The Ghost and the Dead Man's Library hb-3

by Alice Kimberly

  The Ghost and the Dead Man's Library

  ( Haunted Bookshop - 3 )

  Alice Kimberly

  Bookshop owner Penelope Thornton-McClure has just received a rare collection of Poe's complete works. Rumor has it a secret code, trapped within the pages, leads to buried treasure. But it seems everyone who buys...dies. Now Pen will need resident ghost P.I. Jack Shepard to help crack the case.

  Praise for the first Haunted Bookshop Mystery

  The Ghost and Mrs. McClure

  “A deliciously charming mystery with a haunting twist!”

  —Laura Childs, author of Motif for Murder

  “Part cozy and part hard-boiled detective novel with traces of the supernatural, The Ghost and Mrs. McClure is just a lot of fun.”

  —The Mystery Reader

  “A charming, funny, and quirky mystery starring a suppressed widow and a stimulating ghost…He is hard boiled in the tradition of Philip Marlowe and she is a genteel Miss Marple; yet the two opposites make an explosive combination. Alice Kimberly definitely has a hit series if the first book is anything to go by.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “What a delightful new mystery series! I was hooked from the start…I adored the ghost of Jack…Pairing him with the disbelieving Penelope is a brilliant touch.”

  —Roundtable Reviews

  “Quindicott’s enigmatic townspeople come alive in this quirky mystery and readers will eagerly anticipate future installments—and the continuing easy banter and romantic tension between Jack and Penelope.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Ms. Kimberly has penned a unique premise and cast of characters to hook us on her first of a series.”

  —Rendezvous

  Haunted Bookshop Mysteries by Alice Kimberly

  THE GHOST AND MRS. MCCLURE

  THE GHOST AND THE DEAD DEB

  THE GHOST AND THE DEAD MAN’S LIBRARY

  The Ghost

  AND THE

  Dead Man’s Library

  ALICE KIMBERLY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sincerest thanks to Christine Zika, senior editor,

  and John Talbot, literary agent,

  for their “spirited” support!

  Thanks also to Kimberly Lionetti

  for the all-important start.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although real places and institutions are mentioned in this book, they are used in the service of fiction. No character in this book is based on any person, living or dead, and the world presented is completely fictitious.

  To Dad,

  Antonio A. Alfonsi,

  for being a good man in a bad world.

  What you need, young woman, is a trip around the Horn with a southeaster tearing the guts out of you and all hands on deck, with the sea coming over green for three nights and three days—then you’d sleep in sacking and be thankful.

  —The Ghost and Mrs. Muir by R. A. Dick

  (a.k.a. Josephine Aimée Campbell Leslie)

  PROLOGUE

  There was a sad fellow over on a barstool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

  —Philip Marlowe in The Long Good bye by

  Raymond Chandler, 1949

  New York City

  October 18, 1946

  BAXTER KERNS THE Third called Jack Shepard at noon and invited him to dinner at six.

  Jack left his cramped office early, ducked into his flat, changed into his best double-breasted, checked the safety on his gat, and headed into the chilly concrete night. He would have taken a cab uptown, but he was close to tapsville, so for a single silver buffalo, he jumped the Third Avenue el instead then hoofed it from Forty-Second.

  The Madeleine was one of those private clubs in Midtown, near the hotel with the big, round table, where that literati crew used to drink and shoot their mouths off. The place reeked of money, like all the joints on University Club Row. Stone lions at the entrance, stone-faced doorman to match.

  Inside Jack found the typical masculine décor: polished wainscoting and leather armchairs; oak side tables littered with finely carved pipes, neatly folded newspapers. Overseeing it all, a row of iron-haired gentlemen, rendered in dull oils, staring dully down at their living counterparts.

  Jack didn’t know what Baxter Kerns looked like, but that wasn’t a problem. In a joint that served dinner with enough extra silverware to start your own hock shop, Jack was a dead giveaway. His lace-ups may have been polished, but they’d pounded far too much pavement. And although his suit was newly pressed, it was cheap goods among cliff dwelling executives who didn’t wear second-rate gear.

  As for Kerns’s glad rags, the custom-tailored Brooks Brothers’ pinstripes and new patent leathers didn’t change the fact that he was built like a street lamp, with an oblong head and a flagpole trunk. His features were well-chiseled beneath whiskey-colored hair, but his pale skin had a vaguely unhealthy undertone, which led Jack to believe the ruddy cheeks were less the result of a brisk walk in the autumn air than an indication he’d dipped his bill a few times already.

  “I heard about you through Teddy Birmingham,” said Kerns, holding out a hand.

  Jack shook.

  The man’s skin was soft, but his grip firm. His age could have been anywhere from mid-thirties to early forties. The expression in his hazel-brown eyes appeared friendly but appraising at the same time, like a scavenging antiques agent sizing up whether a banged-up urn might prove lucrative on resale.

  “I understand you helped old Ted out of a fix?”

  “That’s right.”

  Kerns stared, eyes candidly expectant, waiting for details.

  Jack Shepard let him wait.

  “Well, Mr. Shepard? I should think you’d like a drink?”

