Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (5 page)

“She runs this place
and
takes care of people’s yards?” I was astounded.

“Oh, you haven’t heard the half of it. She used to clean their houses too before she had the baby.”

“The baby,” I repeated.

“Six months old. And she’s got an eighteen-year-old from a disaster of a relationship with some guy in the city.”

I stared at Franny as she went by, balancing plates of toast on her forearms.What was this woman’s secret? She’d had a baby six months ago and here she was walking around with a bare midriff and a stomach like a washboard.

“Hey Roof, can you come give me a hand here?” Franny was distributing the toast to the various tables. “I’ve told the SLRA they can hold their monthly board meeting in the back room. I hate their guts but I figure it’ll be good for business if people see they’ve given me their stamp of approval. I need to set up a table in back.”

“What’s the SLRA?” I whispered as Rufus prepared to follow her.

“The Stone Landing Residents Association. Mostly New Yorkers with weekend homes around here. It’s the same story wherever you go. They’re some of Franny’s best customers but she resents the hell out of them. Most of them have barely been here ten years whereas Franny’s lived here her whole life. The Cooks have owned property in Stone Landing longer than any of us and Franny’s the eleventh generation. Her family was among the original settlers. They have nine fucking acres whereas most of the SLRA members only have quarter-acre lots.”

When I walked back inside, Franny was coming toward me carrying a trestle table upturned and balanced on her head. As

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she lowered it to the ground, there was a demanding wail from behind the counter.

“Damn!” Franny brushed past me. “Eliza’s awake. I’m going to have to feed her before the SLRA arrive.”

“You keep the baby in the shop?” I blurted out.

“Where else am I going to keep her?” Franny looked at me and shrugged. “We live above the store but I can’t keep running up the stairs to check on her. Hey Roof, you want to take her up and change the diaper?”

“Can’t say I
want
to,” said Rufus amiably enough. “Eliza’s explosions are mega stinky. Franny, this is Lee Bartholomew. She’s over from England. She’s the daughter of a friend of my dad’s.”

Well, that was one way of putting it.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Franny, giving me a quick smile and handing the baby to Rufus. “The diapers are beside the changing table in the bedroom. Bring her back down when you’re done and I’ll feed her at the till. I’m a real pro at working that cash register with one hand while I cradle her.”

Which, to my amazement, was exactly what she did, perched high on a stool behind the counter while the baby suckled at her breast. I found myself waiting with bated breath to see what would happen when a customer came in and caught a glimpse of her bare breast.Was I a prude to expect her to breast-feed in private? And how often did you find guys in their twenties who were prepared to change diapers? But then as I was fast discovering, Rufus was quite an unusual young man.

He was in love with Franny Cook. I’d known it the minute we walked in the store, maybe even before that from the slight catch in his voice when he mentioned her name. Now it was unmistakable as he stood watching her while she fed the baby. He had the same soft tender expression in his eyes as his father did when he

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looked at my mother. Franny might be a good ten years older than Rufus but he just couldn’t take his eyes off her.

It was clear she took advantage of his devotion.When she finished feeding Eliza, she put her in her baby carriage and took her for a walk, taking it for granted that Rufus would mind the store in her absence.

“Who’s the baby’s father?” I asked him.

He looked at me hard for a second as if unsure whether to tell me. Then he said: “Scott. Eliza’s my niece. But my father doesn’t know so you have to keep it to yourself. Franny refuses to let me tell him.”

“But Scott knows?”

“Oh, Scott knows all right but he won’t do a damn thing about it. Says he’s not interested in being a father. And to be honest, Franny likes it that way, says she wants Eliza to be a Cook not an Abernathy.”

“But how did it happen?”

“Nobody ever told you how babies get made?” Rufus winked at me. “One-night stand after the Fourth of July picnic on the beach last year. Franny was drunk. Scott took her back to his place—I saw them leave together. But something wonderful came out of it.We have Eliza.”

At that moment a customer demanded his attention and he left me to go to the cash register.

