I saw his point. But the truth was, after last night, I’d had my fill of haunted houses….
IT WAS A dark and stormy night.
No, really.
Just after my aunt and I set out for our drive, a nor’easter smashed against the New England coast. Rain came down in sheets, pelting the new wax job off my battered Saturn. Intermittent flashes lit up the indigo sky, burying the radio’s weather report under bursts of static. And, after the lightening, of course, came the—
BOUMMMMMM!
Sadie shuddered in the passenger seat. I glanced worriedly her way, my hands choking the life out of the steering wheel. We’d both agreed to take this trip to obtain a tasty commission. It was a “one-night-only” offer to claim a stash of rare books from a lifelong collector, and we didn’t want to lose it.
New England winters were brutal. We were barely into fall and the energy bills were already murder. We needed the money. So we told ourselves we were being brave and responsible in defying the storm forecasts.
I began to reconsider that defiance.
Sadie saw me glancing her way. She gave me a little smile. “It’s not a fit night out for man nor beast,” she quipped, her bravado undercut by a nervous little laugh.
Apparently, it was also a night for clichés.
If you babes want to chin-dip for cornpone, piped up the masculine voice in my head, just say, “It’s raining cats and dogs,” and be done with it.
The spirit of Jack Shepard was nothing if not pithy. His gruff cynicism was also, oddly, a comfort to me in times of trouble. If Sadie had known about the ghost (which she didn’t), she probably would have described him as the kind of friend who bucks you up when you need it the most.
“Offended by clichés, Jack?” I silently replied, his wise crack momentarily averting my worries about the growing reduction of visibility in front of me. “I didn’t know you were a literary critic.”
Neither did I. Chalk it up to fifty years stuck in a hayseed library.
“Buy the Book is not a hayseed library, thank you very much. It’s been a respected independent bookseller for years.”
Of course, it had almost gone out of business in recent years, but I left that part out. Long ago, Sadie had taken over the shop from her father, but with her age, came the inability to manage alone, which had put the store in jeopardy. So, after Calvin took his flying leap out the bedroom window of our Manhattan high-rise, I leapt too (figuratively, anyway).
Defying the threats from my wealthy in-laws to cut me off financially, I’d left my publishing job and moved back to my Rhode Island hometown. I’d endured the enforcement of my in-laws’ threats (Calvin’s wealthy mother and sister did cut me off, although Spencer would still get his trust fund later in life). But Calvin’s modest life insurance benefit was still mine, and I’d cashed it to relocate my life and go into business with Sadie.
We mortgaged Buy the Book for renovations, expansion, and inventory overhaul, and, for the most part, brought the nearly defunct store back to life. I was supremely proud of what we’d done thus far. Our little bookstore had led the way in resuscitating Cranberry, Quindicott’s previously depressed main street.
“We have a smart, literate clientele from all over,” I reminded Jack. “We have author chats and—”
Listen, baby, between your pulps, those glorified True Confessions tomes, and the low-rent mooks and grifters you trot in for jawboning, I’ve heard every cliché in the book, going on times ten over.
“They are not mooks and grifters. They are authors, reading their works.”
Jack really was impossible with his complaints about the store. On the other hand, how thrilled would you be about a place where you’d had (as Jack put it) your lights put out and your ticket punched?
Jack Shepard was killed in our bookstore in 1949 while investigating the murder of an old army buddy. That’s all I know. That’s all, apparently, he knows. He claims his case files (hundreds of them), which I have on loan, contain notes on the investigation he’d been running at the time. But I have yet to locate them—and Jack refuses to help me out.
He says whoever killed him wasn’t “playing,” and he doesn’t want me anywhere near that particular murder mystery. It hadn’t stopped me from solving a few others, however, and, I have to admit, Jack had been a big help in that regard. But then, he had been a private detective.
In life, anyway.
A flash of lightning brought me back to the potentially deadly weather.
“It is an ugly night,” Sadie murmured.
