The Ghost and Mrs. McClure (12 page)

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I said. Then I raised my chin, turned on my heel, and strode back toward the checkout counter. Thankfully, the Jack Shepard delusion of mine didn’t follow.

Midnight, I dare say. . . . That’s the word.

The time when the graves give up their dead, and ghosts walk.

—Dashiell Hammett,
The Dain Curse,
1928

 

 

 

TWO HOURS LATER, at three minutes after nine, Sadie rang up the last of the day’s
Shield of Justice
purchases for a well-dressed, middle-aged couple who also had a taste for the Kellermans—Jonathan and Faye.

No longer capable of smiles, I wisely let Sadie answer their chatty questions and politely send them on their way. The moment they departed, I threw the lock, flipped the sign to read CLOSED, and fell against the door.

“Tired?” Aunt Sadie asked. As she began to empty the register and count the day’s receipts, I collapsed into a nearby chair and stared vacantly at the intentionally rustic charm of the exposed beams in our ceiling.

“Now, why would I be tired?” I replied. “Could it be that I was living through one of the most eventful days in my life with a horrendous hangover—the result of alcohol ingested at your urging, by the way? Or maybe it was the threat from Councilwoman Binder-Smith to shut us down? Or the State Police raid that pretty much capped our morning—and all this before we opened for business?”

Sadie clicked her tongue. “You’re babbling, dear. And, anyway, we can’t help it if a famous author drops dead in our store, now, can we?”

“What if Timothy Brennan didn’t just drop dead?” I asked, finally coming out with the question that had been nagging at me all day. “What if the autopsy suggests foul play? Lieutenant Marsh will want to pin the crime on someone.”

“What if pigs had wings?” said Aunt Sadie with a snort.

As I watched Sadie rubber-band thick wads of cash, my “babbling” continued. “If Brennan
was
the victim of foul play, then the suspect list would include those who had opportunity, access, and, of course, motive, which means we could be on the list.”

“How do you figure that?”

“For better or worse, Brennan’s death put Buy the Book on the map, didn’t it? I mean, look at all that cash—in one day’s take. We’re making money because Brennan died here. And I really didn’t want to admit this to you—or even to myself, frankly—but Lieutenant Marsh looked me up and down this morning like I was guilty.”

“Of what?”

“Anything. Anything he can make stick. I’m sure of it. And that’s what worries me. You and I both know the state won’t take over a local investigation unless they’re asked—and Councilwoman Marjorie Binder-Smith almost certainly insisted, no doubt with a tip-off to watch
me
for suspicious behavior.”

“Don’t be silly,” Aunt Sadie replied. “You’re just over-tired.” But this time her dismissal lacked conviction. I could see my words had made her begin to worry, too.

Aunt Sadie stuffed the day’s receipts into a threadbare canvas bag, which she’d used since she first took over the store from her father decades ago. She tied the bag with its frayed, gray string tucked it under her arm and headed for the stairs.

“I’m going to bed, sweetie,” Sadie called over her shoulder. “Don’t forget to turn out the lights before you come upstairs. See you in the morning.”

Despite my tired feet, I was wired. Worrying will do that to a person. I thought some surfing time on the Internet might help distract me, but first I had to close down the rest of the store.

I moved through the lighted aisles to a bank of electrical controls near the entrance to the community events space. Flicking switches, I shut down all but the recessed security lights in the ceiling.

The entire interior of Buy the Book was now dark, illuminated only by a dull glow that cast deep shadows between the tall bookshelves. Outside the high windows, the night-cloaked streets of Quindicott had gone quiet.

At the end of the block, the hanging stoplight at the crossroad swung in the nighttime breeze, blinking from green to yellow to red, signaling traffic that wasn’t there.

Even the formerly cheerful community events space seemed slightly menacing, its cavernous interior, where a corpse had lain just twenty-four hours ago, blanketed in darkness.

With a sudden shiver, I turned, intending to head back to the main store’s register area when I heard a strange, hollow, banging sound. The noise had come from somewhere inside the darkened community events room.

Trying not to panic, I listened intently. When the sound came again, louder this time, I forced the rational part of my mind to identify the odd yet strangely familiar noise.

“Jack?” I whispered to my delusion. “Is that you? If you’re trying to scare me with some pretense of ghostly manifestation—well, it isn’t very funny.”

No reply. My Jack Shepard alter ego was missing in action.

Typical.

Where’s a psychotic delusion of a ghostly detective when you really need one?

Despite my better judgment, I carefully tiptoed into the darkened community events room in an effort to discover the source of the banging sound.

I tried not to think about my eerie dream the night before, the ghostly presence, the upside-down chairs, the construction workers’ weekly complaints of vanishing and reappearing tools.

Perhaps a squirrel—or even a raccoon—had somehow gotten in through the back door. It had happened before. After all, there were plenty of woods around the town, and the animals were known to root through garbage for food scraps.

