The Ghost and Mrs. McClure (6 page)

I moved toward the exit to the rest room and the back room area, swiping at switches the whole way. When I got to the chilly, bare storage room, I almost dropped the bat.

In the corner were more than a dozen crushed cardboard boxes. Not one was left unravaged.

“Three hundred hardcovers,” I murmured, doing the math in my head. “That’s twenty-seven fifty a copy times three hundred . . . forty-six percent of which we keep. That’s almost four thousand dollars. In one night!”

I wheeled, searching for the man who kept speaking. But there was no one. “Where in hell are you!”

I couldn’t take it. I ran from the storage area, bat
still
in hand.

“I’m calling the police!”

My steps slowed. I looked around again. He wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t see him. What was I going to tell the cops? An invisible man was talking to me. The Quindicott police would have trouble finding a criminal who walked up to their front door!

(It wasn’t their fault, really. They had little resources and even less experience with anything close to a felony. Mostly they broke up fights at the high school football games and gave out speeding tickets to those high-priced performance cars on their way to Newport or Cape Cod.)

“What’s your name?” I demanded, hoping I could just talk him out of hiding.

“Jack what?”

“That’s not funny.”

“No, you’re trying to scare me, and I don’t appreciate it.”

“Yes. True. That’s good news. And you were right about it. But I’m sure it’s just a one-night fluke.”

“What do you mean?”

My mouth still felt like an arid wasteland. I pulled the bottle from under my arm, unscrewed the cap, and drank again.

I lowered the bottle. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

“What?!”

“Well, the same to you, whoever you are—”

“Shut up! I’ve had just about enough. If you’re such a big, tough, hard-boiled dick, then why are you hiding, huh? Where the heck are you? Too afraid to show yourself?” I moved slowly through the store, still seeing no one. I edged back toward the community events space.

There was a long pause. I tightened my grip on the bat. Finally the deep voice spoke again.

Oh, shit, I thought.

Deep male laughter filled my head.
Thought you didn’t use such language.

“How could you hear that? I didn’t say it.”

This was just someone from the book-signing party, I told myself. Someone playing a game. I moved to the end of the room, where I felt I could dash away quickly if I didn’t like what I saw.

I licked my lips nervously and took a final swig from the bottled water, draining it completely. It tasted good, I realized. There was a subtle flavor I couldn’t place. For some reason it reminded me of one of Milner’s pastries.

Had Sutter Spring started flavoring their water now?

The thought might have bothered me, but I had a more pressing consideration at the moment, so I put the bottle on the floor, positioned the bat in a defensive position, and flipped off the lights.

The dull glow of the recessed security lights were the only illumination. That and the silvery streaks from the street-lights beyond the big front window on this side of the store.

Bat at the ready, I scanned the room. Then I saw it: a shadow on the wall. A fedora on a square-jawed profile. Broad-suited shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist.

Whoever he was, he had obviously read my newspaper ads and come in costume.

The shadow moved, and I took a step back. I saw the figure’s arm come up. One finger pushed at the brim of his fedora, moving it back on his head. Then he folded his arms over his broad chest. It was a confident gesture, masculine and sure.

I watched the shadow move off the wall, watched as it became three dimensions and stepped like a dark figure through an invisible archway and into the room. Outside, headlights from a passing car shot shafts of silver through the window, and in the briefest moment of illumination, I glimpsed his visage plain as day: the sunken cheeks, the crooked nose, the iron jaw, and the one-inch scar in the shape of a dagger slashing across the flat, square chin.

Whoever he was, he held the same relentlessly masculine features of the man whose grimacing photo graced every one of Timothy Brennan’s books.

“You can’t be Jack Shepard. You
can’t
be. He’s
dead!
”

My bat dropped to the floor. And about two seconds later, so did I.

Publicity darling, just publicity. Any kind is better than none at all.

—Raymond Chandler, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,”
Black Mask,
December 1933 (Chandler’s debut short story)

 

 

 

“HOWYA FEELING, HONEY?”

First I heard the voice. Then the rattle and snap of a shade going north. The warmth of sunlight streaked across my face, and I lifted my thousand-pound eyelids. The silhouette of a heavy oak bookcase came into focus like the dark center of a blinding eclipse. I read the spines of dust jackets: Rendell, Rhode, Rice, Rinehart . . . Obviously, I was in the R’s.

I turned to see Aunt Sadie’s slight form bustling from the tall picture window to the store’s front door, the streaming sun rays illuminating those “Shirley MacLaine highlights” in her short auburn hair. She was out of her dress and back in her preferred sort of outfit: gray slacks and a white T-shirt, over which she’d thrown a large unbuttoned, untucked denim shirt.

“How am I feeling?” I repeated. “Like a full floor display got dropped on my head from the top of the Empire State Building. I swear I’ll never touch hard liquor again.”

“Just sit tight, dear, I’ll get you something to drink.” She unlocked the door, then vanished, her four-foot-eleven frame dashing so fast across the polished plank floorboards it made my already spinning head spin even more.

“ ‘Something to drink,’ ” I muttered. “I don’t know . . . seems to me I got
into
this state with that advice. . . .”

I was still wearing last night’s outfit, less than presentable after a night tossing in a rocking chair: My black skirt was wrinkled, my pale blue sweater set felt grungy against my skin, my slingback heels had been kicked off—where? I had no clue—and my pantyhose displayed more than one run.

Suddenly Sadie was back. “Here,” she said, handing me a steaming mug of coffee along with one of the Cooper Family Bakery’s leftovers from the night before. “I managed to save a few of the carrot-cake muffins with cream cheese icing. They’re your favorite, aren’t they?”