Clutched in her wrinkled, seventy-three-year-young hands was a frayed piece of paper containing the directions to our destination. The instructions had been faxed to her just two hours ago, right after the urgent phone call summoning us to Newport, which was between thirty to fifty minutes away from Quindicott, depending on the traffic and the—
BOUMMMMM!
“Jeez-Louise. I hate thunder.”
“I am sorry about the storm, dear,” my aunt said, as if she’d been the one who’d brought on the weather in the first place. “Mr. Chesley said it was important that we come tonight. Urgent, was the word he’d used.”
Her voice was nearly lost under the constant swishing of the windshield wipers.
“Don’t worry about the weather. It’s not so bad,” I fibbed, watching blasts of wind ripple the black water pooling on the roadway. “Anyway, we’ve practically arrived.”
Sadie squinted at the directions in her hands. “You’re right, Pen. The next turn is just ahead. But it’s so dark you’d better slow down, or we might miss it.”
With the autumn sunset around five o’clock, half past seven seemed black as midnight, and lights were plenty scarce along this remote section of the Atlantic coastline, which only magnified the gloom.
We swung off the main highway and onto a winding, two-lane blacktop. According to Peter Chesley’s instructions, we were to follow this route until we reached Roderick Road.
On a sunny, dry day, this route might have been pleasant, even scenic. On a night like this, however, the eerie stretch seemed almost claustrophobic. Tall trees stripped of their leaves flanked our vehicle on either side like old, brown bones, rattling in the night.
On one narrow turn, the road swung onto the ledge of a high, narrow cliff. Jagged rocks swept down to the Atlantic’s roiling black plane. Typically, I’d enjoy the rhythmic sound of the lapping waves. But tonight the nor’easter winds were whipping the surf into a seething froth, then crashing it over the ragged shoreline with a fulminating roar.
“It is so strange to think of Peter living out here,” Sadie said with an eye on the desolate horizon. “When I knew him, he loved being in the middle of things, loved living in the bustle of Providence, loved teaching.”
“What did he teach?”
“He was a professor of American history at Brown University.”
I heard Jack groan. Not another egghead. Maybe I’ll just slip away now, before I croak from boredom.
True to his promise, I felt Jack’s presence recede. Where the spirit went, I don’t know. At first, Jack’s ghost appeared to be confined within the fieldstone walls of our bookstore. But last year I found a stray buffalo nickel in a cache of his yellowing private eye files. As bizarre and irrational as it sounded, as long as I had Jack’s old nickel in my possession, his spirit traveled with me. (Sure, the ghost has tested my limits with his wisecracks, jibes, and off-color barbs, but his streetwise advice has gotten me out of some big, hairy jams, so I held tight to that coin. Frankly, I preferred running with the insurance.)
Of course, I’d already considered that Jack wasn’t real at all, that the ghost was simply a figment of my imagination, some psychological split akin to the schizophrenia of John Nash, the famous Nobel Prize–winning mathematician.
Was Jack my alter ego? That small, buried nugget of id that had all the bravado I didn’t? Maybe he was some composite of all the hard-boiled novels I’d read over the years; a subconscious real
ization of those Black Mask stories my late police officer dad and I had loved.
But even if that were true (and I doubted it was), it was just one more reason not to inform anyone of Jack’s existence.
The McClure family owned a lot of land in this part of Rhode Island, and they wielded a lot of influence. They also blamed me for Calvin’s suicide (having conveniently forgotten that they themselves had refused to acknowledge the severity of his depression). English boarding school for Spencer had been their idea of a “helpful” suggestion after Calvin died; after which, I’d told them to take a flying leap and then moved in with my aunt in Quindicott.
My former in-laws would be only too happy to find a reason to take Spencer away from me. So telling anyone (including and especially a therapist) that I, Penelope Thornton-McClure, was having regular conversations with Jack Shepard, the friendly PI ghost, wasn’t something I’d be doing anytime soon.
