The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (14 page)

I groaned and pulled a pillow over my head. “Are you telling me a phantom driver in a phantom car made Seymour’s brakes fail?”

“Consider what?”

I pulled the pillow off my head. “Which case? Tell me.”

“No. First tell me about your case.”

“Jack, I really don’t think that’s going to work tonight.”

“I know. But right now I’m just too wired. There’s no way I’ll be able to nod off.”

Deep male laughter resounded in my head, loudly at first; then it slowly faded, getting weaker and weaker until it diminished completely. Jack’s cool presence receded along with it, and the room became warm again.

I sighed and turned over, feeling frustrated and alone. Lying still in the darkness, I replayed the long day’s events—thought about Seymour and Miss Todd, Mr. Stoddard and his strange assistant, Leo and the failed brakes. Disembodied heads floated in my mind like pieces of a puzzle, but I couldn’t fit them together. As I groaned and turned over again I realized a cool breeze had begun to circle my bedpost. I glanced at the window. My curtains weren’t moving. Neither were the tree limbs outside.

The breeze grew stronger, lifted strands of my auburn hair. I felt the energy, the familiar presence.

“I told you already, Jack, I’m too wired. I can’t fall—”

“Fine!” I said, humoring the dead man. “Okay, they’re closed! But I told you—” I paused to yawn. “I’m not at all”—
yawn
—“sleepy . . .”

 

I OPENED MY eyes.

“Ordering! Two Blue Plates; one ham and Swiss, whiskey down; one bowl of red, make it cry; and burn the British with two eggs—wreck ’em!”

I was sitting on a stool at the counter of an old-time diner. Let me be clear: This was not some retro eatery in a suburban strip mall—a diner built two years ago to
appear
old. This place actually
was
old. The olive-green linoleum counter was wash-worn, the tables and chairs visibly rickety. Behind the counter a Caucasian waitress was shouting orders to two black cooks in grease-stained aprons, their white cardboard hats bobbing back and forth in the ordering window like props in a foodie puppet show.

Up front the customers in the place were mostly white men in suits. The few women in the diner wore hats and belted dresses, which fell past their knees. I glanced down at myself and saw that I was dressed just like them—in a light green print dress with short sleeves and a thin, black patent leather belt. I felt stockings on my legs and saw peep-toed pumps on my feet. Someone had given me a pedicure, too, with deep red polish.

I checked my fingers but couldn’t see the nails. My hands were sheathed in white cotton gloves. A patent leather pocketbook with a little black strap sat primly on my lap. I noticed a mirrored case behind the counter, which displayed desserts. I caught a glimpse of my reflection between the cream pies and fruit tarts. My auburn hair, which I usually wore tied back into a no-fuss ponytail, was now hanging down to my shoulders in a sleek, glossy pageboy, the bangs rolled as perfectly as Barbara Stanwyck’s in
Double Indemnity
. My cheeks were rouged, my eyes (sans glasses) were heavily made up, and my mouth outlined with a lipstick redder than a hazard light. As my finely plucked eyebrows rose, I heard a child’s high-pitched voice ask—

“Who’s
she
?”

I glanced at the counter stool next to mine, half expecting to see Spencer, but it was another little boy sitting there—one I’d never seen before. His freckled face needed a good washing and so did his clothes; and his brown, shaggy hair looked like it could use a good trimming.

The boys in Quindicott wore T-shirts and jeans, almost exclusively. This boy wore a collared shirt tucked into belted and cuffed gabardine slacks. He didn’t appear older than twelve, yet his frank, appraising brown eyes were staring up at me with an expression older and harder than any twelve-year-old’s I’d ever seen.

“Did ya hear me, Mr. Shepard?” the boy asked. “Who’s
she
?”

“She’s going to help me with your case, kid. That’s who she is.” The voice was deep, gravelly, and intimately familiar.

I looked past the boy and saw the man. “Jack.”

It took me a minute to get used to the realness of him—the fortyish face with its hard planes and angles; the flat, square chin with its daunting dagger-shaped scar. His sandy-haired head was bare at the moment, but I noticed his gray fedora sitting on the counter in front of him. The double-breasted suit looked familiar, too, with its lines tightly tailored to his broad shoulders and narrow waist.

