The Ghost and Mrs. McClure Read online

  The young woman stopped pushing and smiled at me. Well, at least her mouth did. As far as I could tell, no other discernible facial tendon had been enlisted for the exercise.

  “Hello, there,” she said, “I’m Shelby Cabot from Salient House.”

  I had lived and worked in New York long enough to spot—from at least five paces—that plastic, time-to-handle-the- non-New-Yorker (i.e., simpleton) expression.

  I extended my hand.

  “Get those chairs rearranged, Shelby!” Brennan shouted. “These idiots gave me nothing but a blank wall and a rest room exit for a backdrop!”

  Shelby shrugged, then turned away from me without a backward glance.

  “Mr. Brennan,” I said, dropping my unshaken hand, “perhaps I can help. I’m the co-owner of Buy the Book.”

  “Oh, yeah? So you’re the one to blame, then? Didn’t you even take the trouble to learn anything about how I like my appearances set up? We’ve got to turn this whole room forty-five degrees to the right. Get my back to those bookshelves over there. And put my novels on that bookshelf. Where’s your brain? In your backside?”

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Brennan,” I said, praying the sudden heat on my cheeks didn’t come with the usual accompanying scarlet flush. (Feeling humiliated was one thing, but having one’s own coloring announce it to the world was beyond excruciating.) “I didn’t realize that your talk was being taped for television, or that you’d require a special arrangement of the space.”

  The truth was, George Young, the beloved and knowledgeable sales rep for Salient House who was based in Boston but handled all the independent bookstore orders for the state of Rhode Island, had gone off on a well-earned cruise vacation. Before he left, George advised us to call Salient House directly and ask for Shelby Cabot, the manager handling the publicity tour for Brennan.

  I’d called, all right. Not once. Not twice. But six times. Six times I’d left messages in an effort to get the correct information. Nobody, not Shelby or anyone else, bothered to return my calls. I wanted to scream all of this back at Brennan, I really did, but I knew Brennan would find a way to turn things around and claim I was simply trying to get Shelby into trouble. Believe me, I’d encountered this sort of unfortunate blame game countless times while working in New York City publishing. There was no winning it.

  “I’m so sorry,” I mumbled again, feeling like the wimp of the century.

  “You should be,” said Brennan. “This place is a mess, but my daughter Deirdre and her husband, Kenneth, over there know how to fix it. They’ve done this many times before.”

  Another folding chair crashed to the floor. Kenneth, who was moving the refreshment table, almost tripped over it.

  “God, Deirdre, your husband’s such a klutz!” Brennan barked, kicking the chair out of the way.

  I tried not to wince as I lifted the chair and set it upright. I turned to see what else needed to be righted when I noticed Deirdre glaring daggers at her father’s back. Her husband, Kenneth, looked ready to strangle him.

  I braced for the blowup. But none came. Deirdre’s and Kenneth’s features simply contorted, then relaxed again, as if enduring such assaults was a regular occurrence, as if giving in had become a habit.

  As I already mentioned, I’d gone through the same thing back in New York—not just in my job but also in my marriage. Some battles you’d already fought and lost so many times that it suddenly seemed a waste of energy to even try fighting anymore.

  Someone took my arm. I saw it was Shelby. She patted it and pulled me away, steering me toward the main bookstore as she quietly said, “Don’t you worry now. Let me handle it. I’m a publishing professional.”

  “I’ve got it, Shelby!” A fresh-faced young man in khaki pants and a blue blazer rushed up to us brandishing a small paper bag.

  “Good, Josh. Heel, boy,” said Shelby. Josh narrowed his eyes at the polished publicity manager but said nothing.

  Snatching the bag, Shelby reached inside and brought out a bottle filled with green liquid. “Thank God you got the right brand.”

  “What is that?” I asked, curious.

  “Throat spray,” said Shelby.

  “Brennan won’t speak without it,” said Josh.

  “That’s fine, Josh,” said Shelby through gritted teeth. “Now be a good boy and help us get this room fixed the way it should be.”