The car radio was finally drowned out by static, so I switched the newscaster off and refocused on the task in front of us.
“Peter Chesley sounds like an impressive man,” I said.
“Yes. Oh, yes…he was.”
“How long have you known him? I don’t remember you ever mentioning him before.”
“I met Peter…let’s see…going on thirty years ago now.”
Sadie leaned back in the passenger seat—the first time since the thunder had started. Despite the tense storm around us, the thought of Peter Chesley appeared to relax her.
“He called to purchase a few titles in an estate library the store had taken on consignment. When he walked in to pick them up, that’s when we first met. He loved the store and he became a regular customer after that…and a friend.”
It sounded to me like he’d been more than “a friend,” but I wasn’t sure how to ask without prying.
“Of course, business was different in those days,” my aunt went on. “You’ve set us up on the Internet now, but back when I was your age, we had buyers dropping by every week, folks from Newport, New Haven, Providence, even New York City….”
She smiled at some memory. “Peter was one of the nicest. He never seemed to have much money, was forever scrimping to purchase rare books for his collection, but he was always well dressed in pressed slacks and a tweed jacket. I remember he had a glorious mop of thick golden hair and blue eyes, like Paul Newman…”
“Hmm.” I smiled. “Can’t wait to meet him.”
Sadie laughed. “Oh, no, no, no, Pen. My description of the man is from my past memories. He must be close to eighty by now.”
“Who cares?” I teased. “I’m a sucker for blue eyes.”
“Ah…but what could you possibly have in common with someone who was in their prime when FDR was president?”
I thought about Jack. “Actually, you might be surprised.”
“Don’t you go and start dating older men,” Sadie warned. “You’re too young for that…You’re still young enough to give Spencer a little brother or sister, someday.”
I snorted. “Considering the pool of available men in a little town like Quindicott, I probably have a statistically better chance of getting struck by—”
An electric flash lit the night sky, followed by an ominous boom.
“’Nuf said,” I concluded.
Aunt Sadie sighed. I could see she wasn’t happy with my lack of confidence that I’d be finding some knight in shining armor around the next bend. But she didn’t argue. The Thorntons always did have that in common—we were realists.
“So when was the last time you heard from Mr. Chesley? Before this morning’s urgent summons, I mean. Did you two have a falling out?”
A shadow crossed Sadie’s face. “Peter’s marriage fell apart the same year my father passed away. At that time, we’d known each other only through the book selling, but, for a short time, we became much closer. I’d go to Providence and we’d…socialize…you understand, dear, don’t you?”
“I understand.”
“Peter helped me a great deal, and I believe I helped him…but it wasn’t meant to be…we were different people, and after about a year, our relationship…well, it soured. Neither of us wanted to pursue anything permanent, but we parted friends. After that, Peter and I saw less of each other, but he remained a good customer, and he made a point of coming by the store at least once a month to see how I was, share a drink or some dinner. Like I said, he was always a good friend.”
“But what happened to him?”
“One afternoon, around, oh…going on ten years ago now, Peter showed up at my shop in something of a state. He spoke about a crisis in his family. An emergency. He told me I wouldn’t see him again for six months at least. But I never saw or heard from him again, until this morning, when he called out of the blue and told me he had some collectable books he wanted me to sell for him.”
“He never contacted you before that?”
Sadie shook her head. “I did try calling him at his home in Providence, but his phone had been disconnected.”
“What happened to him then?”
When he called today, Peter explained that he’d moved back to his boyhood home in Newport. That’s where we’re going now…Prospero House, his family’s oceanfront estate. He apologized for losing touch, but he said after his return home all those years ago, he got busy with family affairs, became something of a recluse.” Sadie sighed. “The truth is, dear, Peter could very easily…how do I put this? He could get lost in things.”
“What do you mean ‘get lost in things’?”
“He’d…obsess.”
“You mean he’d become compulsive? Like OCD?”
