The Perfect Ghost (28 page)

“Some people think money buys everything.” McKenna answered the thought as though reading my mind, and once again I wondered if I might have unwittingly spoken out loud. “Who makes out like a bandit if Teddy’s dead? That’s the kind of question cops ask.”

“Caroline.” Too late, I pressed my lips shut.

“Teddy’s wife? You figure she tooled all the way up here and gimmicked his brakes? She a mechanic?”

“Gimmicked his brakes?”

“He wasn’t drunk or drugged or anything. No heart attack. But the Accident Reconstruction Unit found something funny with the brake line. Snow knows what he’s doing, all right; he just got sideswiped, delayed, getting sick and all. Look, I don’t give this number out, my cell, but you call and I’ll get there twenty-four / seven. Bring a videocam, bring the cops.” Shoving his face too close to mine, he slipped a piece of paper into my trembling hand, all the while warning me to watch myself with Garrett Malcolm, to be careful, on guard.

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“Listen, you gotta watch your back. I mean, where’s that tape, the one you thought I had? You find it? You know who it was he interviewed? What do you bet Teddy got the goods on Malcolm, nailed the bastard?”

A red Mazda pulled into the parking lot and ejected a trio of early tourists. McKenna shot me a sideways glance, the same squirrelly look he’d displayed at First Encounter Beach, the glance that said,
I’m a secret agent and my cover just got blown.
Quickly, he reached into the frayed pocket of his jeans and yanked out a battered envelope.

“Here,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’m pretty sure this helped get Teddy killed.”

I recoiled. “Shouldn’t you give it to the police?”

“Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t everything, not by a long shot. It’s part of a bigger picture, but I can’t talk now.” His sweeping glance encompassed the red car and the wandering tourists. “It could make a book with real consequences, a once-in-a-lifetime story, and they’re all in it, the politicians, the landowners, the government, I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, they own the rest of the land, don’t they?”

Hands in his pockets, head ducked low, he retreated to the van and gunned the engine while the tourists posed for cell phone photos with the lighthouse in the background.

CHAPTER

forty-two

A
criminal investigation into your death. A need to watch my back.
I shifted my eyes from the trio of harmless tourists and stared blankly at the crumpled envelope that McKenna, with the grim élan of a cold war spy, had shoved into my unresponsive hands. Chilled to the bone, bleached and bloodless as a rock, I felt my lower jaw tremble. How could even a madman abandon me on a windblown bench in the raw April cold? I hardly knew, but I was intensely relieved when the navy van disappeared in a spurt of gravel and shells. As the tourists investigated the lighthouse, calling to each other in high-pitched tones, I stumbled toward the Focus.

A criminal investigation into your death.
I unlocked the car, ducked inside, started the engine, and turned on the heater. Prying open the envelope, I withdrew a single snapshot, smoothed its curling edges, and ran a finger across the central image. If this photo had gotten you killed, it should have been the death of me, the death of McKenna as well, since both of us had already screened it on his preview Web site.

McKenna had to be playing some kind of game. The conviction grew and strengthened with the stream of warm air from the vents. He knew I was staying at the Big House, assumed I’d developed a rapport with Garrett. He was jealous and vindictive as well as crazy.

I grabbed the purse I’d stashed under the seat. As I pushed the photo into the outside pocket, I noticed the lighted screen of my cell: a missed phone call, a voice message. When I entered my password, Detective Snow’s rumbling voice filled the car, asking me to call, repeating his number twice in a stern monotone. The horizon line seemed to tilt, and I thought I might faint again.

McKenna hadn’t lied: Snow wanted to talk again. Something must have changed. His visit to Garrett, which I’d filed under routine, might not be routine after all. Garrett’s silence on the subject, which I’d attributed to his harried director’s schedule, now seemed sinister.

Snow was investigating your death. How quiet it seemed. The tourists on the hill were distant stick figures, distorted by the windshield glass. Were they calling to each other or was that the keening cry of the swooping gulls, snatching at seaweed?