  “What way is that, pray tell?” asked Josh, batting his eyes and smirking.

  “Okay to come in now?” called a man’s voice.

  Curious customers started wandering through the archway from the main store area. I rushed forward, embarrassed by the chaos of fallen chairs, a messed-up refreshment table, and a still-irate Timothy Brennan.

  “Everything’s all right, folks,” I announced, shooing them back into the store area. “We’ll have the room ready in a jiffy.”

  Glancing back, I saw Deirdre, Kenneth, Shelby, and Josh gathering up the fallen water bottles while Timothy Brennan told the technicians from the C-SPAN cable network how to do their jobs.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Postmortem Post

  I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work.

  I want to achieve it through not dying.

  —Woody Allen

  IF THERE WAS a hell, Jack Shepard was in it. Or else the universe was playing the cosmic joke of the century. Why else would it doom a guy like him to a place like this?

  In life, Jack’s blood had pulsed to the rhythm of the city’s streets. The smoky dice joints and swingin’ suds clubs, the back alleys, panel pads, and flophouses. The grifters and grinders, Joe-belows and triggermen, high rollers and sweet honeys—he knew them all.

  He even got to know the uptown joints doing swing shifts as a bodyguard for cliff dwellers—those high-rise society types. Believe it or don’t, every third dame would get all hopped up, take him back to her posh Park Avenue pad, and jump his bones. “What do you say, big guy? Be my sixty-minute man?”

  Why couldn’t eternity be a joint like that?

  Instead, he got lead poisoning in the godforsaken sticks—eternity in cornpone alley.

  Now the only excitement Jack ever got was scaring the crap out of small-town operators witless enough to invade his cave. And when that bored him—as it always did—he’d really scare them, running them the hell out of his space.

  At times, whole years would go by with blessed peace and quiet. And Jack found, when human activity was sparse, he could get some true rest settling into a sweet, forgetful limbo, a cosmic sleep akin to passing out after a bender.

  He’d been in precisely that state when the damn construction had started. Hammering, sanding, painting, sawing . . . a lousy, nerve-racking racket in the lousy bookshop where somebody had punched his last ticket and given him the big chill.

  Sure, Jack had played some pranks on the construction crew—making them think work tools had disappeared, sending energy surges through the electrical wiring—but they’d finished anyway.

  Then that buggy dame had started in with the folding chairs. He’d watched her arrange them, one by one.

  Unfold the chair.

  Place the chair.

  Adjust the chair.

  Unfold another chair.

  Readjust the first chair.

  Make a row.

  Adjust the row.

  Make another row.

  If he’d been alive, Jack would have beat his own head against the stone wall until he’d blacked himself out. Instead, he’d made every chair appear turned on its damned head.

  He had to give the broad credit, though. She hadn’t screamed. Hadn’t even made a peep, just hightailed it outta there, returning within minutes to see them set upright again.

  Her name was Mrs. Penelope Thornton-McClure. And he had to admit she showed more moxie than a lot of grown men he’d pranked in the past fifty years.

  Not a bad looker, either.

  Had a nice face and soft voice. Certainly, she was the first living entity he’d even
considered shifting himself toward since he’d crossed over, which was hilarious because, if he’d read her thoughts right, she didn’t even believe in ghosts.

  Well, he hadn’t believed in them, either.

  Concrete Jack. That’s what he’d been. “I’m the hardest case you’ll ever meet,” he once told a client who wanted help beating a murder rap. “Too many con artists to count in this world. You want me to believe something, I gotta see proof. Show it to me plain as the broken nose on my face.”

  Just like Mrs. McClure, Jack had once believed that when you died, you died, and that was the end.

  Brother, had he been wrong.

  So he sat back and watched.

  And right now, it was that broad, Penelope, he couldn’t stop watching. Despite her sweet-as-pie face and her hard-work ethic, this Penelope doll could be pretty damned annoying. The chair-fixing compulsion was just one case in point. Still, the dame didn’t deserve the crap she was getting from the biggest a-hole of the twentieth century if ever there was one—

  Timothy Brennan.

