“I’m back on the air in three minutes,” Karen said without saying hello. “Just wanted to thank you for dinner—it was great—and to see if you had plans for tonight.”
“Nothing important,” I answered. To tell the truth, the plans I had involved leftovers and the television. I didn’t have what you would call an active social life.
“There’s a place in Pensacola I want to check out,” Karen said.
I interrupted her before she could go any further. “I don’t feel much like going out. Why don’t you come over here? Dinner and a DVD, maybe? And I, uh, I have something I want to talk to you about, anyway.”
“Great!” Karen accepted the invitation so quickly that I wondered if that was her intention all along. “I’ll pick up burgers from Curly’s.” She named our favorite fast-food drive-through.
“Sixish?”
“Works for me. Gotta run,” she said, and disconnected. Within seconds I heard her voice on the radio, announcing “News at Noon.”
I told myself it was no big deal. Burgers and a movie. It was a typical Friday night with Karen.
Except that most Friday nights I didn’t tell her I was living with a ghost.
Between customers, I started leafing through the back copies of the News and Times. I had put the papers back in their proper places and tried to forget about them, but I knew when Uncle Louis died, and I was able to find his obituary:
Louis Marcel Georges, 67, passed away on Thursday. The owner of the Southern Treasures Gift Shop, Mr. Georges was a native of Keyhole Bay. He attended Keyhole Bay High School, and served in the U.S. Army during World War II.
He is survived by his sister, Antoinette Georges Beaumont; niece Alexis Beaumont Martine; and nephew Andrew Georges Beaumont; as well as a great-niece and -nephew.
Services are pending.
He had lived in Keyhole Bay his entire life, except for the years he was in the army, and that was all they had to say about him? Sixty-seven years boiled down to two paragraphs?
It seemed like there should be more, somehow.
I looked at the other two obituaries on the page. An elderly woman whose husband had retired to Keyhole Bay from Michigan. The story ran for an entire column full of family and hobbies and jobs. She had clearly lived a full life.
Had Uncle Louis? Linda said he kept to himself; maybe no one knew what to write about him.
The day seemed to fly by. Between customers and phone calls, it was late in the afternoon before I got a chance to do more reading. When I glanced at the clock I was surprised to see that Karen was due in about half an hour. I only had time to look for one more article.
I tried to remember what other dates had been on the newspapers. They had been a few years apart, and both from before my parents were born, which narrowed the search to the 1940s or earlier.
My stock of papers was far from complete, but I had several issues from most years. When I first took over Southern Treasures, I’d found bundles of News and Times tied with yellowed string and stacked in the attic.
I had almost tossed the papers, but Linda stopped me. “There are people who collect old newspapers,” she told me. “Put them in the store and see what happens.”
I had selected a few issues from each year, and slowly started adding them to my stock. Even if they didn’t sell, they attracted attention, and often shoppers would stop to thumb through the plastic-covered papers in the display.
I flipped through the rack looking for the 1940s and had selected a half-dozen issues when the phone rang.
Dumping the stack on the counter, I grabbed the handset and answered. “Southern Treasures; this is Glory.”
My mistake. The whiny tenor on the other end told me it was Peter before he could even get past hello.
Not tonight. Please, not tonight.
But Peter was in full-on “helpful mode,” and I wasn’t fast enough. He plowed right in.
“Glory, I’ve been watching the news, and I heard about that poor high school kid that got killed out in the woods down there. Must have been awful. A real tragedy.”
“Yes, it was—”
He didn’t let me go on. “I was thinking,” he said, a signal that trouble was coming.
I tried to head him off. “It was tragic, Peter. A terrible accident.” I kept my voice soft, soothing. “The star quarterback, just as school is starting—”
“I know,” Peter cut in. “That’s why I called you. I think we need to act fast. Very fast. If we get on this right now, we should be able to make it work. We need a memorial T-shirt, Glory. In memory of the star of the football team. And this is the great part: we contribute part of the proceeds from every sale to support the team! I think it could be great for raising the profile of Southern Treasures. You might even get some TV coverage—it’s hit the regional news all the way up here. Isn’t it genius?”
