he looked mortified for a second, “that makes it sound like you just had a picnic.”

“I know what you mean.” I smiled. “They’re taking the coffin

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to a crematorium and later they’re going to scatter his ashes over the bay. Did you walk over here?”

He nodded. “Dumpster told me where you were staying. He said it would be a short and beautiful walk and he was right. I just wandered down through my woods and there I was. I really have to get out and about more. I’ve become such a recluse.”

“That’s what they say about you round here—that you’re a total hermit. No one ever sees you and the only way people know you’re here is that you hire local people to work at the house and
they’ve
seen you. Like Dumpster.” I looked at him. “Dumpster told you where to find me? So you’ve seen him around Mallaby lately?”

“Sure,” said Shotgun, “like half an hour ago. He came by to take care of a few things around the house, in Sean’s old room above the stables as a matter of fact. He’s helping me clear the place out and maybe I’ll let him move in there permanently. He seems to be sleeping there most of the time anyway.”

“He’s hiding out with you?”

“Hiding out?”

“As far as his mother’s concerned Dumpster’s disappeared.”

“Is that right?” said Shotgun. “Well, maybe you’d better keep quiet about the fact that Dumpster’s with me.”

Shotgun was shielding Dumpster.

“So who was that woman who just left? She didn’t exactly act like she was one of my fans.”

“On the contrary,” I said, thinking of Martha’s remark about me introducing Shotgun to her as a rich and eligible suitor, but I thought better of mentioning it. “That was Martha Farrell. She’s lived round here for—what?—twenty years? So you’ve probably caught sight of her at some point—on one of your rare excur-sions outdoors during the daytime.”

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“Martha Farrell,” he repeated it slowly. “She said ‘Shotgun did it.’What am I supposed to have done?”

“You mean you really don’t know?” I forced myself to continue the banter between us and hoped he’d let it go at that. “So, when would you like me to come over for another session? I think I’m ready to go back to work—now that we’re past the funeral.”

He didn’t answer me. Instead he seemed preoccupied with something he could see through the open door.

“Shotgun? Kip, I mean?”

“Look,” he said, turning around suddenly, “this is awkward. I really did come over to offer my condolences about Philip Abernathy but there’s another reason I wanted to see you. I’m through with the book. I don’t want to go on with it.”

I was staggered.

“But you were doing it for Sean.”

“I was. Only for Sean,” he confirmed. “But I’ve changed my mind. No more book.”