The Ghost and Mrs. McClure (7 page)

Think again, babe,
said the deep voice.
I’ve been here since before you were born.

“Be quiet now,” I silently told the voice. “I can’t deal with this delusion on top of everything else!”

The councilwoman was now shaking her finger in Sadie’s face. “Don’t you threaten me, Sadie Thornton!”

“Threat?” Sadie said calmly. “That was no
threat.
Really, Marjorie, can’t you recognize a simple
insult
when you hear it?”

I so hated confrontations. But whenever Sadie and Marjorie were in a room together, friction seemed inevitable. Sadie would never discuss the reason, but the bad blood between the two women was long-standing. It predated even the feud between Marjorie and the Quindicott small-business owners, which had been going strong for well over a decade.

Linda Cooper-Logan had actually dubbed the woman “the Municipal Zoning Witch” because of the relentless list of regulations and taxes she continually attempted to pass on local businesses.

The woman had very wealthy backers, too, thanks in part to her willingness to advance their private concerns. The McClures were among them. They still owned quite a bit of land in Quindicott, despite the fact that most of their residences were in New York, Palm Beach, and Newport.

In return for her various “favors,” to people such as the McClures, Marjorie expected backing for the Council president’s office next year and maybe even the governor’s office in the future—or so she liked to tell people. Lately, she’d taken to wearing Hillary Clinton pastel suits, and, according to Colleen, she’d even asked for her brown hair to be dyed blond and cut short à la Hillary.

“Hillary Smillary,” Aunt Sadie had said when Colleen had passed along the gossip. “Thirty years ago that woman was obsessed with the Kennedys. Even dyed her hair black like Jackie O’s. Marjorie is just a silly, silly woman.”

“I know your tactics, Marjorie,” said Sadie, tightening her grip on the aluminum bat and raising it up just a fraction from her side. “You’re always looking for some issue to advance your political profile. Well, you’re not latching onto this one—even if it
is
the biggest news that’s hit this town since Seymour Tarnish won twenty-five thousand dollars on
Jeopardy
!”

“You’re wrong, Sadie.” Marjorie’s eyes narrowed and she actually poked her manicured finger into Sadie’s small shoulder. “This isn’t about politics, it’s about rules. You haven’t paid the town for the proper license to sell food!”

What a shakedown artist,
said the Jack Shepard voice.
You want some advice? Grab that bat and give it a swing or two.

“Shut up,” I rasped.

“What did you tell me?” said Marjorie, wheeling to confront me.

“Take it easy,” I said, quickly backing up a step. “We don’t have a license to sell food because we aren’t
selling
food. You can check with the people who came last night. Welsh and Eddie took down all their statements—”

“You’re denying you had food here? What about the doughnut Brennan choked on, then?”

“We did serve complimentary refreshments during the social gathering, which is within our right,” I said. “But Timothy Brennan didn’t choke to death on a doughnut. He didn’t even eat.”

“What about the news report?” challenged Marjorie, slapping at the paper in my hand.

“It’s the
Quindicott Bulletin,
not the
Boston Globe
!” cried Sadie. “It’s Elmer Crabtree, for cripes sake!”

Elmer, the
Quindicott Bulletin
’s publisher, was pushing eighty these days, but his age wasn’t the issue. His primary business had always been as local printer of things such as supermarket flyers, sales brochures, and wedding invitations. More than forty years ago, he’d started the
Bulletin
not to extend the fourth estate or to put truth on the kitchen tables of the Quindicott citizenry, but to make a tidy profit from local business ads and grocery store coupons.

The
Bulletin
’s contents, therefore, mostly consisted of verbatim press releases from town officials, notices for local meetings, sports scores from school teams, and classified ads for selling used cars and the like. He wrote up the occasional “hard news” story on his front page—like the piece on Brennan’s death. But he was almost never an eyewitness—and neither were his usual sources. The accounts, in fact, were primarily told to him third- and fourthhand.

“You know how he gets most of his news?” said Sadie. “Busybodies leaving messages on his phone machine!”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It’s in print!” cried Marjorie.