Peter finally paused, as though allowing me time to appreciate his splendid idea. And for a moment I couldn’t speak.
I quickly found my voice. “That is very probably the worst idea you have ever had, Peter. It’s horrible!” I was shaking now, the anger and pain I’d suppressed bubbling to the surface. “A seventeen-year-old boy is dead, Peter,” I shouted. “He took his prized baby-blue muscle car out on a country road and flipped it, and he died. I cannot believe you want to capitalize on that tragedy. Do you think someone should have made freakin’ T-shirts when my parents were killed? And maybe given me a few cents for each one to help ‘support’ me? Is that what you think?” I wanted to wring his scrawny neck with my bare hands for his callousness.
“No, no, not at all. I didn’t mean anything like that, Glory. I just thought we could do something for the school; that’s all. And maybe get some good publicity for us as kind of a bonus. It wasn’t about the money.”
“That’s the kind of thing the Booster Club does, Peter. They build themselves up by very publicly supporting the sports stars.” I brought my voice under control with an effort. “I have never been a part of that, never wanted to be a part of it, and I certainly don’t want to be part of it now. Especially not this way.”
I drew a deep breath and spoke softly. It was usually more effective than yelling, once I had Peter’s attention. “The answer is no. Absolutely not. Never. I am going to hang up now and try my damnedest to forget we ever had this conversation.”
I broke the connection with trembling fingers, the adrenaline rush of anger draining away, leaving me weak and shaky.
I’d lost my temper, something I rarely do. I had been on my own since I turned eighteen, and in the last fifteen years, I had learned a few things about maintaining control of my emotions.
The flare of temper had caught me by surprise, unleashing a flood of anger and loss that was usually tightly controlled. Somehow, Peter had managed to push a button I wasn’t even aware of, to expose the pain of my parents’ death.
Which explains how Karen caught me in a weak moment.
Bluebeard left his perch and made his way across the shop to sit on my shoulder. There wasn’t enough room for him to actually fly; instead, he hopped from the perch to a display rack and across the gondolas of T-shirts and souvenir glasses.
“Good job,” he said in Uncle Louis’s voice.
I was startled for a moment but nothing like a few days earlier. Maybe I was getting used to the idea of sharing my store with a ghost.
Or maybe I was just too overloaded to react. Either way, I actually felt grateful for the reassurance. I reached up and petted his head, getting a nuzzle in return.
I laughed, my voice still a little shaky. “I lost my temper. Not such a great idea. Besides, you don’t know Peter, so how do you know?”
“You’ll find out,” he replied.
I think my mouth was still hanging open when Karen opened the front door, carrying a cardboard tray with burgers and shakes from Curly’s.
“I figured after the week we had, we deserved a treat,” she said, nodding at the shake cups. She glanced up and caug
ht the surprised expression frozen on my face.
“Wow,” she said. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“YOU HAVE NO IDEA,” I MANAGED TO SQUEAK OUT. I tried to calm my shaking and control the tremor in my voice.
Bluebeard moved off my shoulder onto the counter, peering at the cups in Karen’s tray. “Coffee?” he asked.
“It’s not coffee, and it’s not for you.” It occurred to me that his obsession with coffee might have another explanation. In fact, Uncle Louis might be the explanation for a lot of things. Not that the idea made me happy.
Karen set the tray on the counter and put her arm around my shoulders. “Glory? What’s wrong? I mean, you really look upset.”
“I haven’t seen a ghost, Freed. Just, well, heard one.” I winced at the startled look on Karen’s face. “Let me lock up,” I added hurriedly, “and we can take our burgers upstairs. I promise I’ll tell you everything.”