  Jack nodded, followed Kerns’s loosey-goosey gait to the private club’s dining room, a stoic, dimly lit arena with a vaulted ceiling and horn-headed beasts affixed to the walls. The setup was white linen and leaded crystal, fine wine and chilled salad forks. Jack let Kerns suggest the best of the menu, order the grape juice, and drive the streetcar.

  Kerns’s voice was quiet and even as he directed the conversation, like he was practiced at explaining complicated investments to society ladies. But for Jack, listening to a man with an overly smooth voice was like traveling a continuously flat landscape—it became tiresome fast.

  Kerns gave his opinion on national and local politics, cultural events, and the postwar economy. He inquired about Jack’s service, quizzing him about his job in army intelligence. Asked about his work before that as a flatfoot. Jack didn’t especially enjoy talking about himself, but he gritted his teeth and answered every inquiry, knowing full well this wasn’t a social engagement but a job interview.

  It never ceased to amaze him how the upper classes did business. Aristocrats, real or aspiring, flinched at anything close to giving off the base, commonplace aroma of work. Even hiring and firing staff was suspect. Consequently, they were perpetually attempting to make business look like anything but.

  Eventually, however, Kerns did get down to it.

  “…and, as I mentioned before, I’m a friend of Teddy Birmingham, and he recommended you, although for the life of me, I can’t see why Teddy would need a private detective.”

  Jack let the repeated question-that-wasn’t-a-question hang between them in the dim light of the fossilized club.

  Men like Kerns used silence to great effect. Somewhere along the road, they’d learned what Jack already knew about the parturient pause: Weaker souls tended to feel terrorized by long silences in polite conversation. Pressured by
the inferred censure in the paternal lift of the eyebrow, the slight downturn of the mouth, they almost always spilled their guts.

  Jack wasn’t a weaker soul.

  He picked up his long-stemmed crystal goblet and sipped. The wine was good, full-bodied and sweet-smelling. It reminded him of Sally, a woman he’d known before the war. After two long minutes of Jack’s breathing in perfumed memories, Kerns became the impatient party.

  “You won’t share your business with Teddy?” he pressed.

  “No, Mr. Kerns,” Jack replied, more than willing to give a straight answer to a straight question. “You won’t find out from me. My discretion comes as part of the service.”

  Kerns shifted in his leather dinner chair. “Must I pay extra for your discretion, Mr. Shepard?”

  “It’s free of charge.” Jack allowed a small smile. “Part of my per diem.”

  “Yes, so you quoted. Twenty dollars a day, plus expenses.”

  Kerns began to explain the specifics of the job. It seemed his sister, Dorothy, had gotten herself engaged to a savvy broker who’d claimed he’d made a real killing with prewar investments in steel manufacturing.

  “His name is Vincent Tattershawe, or that’s what he calls himself, anyway.” Kerns frowned and shifted.

  “Go on.”

  “He has pretensions to society, but I’m worried for my sister.”

  “I see.” Jack pulled out a small notebook and jotted down Tattershawe’s name.

  “My sister has many virtues, but she’s naïve about the ways of the world, and far too trusting. Without consulting me, she gave Mr. Tattershawe a considerable portion of her inheritance for him to invest.”

  “Why is that naïve? You said yourself that this Tattershawe is an up-and-comer with a nose for business.”

  “I’m not so sure he really does have the connections and background he recited to Dorothy. Nor can I be sure he actually made a lucrative investment in prewar steel. That’s simply what he told her.”

  “So you’d like me to investigate this Vincent Tattershawe? Answer some of your questions?”

  “I want you to locate the man.”

  “He’s missing?”

  “Shortly after Dorothy turned over her money to him, he vanished. I asked around a bit, and I’m troubled by what I’ve learned. I believe this man presented himself to my sister as something he is not. I understand he drinks a lot as well.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “We all drink a lot, don’t we, Mr. Kerns?” During dinner, Baxter had consumed two Scotches, more than half their bottle of wine, and was now nursing a cognac. And Jack suspected the man had knocked back a few before Jack had even arrived.

  “There’s a difference between drinking”—Kerns lifted his snifter of liquid gold—“and being a drunk, Mr. Shepard.”

  “So you think Tattershawe either took off with the loot or fell back into a bottle?”

  “Possibly both. My sister claims she convinced Vincent to give up drinking. But you and I both know that a man will tell a woman almost anything if he wants to…shall we say, grease the wheels?”

  Jack sipped his wine. He didn’t share Kerns’s philosophy on dames. Lying to women was a boy’s game; and he always figured any broad that required him to be something he wasn’t, wasn’t worth his time. But in Jack’s experience, telling a disdainful Ivy Leaguer like Kerns that you knew something he didn’t was like trying to crack a manhole cover with a soda straw. Jack saved his breath.

  “I’ll have to speak with your sister, Dorothy.”

  Kerns leaned forward, his relaxed posture tensing for the first time that evening.

  “Listen, Mr. Shepard, I’m going to be perfectly blunt with you. I contacted you because my sister insisted a private investigator be hired. I don’t like the idea myself. I stepped in because she had no idea how to proceed. I want you to find Mr. Tattershawe, but you are not to convey his location to my sister. Tell me and only me what you discover, so I can deal with him.”