“Hiya, baby. Welcome back to my world.”

He was gazing at me now, over the boy’s shaggy head, with a kind of bemused expectation—as if waiting for me to react to this trip back in time, back to the world of his memories.

I tore my gaze away from his intense granite eyes to check out the scene beyond the diner’s front window. I could see it was daytime, the sidewalk crowded with pedestrians in ’40s-era garb—men in suits and hats, women in calf-length skirts and dresses. Not one pair of distressed jeans. No flip-flops, T-shirts, tattoos, or piercings. The cars looked like something from a Smithsonian display: heavy metal dinosaurs spewing leaded fossil fuel. A few stories above, the steel-girder framework of an elevated train muted the midday light, dappling the otherwise sunny day with gray shadows and blue shade.

I glanced back at my PI. “What year is it exactly?”

Jack slid a newspaper across the dull olive counter. I skimmed the
Times
headlines—“Butter Rises to 90 Cents a Pound,” “Truman Hails National Guard,” “Long Island Fire Kills 8.” My gaze searched page one for the date: September 10, 1947. Two years before a bullet sent Jack Shepard to an early afterlife.

“She got a name, Mr. Shepard?” the boy asked.

“She does,” Jack replied, throwing a wink down the counter at me. “But it’s Mrs. McClure to you.”

The boy whistled. “She’s a good looker. She your girl?”

“I’m not his girlfriend,” I said. “I’m his—”

“Secretary,” Jack said.

“Partner,” I corrected. “Remember?”

“We’ll see,” Jack murmured, patting his pocket.

“We’ll see?”
I repeated.

“Case by case, honey. Case by case.”

Jack pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one clear. I stared in shock as he dared to light up inside the restaurant. “Are you crazy?” I said, expecting the restaurant manager to rush over immediately and kick him out. And then I remembered.

“What’s with the face?” Jack asked. “Oh, sorry. You want one?” He offered me the pack.

I shook my head.

“Oh, yeah.” Jack laughed. “Forgot. You’re one of those good-girl, do-right, no-smokin’ Janes.”

“Nicotine’s a terrible carcinogen, Jack. That’s why smoking’s been banned almost everywhere in my time.”

The PI blew a smoke ring. “Well, we’re not in your time.”

“I’ll have hers!” In the space of an eyeblink, the little boy had grabbed a cigarette from the pack and shoved it between his lips. “Got a light?”

I plucked the Lucky from the kid’s mouth, shoved it back into Jack’s pack, and slid it back to its owner.

“Hey!” the boy cried. “What’s the big idea?!”

“Your health’s the big idea, young man. Haven’t you heard that smoking causes lung cancer?”

“Lung what?” The kid turned to Jack. “Jiminy crickets, what’s she talking about!”

Jack took another drag, blew it out. “She’s saying you’re too young to smoke.
That
I happen to agree with.”

“I’m twelve years old!” the boy cried, as if that were plenty old enough.

“You shouldn’t start smoking at
any
age,” I said.

Jack threw me another bemused look, and I realized with a start that whatever this boy did back here wouldn’t matter anyway. These were Jack’s memories, his long-past memories. This little boy, whoever he was, might very well be deceased already. Feeling like an idiot, I closed my eyes.

“Easy, baby,” Jack whispered. “We’re here for a reason, remember? Your case—and mine.”

My eyelids lifted. “This boy is your case?”

Jack nodded.

“What’s his name?”

“John James Conway’s the name,” the boy announced loudly between us. “But you can call me J. J.”

I looked back down at him. “Okay, J. J. Maybe
you
can tell me what I’m doing here?”

“That’s easy. I just hired Mr. Shepard for a finder’s job.”

I smiled at Jack. “Lost dog?”

Jack shook his head. “Mother.”

My face fell. “His mother’s missing?”

“She went off to work two weeks ago and never came home,” J. J. said.

“Where does she work?” I asked.