Telling Karen everything took a lot longer than I imagined. At first she simply stared, but she quickly recovered her natural curiosity. Soon she was interrupting to ask questions, and then she began reminding me of incidents I had forgotten. As she did, I realized there were a lot of little things I’d chosen to ignore: lights that went on and off when I wasn’t in the room, locks that opened themselves, merchandise moved around the store.
I’d dismissed the lights as old wiring, and the locks as my own forgetfulness. I’d blamed Bluebeard for the merchandise. But now, after Kevin’s death, I was looking at all of it in a different light.
“When we came back after…” she hesitated, as though looking for the right word. “After the accident,” she continued, “Bluebeard said, ‘It wasn’t an accident.’”
I nodded, afraid of what was coming next.
“Do you think he meant the shop? Or did he mean Kevin?”
It was the same question I’d been asking myself for days, and I didn’t like my answer.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “At first I just thought he meant the shop—that Bluebeard was pitching a fit and he wanted me to know he was angry. But then there were all those newspapers, and I wondered if it might have something to do with Uncle Louis.”
I couldn’t sit still any longer. I stood up and carried the burger wrappers and empty cups to the trash. I got a dishrag and wiped down the table, even though there wasn’t anything to clean.
“I think,” I said, dropping the dishrag in the sink and turning to face Karen, “I think he meant Kevin.”
I sat back down again, sighing. “But how could he know? How could he…” I forced myself to say his name. “How could Uncle Louis know what happened? He wasn’t there!”
Karen laughed, but not like there was anything funny. “How do we know? If he’s a ghost—and I’m not saying he is—but if he is a ghost, we don’t know what the rules are for him. Maybe he can come and go, and he was out on County Road 198, or at Thompson’s Corner. Or maybe he’s been talking to Kevin. Maybe Kevin told him what really happened, and all we have to do is ask and he’ll tell us.”
“But why now? Why not when my parents died, or when I took over the store? There has to be some reason, some connection, that made him start talking now.”
Karen got up from her seat at the table. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do about this ghost,” she said. “So let’s go downstairs and see what we can find in those old papers. We’re not going to fix this sitting around watching a movie.”
I led the way back downstairs into the shop. Bluebeard had retreated to his cage to sleep, and he gave us a sharp look when we came in. I tossed a worn dark-green blanket over his cage, and he went back to sleep.
For the time being, I would rather not have his help—or his comments—while we looked for clues to Uncle Louis.
Searching the back issues went a lot faster with Karen’s help. She took the stack I had already sorted out, and I started back through the display.
Karen slid the yellowed newsprint from its protective sleeve. “At least now I understand why you didn’t call Boomer,” she said.
“Yeah.” I shifted a stack of papers to the counter. “I hoped it was just Bluebeard. And if it wasn’t, I didn’t want to tell the police a ghost had trashed my store. Just easier to clean it up and forget it.”
“But you looked at the papers?”
“Not at first. I wanted to just forget about it. Then today I decided I had to figure it out. I’d just started through the stuff down here when Peter called.” I stopped, remembering the insane idea he’d proposed and feeling the same rush of anger. “Did I tell you his latest scheme?”
“You told me about the coffee idea. Was that it?”
“No.” I launched into the story of Peter’s memorial T-shirt idea, and soon we were both giggling. Karen could see the absurdity in every one of Peter’s brilliant plans, and she pointed it out each time he called with his latest idea.
“Is all his taste in his mouth?” Karen asked between gales of laughter. “I mean, this gives a whole new meaning to the word tacky!”
“The part that amazes me is how crass he is. I’ve always thought his mother—you’ve met my aunt Missy, right?—I always thought her name rhymed with prissy for a reason. She’s the type who never says a bad word.”
Karen set one paper aside and carefully opened another, scanning the stories as she gently paged through the brittle newsprint. “Isn’t she the one who always said, ‘Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?’ if we slipped up in front of her?”
I nodded. “Her favorite was always ‘Bless her heart,’ though.”
