The Ghost and Mrs. McClure

CHAPTER 5

Hard-Boiled Bogey Man

The guy was dead as hell.

—Mike Hammer in Vengeance Is Mine! by Mickey Spillane, 1950

“PEN? PENELOPE? CAN you hear me?”

“She just drank too much, Sadie. Let her sleep it off down here.”

“Okay, Milner. I’ll walk you and Linda out.”

I heard the voices, tried to open my eyelids, but for some reason they seemed to weigh more than a pair of unedited Stephen King manuscripts. “We gave him the heart attack,” I murmured. “Half the audience . . . costumed like Jack Shepard . . . Oh, god . . . we killed him.”

“Oh, no, she’s starting that up again.”

“It’s too bad what happened, Sadie.”

“Forget it,” said Sadie. “Fate’s fate. When your number’s up, it’s up. But thanks again for those baked goods. The crowd certainly devoured them.”

“More of a wake than a party.”

“So it was. But Brennan didn’t go anywhere we’re all not headed.”

“True, Sadie. Good night.”

“ ’Night, Milner. ’Night, Linda . . .”

MY POUNDING HEAD lolled from side to side as I wrestled with dreamland. When consciousness finally won, I rose from the rocking chair and moved shakily through the dimly lit store.

“Anyone here?”

My mouth was cotton. I checked my watch. Big hand on twelve, little on four.

Well, the party’s certainly over, I thought, looking at our beautifully renovated store, all the new inventory, the antiques, the fixtures. All our hopes and efforts . . .

More than the party was over, and I knew it.

Timothy Brennan had been Buy the Book’s very first author appearance, and he’d ended up dead. Talk about cursed. Now authors would avoid our store in droves—right along with the customers. Not that they hadn’t before. This incident just gave them a new reason.

I sighed. Who in the world would patronize us now?

Maybe Brennan’s ghost, I thought. If I believed in ghosts.

Brainert once said that ghosts in stories meant unfinished business. But he’d been talking about literary devices.

As my shaky legs moved beneath the archway that led to the community events space, I tried to recall the last time I’d considered actual spirits. It had been years. Back when I’d watched them lower my mother into the muddy earth of the Quindicott Village Cemetery.

At the ripe old age of thirteen, I had been certain that death was not the end. Every night I’d whisper into the dark from beneath my blanket. I’d tell my mother about my day at school, a boy I liked, a grade I got. I was certain my mom could hear, just couldn’t answer. Not in a normal way but in signs.

I had looked for signs of my mother everywhere, and I’d found them. In the shape of a cloud, or a piece of music on the radio. In the way a bird would follow me home or a phrase some stranger might utter on the street.

After school every day, rain or shine or snow, I used to visit my mother’s grave at the old Q cemetery, bring her a flower, read her a poem. Sometimes I’d visit other graves, too. A neighbor boy who’d been hit by a car. A favorite teacher who’d suffered a massive heart attack. A teenage girl who’d drowned.

I’d become an expert at talking to the dead. And, a few times, when I’d been under great stress at school, I even thought I could hear the dead speaking to me. A voice here or there.

But then I lost my older brother. And my dad.

At seventeen, I suddenly stopped looking for signs. Or visiting graves to talk to the dead. It seemed pointless: I was alive, and they were not. Wherever they’d gone, they’d left me behind. And it suddenly seemed clear that the only thing the dead left the living was alone. So that was that.

One of the store’s dim night-lights shone in the corner. The chairs had been folded up and stacked against the far wall, leaving a wide expanse of empty floor. No police tape or chalk lines or anything out of the ordinary. Why should there be? Brennan died of natural causes—a heart attack, perhaps. Or a stroke. I deliberately chose not to think about the other possibility: fright! No, I told myself, we didn’t frighten Timothy Brennan to death, despite his puzzling last words.

Sadly, I saw that the refreshment table was empty. Totally clean. No goodies, no soda, no bottled water. I sighed. My mouth felt as dry as the Sahara desert. No doubt from the whiskey. I could use a stiff drink of something wholesome and nonalcoholic, preferably bottled water.

I gazed at the carved oak podium, now standing in the corner, the spot where Brennan had fallen. A doctor in the audience had performed CPR on the author for ten minutes before the paramedics finally arrived to pronounce him done for. There would be no ghost.

“When you’re dead you’re dead and that’s all there is,” I mumbled.

Oh, yeah? Who says so?

I froze.

No, I thought. No way. I couldn’t be hearing the very same deep male voice that had heckled Brennan’s speech.

I took a step back, searched. But there was no one. Still, the room was too dark to see through every shadow.

“Whoever you are, the party’s over, okay?” I said, trying and failing to sound commanding. “You have to leave now.”

Believe me, honey, I would if I could.

I told myself to keep steady. Sadie and Spencer were upstairs. I had to get this guy out. Now.

“What do you want? Money? I doubt we sold many books today.”

Think again, doll. You sold them all.

“What?”

They’re all gone. Look for yourself.

I wanted to run full speed to the back room, but I hesitated. What if this man were hiding in the corner shadows? What if he were luring me into a trap?

No trap. Go look.

“How did you know what I was thinking?”

Don’t know how. Just do.