That explanation sounded credible enough to make me bold, and within a few moments I had pretty much convinced myself that this was the case, which is why I kept the lights off. Turning them on again might scare the critter.

It was only after I had completely crossed the creepy emptiness of the community events room that I had second thoughts.

What if I were wrong, and it wasn’t some cute, furry squirrel making all that racket? What if it was a raving mad,
rabid
raccoon—with sharp claws and ripping teeth! Or worse, what if the noise was caused by an intruder? A burglar, or worse? And here I was, confronting him alone, without even a weapon.

By this time I spied a sliver of light shining out from under a lavatory door, which didn’t alarm me at first because the switches for those lights weren’t controlled by the master.

Then I heard the sound again. Hearing it in context, this time, I knew what it was. In fact, I heard it twice a week when I removed the aluminum covers from the paper towel dispensers to refill them.

Before I could puzzle out why a squirrel would jump four feet in the air to mess with a paper towel dispenser, the door to the women’s room burst open, blinding me with the explosive glare of fluorescent light.

I yelped, and someone grunted. The dark silhouette of a man appeared in the doorway. The figure lurched forward, and the door closed behind it. Once again the world was plunged into darkness—only now my night vision was a blurry mess of fluorescent afterglow.

A body crashed into me. Fingers gripped my shoulders and held on. With a scream, I tore free of the intruder’s grasp and ran across the darkened room.

“Wait!” a voice cried.

But I wasn’t stopping. Despite my impaired vision, I crossed the room in record time, arms outstretched like Frankenstein’s monster. Finally I stumbled over my own feet and smacked into the wall. Reaching out, my fingers closed on the light switches and I flipped every last one.

The room brightened, and with my vision restored, I turned to face the intruder. “Don’t you come near me or—”

Or
what
I didn’t know. Fortunately, it didn’t matter.

“Mrs. McClure! It’s me. Josh! Josh Bernstein from Salient House. Shelby Cabot’s assistant!”

“Josh?”

“I’m so embarrassed,” Josh Bernstein said. “I came to the store a little before closing time, just to say hello and see how things were going. But suddenly I felt a little sick . . .”

He rubbed his stomach as if to emphasize the problem.

“I went to the rest room, and I guess I was there a long time. I didn’t realize you had closed the store . . . I guess I’m lucky I wasn’t locked in all night!”

Needless to say, I felt like an idiot. I apologized for reacting so hysterically, and politely offered to make him some tea. He refused, saying he just wanted to return to Finch’s Inn and go to bed.

Privately relieved, I unlocked the door, and he departed.

My heart was still beating fast from the fright as Josh stopped to look at me through the window. When he saw me looking back, he offered a forced sort of half smile before vanishing into the night.

The Salient House publicity assistant seemed just as shaken up as I, and I wanted to dismiss it on face value.

But I couldn’t. “Because his story didn’t explain why he’d come out of the
women’s
room,” I murmured.

My Jack delusion was back. And I was pissed. “Where have you been?” I demanded. “I could have used some company a few minutes ago.”

“Well, that proves you’re not a real ghost. You can’t be. You didn’t even warn me Josh was in there, and you had to know I was heading his way.”

“What do you mean? He just used the women’s room mistakenly?”

“Looking for what? Tampax tampons?”

Jack laughed.
Thought you didn’t like vulgarity.

“Just spill it!”

“What?”

“What was a syringe doing buried in the paper towel dispenser of our women’s room?!”

“Brennan’s?”

“There could be a perfectly innocent reason why the syringe was hidden in there,” I argued.

“It could have been used for insulin. One of our customers could have been a diabetic.”

“I don’t know, but—”

“Please stop with the sexual analogies.”

“What did you say?”

“Let’s stay on the subject at hand. If you’re really some all-knowing ghost of a private eye, then what happened to Brennan exactly? Was that syringe involved? And what was it doing in my store’s women’s room? Who put it there? And what does Josh want with it?”

“Forgive me if I remain skeptical.”

“Oh, no you don’t. I’m not doing anything you direct me to until I get a handle on exactly
what
you are.”

With a dead author, a suspicious State Police investigator, and a hidden syringe in my store over the past twenty-four hours, I was now fairly sure I had a bona fide murder mystery on my hands. And the only one who seemed capable of helping me was a ghost.

Either that or a delusion.

Okay, so the whole “Jack Shepard” matter was a mystery in itself—one I knew I’d better resolve. And fast.

I myself knew next to nothing about ghosts, which meant I needed to consult with experts on the matter—and I needed to do it
anonymously
. That narrowed my investigative options down to one: the Internet.

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it—they also believed the world was flat.

—Mark Twain

 

 

 

Ghosts are not spirits of the dead. Ghosts don’t have innate intelligence. Ghosts are merely the hopes, fears, and emotions of the living, recorded on the psychic plane and replayed in an eternal, endless loop long after the person who inadvertently made that recording is dead.