The bell began to
ping
repeatedly as the screen door opened and shut several times and half a dozen people converged on the store, helped themselves to coffee, and crowded into the small space in front of the cash register to pay for it. I became aware of a man standing beside me, scanning the shelves. I saw his hand, large and ugly with fingers like sausages, reach out and pluck a packet of Oreos. I was annoyed because it was the last one and I had been planning to buy it myself. I turned to see who had

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thwarted me and I saw him open his jacket and place the Oreos inside against his ribs. I watched, stunned, as he zipped up the jacket and looked straight at me for several seconds before walking out the door.

He’d had black hair brushed forward to frame a hard, brutal face in a style reminiscent of a Roman emperor, and a Roman nose to match. I suppose he was handsome if you went for the Tony Bennett type but he’d scared me and I’d behaved like a complete wimp. I’d let him walk out of the store and I hadn’t said a word.

When Franny walked in a few minutes later I knew I had to tell her she’d had a shoplifter.

“What’d he look like?” she asked me.

I described the man and she nodded.

“You know who it was?” I said. “Listen, Franny, I’m sorry I didn’t do anything. I was just thrown. I don’t know what came over me.”

She nodded again. “Yes, I know exactly who it was,” she said slowly, “and I totally understand why you didn’t do anything. If it makes you feel any better, it’s not the first time it’s happened and I’ve never done a thing about it.”

And then before I could say anything else, she pushed past me to wheel the baby carriage behind the counter just as the members of the SLRA arrived for their meeting. The president, Louis Nichols, was an attractive well-preserved man who I guessed to be in his middle fifties. Rufus whispered to me that his family had been one of the first to build a vacation home in Stone Landing in the late fifties. In fact his parents had started the SLRA. Some people felt there was an element of droit du seigneur in the way he had assumed the presidency when it became vacant but no one could deny that he had worked tirelessly to keep the Association going.

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He summoned everyone to the table and opened the meeting.

“I was going to put forward Franny Cook’s name today since she’s been so kind as to let us use her store.”

“Did I hear my name mentioned?” Franny sauntered over to them.

Louis got up and offered her a chair.When he reached out to take her arm, I sensed that maybe Rufus wasn’t the only one interested in her. “Join us for coffee,” he said. “We need another person on the board.”

“Yes, I heard.” Franny ignored Louis’s hand and remained standing, turning to one of the other members. “Abe, you left a message about some logs. How many you want? Half a cord do you?”

“What are we going to do about the teenagers drinking on our beach at night?” an elderly woman interjected, getting down to business. “It’s disgusting what you find when you go down there in the mornings.”

“Condoms?” Franny asked, looking up at the ceiling.

“Same thing we’re going to do about the beach vehicles that are causing all the disturbance to the beach grass. Write a letter to the town supervisor and the trustees asking them to restrict beach vehicle access. And we’re going to ask for a ban on Jet Skis in the bay. I’ve got a draft right here if anyone wants to read it.”

Louis waved it in the air. Nobody took it from him.

“What’s the point? They’ll say the same thing they always do,”

said Abe. “The fishermen need to be able to launch their boats from there and if someone has a heart attack, or gets eaten by a shark, they need to be able to drive the ambulance along the sand.”

“And they’ll be right,” said Franny. “So there are people launching Jet Skis and racing SUVs and disturbing your peace.

That’s the price you pay for turning Stone Landing into a vacation

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spot. It wasn’t like this when my dad was growing up. Now it’s a weekender’s paradise. I know, I get to watch their homes all winter. Seventy-five percent of the homeowners are from the city.

They’re the ones who bring the SUVs and the Jet Skis.”

“And they’re the ones who’ll keep you in work,” said Abe sharply as Franny towered over him in such a rage that for one second I thought she was going to strike him, but then she wandered back to the cash register.

“Oh God,” whispered Rufus, “when will Franny learn
not
to bite the hand that feeds her.”

