Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (45 page)

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Hope McIntyre

poses Shotgun had become the father Dumpster never had and if Franny had a problem with this, she kept it to herself. All she asked of Shotgun was that he keep Dumpster clear of any drug activity.

Despite her new role as the fiancée of a millionaire, Franny still turned up to run the Old Stone Market every day and whenever I went there, I thought of my first meeting with Angie Marriott. Over the past nine months I had spent a lot of time trying to get Angie Marriott out of my head and wondering over and over again if she had planned the final outcome of what happened that night at her house off Portobello.

Following the deafening blast of the shotgun on the other side of the door, I had held my breath for as long as I could before rushing to rattle the door handle in panic.

“Let me out! Please, let me out of here.”

And then I heard Max’s voice. “Lee, don’t move. DO NOT

MOVE!” I heard him running up the stairs and then the sound of the key turning in the lock. I rushed to the door but he only opened it a crack. He was leaning in and pushing me away.

“Stand back. Move right away from the door. Go on,” he said as I struggled to get out. “You’re not coming out.You’re staying here.”

What was he
doing
? He had to let me out. Was he trying to hold me prisoner too? And then I looked down and saw the bloody footprints made by the soles of his shoes and I began to shake. He pushed me firmly away from the door and locked it from the inside.

“You’re staying here, Lee. Do you understand? I do not want you to see what’s out there.We’ll get a ladder up to the window and take you out that way.”

“What happened?” I whispered, almost paralyzed with fear.

“Did she shoot Martha?”

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“She shot herself,” said Max. “She sat down on the top step, rested the shotgun a few steps down with the barrel pointing up into her mouth and fired. Her brains exploded all over the landing.”

“You just stepped in them,” I said, staring at his bloody shoes.

“I had to tread in them to get to you and you will too if you go out there.” He threw open the window and leaned out to yell down to the courtyard, “Up here, we’ll need a ladder soon as you can.The entrance is round the corner in Westbourne Park Road.”

“So,” he turned back to me, “what happened?”

I told him, speaking very fast because it was the only way I could stop myself from breaking down in tears.When I’d finished, a smile began to spread across his face. All the brooding tension that was part and parcel of his normal expression seemed to dis-solve as his features relaxed. For one memorable instant he looked genuinely happy and I barely recognized him.

I yearned to be able to capture this softer side of Max and bottle it so I could produce it to offset the grouchiness he normally presented to me.Was this the only thing that put him at ease? The solving of a murder?

“Wait till Frank Shaw hears about this!” He punched the air with an uncharacteristic show of excitement.Then before I knew what was happening he had gathered me up in a spontaneous hug that was so forceful I felt the tip of my nose being abraded by the scratchy tweed of his jacket and I pulled away.

“Oh, sorry,” he said and the scowl was back.

“No,” I said and pointed to my nose. “Your jacket’s like a Brillo pad.”

He took it off and flung it on the floor.Then before I could say another word, he brought me back into his arms and lifted my chin so that my lips met his.

His lips were unbelievably soft and his tongue explored my

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Hope McIntyre

mouth slowly and carefully as if he were investigating it for evidence. I reached up with my arms above my head and stretched myself against him. He ran his hands down the sides of my body to the bottom of my thighs and up again and then he lifted me up and held me high above him as if I were a feather. He brought me down slowly to reengage his mouth with mine.

It was all over in seconds—suddenly there was a tap on the window and I saw a hand reaching up. Richie’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. I felt Max freeze in my arms before he sprang away from me.

“I’m sorry,” he said curtly, “I don’t know what came over me.

I’m truly sorry.”

Richie was standing there on the other side of the glass, trying in vain to open the window from the outside. Max signaled to him to go back down again.

“I’m not remotely sorry,” I said quickly. “I’m very pleased and happy and excited about what just happened and I’d like it to happen again. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He didn’t give me an answer, just opened the window and beckoned me to climb out onto the ladder.

We had several meetings after that, about the investigation and nothing else, and he made sure that each one took place in an interview room down at the station. It was sheer agony for me to sit there, separated from him by a metal table with Richie parked beside him like a chaperone. At one point our knees touched and I became electrified. I contemplated reaching out with my foot although where exactly I intended to aim it, I wasn’t too sure. In any case there was a chance I’d start stroking Richie by mistake and make things even worse.

Max’s eagle eyes bored into mine during the interviews but the minute they were over, he stood up and barely looked at me again. And then he disappeared off my radar altogether. Cath told

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me he and Richie were caught up in a horrendous case investigating the murder of a four-year-old girl and that Richie was so strung out he was coming home and not speaking to her all night.

She didn’t say anything about Max and me and I began to think that maybe Richie hadn’t seen us kissing, or if he had, he hadn’t said anything to Cath.

