The Ghost and Mrs. McClure (2 page)

For decades, Sadie had run the bookstore as modestly as her late father had. Never once had she considered holding an author appearance like this one. It was stupid, presumptuous
me,
Mrs. Penelope Thornton “Know It All” McClure, who’d tried to bring twenty-first-century bookselling to Quindicott.

Why? Why in the world did I think I could pull it off?

Sure, right after college I had taken a job in the hard-nosed offices of New York City book publishing. But I hadn’t exactly been wildly successful at it (my nose being as squashy as a Stay Puft marshmallow). The one thing I thought I
had
gotten from the experience was the knowledge of how to create a hospitable, crowd-drawing store on the book tour circuit.

Of course, that was before Timothy Brennan—the very first best-selling author we were lucky enough to host—began choking in the middle of his televised lecture, then commenced flailing around like a big Irish goldfish ejected from its bowl, and finally dropped dead as a doorknob in the middle of the bookstore’s brand-new community events space.

“Someone get my niece a drink!” Aunt Sadie called from her rocker.

Linda Cooper-Logan heeded Sadie’s call. In her thirties, her short platinum hair still in the spiky, punkish style she’d first worn in the eighties, Linda appeared in a long, flowery skirt and worn denim jacket. Her jade and silver bracelets jangled as she held out a bottle of carrot juice. I reached for it, but Sadie interceded.

“Not
that
kind of drink,” said my aunt. “A
real
drink.”

“Oh!” said Linda. She put two fingers in her mouth. A sharp whistle caught the attention of Linda’s husband, Milner Logan. He was at the other end of the store, watching Officers Eddie Franzetti and Welsh Tibbet—one-quarter of the entire patrol division of Quindicott’s lilliputian police department—take down the names of guests who hadn’t already fled, and few had. After all, what better spectacle could be found tonight in the entire state of Rhode Island? Anyone present knew their “I watched Timothy Brennan drop dead” story would render them good as gold at every church social and backyard barbecue for the next ten years.

“Are you puckering up and blowing for me, Linda?” asked Milner sweetly. Quarter-blood Narragansett Native American, Milner frequented our store for crime novels, noir thrillers, and the occasional frontlist Tony Hillerman. Like his wife, he’d held on to some fashion trends of his own youth—a decade before Linda’s. He wore a small gold hoop in his left ear and his long hair in a ponytail, the strands looking more wiry salt-and-pepper these days than midnight black.

Together Linda and Milner ran the Cooper Family Bakery here in Quindicott. Linda handled the comfort food; Milner, the fancy French stuff. (He and Linda had met when Milner was teaching a cooking school class in Boston on the art of French pastry. Linda fell for him over a perfectly mixed ball of
pâte sablée.
)

Having their baked goods as part of tonight’s hospitality refreshments had been a coup for the bookstore. Milner had added French touches to so many of the old Cooper family recipes, the result was a table of goodies to die for—and, unfortunately, tonight someone actually had.

“We need a drink for Penelope!” Linda called to her husband.

“Oh?” Milner strolled closer in his fedora and double-breasted gray suit—like many of those who’d attended tonight’s event, Milner had come dressed as Jack Shield, the hard-boiled detective star of Timothy Brennan’s internationally best-selling series.

And I’d actually encouraged it.

From Providence and Boston to high-toned Newport and Greenwich, the newspaper ads I’d placed invited Brennan’s fans to come dressed as the famous hard-boiled detective. Every fan knew how Jack Shield dressed, of course, because Shield had been based on a real private investigator of the late 1940s named Jack Shepard. And Shepard’s chilling, anvil-chinned grimace appeared (in black-and-white) on the back flap of every Brennan dust jacket, right under the author’s own photo (in living color).

“You mean the hard stuff? Joy juice? Hooch?” asked Milner, nudging up the front brim of his fedora one-finger style, like Shield.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” cried Sadie. “Just get the bottle from under the register already!”

Milner brought over the bottle of whiskey and a few paper cups. Sadie poured shots all around. “After the shock of tonight’s events, I’d say we could all use a belt.”