  “Deal with him?”

  In Jack’s part of the civilized wilderness, “dealing” with someone usually meant helping them meet with an unfortunate accident.

  “His theft of her money,” Kerns clarified. “Dorothy has had a lot of heartache in her life. Her only serious suitor died in the war. Now she’s forty, and far from a beauty. But she’d be better off staying a spinster than marrying a man like Tattershawe, who I believe would cause her harm. I wish to retrieve her money but not at the risk of reuniting her with the man who took it. Do you see what I’m trying to accomplish?”

  Jack nodded.

  “I’m trying to protect her. You understand wanting to protect someone you care about, don’t you, Mr. Shepard?”

  Kerns was still leaning forward, his hazel-brown eyes shining, intense. Clearly, he wanted Jack to understand that although he preferred to avoid the appearance of doing business, when it came to this, he meant it.

  “I understand, Mr. Kerns.”

  Kerns downed an unfashionably large gulp of cognac, then finally leaned back, his tense limbs going slack again. “I’m not a man who expresses gratitude often. But I do thank you for respecting my wishes.”

  Jack reassured his client that he understood the terms of the job. “For now, all I need to get started is your sister’s address.”

  “Fifth Avenue, across from the park.” Kerns reached into the breast pocket of his pinstripes. “Here’s her calling card.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Descent into the Maelstrom

  The continuing popular appeal of Poe’s works is owing to their power to confirm once-real beliefs from which most people have never entirely freed themselves…that the dead in some form survive and return.

  —Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Rememberance, 1991

  Quindicott, Rhode Island

  Today

  “HEY, MOM. DO you think they’ll have a Halloween party at school this year?”

  Beneath his getting-too-long-again bangs, Spencer’s grass-green eyes looked up. I slapped a dollop of steaming oatmeal into his bowl and mine, then set a fresh quart of milk on the table. Yawning, I adjusted my black rectangular glasses and brushed aside a lock of my own copper hair.

  Spence had my hair color, my late older brother’s handsome features, and my late husband’s eyes. But, although the light green hue and large, round shape were Calvin McClure’s, the emotional expression inside them held little resemble to the man I’d married—and for that I was eternally grateful.

  “Spencer,” I said with all the sternness that I could muster after only four hours sleep. “You haven’t seen a class since last June. I think you should worry about your education before you worry about Halloween parties.”

  “But Halloween’s only two weeks away. That’s a fact. The principal can’t just ignore it.”

  My son, the budding trial lawyer.

  Always precocious, Spencer’s rhetorical skills had been initially influenced by the exclusive private school the McClure family had insisted he attend when we lived in Manhattan. He was in Quindicott’s public school system now, of course. But his vocabulary and stubborn proclivities were lately a result of the crime shows and legal dramas he’d been watching on the Intrigue Channel.

  This autumn he’d gotten a political education, too, thanks to City Councilwoman Marjorie Binder-Smith, locally known as the Municipal Zoning Witch for the charming taxes and regulations she continually attempted to slap onto Quindicott’s businesses.

  In her latest effort toward being “politically proactive,” she’d insisted on soliciting outside bidders to compete for the contract to repair the severely damaged Quindicott Elementary School (an electrical fire in early June had completely wrecked the classrooms).

  Typically, the town council would have hired Ronny Sutter, who’d been doing Quindicott’s construction for decades. But hiring Ronny was what Marjorie termed “long-standing cronyism,” and she insisted they search far and wide for outside bidders. The woman ha
d swayed a majority of the council, many of whom were brand-new to their seats, and off they went, searching for bidders.

  Because of the subsequent motions, consultations, and delays, too much of the town council’s time was wasted accessing competing bids from contractors located in Providence, Warwick, Newport—even as far away as Brattleboro, Vermont. The project was delayed for six weeks. By the time the lowest bid was in and the builders went to work, the job was hopelessly behind schedule.

  While Councilwoman Binder-Smith preened about the process at last being “impartial, unbiased, and fair,” the rest of the town watched Labor Day come and go without the start of elementary school classes.

  Now, finally, on the cusp of All Hallow’s Eve, the children of Quindicott were heading off to their very first day of school. Needless to say, there would be no spring break this year. And I doubted a “snow day” would be called unless Quindicott was subjected to weather conditions bordering on Alaskan whiteout.

  “Mom, can we go to the haunted house on Green Apple Road this weekend?”

  I moved to the counter to fetch a squeeze bottle of clover honey. “I don’t know, Spencer. It might be a little too intense for a ten-year-old.”

  A year ago, Spencer would probably have whined. Today he shot me a look that said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Puh-leaze,” he said. “You forget I watched Silence of the Lambs last month.”

  “You watched half of Silence of the Lambs before I caught you. That won’t happen again, kiddo. The V chip has been activated and is in full force.”

  Spencer rolled his eyes. “How scary could a haunted house be? If it was too scary, people would be having heart attacks and stuff. Then people would sue, and there wouldn’t be any haunted houses anymore. See my point?”