  Timothy Brennan, the lousy rat fink.

  Before Brennan appeared, Jack had been observing the bookshop activities this evening with mild interest at best.

  Now Jack was awake.

  And alert.

  And pissed.

  Brennan didn’t know it yet, but he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life: he’d finally walked into Jack’s bookstore.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Drink before Dying

  I’m just not sure we need this . . . mess right now.

  —Angie Gennaro to Patrick Kenzie, Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane, 1998

  I WAS STANDING next to the refreshment table. It had been dragged, on Brennan’s orders, to the back end of the room—unappealingly close, in my opinion, to the rest rooms. Before me, a surreal sea of battered fedoras bobbed with excitement. Murmurs of approval rose and fell amid the dark ties and three-piece suits.

  Timothy Brennan was leaning forward against a carved oak podium (which I’d bought for a song at a Newport estate sale), captivating the crowd with his prepared speech:

  “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Brennan read aloud. “Such words could have been applied easily to my fictional private detective, Jack Shield, a man who was a complete man and a common man, and above all a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”

  I winced.

  Brennan had just asserted that “Such words could have been applied easily to Jack Shield.” But he’d somehow forgotten to mention that they were Raymond Chandler’s exact words in his famous essay describing the quintessential detective.

  I searched out Brainert, seated near the front. Not surprisingly, he was shaking his head with all the perfected disappointment of an English professor reviewing a badly footnoted paper. He caught my eye and together we mutely mouthed “Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder.”

  I shrugged and lifted my hands palm up, as if to say, Perhaps it had been an innocent oversight.

  Brainert rolled his eyes.

  J. Brainert Parker (the J. was for Jarvis, a first name he’d utterly rejected since age six) was one of my closest childhood friends. A single, gay St. Francis College English professor in his thirties with a stringbean body, blanched complexion, and self-described “Ichabod Crane” style, he was also (as Sadie put it) one of those “relentlessly sober” types.

  Brainert claimed to be a distant relative of the Providence occult author H. P. Lovecraft; and, like his supposed ancestor, he was extremely well-read. All the regular customers respected his opinions. And his enthusiasm for out-of-print Holmes books kept the store’s lights on—his most recent purchase being a forty-eight-dollar copy of a P. F. Collier & Son Holmes collection decorated red cloth hardcover, circa 1903.

  In any event, I was feeling pretty badly about Brennan’s unhappiness with our bookstore in general and me in particular. Before his speech, I’d actually tried to make peace by fetching him a cup of coffee and a plate of the Cooper Family Bakery goodies. The incoming guests were already digging into the food, and I was afraid Brennan wouldn’t get to sample any of it.

  Wrong. He’d practically slapped the five-nut tarts and Vermont maple doughnuts out of my hand, barking that he never ate anything before, during, or after his lectures.

  “Are you running a bookstore or a diner?” he’d snapped at me. “Water only. Just be sure there’s water.”

  Okay, I admit it: Timothy Brennan wasn’t exactly the nicest author on the best-seller list. But I was willing to forgive his rudeness, his pomposity, his blustery impatience, even his quoting of Chandler without mentioning Chandler. Why? Because I myself was a huge fan of his books, purple prose and all. Maybe it was because Jack Shield could always say the sorts of things I wouldn’t. Do the sorts of things I couldn’t.

  Whatever the reason, I enjoyed the Shield yarns as much as those old hard-boiled detective tales in the pulps of the twenties and thirties that my father had collected. Brennan himself hadn’t been published in Black Mask (the magazine that had launched writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett), but he’d known some of the men who had, and he wrote in their tradition. That was good enough for me. So like a pathetic kid defending some sports hero caught strung out on steroids, a part of me was still looking for excuses to defend the bad-behaving Brennan.