“Lou, I think you’ll have a hard time getting us to vote
her
in,”

I heard Abe say. “She’s not one of us, now is she?”

I wanted to tell him to keep his voice down but too late—

Franny had turned on her heel and was marching back.

“What do you mean, not one of you? I’ve never heard such a crock. I’m a Stone Landing resident, I pay my taxes. I’m—”

A cell phone started ringing. Everyone fumbled in their pockets until I suddenly realized the sound was coming from Rufus who was standing right beside me. He turned away and began to walk out of the store, his phone clamped to his ear. Franny had abandoned her tirade to go back to the cash register yet again and I followed Rufus, worried he would leave without me. But we almost collided as he came back in again, the screen door banging behind him.

“They’ve found another one,” he yelled. “Another body. A woman and they found her on his property.”

“Whose property?” Franny leaned across the counter.

“Shotgun Marriott’s,” said Rufus and my blood ran cold. “First his son is washed up on the beach and now there’s a woman lying facedown in his woods and they’re saying someone shot her in the back with a bow and arrow.”

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SHOTGUN MARRIOTT HAD ONCE BEEN HUGE!

You couldn’t write him off as just another aging British rocker. He’d been a superior bluesman in his time and a leg-endary womanizer.What’s more, they were classy women, by all accounts. A Shakespearean actress, a lawyer, a prize-winning photojournalist who spent more time in war zones than with him.

I’d always wondered whether they actually called him Shotgun in moments of intimacy. Of course there were plenty of scrubbers crawling all over him in nightclubs and his band, the Suits, were rumored to have trashed hotel rooms the world over but even so, Shotgun Marriott had always had more style than your average rock ’n’ roll artist.

It was a woman who had brought him down, ended his career and dispatched him to oblivion where he’d been for almost fifteen years. A groupie, found dead in his bed after a concert. He wasn’t charged with anything, but he had never revealed what had happened that night. It had become the rock ’n’ roll Chappa-quiddick and if he told the whole story in his autobiography, it would be dynamite.

I was desperate to land the job of working on that autobiography because it might well turn out to be the plum job of my career. I’m a ghostwriter. I am the “as told to” or the “written with” you see in small type underneath the celebrity’s name. For

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the past ten years I’ve worked in my native London coaxing reminiscences—or in some cases mentally blocking my ears to a torrent of sentimental fabrication—from showbiz personalities, sports stars, a medium, a fashion entrepreneur, you name it. My beloved agent Genevieve kept the work coming on a regular basis and all I had to do was show up, listen—and then go away and write, of course.

But recently I had encountered a problem in the form of a certain Bettina Pleshette.

I had always been aware that Genevieve had other clients besides me but until she’d taken on Bettina about eighteen months earlier, I had never been remotely interested in them. Providing Genevieve found me work, I didn’t care a fig what her other clients were up to. But Bettina presented me with something I’d never encountered before: competition. I was used to the interviews Genevieve set up for me being merely a formality. Then, suddenly, whenever she put my name forward for a job, I’d find Bettina was also in the running.

“They asked for her, they knew about her, what could I do?”

was always Genevieve’s excuse. The problem was Bettina invariably got the job.

I found I wasn’t comfortable being competitive. It comes naturally to some people but I had never even thought about it until Bettina entered the fray. I suppose I should have been grateful to her for single-handedly putting ghostwriters on the map. Until she came along we were backroom people both by nature and profession, content to suppress our egos and remain invisible.

But that just wasn’t Bettina’s style. She’d hired a publicist and made herself a star as well as her subjects, so that whenever she ghosted a book, it immediately raised the stakes. This went against every single ghostwriting grain in my body and I hated her long before she ever came up against me for work.

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Cards on the table: She’s twenty-eight, eleven years younger than me. She’s incredibly well-connected. She’s sexier, firmer, and her hair is thicker. She seems to go out with a different guy every night and while Genevieve has never let on, I’m convinced Bettina commands a much higher rate than I do.