The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (2 page)

Birdie nodded. “She said she had a real good time with you, all right. But then after . . .” She shook her head. “You never called her again.”

Jack worked his iron jaw. Dames never complained when they were with him. Why wasn’t that enough?

“Tell you the truth, Birdie, I called Viv plenty. She just had the wrong idea about me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m a taxi, honey. I’ll give you the best damn ride in the city. But you can’t lock me up in your garage. Not with so many of you dolls needing my services around town. Just wouldn’t be fair.”

Birdie laughed so hard a few customers looked their way. “Jack, you’re terrible!”

Jack shrugged his acre of shoulders. “Listen, honey, you want a proper boyfriend? Go find a nice church social, or better yet move to some little cornball town where the Alvins all buy you malteds and bore you to tears. But, honey, if you want a good time”—he threw her another wink—“you know where to find me.”

By now, everyone in the building knew Jack’s office was five floors up. He tipped his scarred chin north, just to remind her.

For a curious moment Birdie studied that dagger-shaped scar—a souvenir from his four hard years “over there” for Uncle Sam. Her gaze dropped down to the broad
T
of his shoulders, followed the line of his double-breasted as it tapered to his still-narrow waist. Finally her baby blues returned to the hard planes and angles of his nearly forty face.

“I’ll think about it,” she said, but the hot stare said something a whole lot more encouraging.

Jack almost smiled. Catching dames was no different than catching grifters. You just had to throw out your bait and wait. Birdie here was nearly ready to bite; she just wanted to be fed a few more lines. Jack was all set to oblige; then he’d reel her in with a nice, firm tug. He opened his mouth to make his play when the tug came to his coat sleeve instead.

“Hey, mister. You Jack Shepard?”

The voice was high-pitched, but it wasn’t a dame. Jack turned on his stool to find a scruffy little runt standing behind him. The kid was young—eleven, twelve maybe. His freckled face could have used a good scrubbing. Ditto for his wrinkled clothes. And his shaggy brown hair was in sore need of a boot-camp razor. Jack recognized the kid from somewhere . . .

“You’re a gumshoe, ain’t you? You got an office right upstairs?”

“What’s it to you, kid?”

“I need to hire a private dick. And you’re as good as anybody. That’s what my boss says.”

“Your boss?” That was when the light dawned. This kid worked the corner, hawking headlines every afternoon.

“My boss is Mr. Dougherty,” the kid said, pointing out the window. “He runs the corner newsstand.”

“Sure, kid, I know Mac Dougherty. But I’m trying to get some lunch here.”
Among other things . . .
“So do me a favor and shove off, okay? You can tell me to ‘Read All About It’ some other time.”

Jack turned back to Birdie, but she’d disappeared on him. He glanced down the counter to find her five seats away, waiting on some salesman with a plastic grin and a dime-store tie. Jack cursed softly, stubbed out his cigarette.

“You got it all wrong, mister,” the boy said.

“You still here?”

“I’m not trying to sell you a paper.”

Not only did the kid fail to shove off, he climbed aboard the empty stool next door. “What’s the big idea, junior? You’re ruining a perfectly good lunch hour.”

“I told you, Mr. Shepard. I want to hire you. It’s a finder’s job. Should be easy for someone like you. Mr. Dougherty said you used to be a copper. He said you was a war hero, too.”

Jack looked away. “Gunning men down doesn’t make you a hero, kid. Not in my book.”

“I got money to pay, Mr. Shepard. It’s not dirty or nothing, neither.”

The kid gaped at Jack then, his big, brown eyes all puppy-dog expectant. Jack exhaled long and hard, drained his coffee cup, and set it down.

“Listen, son, I’m not in the business of finding lost poodles. Tack up some posters, maybe you’ll get lucky.”

“I didn’t lose a dog, mister. What I lost was a person. She walked right out the door two weeks ago and never came back.”

“Oh, yeah? And who would that be?”