I went back to the main part of the store, reached under the counter where the register sat, and let my fingers close on Sadie’s aluminum baseball bat. Sadie would have locked up the money in the safe upstairs, so the back room was the only evidence.

As I drew the bat out, I knocked over a half-filled bottle of water. After Brennan had collapsed, I remembered grabbing it off the table as a pacifier, drinking half the contents, then stashing it here during the craziness of the ambulance and police coming in.

I was dying of thirst, so I unscrewed the cap, took a swig from the bottle, put the cap back on, and started for the community events space again, the bottle tucked under one arm and the bat raised high.

“Stay out of my way if you don’t want a bashed-in skull,” I said.

Too late, said the man.

I flipped the main switch. Dozens of bulbs sparked to life in the newly installed track system. The entire space brightened and revealed . . . no one.

I moved toward the exit to the rest room and the back room area, swiping at switches the whole way. When I got to the chilly, bare storage room, I almost dropped the bat.

In the corner were more than a dozen crushed cardboard boxes. Not one was left unravaged.

“Three hundred hardcovers,” I murmured, doing the math in my head. “That’s twenty-seven fifty a copy times three hundred . . . forty-six percent of which we keep. That’s almost four thousand dollars. In one night!”

An average annual income in my time. Good haul, honey.

I wheeled, searching for the man who kept speaking. But there was no one. “Where in hell are you!”

Right here. With you.

I couldn’t take it. I ran from the storage area, bat still in hand.

“I’m calling the police!”

To tell them what? You’re hearing voices?

My steps slowed. I looked around again. He wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t see him. What was I going to tell the cops? An invisible man was talking to me. The Quindicott police would have trouble finding a criminal who walked up to their front door!

(It wasn’t their fault, really. They had little resources and even less experience with anything close to a felony. Mostly they broke up fights at the high school football games and gave out speeding tickets to those high-priced performance cars on their way to Newport or Cape Cod.)

“What’s your name?” I demanded, hoping I could just talk him out of hiding.

Name’s Jack.

“Jack what?”

Jack Shepard.

“That’s not funny.”

I’m not trying to be funny.

“No, you’re trying to scare me, and I don’t appreciate it.”

Well, ain’t that a tragedy. At least you sold your books.

“Yes. True. That’s good news. And you were right about it. But I’m sure it’s just a one-night fluke.”

Maybe. But I’ll tell you what’s not a fluke: Brennan’s death.

“What do you mean?”

He was murdered, honey. Set up. And sent up.

My mouth still felt like an arid wasteland. I pulled the bottle from under my arm, unscrewed the cap, and drank again.

Don’t choke now.

I lowered the bottle. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

Awww, take a break from Miss Priss-land, would ya?

“What?!”

You nice-thinking Janes really burn me up.

“Well, the same to you, whoever you are—”

I told you. Jack Shepard.

“Shut up! I’ve had just about enough. If you’re such a big, tough, hard-boiled dick, then why are you hiding, huh? Where the heck are you? Too afraid to show yourself?” I moved slowly through the store, still seeing no one. I edged back toward the community events space.

There was a long pause. I tightened my grip on the bat. Finally the deep voice spoke again.

Turn off the light.

Oh, shit, I thought.

Deep male laughter filled my head. Thought you didn’t use such language.

“How could you hear that? I didn’t say it.”

Baby, I don’t know how, but I can hear your thoughts. I just can. So? You want to see me? Turn OFF the lights.

This was just someone from the book-signing party, I told myself. Someone playing a game. I moved to the end of the room, where I felt I could dash away quickly if I didn’t like what I saw.

I licked my lips nervously and took a final swig from the bottled water, draining it completely. It tasted good, I realized. There was a subtle flavor I couldn’t place. For some reason it reminded me of one of Milner’s pastries.

Had Sutter Spring started flavoring their water now?

The thought might have bothered me, but I had a more pressing consideration at the moment, so I put the bottle on the floor, positioned the bat in a defensive position, and flipped off the lights.

The dull glow of the recessed security lights were the only illumination. That and the silvery streaks from the street-lights beyond the big front window on this side of the store.

Bat at the ready, I scanned the room. Then I saw it: a shadow on the wall. A fedora on a square-jawed profile. Broad-suited shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist.

Whoever he was, he had obviously read my newspaper ads and come in costume.

The shadow moved, and I took a step back. I saw the figure’s arm come up. One finger pushed at the brim of his fedora, moving it back on his head. Then he folded his arms over his broad chest. It was a confident gesture, masculine and sure.

I’m Jack Shepard, Mrs. McClure. Or to be absolutely precise—you like precision, don’t you? I’m his ghost.

I watched the shadow move off the wall, watched as it became three dimensions and stepped like a dark figure through an invisible archway and into the room. Outside, headlights from a passing car shot shafts of silver through the window, and in the briefest moment of illumination, I glimpsed his visage plain as day: the sunken cheeks, the crooked nose, the iron jaw, and the one-inch scar in the shape of a dagger slashing across the flat, square chin.

Whoever he was, he held the same relentlessly masculine features of the man whose grimacing photo graced every one of Timothy Brennan’s books.

“You can’t be Jack Shepard. You can’t be. He’s dead!”

Now you’re gettin’ it.

My bat dropped to the floor. And about two seconds later, so did I.