I didn’t want to partake, but Sadie pressed the cup into my wringing hands. “Now, Penelope, honey, listen to your elder.
Drink
.”

I did. The liquid burned, but I trusted my aunt knew what was best at the moment—at least she seemed much calmer than I.

“Feel better?” asked Sadie.

“Don’t worry, Pen,” said Milner. “I overheard Eddie say there’s going to be an autopsy, because it’s a suspicious death. It’s just like a crime novel. Kinda cool, actually.”

“What killed him?” I said, noting that the room was both too bright and too dark. Was that possible?

Milner shrugged.

I took another swig from the cup. “What’s going to happen, do you think?” I asked. “Because of Timothy Brennan’s death, I mean. Do you think we should close the store? Forever?”

He shrugged again.

I took another swig.

Hard liquor was new to me. A glass of white wine or light beer once a month or so was my usual consumption rate. Whiskey, it would seem, sure hit faster than Chardonnay.

Linda and Milner were speaking, saying something like all this was in no way the store’s fault, and I should just go on as if nothing had happened. But their voices seemed as fuzzy as their faces. And then the room began a slow spin.

How could this have happened? I wondered. How?

I’d worked so hard to prepare. Just two hours ago, everything had been in perfect order . . . just two hours ago . . .

[N]ice men often write bad verse and good poets can be monsters. . . . It seemed easier all around not to be able to put a face to a name, and judge solely on the printed page.

—A. Alvarez,
The Savage God: A Study in Suicide

“How are things going?” I asked my aunt as she rang up—thank the ISBN gods!—four
Shield of Justice
purchases for one of the early guests now browsing the stacks. Timothy Brennan was scheduled to appear in exactly fifty-three minutes, and I was trying not to worry.

I had dressed with care in a crisply ironed black skirt, baby blue short-sleeved sweater set, nude stockings, and slingback heels. Sadie had made an effort, too. She’d actually brought out one of her few dresses—the belted, pine green number that matched her eyes and complemented her short gray hair, colored auburn and accented at Colleen’s Beauty Shop with “Shirley MacLaine” strawberry blond highlights.

“Hard to tell how things are going,” said my aunt. “Not many arrivals yet.”

“This event will bring us heaps of new business. You’ll see,” I told her.

“Well, if it doesn’t, look on the bright side. We can stack those three hundred hardcovers in the back room straight up to the part of the ceiling where it’s starting to droop and call it a literary pillar.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Okay. We’ll burn them for kindling, then. We haven’t used that potbellied stove on the back porch since my father was breathing.”

“
Still
not funny,” I said. “And you know very well we’d have to return them unsold or else pay the publisher fifty-four percent of each copy’s retail cover price.”

“So we’ll burn the invoices and overdue notices then,” Sadie said. “Either way, dear, if this shindig doesn’t bring in new business, we’re going to need something to keep us warm this winter.”

I inspected the floor display we’d unpacked and assembled hours earlier. The dump was typical corrugate from the publisher, with a big image of the book’s cover and the handsome author photo that appeared on every one of Brennan’s dust jackets. Space for twelve hardcovers also was provided—four face-outs, three deep.

One of the books seemed a tad out of line. I adjusted the angle, then fiddled with the life-size cut-out display of the handsome author. Timothy Brennan had sandy blond hair and a charming grin. His standee image looked about forty and very fit.

True, he had to be older than the photo, but some men aged very well, never losing their virility (I wouldn’t turn down a date with Sean Connery or Clint Eastwood, for instance), and I’m embarrassed to admit I’d developed a bit of a crush on Mr. Brennan.

“Have you actually seen Mr. Brennan yet?” I asked, resisting the urge to chew my thumbnail.

“No, dear,” said Sadie. “But I noticed—” Sadie paused to let out a little sneeze.

“Bless you,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I was about to say—I noticed an older man who looked a little like Brennan. Maybe he was an older relative. He came in with three well-dressed people—” This second sneeze was so sudden her glasses fell from the end of her nose to dangle from the string of red beads around her neck.