“My mother.”

CHAPTER 1

In the long run, we are all dead.

—John Maynard Keynes

 

 

 

Quindicott, Rhode Island
June 9, present day

 

“OH, NO. DON’T tell me . . .”

Since I’d crawled out of bed at seven this morning, I’d encountered setbacks galore: a stubbed toe, a misplaced wallet, a malfunctioning toaster, no milk for my son’s cereal, and a kitty litter shortage. That was only the first hour.

Spencer was leaving for summer camp tomorrow and after I’d stuffed his clothes into our old washer, he told me about a list of things he was supposed to pack and didn’t have. So I was off, shopping for a second pair of swim trunks, rubber flip-flops for the shared camp showers, and sunscreen with an SPF high enough to block a nuclear winter—not to mention the milk and kitty litter we’d just run short on.

(Until I got back, Bookmark had to make due with piddling on this week’s
Quindicott Bulletin
, which was actually a pretty good use for it, considering the rumor-as-journalism philosophy of the town paper.)

Then Aunt Sadie called my cell to inform me the store just got saddled with a triple shipment of stripper-turned-television-actress Zara Underwood’s debut crime novel,
Bang, Bang, Baby.

I knew the book was sailing on celebrity for most of the country. She received a huge advance, and there was a big, expensive publicity campaign with print and radio ads, but the review galley was written on the level of “See spot run.” And since my customers actually liked to read the books they purchased, I figured we’d be lucky to sell five of the woman’s books, let alone the eighty-four copies the publisher had shipped us mistakenly.

I raced back to the shop, and while Aunt Sadie rang up customers, I put together the cardboard dump (with the life-size standee of grinning “stripper-turned-actress-turned-writer” Underwood, who was practically wearing nothing but underwear), and then the store phone rang.

Soft-spoken shut-in Miss Timothea Todd was calling to politely inquire about her June 1 book delivery. It was now June 9, and my aunt felt so badly about the oversight that I’d agreed to do a quick, there-and-back run after our lunchtime business had died down.

Quick
was the operative word until I’d hit the funeral cortege. Now I was trapped in my car watching a long parade of tiny black flags flutter on radio antennas behind a fully loaded hearse. Its final destination (pardon the pun) was the “Old Farm”—what we locals called Quindicott’s nondenominational town cemetery, a manicured area of gentle Rhode Island hills situated between the central district and the secluded mansions of Larchmont Avenue.

The vast graveyard used to be part of the Montague family farm until the city forefathers bought the land one spring when a terrible fever ripped through the region and there were far too many dead for any one church to handle. (Seymour Tarnish, our shop’s mailman and the local repository for all manner of trivia, insisted the phrase
bought the farm
actually originated in our little town with that plot purchase.)

Anyway, since Miss Todd lived on Larchmont, it was my destination—at the moment. I was well aware my
final
destination would be the Old Farm, too, since Quindicott’s dead had been planted there for going on three centuries now.

I shifted in my car seat, watching the funeral party wind its way around a bend. All of the vehicles’ headlights were on, a typical funeral procession tradition, but I hadn’t noticed that fact until the caravan rolled under the dappled gray shadows of overhanging dogwoods. Funny, I thought, how something as bright as a headlight can be made to appear invisible by the glare of a sunny day . . .

As I contemplated tricks of light, beads of sweat formed on my neck and began trickling beneath my blouse. My black-framed glasses slipped down my slick nose. I pushed them back up. My Saturn was more than ten years old. Its air conditioner had sputtered into dysfunction last September, and I had yet to get it fixed.

I powered down the car’s windows and tied my shoulder-length auburn hair into a ponytail. I was dressed for summer in flat leather sandals, beige capri pants, and a white sleeveless blouse, but now I was really beginning to bake. Sticking my head out the window, I longed for that fresh glass of Del’s frozen lemonade Miss Todd would likely be whipping up for me, and considered passing the slow-mo procession.