“I can understand your concern,” I said quickly, trying to defuse the argument. “But even Brennan’s own daughter Deirdre can verify he ate nothing. In fact, Brennan told me he never eats at author appearances—he probably had a nervous stomach or something.”

“Well, if he didn’t choke on a doughnut, what did he
die
of, then?” asked Marjorie.

“His daughter mentioned in passing that he had a weak heart.” I was reaching—my nervous shrug making
that
patently obvious. “But I’m sure the state medical examiner’s autopsy results will be made public.”

Then I thought about all those fans dressed as Jack Shield and the terrified look on Brennan’s pale face before he died. My stomach nearly lost its contents. Of course, I kept as brave a face as possible in front of the councilwoman. My bright idea may have inadvertently helped along Brennan’s heart attack, but Buy the Book certainly hadn’t done anything criminal.

“Well, I’m warning you both right now that I’ve already made a few phone calls to the proper authorities,” said the councilwoman, turning her pink leather pumps toward the door. “And no matter what the outcome of their investigation, it’s more than apparent you’ve brought bad luck to this town—and most likely busted our budget, too. I shudder to think of the municipal overtime costs incurred from last night’s . . .
mishap
.”

After a martyr’s sigh, she continued, “I tell you, I’ve been working for years to bring business back to Quindicott, and this botched event is sure to set the economic clock backward. I swear, if you’ve ruined this town’s chances for a recovery, I’ll come after your license to operate a business at all!”

Marjorie opened her mouth, about to continue, when she stopped abruptly, her eyes taking in my disheveled appearance, from my shredded hosiery to my copper tangles. “Penelope Thornton-McClure, what in the world
happened
to you? You look as though you’ve been out partying all night! What sort of life have you got your son involved in? I just spoke to your sister-in-law, and I’m sure the McClures would not approve.”

Here we go, I thought.

After Calvin’s leap, the McClures—led primarily by Calvin’s older sister, Ashley McClure-Sutherland—never came right out and
said
they blamed me for Calvin’s suicide; that maybe
I
was the crazy one; and that my son would be better off with them than me. But I knew very well they were constantly looking for an excuse to take my boy away.

“Aw, get lost, already,” Sadie told Marjorie.

“Fine,” she said, “I’m going. But I
must
remind Penelope that the McClures are expecting to see her and Spencer at Gardener’s big birthday party tomorrow. The precious boy is turning nine. It’s a very big day, you know. I’m invited as well, of course.”

“Marjorie, I’m sorry, but I told my sister-in-law already, Spence and I can’t make it. Sadie and I just reopened the store a week ago, and I need to be here to work.”

“Yes, well, Ashley said you might be too busy, with this store and all. That’s why she told me to tell you she’s going to have her chauffeur pick up Spencer and drive him to the Newport estate. Spencer has a right to see his cousin, you must admit.”

“I don’t think Spence should go without me—” I began, but Marjorie cut me off.

“Nonsense!” said Marjorie. With one more snide look, she added, “You don’t want me to suggest to them that I found you looking as though you’d been out partying all night . . . do you?”

Tell her to go to hell,
the ghost voice said in my head.

I gritted my teeth and ignored it.

“The car will be here at nine o’clock sharp. Make sure he’s ready. Ta!” With a wave of her hand and a tinkling of the door’s little bell, Marjorie was gone. Sadie looked mad enough to spit. But she didn’t have time.

The door’s Tinkerbell impersonation started up again, followed by a loud “Hi-yooooooo!”

Vinny Nardini, our Dependable Delivery Service man, strode in with clipboard in hand and the old
Tonight Show
Ed McMahon greeting. A gentle guy with bark-colored hair and a full beard, Vinny had been on the Quindicott High School football team with my late older brother, Pete, who’d died at age twenty while drag racing his souped-up GTO to impress MaryJo Lerrotta. Whenever I saw Vinny’s large frame sporting the universally recognized DDS brown uniform, I couldn’t help thinking of Peter.

If my brother had lived, I was certain he would have made close to the same choices as Vinny, who had taken a job in Quindicott, married a girl from Quindicott, and quickly begun to raise three children in Quindicott. Vin was pretty typical of most of the people with whom my brother and I had gone to school. He was also one of the happiest guys I knew.

