The Ghost and Mrs. McClure (4 page)

“What is that?” I asked, curious.

“Throat spray,” said Shelby.

“Brennan won’t speak without it,” said Josh.

“That’s fine, Josh,” said Shelby through gritted teeth. “Now be a good boy and help us get this room fixed the way it
should
be.”

“What way is
that,
pray tell?” asked Josh, batting his eyes and smirking.

“Okay to come in now?” called a man’s voice.

Curious customers started wandering through the archway from the main store area. I rushed forward, embarrassed by the chaos of fallen chairs, a messed-up refreshment table, and a still-irate Timothy Brennan.

“Everything’s all right, folks,” I announced, shooing them back into the store area. “We’ll have the room ready in a jiffy.”

Glancing back, I saw Deirdre, Kenneth, Shelby, and Josh gathering up the fallen water bottles while Timothy Brennan told the technicians from the C-SPAN cable network how to do their jobs.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to achieve it through not dying.

—Woody Allen

 

 

 

IF THERE WAS a hell, Jack Shepard was in it. Or else the universe was playing the cosmic joke of the century. Why else would it doom a guy like him to a place like this?

In life, Jack’s blood had pulsed to the rhythm of the city’s streets. The smoky dice joints and swingin’ suds clubs, the back alleys, panel pads, and flophouses. The grifters and grinders, Joe-belows and triggermen, high rollers and sweet honeys—he knew them all.

He even got to know the uptown joints doing swing shifts as a bodyguard for cliff dwellers—those high-rise society types. Believe it or don’t, every third dame would get all hopped up, take him back to her posh Park Avenue pad, and jump his bones.
“What do you say, big guy? Be my sixty-minute man?”

Why couldn’t eternity be a joint like
that?

Instead, he got lead poisoning in the godforsaken sticks—eternity in cornpone alley.

Now the only excitement Jack ever got was scaring the crap out of small-town operators witless enough to invade his cave. And when that bored him—as it always did—he’d
really
scare them, running them the hell out of his space.

At times, whole years would go by with blessed peace and quiet. And Jack found, when human activity was sparse, he could get some true rest settling into a sweet, forgetful limbo, a cosmic sleep akin to passing out after a bender.

He’d been in precisely that state when the damn construction had started. Hammering, sanding, painting, sawing . . . a lousy, nerve-racking racket in the lousy bookshop where somebody had punched his last ticket and given him the big chill.

Sure, Jack had played some pranks on the construction crew—making them think work tools had disappeared, sending energy surges through the electrical wiring—but they’d finished anyway.

Then that buggy dame had started in with the folding chairs. He’d watched her arrange them, one by one.

Unfold the chair.

Place the chair.

Adjust the chair.

Unfold another chair.

Re
adjust the first chair.

Make a row.

Adjust the row.

Make another row.

If he’d been alive, Jack would have beat his own head against the stone wall until he’d blacked himself out. Instead, he’d made every chair appear turned on its damned head.

He had to give the broad credit, though. She hadn’t screamed. Hadn’t even made a peep, just hightailed it outta there, returning within minutes to see them set upright again.

Her name was Mrs. Penelope Thornton-McClure. And he had to admit she showed more moxie than a lot of grown
men
he’d pranked in the past fifty years.

Not a bad looker, either.

Had a nice face and soft voice. Certainly, she was the first living entity he’d even considered shifting himself toward since he’d crossed over, which was hilarious because, if he’d read her thoughts right, she didn’t even believe in ghosts.

Well, he hadn’t believed in them, either.

Concrete Jack
. That’s what he’d been. “I’m the hardest case you’ll ever meet,” he once told a client who wanted help beating a murder rap. “Too many con artists to count in this world. You want me to believe something, I gotta see proof. Show it to me plain as the broken nose on my face.”

Just like Mrs. McClure, Jack had once believed that when you died, you died, and that was the end.

Brother, had he been wrong.

So he sat back and watched.

And right now, it was that broad, Penelope, he couldn’t stop watching. Despite her sweet-as-pie face and her hard-work ethic, this Penelope doll could be pretty damned annoying. The chair-fixing compulsion was just one case in point. Still, the dame didn’t deserve the crap she was getting from the biggest a-hole of the twentieth century if ever there was one—

Timothy Brennan.

Timothy Brennan, the lousy rat fink.

Before Brennan appeared, Jack had been observing the bookshop activities this evening with mild interest at best.

Now Jack was awake.

And alert.

And pissed.

Brennan didn’t know it yet, but he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life: he’d finally walked into Jack’s bookstore.

I’m just not sure we need this . . . mess right now.

—Angie Gennaro to Patrick Kenzie,
Gone Baby Gone
by Dennis Lehane, 1998

 

 

 

I WAS STANDING next to the refreshment table. It had been dragged, on Brennan’s orders, to the back end of the room—unappealingly close, in my opinion, to the rest rooms. Before me, a surreal sea of battered fedoras bobbed with excitement. Murmurs of approval rose and fell amid the dark ties and three-piece suits.

Timothy Brennan was leaning forward against a carved oak podium (which I’d bought for a song at a Newport estate sale), captivating the crowd with his prepared speech:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Brennan read aloud. “Such words could have been applied easily to my fictional private detective, Jack Shield, a man who was a complete man and a common man, and above all a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”

I winced.

Brennan had just asserted that “
Such words
could have been applied easily to Jack Shield.” But he’d somehow forgotten to mention that they were
Raymond Chandler’s
exact words in his famous essay describing the quintessential detective.