Dogwood was a narrow route with the dark density of Montague’s Woods on its left and the old graveyard’s rustic, gray fieldstone fence on its right. There wasn’t much of a shoulder on either side; and, unfortunately, the painted line running down the middle of the road’s black tarred surface was solid yellow. This area was a no-passing zone.

But no one was coming toward me in the other lane (at least that I could see), and a quick glance in my rearview mirror told me there wasn’t a police car around, either. In fact, there was no one behind me.

“Should I risk it?” I turned the wheel a fraction, ready to veer into the oncoming lane and put the hammer down. “Why not?”

The explosive masculine voice in my head was accompanied with a sudden decrease in the temperature of the warm car. The double whammy jolted me backward.

“Jack?” I called to the chilly blast of air. “Is that you?!”

“Where’ve you been all day?”

“It’s Quindicott, Jack, not Cornpone-cott—and I was beginning to think you’d abandoned me . . .”

I once seriously considered therapy to sort out whether Jack was an actual ghost (i.e. spook, specter, spirit of a dead guy). I mean, a private detective named Jack Shepard was actually gunned down sixty years ago inside the bookshop my aunt Sadie and I now owned. Not long ago, a major mystery writer had revealed Jack’s fate as a true-crime fact.

Still . . . I was the only one who ever heard the ghost, which sometimes made me question my sanity. I mean, add it up: I’d always been an admirer of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. So Jack
could
be the equivalent of an “imaginary friend,” created by my subconscious to help me (say) cope with life’s relentless stresses. In that case, any shrink would probably just reduce Jack down to an alter ego with a fedora, ready to coach me through things my vulnerable self didn’t think it could handle.

On the other hand, I had to wonder why my vulnerable self would use off-color language and slang so outdated I couldn’t follow it. And if I really was a candidate for (as Jack once put it) “the cackle factory,” would I even be able to rationally consider psychological options?

Tired of debating myself, I threw in the skeptical towel. There was, however, another key reason why I was determined to keep the dead gumshoe all to myself: my late husband’s wealthy, well-connected family. Ever since my chronically depressed young husband had decided to stop taking his meds and instead take a stroll out the window of our New York high-rise, any hint of crazy from me was going to be enough for the McClures to put me away and ship Spencer off to boarding school (their original “suggestion” for me the summer after my husband killed himself).

That infuriating advice (more of a threat, really, if you knew the McClures) had been quite enough motivation for me to move Spence up here to my small Rhode Island hometown so we could both start over again. It was also more than enough reason to keep my mouth shut about Jack the PI ghost.

By now, I’d become quite fond of the ghost. We’d been through a lot together. His police and PI experience on the mean streets of New York had come in handy more than once. Even his supernatural chills turned out to be handy—particularly when riding around in a hot car with a broken air conditioner.

There was a downside to Jack, too, of course. His 1940s sensibilities weren’t always, shall we say . . .
enlightened
?

“I’m glad to have you on board,” I told the ghost. “I was beginning to think you’d stayed in the store to hang out in our new occult book section. I mean, given your own state, you might find some interesting reading.”

“Excuse me, but—”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake! They’re just college students, Jack! In a few years, their piercings will be gone and their tattoos will be covered up with button-downs and blazers. Some of them might even be scribbling PhD beside their names.”

I shook my head and Jack fell silent for a few minutes. The deep freeze had lessened into a pleasant coolness and the car’s interior was much more comfortable now. Still, I frowned at the SUV bumper in front of me and checked my watch again. The funeral procession was moving with all the speed of maple tree sap.

A big, bronze vintage Harley blew by me in the opposite lane. Before I’d even caught a glimpse of Leo Rollins’s shiny gold helmet, I would have recognized his uniquely customized engine by its odd high-low-pitched sound. Other than Leo, however, there was no one else. No other traffic was traveling back from Larchmont Avenue.