by Cleo Coyle
“Kent” was Mister Clark, Stuckley Motors’ top salesman. He’d sold half the folks in this town a vehicle, including me.
Kent Clark? And I bet I know his alias. Man Super.
Very funny, I told the ghost. Then I pressed Wanda—
“What happened next?”
“After she swerved, I lost my balance and fell on the street. Mrs. Hudson got out of the car to see if I was hurt. She was still clutching her smartphone to her ear—and the conversation must have been terrible, because she had a really nasty expression on her face. And she acted so strangely. Almost crazed!”
I took the empty cup. “How did you know? Did you speak with her?”
“That’s just it . . .” Wanda shook her head. “She didn’t say a thing to me. Didn’t apologize. Didn’t even ask if I was all right. She just kept talking on her phone—shouting, really. ‘Sorry isn’t enough!’ she said with this beet red face. Then I got to my feet, and as soon as she saw I wasn’t hurt, she slammed back into her car and raced west, right out of town. She never even looked back!”
Wanda sniffled. “Whatever is wrong in that poor woman’s life, she’s too distracted to be driving. I swear she’s going to kill someone . . .”
As my aunt handed Wanda a box of tissues, she shot me a look. What began as a freakish occurrence was beginning to resemble a tragedy—the kind of tragedy I was all too familiar with.
“Well, you’re alive, and you can thank God for that.” Sadie laid a soothing hand on Wanda’s shoulder. “Just relax until you feel better. Is there anything else I can get you? How about some tea? And something to read, perhaps?”
Wanda nodded and dropped her voice so low we had to lean closer. “Actually, there is a book I wanted to buy. It’s called Shades of Leather. Have you heard of it? Everyone in my choir seems to be whispering about it. I noticed a copy on Emma Hudson’s dashboard as she drove away.”
Sadie smiled. “I’ll be happy to get one for you, dear.”
The front door bell signaled a cluster of arriving customers. While Sadie handled Mrs. Clark, I took care of the newcomers. Then Wanda departed, carrying off our last copy of Shades of Leather, a credit card purchase this time—
Yeah, instead of a five-finger discount!
Two busy hours later, the afternoon skies darkened as clouds rolled in. The turn in the weather was followed by a lull in business. That’s when I made my move.
I unlocked the door connecting the main store with our Community Events space, where I’d hung my coat and scarf.
The spacious room was shadowy. Most of the chairs were folded and stacked, with the exception of a dozen or so, which we set up in a circle for the Monday night meeting of the Quindicott Business Owners Association (better known around town as “the Quibblers”). Buy the Book’s next event would be an author talk with Dr. Roger Leeds, winner of the Bentley Prize for Literary Criticism. (We expected a huge turnout.)
When I returned to the shop, my aunt wasn’t at all surprised to see me with my hair down, makeup refreshed, and hands tightening the belt on my raincoat.
“I’m going to return Emma Hudson’s driving gloves and check up on her. If I can find out what’s wrong, maybe I can help the poor woman.”
“Good idea.”
“I’ll try not to be too long.”
With understanding in her eyes, Sadie patted my hand. “Take as long as you need, dear.”
As long as you collect that twenty-nine bucks plus tax!
Oh, give it a rest, Jack.
CHAPTER 4
Girl in the Wilderness
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
—Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
OUTSIDE, THE STING of drizzle struck my cheeks as a rushing whoosh of briny wind battered my coat and ravaged my hair.
Shivering, I slammed the car door, tossed Emma Hudson’s gloves onto the dashboard, and quickly finger-combed my reddish brown tangle. Then I scraped it back into a ponytail.
I like it better when it’s down, baby.
“Tell that to the nor’easter.”
While the real rain had yet to fall, clouds of angry purple and ominous gray were moving in quickly off the ocean. Gazing through my streaky windshield at the menacing sky, I now wondered—
“Should I reconsider this drive?”
I’m a spirit, not a weather vane. Check the forecast.
I flipped on the radio, and the local news assured me the squall would pass soon enough, as opposed to the local traffic.
After pulling out of the alley next to our shop, I turned onto Cranberry, the main drag of Quindicott’s shopping district, for a straight shot to the town’s west side. Within two blocks, I ran smack into the jam-up Ciders had predicted—and predictably groused about.
The football game was over, and despite the coming storm, the streets around the town commons were clogged with revelers on wheels and on foot.
“Now what?”
When things stand in your way, you got two choices. You can stay still as a corpse. Or make your own road.
My ghost was right again.
One U-turn later, I was headed for the highway with a hasty plan to double back. This detour would add miles to my drive, but at least I was moving.
As I rolled off the highway near the burned-out barn that marked the edge of Prescott Woods, the deluge started. Fat raindrops splattered my windows as gusts from the cold Atlantic rattled my car. Then a boom of thunder shook the sky, and a lightning bolt bleached the swaying dark trees around me. With a loud crack, a branch broke off and tumbled through the air like a somersaulting high diver. When it slapped against my windshield, I jerked back in my seat.
Once more, a sky-flash turned everything ghostly white, and for a brief, disturbing moment, that ordinary fallen branch was transformed into my other ghost—the vision of my young husband sprawled on a Manhattan sidewalk.