“Hi-yo, yourself,” said Sadie. “What are you doing here? We’re not even open yet.” My aunt was as surprised as I was to see a DDS man on a Saturday.

“I’m collecting names. A petition to save the town square squirrels,” he said, presenting his electronic clipboard to Sadie. “Sign here, young woman, to stock the city hall with nuts.”

“I hope I’m not signing for a shipment of narcotics,” said Sadie.

“I only deliver heroin on Thursdays,” said Vinny.

The ghost voice. Again.

As Vinny went back out to his boxy brown DDS truck, the door tinkled yet again.

“Good morning, all,” said Professor Brainert Parker. He was such an old friend, and good customer, ignoring the CLOSED sign had become routine.

On teaching days, Brainert always wore a three-piece suit and tie. Today, however, was “casual” weekend wear, which for Brainert expressed itself in a wrinkle-free yellow cotton buttoned-down tucked into pressed J. Crew khakis with a knife-sharp crease.

“Have you seen the
Bulletin
?” he asked.

Sadie rolled her eyes. I held up the offending front page.

“Elmer Crabtree strikes again,” said Brainert.

The door swung wide once more, with Vinny pulling a handcart filled with cardboard boxes. He unloaded twenty in all. Five at a time. Each held twenty-five hardcover books. Sadie read the words stamped on the side of each box:
“Shield of Justice.”

“This must be a mistake,” I said in shock. “We already received this order!”

“No mistake,” said Vinny, piling the last of the boxes up by the checkout counter. “And Sadie’s signed, so it’s off my hands—and my truck. Toodles.”

“Oh, my goodness,” I told Sadie. “I remember now. That Shelby woman from Salient House, the publicist, she cornered me right before Brennan spoke. She said she’d convinced Brennan to stay over a few days and come back to our shop to sign all weekend. She said she had the warehouse on her cell phone and needed the store’s account number to approve an order of ‘a few’ more books. I agreed to ‘a few,’ not five hundred!”

“Hen’s teeth,” said Sadie.

“What do we do?” I said. “Brennan isn’t about to rise from the dead to sign these now—”

Ohmygod.

“You’re right. We’ll never move this many copies,” said Sadie. “After last night’s run, I think we already must have sold a
Shield of Justice
book to every Jack Shield fan in a fifty-mile radius.”

“Can’t you just send back the unopened boxes to the publisher on Monday for credit? No harm done?” asked Brainert.

“Normally, yes,” I said. “But Salient House just instituted a new penalty policy.”

“Oh, dear. I’d forgotten,” said Sadie.

To discourage returns, the publisher now made bookstores pay a penalty when returning more than 50 percent of any order. Plus postage.

“We’ll still come out ahead,” said Sadie.

“Yes, but it’s a shame to lose
any
of the profit,” I told her. “We need every penny—”

“Well, why don’t we at least refill the display?” she suggested. “Who knows, we might move a few copies over the weekend.”

We unpacked exactly one box of
Shield of Justice
and wheeled the remaining nineteen into the back, where I rubber-stamped them with the “Property of Buy the Book” seal. But I knew that designation was only temporary.

On Monday, the bulk of this shipment would surely go back to the publisher’s warehouse under the most dreaded designation in the book trade—a ghastly, horrifying word no bookseller, publisher, or author ever wished to utter:

RETURNS.

Chandler began to wonder whether even hard-boiled murder stories were not going to seem “a bit on the insignificant side” . . . considering the publicity given to real-life urban homicide.

—Tom Hiney,
Raymond Chandler: A Biography

 

 

 

AS I RETURNED from the storage room, I noticed a crowd gathering on the sidewalk.

Customers? Already?

Buy the Book wasn’t supposed to open for another fifteen minutes or so, but now I considered opening early. I glanced briefly at the crowd and spied a familiar face: Josh, Shelby Cabot’s assistant from Salient House. I assumed he’d come to pay a courtesy call on behalf of the publisher. “We’re so sorry our author dropped dead on you and we stocked your business with an immovable ton of his unsigned books.”