Or maybe he had. Because Cath didn’t stop going on about Tommy and when was I going to go back to America? And then Genevieve got in on the act and reported that Shotgun had been asking about me. In the light of what had happened, he wanted to return to the book.

“Oh, I don’t know, Genevieve,” I said. “I’m wondering maybe if I’m not too close to this whole thing.”

“Well, that’s why you have to see it through,” said Genevieve, matter-of-fact as ever. “Or shall I look for someone else to take over?”

I was like a rat out of a trap. “Absolutely not! If Shotgun’s asked for me, I have to go back, don’t I?”

If Genevieve was surprised by my abrupt change of mind, she didn’t show it. At some point in the last few months it seemed I had learned—at this late stage in my life and career—to be competitive.

Even though it was some time before Shotgun came through with his startling revelation that he had known all along that Angie was the killer, the minute I walked back into Mallaby, I knew there was an unbreakable bond between us. As a ghostwriter I am often party to confidences pertaining to my subjects’

lives that are not mentioned in the book. As Shotgun and I went back to work, I sensed a tacit understanding between us that he was going to have to tread very carefully as to what he put in and what he left out. He didn’t know how much I knew. He didn’t

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know exactly what Angie had told me about the night the groupie had died and gradually I enlightened him.

“You knew,” I said, looking directly at him and speaking in a tone that brooked no evasion on his part, “you knew it was she who killed the groupie.There must have been some clue.You removed the pillow she used,
something
.”

But he’d had fourteen years to perfect his story.

“It was a long time ago,” was all he said and later on in the book he left out the fact that Dumpster had told him what he had seen so he wasn’t implicated there either.

It was collusion on my part too. Shotgun was taking a big risk.

I could easily report what he had said to me but I knew that I never would. Apart from the fact that I would be done for obstruction, it was as I had told Max—I liked Shotgun. And for Franny’s sake, I would keep quiet about Dumpster too.

Shotgun and I established a routine whereby I arrived for work at ten each morning and stayed there the whole day.As a result we were able to get the book done in six months and it was due out before Christmas. The buzz was already growing and Genevieve was beginning to make the kind of clucking noises she emitted when she sensed a best seller in the offing.

As for Tommy, he and I had managed to coexist at the cabin surprisingly well but this was because we hardly saw each other.

Tommy had become a workaholic. He left the cabin every morning around six thirty to hook up with Rufus and four evenings a week he was out till 2:oo a.m. embarked upon his new career.

For in my absence in London,Tommy had become a karaoke DJ.

He had discovered it at a bar in Montauk where he proved to be an instant hit with the crowd. He sang all his Johnny Cash favorites—“Ring of Fire,” “I Walk the Line”—and apparently they loved him.The photos he produced with great pride showed him dressed in black from head to toe and in a video he insisted I

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watch, I had to concede that his voice wasn’t as bad as I expected.

He would be performing later on at Franny and Rufus’s wedding party, for which Shotgun had given them permission to use Mallaby—a clear sign that he was emerging from his reclusive state.

The ceremony was over now and as we prepared to follow the rest of the guests in a procession along the beach to Mallaby, Tommy took my hand and whispered.

“So, could this be you and me soon? Shall we get married on the beach too? Hey, I just had a thought? Will our kids be American?”

“You mean if we were to be married on an American beach?”

“Ha-ha! No, I mean if we bring them up in America.”

“Well, no, they won’t,” I leaned in closer to him, “because I’m going back to England now I’ve finished the book.”

Tommy raised his head to a passing seagull. “I don’t know,” he said, “what would you do, mate?” Then he gave me a squeeze.

“Well, I guess they’ll have to be mid-Atlantic kids because I’m staying here. I love it in America. Give me one good reason why you would want to go back to London when you could have all this?”

Later that night as I watched him in his element setting up his karaoke equipment—and thinking that being a DJ was the perfect follow-up for a sound engineer—I thought about his question. It would be wonderful to get married on a beach. And my parents looked like they were going to settle in New York for a while. Genevieve had reported lucrative assignments were being rumored for me in America and she seemed convinced that once Shotgun’s book came out, I would be the hottest ghost in town.

In fact every time I turned my mind to it, I came up with another reason to stay.

But then I would remember the letter already in an envelope

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Hope McIntyre

with Tommy’s name on it, the one I had begun on the flight to London almost a year earlier—
It’s tricky what I want to say to you
and that’s why I’m writing a letter
—and which I had finally finished a few hours before Franny and Rufus’s wedding. Franny had it safely stashed under the counter at the Old Stone Market and she was under instructions to give it to Tommy when he contacted her after he’d discovered I’d gone. And she and Rufus would be there for him, to help him understand.

Because by this time tomorrow I would be on my way to the airport because there
was
one good reason for me to go back to London. Just one, and it was an insane reason given that I had never heard another word from him, but it was the only one that mattered.

Max was there.

• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Author's Note
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20