  “It was back when I was wet-behind-the-ears reporter that I first met and then knocked around with Jack Shepard,” Brennan continued to tell the audience. “The model for my fictional detective was a tough-talking, no-nonsense, street-smart private eye dedicated to uncovering the truth, no matter where it leads.”

  Some members of the audience actually mouthed these familiar words right along with Brennan. They’d been part of the jacket copy for decades. Hoots and applause followed.

  “Jack Shepard left me his case files. Changing the names to protect the guilty, I used them as the basis for my stories—”

  A deep voice interrupted: You did what?! You “used” them for your stories? Then you stole them, you low-down, dirty grifter. No one “left” you those files.

  Every muscle in my body froze in mortification. Some man had just heckled this beloved author. At my store! Brennan would never forgive me! And the crowd would tear the place to pieces!

  I waited for the typhoon to hit.

  But it didn’t.

  Brennan simply continued his speech. Ignoring the heckler, the audience obviously followed Brennan’s lead.

  “Lately, readers have been asking me if the real Jack Shepard was the equal of fictional Jack Shield,” said Brennan. “I tell them that truthfully Shields is Shepard with Timothy Brennan mixed in. Shepard wasn’t exactly leading-man material, y’know.”

  Yeah. Right. Not like you, ya bloated, barstool raconteur!

  Once more, I braced for impact. Surely there would be a reaction this time. . . .

  But Brennan disregarded the man—and so did his audience.

  I scanned the crowded room, desperate to locate this deep-voiced pest. He sounded very close. But the only people standing near me, in front of the refreshment table, were women—Linda Cooper-Logan and Fiona Finch, the sixty-year-old owner of Finch’s Inn, the only hotel in Quindicott.

  “Shepard had a ton of weaknesses and sad problems—”

  Oh, and you didn’t, ya degenerate, gambling ginhead!

  What in heaven’s name is going on? I thought. Was I the only one hearing this?

  “And, frankly, he wasn’t that smart,” continued Brennan. “It took me—my writing, my words, and my ingenuity—to make him a hero that would span nineteen best-sellers and inspire two television shows. You might say I’m responsible for adding the heroism to the antihero.”

  No, Tim-bo. Sounds to me like you’re responsible for stealing my stories, my life, and making a mint on it!

  With a nauseating abruptness,
I knew why no one else was reacting to the voice. And why I was the only one hearing it.

  That voice wasn’t in the room; it was inside my own head.

  But how can that be? How? I asked myself. It wasn’t my voice. Or my thoughts. I’d never thought such crude things in my entire life!

  Of course you haven’t, said the male voice. You’re one of those nice-thinking, fair-play Janes—gullible as a corn-fed calf and just about as defenseless.

  “Where are you?” I rasped in a loud whisper, unable to understand how the man had answered me when I hadn’t spoken a word.

  Linda and Fiona looked at me with puzzled expressions.

  “Where’s who?” asked Linda.

  I shook my head. “Forget it,” I whispered.

  “Jack Shepard and I were both working the mean streets,” Brennan continued. “Jack as a detective and me as a reporter. We were just regular guys walking a thin line between the world of respectability and the underworld of crime.”

  HA!

  I inhaled. Then exhaled. Joan of Arc heard voices, right? But they were probably nice, gentle, inspirational voices. Saintly voices.

  I was the one walkin’ that thin line, ya drunken bum. You were the one rackin’ up debts at the track, bangin’ poor workin’ girls then callin’ the cops on them to get out of payin’, and drownin’ your tonsils in so much suds I’d have to pick you up off the taproom floor.

  I closed my eyes and opened them again. This voice was certainly no saint. And it really wasn’t mine—at least not a voice from my conscious self. This left me with one conclusion: I was cracking up.

  Get a grip, Penelope, I told myself. Refocus your attention!

  As applause echoed off the walls, I concentrated on the crowd, scanning the mix of Quindicott townies, Providence professionals, and college kids, as well as Newport yacht-club and old-money types. All appeared entertained enough to shell out $27.50 each.