It was a great Southern tradition. We never spoke ill of someone directly. But if we said something that could be construed as critical, the proper formula was to add the phrase “Bless her heart,” or “his heart,” as though the individual in question just couldn’t help whatever harebrained thing she or he had done.
“Of course!” Karen said. She dropped her carefully trained voice and exaggerated her drawl. “Now, Glory, you know Peter is just tryin’ to help you. You bein’ just a lil’ ol’ girl and all. Bless his heart.”
At first, when Karen whooped loudly, I thought it was part of the hysterical laughter we’d shared. But as she carefully picked apart the pages of the paper she had in front of her, I realized she’d found something.
“Here it is,” she said. Her normal voice—a hint of the South overlaid on a trained broadcaster’s diction—couldn’t hide her excitement.
I set down the paper I was working on and moved around the counter to read over her shoulder.
The date at the top of the page read October 17, 1945. A banner proclaimed it the “Business” section. In the center of the page, a photo of Southern Treasures looked both familiar and strange. Next door, where The Lighthouse stands now, was a produce stand full of pumpkins. The other side was an empty field where The Grog Shop would be built.
Cars parked diagonally against the curb, but a few spaces were empty directly in front of Southern Treasures. On the sidewalk, a man stood next to a window displaying a giant sign proclaiming “Under New Ownership.”
The caption identified the man as Louis Georges, new owner of the Southern Treasures Gift Shop. Below, a two-column story gave more detail:
Local serviceman Louis Georges has purchased the Southern Treasures Gift Shop on Main Street.
Mr. Georges, a graduate of Keyhole Bay High School, recently returned to our fair city after a seven-year absence, serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He saw action in both the European and Pacific theaters as a flight engineer.
Upon his return, he purchased Southern Treasures from Mr. Ernest Willingham. Mr. Willingham and his wife are retiring to Montgomery, where their daughter and son-in-law reside.
Southern Treasures provides a diverse assortment of merchandise, including many souvenir items suitable for gift giving. The store caters to the visitors whom peacetime will bring to enjoy the delights of a coastal vacation, and to local residents looking
for the perfect gift for friends and family.
Centrally located on Main Street, with street-side parking for shoppers, Southern Treasures is sure to achieve continued success.
When asked about his decision to return to Keyhole Bay as a shopkeeper after his many adventures abroad, Mr. Georges said he simply wanted to come home and enjoy the peace and quiet of his hometown.
“I lived in Keyhole Bay from the day I was born until I left to serve my country,” he said in response to questions from this newspaper. “It is my home, and I can’t think of a place I would rather be.”
Assisting him in the shop is his younger sister, Miss Antoinette Georges. A popular student at Keyhole Bay High, Miss Georges says she is looking forward to working with her brother as he moves forward with his new venture.
The shop will be open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M., although Mr. Georges says he hopes to extend the hours during the summer.
“I wonder why he wasn’t open on Sundays? You would think that was a good day for tourist business.”
Karen smiled at me, and I was sure she knew the answer, just from the smug, I-know-something-you-don’t look on her face.
“It was 1945, Glory. Ever hear of blue laws?”
“Of course,” I replied. “No Sunday sales. But I thought it just meant booze. And I thought they repealed all that a long time ago.”
“They repealed the last of them when we were in grade school. But there were lots of local ordinances back in the first half of the century. For a while, the only place that could legally open on Sunday was the drugstore, because there might be a medical emergency. And even then, there were often laws about what they could and couldn’t sell on Sunday.”
I thought back to my grade-school days. My parents weren’t particularly religious, and though I occasionally went to church with my grandmother, it wasn’t a regular thing. I had spent a lot of Sundays playing in the schoolyard or riding my bike down to the bay to watch the fishing boats.
“That’s why Doc Bowen’s was the only place to buy a soda on Sunday.” I had never made the connection before, but it all made sense. “I always assumed the stores were closed because they all went to church. But if there was a law…” I shook my head. “But why would you know that and I wouldn’t?”
Murder Buys a T-Shirt Page 6