“Yes, dear…I’m sure you’ve noticed that particular tendency in some of our more, shall we say, enthusiastic collectors.”
“Now that you mention it…”
At least three regulars came to mind. They e-mailed or called like clockwork, looking for missing volumes in collections we’d never carried, signed editions we’d never advertised—just to be sure they hadn’t missed an announcement on our Web site or listing in our catalog. But their searching was passionate and constant, almost ritualistic. I had engaged each of them in conversation at one time or another and discovered we were just one call on a long list of calls they made every day.
“If Peter found himself on the receiving end of a major inheritance,” Sadie continued, “any number of things related to it might have taken hold of him and pulled him in…consumed him.”
“An estate in Newport is pretty impressive,” I noted. “He must come from real money, then?”
“It was a surprise to me, I have to tell you. To think that Peter came from old Newport stock, that his family owned a mansion. He’d never mentioned it to me in all the years we’d been friends. The Peter Chesley I knew was so unassuming. And I would have never guessed he came from money. The man always seemed so frugal.”
“So what kind of books did Mr. Chesley collect? Mysteries?”
“Oh, heavens no.” Sadie waved her hand. “Peter’s passion was history. The Revolutionary War—books by or about the Founding Fathers. I believe his great-great-great-grandfather was at Bunker Hill. He was crazy for anything dealing with that period.”
“You moved books like that?”
Sadie shrugged. “I moved everything and anything, in my time…. Oh, look there!”
We both saw the next turn at the same moment. Roderick Road was downright schizophrenic. With twists and turns that seemed to leap out of the darkness, the road appeared to have been designed around the landscape. We circled a huge outcropping of pure New England granite, and what appeared in the gloom to be a tree at least two hundred years old, its protruding roots gnarled.
“You should feel good that Peter didn’t forget you after all these years,” I said.
Sadie nodded. “Yes, it’s very nice of him to offer me first pick of the books he plans to sell. But for the life of me, I can’t see why I couldn’t come by tomorrow or Tuesday. Why we had to make th
is trip tonight of all nights.”
I raised an eyebrow. If the man had obsessive-compulsive disorder, I figured that was reason enough—and it also gave me a clue why Sadie had walked away from the relationship all those years ago.
“There’s the turn,” Sadie said.
I saw the gateposts at the last possible second, and hit the brakes too suddenly—the tires immediately began hydroplaning across the wet asphalt. Careening out of control, the Saturn spun off the road, into the shoulder, the soft, wet mud finally stopping us with a teeth-rattling jolt.
The car stalled, cutting off the hissing heater and swishing windshield wipers along with the rumbling engine. The abrupt silence was followed by the thump, thump, thump of pelting rain hitting the roof, the hood, the trunk.
“Are…Are you okay?” My voice cracked from the tension.
Face pale, Sadie took a deep breath and nodded.
What are you trying to do, baby, pull a Dutch act? Jack piped up in my head. If you wanted to off yourself, there’s no reason to take your sweet little ol’ auntie with you. And where did you learn to drive, anyway—the bumper cars at Coney Island?
Sadie and I sat in silence for a moment, listening to the rain batter the metal. Then I shifted into neutral and turned the ignition key. The engine came to life. We both let out the breaths we’d been holding. I eased the car into reverse and slowly applied the gas. The tires skidded a little, but the sedan rolled back onto the pavement without incident.
Two tall granite gateposts flanked the driveway, bridged by a wrought-iron arch that spelled out the house’s name in rusty, pitted letters. As I rolled through the open gate, lightning flared like a shattering bottle rocket, illuminating the sprawling mansion.
“Goodness!” Sadie exclaimed, getting a good look.
“Man alive,” I murmured.
I felt a shiver—but not from the raw weather. We had arrived at Prospero House.
“Looks like the architect couldn’t decide whether his client was the Addams Family or JP Morgan,” I said.
The looming, four-story mansion was so grotesque it even gave my ghost the creeps.
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