“Okay,” I said, “maybe life’s worth living after all.”

“Wasn’t easy saving them, I can tell ya. That crowd was cooped up here for two hours giving their names and statements to Welsh and Eddie. Seems like a lot of fuss over an unfortunate incident.”

Officers Welsh Tibbet and Eddie Franzetti (of the Franzetti’s Pizza Place Franzettis) were the two Quindicott cops who’d been sent to the bookstore after Brennan’s death. Our town was large enough for a small police force but way too small to support anything more. For investigations, forensics, and the like, the old Q cops relied on the state. I figured taking names and statements was simply routine.

“Where’s Spencer?” I asked.

“Upstairs, still sleeping. It was a late night for everyone.” Sadie unlocked the front door but left the CLOSED sign in place since, mercifully, we weren’t scheduled to open for another hour. Then she turned to me and grinned.

Now, why the heck is she so happy? I wondered. We’d just had our first author appearance—and the author hadn’t survived it. And how the heck did my derriere get back into this rocking chair? I remembered passing out on the floor.

Well, if I woke up in this rocker, I reasoned, I must NOT have passed out on the floor, which pointed to one conclusion:

“I had a funny dream,” I blurted, my mouth half full of muffin.

“You don’t say,” Sadie said. “Ha-ha funny or spooky-weird funny?”

“I talked to the ghost of Jack Shepard.”

Sadie was quiet a long moment. “That’d be the spooky-weird kind then, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re telling me.”

“What did he say to you, Pen?”

“Oh . . . I don’t know. . . .” I ate more muffin, chewed, swallowed, and suddenly regretted saying anything. “It was just an outlandish dream. . . .”

“
What
did he tell you?” Sadie’s voice wasn’t kidding around. Her pine green eyes had focused in and locked on.

“He didn’t say much,” I hedged. “Just that we sold all of our Jack Shield books, for one thing. Isn’t that crazy? I mean, nobody sells three hundred hardcovers out of a store this small in one night.”

“We did.”

“What?” I nearly dropped the hot mug of coffee into my skirt’s wrinkled lap.

“We sold every last copy.”

“HOW? There weren’t three hundred people in the store last night!”

“No, but there were just over one hundred, and these were serious fans. Most bought multiple copies of
Shield of Justice
along with every last title in Timothy Brennan’s backlist. There isn’t one Jack Shield book left in the store.”

“They bought multiple copies?”

“Darn right. Some bought four or five, just to have the sales receipt that showed the date it was purchased—the day Brennan died—and to show where it was purchased.”

“Where it was purchased,” I repeated, distracted. For most bookstores, turnover of an initial print order took six to eight
weeks,
not one night.

“Yes,
where
it was purchased is now vital to these fans,” said Sadie. “Before he died, Brennan announced he’d traced Shepard’s last movements in ’49 to
this
very store.
Our
store!”

“Right. I remember. It still sounds crazy, though.”

“Hey,” Sadie suddenly called from the archway connecting the main store with the events space, “what’s my baseball bat doing on the floor?”

I rose so fast from my cross-hatched Shaker seat, I set my head to rocking more violently than the chair. In stockinged feet I managed to stumble over to the archway without landing on my face, although I did end up shredding the last vestiges of nylon covering my toes.

Sadie pointed to the aluminum bat. It rested on the wood plank floor in the exact spot where I’d been talking to the ghost—before I blacked out, that is. My slingbacks were here, too.

“I think . . . I must have been . . . sleepwalking,” I concluded.

“Part of your ghost dream?” asked Sadie, picking up the bat.

“Yes,” I said, slipping back into my shoes. “Let’s just drop it, okay?”

I stuffed the last bit of muffin into my mouth—hoping to swallow my anxieties along with it. Then I drained my coffee mug and headed toward the stairs, intending to check on Spencer, shower, change, and stuff at least one more delicious muffin in (my size fourteen skirt was already tight, but after the night I had, I figured I deserved a little baked-good comfort). That’s when the bell above the front door tinkled and a female voice sharply called out:

“Sadie Thornton!”

Completely ignoring the CLOSED sign, town councilwoman Marjorie Binder-Smith barreled through our front door, wearing one of her numerous pink suits.

“Now, what in hell could
she
want?” muttered Sadie.

“Have you seen the morning paper?” Marjorie waved a copy of the Saturday morning
Quindicott Bulletin
in front of our faces and commanded, “Just take a look at this!”

We did. The headline, which stretched the width of the front page in letters at least two inches tall, stated:
Noted Author Dies in Local Bookstore Mishap!

“Please tell me, ladies,” said the councilwoman, “
why
someone choked to death on a doughnut in a business that does
not
have a license to sell food?”

“Choked to death? On a doughnut?” I repeated. I skimmed the story. The general news was correct, but some of the details were all wrong.

“Well, what have you got to say for yourself?” demanded the sixtyish councilwoman. Her voice sounded outraged, but her eyes, edged by the cracks that came from applying a copious amount of face powder, held the glee of a driller making an oil strike—a timely issue to exploit was just the thing to raise a politico’s profile.

I was about to answer her charge when Aunt Sadie put herself between us.

“Calm down, Marjorie,” she said. “You don’t want to pop any plastic surgery stitches, do you?”

The laughter in my ears was deep and loud. The laugh of Jack Shepard. I looked immediately for a reaction from Sadie or Marjorie, but neither appeared to have heard it.

“You can’t be real,” I silently told the Jack Shepard voice. “I dreamed you up. That’s all you are. A delusion.”