I followed the flight of a gull, skimming, sinking, then rising on an invisible current. Did the gull notice the car? Sense my gaze? If I left the tepid warmth and threw myself off the cliff, how would that final unconsciousness differ from the fleeting unconsciousness of a fainting spell? What would fill the void?

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.

Hamlet
, Act Three, scene 1. How could anyone make sense of it, Teddy, the massive significance and utter insignificance of a single life, a single death? And not end up barking mad, howling at the tide, taking ship for England in the company of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? I plucked the photograph from the envelope again and carefully centered it at the hub of the steering wheel so the horn wouldn’t sound and alarm the tourists or the gulls.

A younger Garrett Malcolm gazed at me steadily from the lower-right-hand corner of the unposed shot, his left arm outstretched, hand tugged by the hand of the cut-off figure of the dark-haired woman. I stared at the image until it blurred, recalling the caption as it appeared on the Web site: 939495. I let my eyes close, but the image stayed, as though the picture had burned into my retinas.

Waves crashed against the rocks and the wind tried to penetrate the crack at the top of the window. I considered other images—on McKenna’s Web site, the girls frolicking in the waves, then the framed photos on the wall behind Malcolm’s Oscar-laden desk. When I got as far as the photo of young Jenna Malcolm dancing in the sand in front of the beach shack, my lips tightened. What if I ignored the figures in the foreground?

Where had I seen that low, flat building, that diamond-shaped sign? The letters were unfocused and illegible, but the conjunction of shapes, the curbed sidewalk, the narrow driveway brought a glimmer of recollection. That sign, or a similar sign, fronted the women’s clinic situated next to the hair salon, and the couple could have been headed for the entrance.

CHAPTER

forty-three

No lingerie shops lined this drab street in this drab town. Hours earlier, I might have called the narrow lane charming, the small shops with shingled exteriors and hand-painted signs quaint. But color had been washed from the day, the sky, so vivid over the ocean, had dulled to gray, and I had no eyes for dainty window displays. The aperture had closed, the lens narrowed, and I was left with tunnel vision as I studied the small figures in the foreground of the print.

Garrett was ten years younger, probably more, possibly twenty, so that he would have been perhaps twenty-five, a year younger than I am, a young man still. There are long years in which men change very little. The lines at the corners of his eyes cut deeper now; the shadows beneath them had darkened.

McKenna’s mind was as twisted as a nest of snakes, but one of those serpents had dug a fang into my veins and injected pure poison. The gossipmonger believed Garrett had done something to harm you, Teddy, believed you’d discovered some dire secret in the director’s past.

A picketing protester tried to catch my eye, but I ignored him and concentrated on the photo. The hairdresser at the beauty salon next door said that local girls who got in trouble with baseball players or actors came here for relief. “In trouble” as in pregnant, “relief” as in abortion. This could be a photo of Garrett escorting a local girl, some underage girl he’d impregnated, to the clinic. The hairdresser said the actors joked about a local “directory” of female “talent.”

I concentrated on the female. She didn’t look like a teen. She seemed older, but it was hard to say why, hard to peg her age. Women too, have those years, twenties to thirties, even forties, when the facial muscles hold fast and makeup aids the youthful illusion. Little of her face was visible, just the corner of an eye, the shadow of a cheekbone. She was defined by her hair, that dark flying wedge.

I stood on the pavement near the hair salon, careful to keep my distance from the few picketers who kept vigil across the street from the entrance to the women’s clinic, glancing down at the photo, up at the clinic, easing myself into the exact position where the photographer once stood.

Garrett was easy to identify, but I was sleeping with him; I knew his every pore. I’d studied photos of the man in his teens and twenties. McKenna had picked him out as well, but McKenna, too, was a specialist who recognized his celebrities. Garrett’s fame was a fairly recent by-product of his success. His renown as a film actor, dependent on a variety of chameleon-like roles, had been less than his glory as a director.

Until recently, Garrett had been a man who walked under the radar, but in the photo, he wore a trench coat with the collar turned up. Since he had made an effort at disguise, the woman might have tried to alter her appearance also. There were costumes at Cranberry Hill, rods laden with them, neat rows of wigs on the shelf in the Old Barn. I shifted my grip on the snapshot so that my thumbnail covered the wedge of dark hair.