A powerful windblast swept the large branch away, but not everything went with it. Leaves and twigs remained on the glass, beyond the reach of the busy wiper blades.
Just like those horrible memories, I thought, forever clinging to my edges.
Seeing a safe spot on the shoulder of the road, I pulled over, cut the engine, and listened to the storm battering the car windows.
It’s no wonder I feel so compelled to help Emma Hudson . . .
The woman’s unstable behavior reminded me of Calvin in those final weeks—paranoid illusions about people, places, and events, past and present; extreme shifts in emotion; sudden outbursts, all leading to tragedy.
I had no plans for singular heroics. If I found the woman in a disturbed state, I would simply notify the authorities. But I had to do something. I had failed—utterly failed—to help the father of my child. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake with our new customer.
As my thoughts swirled, the brightest flash yet split the air, and I felt a shudder go through me like sparks of icy electricity. That’s when he appeared, his long legs stretched out in the passenger seat beside me.
He had a rugged face and iron jaw with a dagger-shaped scar, as if the lightning had etched it on his anvil chin. His shoulders were broad, tapering down in a V to his trim waist. His strong body was clad in a double-breasted suit, and on his head sat a fedora of gunmetal gray.
Sitting next to me was the spirit of a dead man, but there was nothing lifeless about him. Energy pulsed around the ghost, crackling and exciting, as if the virility and vitality he’d possessed in life had been amplified in his afterlife.
In a frank and masculine gesture, Jack’s gaze swept me up and down, and the tingling connection raced through me again, from feet to fingertips.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out.
When I opened them again, the vision was go
ne, but the electric presence remained.
Such a preternatural contact should have been unsettling, if not downright frightening. But by now, the unfathomable relationship I shared with my ghost was both familiar and welcome, especially on this turbulent afternoon.
You know, baby, there’s something missing from your melodrama. Or maybe the thunder’s so loud its drowning out the violins playing “Hearts and Flowers.”
“‘Hearts and Flowers’? Isn’t that the sappy filler music they play during silent movies?”
Now you’re catching on.
“Excuse me? You’re likening my memories of Calvin’s suicide to celluloid melodrama?”
Yep. Both are flights of fancy, ain’t they?
“Calvin’s death is a fact. He jumped from the bedroom window of our high-rise apartment.”
And once again you’re taking the blame for it. Telling yourself you had control over something you didn’t. But listen, sweetheart, thinking like that is a dead-end road to nowhere.
“Except I still don’t have any answers. Not for myself, my in-laws . . . or my son.”
I’ve been in your head, baby. You have plenty of answers.
“Sure, I can tell you all about the succession of doctors and therapists Calvin gave up on. The medications he stopped taking. I can tell you about his mood swings—from his aloof silences to his verbal abuse. But none of it answers the most basic question of why. Why did Calvin McClure give up on life at such a young age? Why did he give up on me and Spencer? Why did Calvin kill himself?”
You’re still breathing air, so you haven’t figured it out yet.
“Figured out what?”
The mysteries that are hardest to solve are the ones in our own lives.
“Then how do I stop feeling guilty?”
You don’t. But here’s something you can do. Get off the mental merry-go-round. There are plenty of concrete problems to pound on in this mixed-up world of yours. And you’ve already got one ghost. Three’s a crowd. Stop flirting with your phantom from the past, and focus on something real.
“Coming from you, that’s not exactly self-serving.”
Don’t crack wise, honey. That’s my jigger of gin. All I’m saying is hammer at the walls you can break, and dump all the other garbage. Today you’ve got actual business on your plate, a genuine, bona fide mystery to crack open.
“That’s what I’m doing, Jack, although it’s not much of a mystery. Just a lot of extenuating circumstances.”
Don’t be vague. In my business, thinking like a rube gets you nowhere.
“I’m not trying to be vague, just polite—”
And politeness will get you killed.
“Fine. What do you need to know?”
I already know the facts. What’s your theory about this dame? She got a record?
“I doubt it, though she does appear to have some mental instability. When she fled with that thirty-dollar hardcover, I doubt she was even aware she was holding it. Today’s so-called crime is no more than petty larceny.”
Petty? In my day, three Hamiltons could buy you a month’s rent. And I put my life on the line for that sum, more times than I can count. So remind me, please. Why didn’t the local yokels follow up?
“They had other duties.”
Where? The doughnut shop?
“According to the chief, it was a matter of prioritization.”
Seems to me actual policing is as rare as the dodo bird in Cornpone-cott.
“There are too few officers here in QUINDICOTT, and too much to do on weekends. They don’t have time for petty theft—”
Baby, there’s nothing petty about theft when you’re the victim.
“What’s really bothering you, Jack? Are you bored because Spencer hasn’t been around to turn on those old TV crime shows?”
Sure, I miss the snot-nosed little piker. But that didn’t put the fly in my fedora.
“What did?”
That kooky klepto got under your sweet skin, right? So let’s find a way to pry her loose—together.
CHAPTER 5
The Bird Is the Word
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
—Will Rogers
“HERE WE ARE, 1919 Pine Tree Avenue . . .”