“Bless you,” I said again.

A vile stench tickled my own nose. A
cigar,
I realized with a shudder. Obviously someone was ignoring the
No Smoking
signs posted all over the store.

I’d find the offender and set him straight, but I wanted to check on Spencer first. He was wandering around in his little gray Brooks Brothers pinstripes.

“You look very handsome,” I told him, my maternal pride gushing forth.

“Yes, Mother, you said that already.”

Spencer remained less than thrilled with our move up to Rhode Island. But I couldn’t blame him, really. His seven years on earth had been spent living in a luxurious Manhattan apartment. Our move forced him to live in six small, run-down rooms above an old bookstore with the looming prospect of
public
school—an institution his wealthy in-laws had convinced him mainly housed potential convicts.

Tonight, we’d actually argued about his coming downstairs. He insisted on watching TV. I insisted he get dressed and show some support of what was now our family business.

 

 

ACTUALLY, MY BOOKSTORE-OWNING days had started about three months ago. Standing in the marble lobby of my doorman building, I’d been reading Aunt Sadie’s periodic letter about the local goings-on in Quindicott when my gaze locked on her casual postscript:
By the way, the store is about to go belly up and I’ll be closing the doors in a few weeks.

I’d phoned her that day, the modest check from the life insurance policy of my late husband, Calvin, in my hand, and proposed we go into business together.

Two weeks later, after Spencer finished second grade at the expensive private school Calvin and his family had insisted he attend (with a faculty so pompous and intimidating I practically needed one of Calvin’s Valiums to get through Parents’ Night), I moved us out of the posh McClure-owned penitentiary on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and into my aunt’s humble walk-up. Now, at least, I could raise my son in peace—that is, without the thinly veiled financial threats of my in-laws.

My own income, working at a publishing house, had been modest, and Calvin had never worked—his income having been supplied by his wealthy mother. So the life insurance money was practically all I had now.

Apart from my young son’s trust fund, which I was legally forbidden to touch, no inheritance or any “financial aid” would come my way unless I agreed to remain under the thumb of the McClures and their opinions, which actually included the idea of an English boarding school for my little boy.

(Excuse me? Not now. Not ever.)

So I’d shocked them all by packing up and moving beyond their hypercritical gazes. Now I was a full-fledged co-owner of my own failing business. And I was determined to remake it from top to bottom.

To Sadie’s credit, from the day I’d arrived, she stood back and let me. Buy the Book hadn’t even been the original name of the place. Personally, I’d liked the old Thornton’s sign, which stated in that unadorned, pragmatic way of the 1940s: We Buy and Sell Books. But the past was
dead
, and our future depended on recognizing this.

“If we’re going to attract those book-buying urban dwellers with wads of disposable income,” I’d explained to my aunt, “we’ve got to have a name that’s postmodern.”

“What do you mean? Something cutesy? Like Book-ends?”

“No. Something more deliberately ironic and self-aware. Remember, the elite,
über
educated generation of today disdains literal plain speaking. We must find a name that has a double meaning.”

“Double meaning?”

“Something slick and smart aleck-esque, you know? Something a precocious kid might think was funny.”

Aunt Sadie nodded. “In that case, let’s ask Spencer.”

So I called up to my bright little boy.

“Yes? What do you want?” Spencer yelled from the upstairs window with the perfect diction of a privately schooled New York child.

“Come down and help us rename the store,” said Sadie.

“But Sergeant Friday’s getting ready to book the bad guy!”

“Well, dear, after the man is cuffed, come on down!”

From the day we’d moved in with Sadie, Spence wanted to do little more than watch old cop shows on Sadie’s new digital cable and stroke the marmalade-striped kitten she’d given him.

I loved the kitten, but I was worried about his watching so much television. On the other hand, Spence was still adjusting to a lot, so I saw no harm in indulging him a little—although this cop show obsession was truly peculiar. I couldn’t recall Spence ever having such an interest.

Then again, how would I have known? Calvin had refused to allow a television in any room of our apartment—he claimed it stressed his nerves, but then almost everything did, including Spencer himself.