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
Not
Hamlet
, but still Shakespeare:
Antony and Cleopatra,
Act Two, scene 2. If Claire Gregory had ever played Cleopatra, I might have recognized her sooner in her dark blunt-cut wig.

A man in a trench coat, a woman in a wig. Garrett and Claire. In disguise.

I stared down at the photo, up at the clinic, and experienced a strange dissonance, a sense of disconnectedness. It was the same clinic, but not the same clinic. The sign was the same, the sidewalk the same, the building to the left that housed the hairdresser the same, but the clinic building itself was set closer to the sidewalk. As though wandering in a hypnotic trance, I perambulated toward the door.

A gray-haired, gray-faced man intercepted me. “Don’t kill your baby.”

“Get your hands off me.”

“You don’t have to go through with it.”

I brushed him aside and rushed through the door. Disinfectant and air freshener battled for dominance in the refrigerated chill. Someone had made an attempt at a homey touch, scattering throw pillows across mismatched chairs and a low sofa, but the waiting room still screamed doctor’s office. Magazines studded a circular coffee table. A water cooler burbled in an alcove. A sign read
OUR SERVICES
and listed them in alphabetical order: abortion, body image, men’s sexual health, morning-after pill, sex and sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, women’s health.

“Your name?” A snub-nosed young woman shifted her gaze from her laptop screen.

“I’m not here to see anyone. I—is there another clinic that looks almost the same as this one?”

The woman assumed a defensive posture, straightening her back and pursing her lips, making me wonder whether the picketers ever sent anyone—say, a young woman with questions—inside for the express purpose of annoying her while she worked, or if working in an atmosphere of constant, muted, daily threat, disconcerted her.

“I’m sorry, are you looking for another address?” She stayed barely polite, her tone caustic.

“Is there another branch, another clinic with the same sign?”

“No, miss, but we might be able to help you here.” Her smile, when it came, was surprisingly warm. It seemed she had decided I was too young and naïve, too scared to mention the reason I might wish to see a doctor. I hesitated. I didn’t want to show her the photo. Garrett Malcolm was definitely recognizable now.

“She might mean the old building.”

I turned my head and caught the glance of a second receptionist, this one plump and motherly, her right hand raised to fit a sheaf of medical records into a bookcase that stretched across the rear wall.

“The old building,” I repeated.

She offered a wide smile with a dimple at one corner. “Yes, this isn’t our original space here. When they rebuilt, they made a few changes.”

“Remodeled?”

“Not intentionally. The old clinic burned to the ground.”

“Fire-bombed,” the younger receptionist chimed in, “and they still let those picketers stand there every day, harassing us and bothering our clients.”

“No one ever proved it was arson,” the motherly woman said mildly.

“But it burned?” I said. “When?”

“A long time ago.” This from the young one, a dismissive snort.

“When dinosaurs ruled the earth.” The older woman raised an eyebrow. “And, yes, I was working here at the time.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. It happened late at night, thank God, must be fifteen years ago. Back when we kept paper records. Nothing on line, so the whole thing was a nightmare.”

I turned away, took a step or two, and sank into a sagging armchair. Claire might have undergone an abortion prior to Jenna’s birth, but she would never have considered aborting Jenna, the long-awaited child. Unless Garrett, worried about his father’s bias toward boys, compelled her to come, forced her to find out the sex of the unborn child.

That didn’t work; the baby girl hadn’t been aborted. But the clinic, the clinic in the photo, had burned to the ground. Surely McKenna wasn’t accusing Garrett of burning down a clinic. The director certainly had a thing about fire; Darren Kalver pointed out the fire extinguishers in the barn on my first visit, cautioned me against smoking, mentioned a fire that occurred when Garrett was young. And he used fire with great effectiveness in his films. But to base an accusation of arson on such sketchy ground was as bad, worse than having O’Toole, the fool of a district attorney, accuse Garrett of being involved in Helga Forester’s death just because he hadn’t volunteered to step up and swab his cheek.