Against a backdrop of dismal gray, the rambling, tree-shrouded Victorian had darkened windows, peeling paint, and all the grim foreboding of a Shirley Jackson novel.
What a dump.
“Thank you, Bette Davis.”
Excuse me?
“Her famous line from Beyond the Forest, the film noir?”
Never heard of it. And don’t get me started with your French euphemisms for black-and-white B movies.
I sighed, gazing at the run-down structure. “This place was lovely, once upon a time.”
If you say so. Me, I’d prefer getting beyond THIS creepy forest. Not to mention the fright wig of a house . . .
I couldn’t argue.
The expansive property was overgrown with weeds, ivy, and the old New England evergreens that gave Pine Tree Avenue its name. Amid this jungle sat the huge wooden structure. Its four sprawling floors would have provided more than enough space for a large turn-of-the-last-century family, live-in nanny, housekeeper, and cook.
But the past hundred years had been hard on Quindicott in general and this neighborhood in particular. Few Rhode Islanders lived the Gilded Age lifestyle these days—and certainly no one on the west side of our town. Over decades of decline, this once-great house had been divided into apartments for working people, and later for retirees and the unemployed.
Emma Hudson may have been impeccably dressed. She may have just purchased a brand-new car. But if she lived at this address, she had fallen on hard times, too.
A long sidewalk of rain-soaked concrete took me to a sagging front porch. I found a bank of mailboxes with peeling paint and a hand-scribbled note informing me that Apartment 7 had its own entrance at the rear of the property.
So around the building I went, following a narrow redbrick path with the house on my left side and an overgrown wall of pines on my right. I ducked a few swaying branches but couldn’t avoid the post-rain drops, which splashed off the trees and onto my head.
As I approached the corner of the house, I heard a noise, coming from around the bend—rapid footsteps descending a flight of creaking stairs.
The sound was so close I stopped in my tracks for fear of colliding with the person, possibly a disturbed Emma Hudson herself. But the footsteps abruptly ceased, and no one appeared on the path, so I pushed forward.
When I finally made the turn, I saw no one.
The brick sidewalk ended at the wooden steps where I’d heard the creaking. The staircase led up to a dizzyingly high fourth floor. A check of the mailbox told me I was at the right place, so I began the ascent.
With the first creak, I again wondered about those phantom footsteps, and what happened to those feet.
“Maybe it was a ghost and this place is as haunted as it looks.”
No way, Jack replied. I have it on good authority that there’s no such things as ghosts.
Near the top of the stairs I heard an animated voice coming from inside the Hudson apartment. I paused to eavesdrop.
“One last dance! One last dance!”
The tone was high-pitched and a little hysterical. Whether the speaker was a woman or child, I couldn’t tell. But it was certainly not the voice of Emma Hudson as I remembered it.
I waited for a reply, but none came.
“Is this a telephone conversation?” I whispered.
I don’t think it’s a conversation at all.
“One last dance . . . Squawk!”
“It’s a talking bird!” I realized. “A parrot or maybe a mynah.”
/> More like a stool pigeon—
“Huh?”
That bird has a pretty loose beak. You should pay attention to its patter.
“Do you think Emma Hudson is alone up there?”
Probably. Unless a pirate’s shoulder is attached to the bird.
I finished my noisy climb. The stairs lead to a rickety widow’s walk, which encircled the Victorian’s highest floor. Branches of the tall pines hadn’t been trimmed back in years. They’d grown so close to the house that they nearly blocked out the gray afternoon sky.
Reaching the shaky walk, I saw it served as a kind of front porch with a welcome mat and potted fern. Oddly, the apartment door stood wide open, so I called out—
“Mrs. Hudson? May I speak with you?”
The only reply was a flutter of wings and another high-pitched squawk.
“Hello?” I tried again. “Mrs. Hudson?”
“Hello, hello!” replied the bird.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped across the threshold—and nearly tripped over an open cardboard box packed with old photo albums.
The living room was small and modestly furnished, with a worn floor of scuffed, poorly painted hardwood. The walls were once Victorian blue, but the color had dulled as much as the dirty white trim.
There wasn’t much in the way of furniture—a matching set of folding chairs and tables, an old Singer sewing seat with embroidered upholstery, a pair of inexpensive standing lamps. There was no computer, television, radio, or even a telephone in sight.
There were, however, books. Hundreds and hundreds of them stood, neatly arranged, in alphabetical order on cheap pressed-wood bookshelves. Other volumes were piled on the floor in stacks, rising in knee-high columns. More books likely filled the sealed acid-free boxes stacked in the middle of the floor.
These weren’t just any books. Most were protected by clear acid-free bags or swathed in Brodart book jackets, and my cursory glance revealed a treasure trove of literary booty.
In chronological order, I saw a string of signed Raymond Chandler first editions from Farewell, My Lovely to The Little Sister. Filed with the Fs I spied a first edition of Howard Fast’s Spartacus and two autographed copies of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. I moved along to the Hs and found a British first edition of Brave New World; a pristine, personally inscribed copy of Hammett’s The Thin Man; and a number of Hemingway signed editions, including A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Sun Also Rises.