“At a school uptown. She’s a teacher.”

“What school exactly?”

The boy shrugged. “She never told me.”

“Where’s your dad, J. J.?”

“What dad?”

I met Jack’s eyes above J. J.’s head. “What do I need to know here?”

“His mother’s a schoolteacher. She went off to work uptown, never came home. Kid doesn’t know where she teaches. Mother never told him.”

My lips pursed. “I know that already. The boy just informed me of those facts.”

“And?” Jack took another drag on his cigarette, blew it out. “What’s your next step?”

“
My
next step? This was
your
case.”

“Not anymore, baby. If you’re bucking for partner, you’re going to have to show me what you got.”

CHAPTER 11

Listen, darling, tomorrow I’ll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don’t worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

—Detective Nick Charles to his wife, Nora, in
The Thin Man
, Dashiell Hammett, 1933

 

 

 

I DRUMMED MY white-gloved fingers on the dull green countertop and considered my options. “Just tell me one thing, Jack. What does this case have to do with what’s happening in my time?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” He picked up his coffee cup and threw me a wink. “If you’re up to it.”

“Who’s
she
?”

Once again, it was a high-pitched voice asking the question, only this time it wasn’t a boy’s. This voice belonged to a grown woman—very grown.

Standing in front of Jack, holding a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes, was a waitress wearing a pink apron. The woman was young—probably mid-twenties. She was also quite tall and, much like our Zara Underwood standee, built with conspicuously above-average lung capacity. Beneath her little pink waitress hat, her face was roundish, her features handsome. She wore her light blond hair in curls, and her big blue eyes were presently glaring at me.

It was painfully obvious the waitress was unhappy to see some other female on the receiving end of a Jack Shepard wink. She banged the plate of food down on the counter in front of the PI and pointed.

“She your sister or something?”

Jack tossed an amused glance at me. “Or something.”

The waitress scowled, sizing me up.

“That sure smells good,” J. J. announced, eyeballing the Blue Plate special.

Jack observed the boy. “You hungry?”

J. J. nodded.

“Well, that’s good. ’Cause, come to think of it . . .” Jack scratched the back of his head. “I’m not that hungry after all.”

“No foolin’?”

“No foolin’. So help me out, kid.” Jack slid the plate over. “Take this off my hands, will ya?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Shepard!”

J. J. dug in, shoving the potatoes into his mouth like he hadn’t had a hot meal in days. I met Jack’s eyes again. He shrugged, looked away.

The waitress was still standing in front of him. She propped her shapely hip and put a hand on it. “So what about those big plans of yours, Jack Shepard? The ones you had for
us
tonight?”

Jack glanced at my raised eyebrow and shifted on his stool. “We’ll have to make it another night, Birdie. See, I just took on a case.” He gestured in the general direction of J. J. and me.

“Oh.” Birdie’s arm fell off her hip and her scowl relaxed into the semblance of a sympathetic frown. She lowered her voice. “The dame and her kid your new clients, huh?”

“Yeah, Birdie, something like that.”

J. J. snickered between bites of roast beef. Jack lightly elbowed him. The waitress caught the exchange and looked me over again.

“You gonna have anything, sister? Or you just gonna sit there takin’ up a seat at my counter?”

“Um—”

“Do me a favor, doll,” Jack murmured. “Don’t order a damn Vesper this time. Go for something that’s been invented in this century.”

“The Vesper
was
created in this century, Jack. Don’t you remember?
Casino Royale
, Ian Fleming, 1952.”

“At the moment, dollface, 1952 is still five years away.”

The waitress put a hand on her hip. “Lady, are you gonna order or what?”

“Yes,” I said. “A cup of coffee, please.”

The waitress shook her head. “Big spender,” she muttered, then sashayed away, putting far more swing into her hips (in my opinion) than was necessary for simple locomotion to a coffeemaker. I glanced down the counter and sighed. Jack’s gaze was exactly where I figured it would be—glued to her caboose.

“Ah-hem!”
I said.

“Yeah, baby?” Jack asked without breaking his focus. “You got something to say?”