I searched out Brainert, seated near the front. Not surprisingly, he was shaking his head with all the perfected disappointment of an English professor reviewing a badly footnoted paper. He caught my eye and together we mutely mouthed “Chandler.
The Simple Art of Murder
.”

I shrugged and lifted my hands palm up, as if to say, Perhaps it had been an innocent oversight.

Brainert rolled his eyes.

J. Brainert Parker (the J. was for Jarvis, a first name he’d utterly rejected since age six) was one of my closest childhood friends. A single, gay St. Francis College English professor in his thirties with a stringbean body, blanched complexion, and self-described “Ichabod Crane” style, he was also (as Sadie put it) one of those “relentlessly sober” types.

Brainert claimed to be a distant relative of the Providence occult author H. P. Lovecraft; and, like his supposed ancestor, he was extremely well-read. All the regular customers respected his opinions. And his enthusiasm for out-of-print Holmes books kept the store’s lights on—his most recent purchase being a forty-eight-dollar copy of a P. F. Collier & Son Holmes collection decorated red cloth hardcover, circa 1903.

In any event, I was feeling pretty badly about Brennan’s unhappiness with our bookstore in general and me in particular. Before his speech, I’d actually tried to make peace by fetching him a cup of coffee and a plate of the Cooper Family Bakery goodies. The incoming guests were already digging into the food, and I was afraid Brennan wouldn’t get to sample any of it.

Wrong
. He’d practically slapped the five-nut tarts and Vermont maple doughnuts out of my hand, barking that he
never
ate anything before, during, or after his lectures.

“Are you running a bookstore or a diner?” he’d snapped at me. “
Water
only. Just
be sure
there’s water.”

Okay, I admit it: Timothy Brennan wasn’t exactly the nicest author on the best-seller list. But I was willing to forgive his rudeness, his pomposity, his blustery impatience, even his quoting of Chandler without mentioning Chandler. Why? Because I myself was a huge fan of his books, purple prose and all. Maybe it was because Jack Shield could always say the sorts of things I wouldn’t. Do the sorts of things I couldn’t.

Whatever the reason, I enjoyed the Shield yarns as much as those old hard-boiled detective tales in the pulps of the twenties and thirties that my father had collected. Brennan himself hadn’t been published in
Black Mask
(the magazine that had launched writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett), but he’d known some of the men who had, and he wrote in their tradition. That was good enough for me. So like a pathetic kid defending some sports hero caught strung out on steroids, a part of me was still looking for excuses to defend the bad-behaving Brennan.

“It was back when I was wet-behind-the-ears reporter that I first met and then knocked around with Jack Shepard,” Brennan continued to tell the audience. “The model for my fictional detective was a tough-talking, no-nonsense, street-smart private eye dedicated to uncovering the truth, no matter where it leads.”

Some members of the audience actually mouthed these familiar words right along with Brennan. They’d been part of the jacket copy for decades. Hoots and applause followed.

“Jack Shepard left me his case files. Changing the names to protect the guilty, I used them as the basis for my stories—”

A deep voice interrupted:
You did what?! You “used” them for your stories? Then you stole them, you low-down, dirty grifter. No one “left” you those files
.

Every muscle in my body froze in mortification. Some man had just heckled this beloved author. At
my
store! Brennan would never forgive me! And the crowd would tear the place to pieces!

I waited for the typhoon to hit.

But it didn’t.

Brennan simply continued his speech. Ignoring the heckler, the audience obviously followed Brennan’s lead.

“Lately, readers have been asking me if the real Jack Shepard was the equal of fictional Jack Shield,” said Brennan. “I tell them that truthfully Shields is Shepard with Timothy Brennan mixed in. Shepard wasn’t exactly leading-man material, y’know.”

Once more, I braced for impact.
Surely
there would be a reaction this time. . . .

But Brennan disregarded the man—and so did his audience.

I scanned the crowded room, desperate to locate this deep-voiced pest. He sounded very close. But the only people standing near me, in front of the refreshment table, were women—Linda Cooper-Logan and Fiona Finch, the sixty-year-old owner of Finch’s Inn, the only hotel in Quindicott.

“Shepard had a ton of weaknesses and sad problems—”

What in
heaven’s name
is going on? I thought. Was I the only one
hearing
this?

“And, frankly, he wasn’t that smart,” continued Brennan. “It took me—my writing, my words, and my ingenuity—to make him a hero that would span nineteen best-sellers and inspire two television shows. You might say I’m responsible for adding the heroism to the antihero.”

With a nauseating abruptness, I knew why no one else was reacting to the voice. And why I was the only one hearing it.

That voice wasn’t in the room; it was inside my own head.

But how can that be?
How?
I asked myself. It wasn’t
my
voice. Or my thoughts. I’d never thought such crude things in my entire life!

Of course you haven’t,
said the male voice.
You’re one of those nice-thinking, fair-play Janes—gullible as a corn-fed calf and just about as defenseless.

“Where are you?” I rasped in a loud whisper, unable to understand how the man had answered me when I hadn’t spoken a word.

Linda and Fiona looked at me with puzzled expressions.

“Where’s who?” asked Linda.

I shook my head. “Forget it,” I whispered.

“Jack Shepard and I were both working the mean streets,” Brennan continued. “Jack as a detective and me as a reporter. We were just regular guys walking a thin line between the world of respectability and the underworld of crime.”

I inhaled. Then exhaled. Joan of Arc heard voices, right? But they were probably nice, gentle, inspirational voices. Saintly voices.

I closed my eyes and opened them again. This voice was certainly no saint. And it
really
wasn’t mine—at least not a voice from my
conscious
self. This left me with one conclusion: I was cracking up.