Elizabeth and Kurt exchanged looks.
"Exactly what I was going to suggest," he said.
"In your dreams!" She laughed and looked my way. "Let's get going, sister. I can't wait to show this star"—the way she said the word, it wasn't a compliment—"that Merilee really is going to get rid of Palmer in the next book."
"All right. Okay." I rounded the desk. "Only before we look at the manuscript, I need your help."
"Us?" Kurt shot daggers at Elizabeth. "You can't be serious. What could we possibly do for—"
"You can tell me about when the book came out. The original book." Merilee's notebook sat in the middle of the desk. It was closed. I put my hand on the cover, just to let these two dueling ghosts know that I wasn't kidding. Their answers were the price of my cooperation. "Back when the book was published, did you think Merilee really wrote it?"
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "We didn't know her then," she said. "No one did. Not until the book came out and caused a sensation. Then, of course, everybody knew her name! I never even met Merilee until she came to Hollywood when the movie was being filmed. Before that… " She tossed her head. Her golden hair gleamed. "Before that, I had my career to worry about. I was an ingenue." She said the word like it was something special, and when I didn't react because I didn't know what the hell she was talking about, she made a face at me.
"In-gen-ue. It's French, honey. It means I was young and a very hot property. Oh yeah, back in those days, I had more important things to worry about than who wrote what book."
"Yeah, like who on earth would ever hire you after your horrendous reviews in Henry IV on Broadway." His artistic sensibilities offended, Kurt shivered. He looked my way. "Of course Merilee wrote the book. Her name is on the cover, isn't it?"
"You're listed in Who's Who as an actor, aren't you?" Elizabeth thought this was very funny. She laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. When she got ahold of herself again, she looked at me through narrowed eyes. "What you're saying is that you don't think she wrote it."
"What I'm saying is that I don't know." There was no use beating around the bush. Not with these two. It wouldn't get me anywhere, and besides, maybe they knew something that could help. "I've heard from Merilee's sister, Didi. She says she wrote the book."
Elizabeth lit another cigarette. "Don't know Didi."
"Never heard of her," Kurt said.
"Are you sure?" I looked at him hard. "She says she was in a movie with you."
He grinned, and as much as I hate to admit it about a dead guy, I could see why the millions of women who'd seen his movies had fallen in love with him. Kurt Benjamin had a twinkle in his eyes that said S-E-X. That must have been very appealing to women back in the Stone Age fifties. He was good-looking, too, even if he did have that goofy mustache.
He glanced over my body before he looked me in the eye. "My dear, I've been in movies with plenty of people. If she was a bit player, I might never have known her name."
"But I need to know if she's lying about this."
He smiled an apology. "Can't help you. She might have been in one of my movies. She might not have been."
I was getting nowhere fast, and I scrambled to come up with the right questions, hoping something these two knew might help. Maybe if I concentrated on what—if the clothes they were wearing meant anything—must have been the highlight of their acting careers, I might get somewhere.
"What about when you were filming the movie? So Far the Dawn, I mean. When you were filming the movie, was there anything about Merilee that made you think maybe she didn't know as much as she should know about the book?"
Kurt shook his head. "It wasn't that she knew too little. It was that she knew too much. She complained to the set designers and the costume folks a lot. The lamps weren't authentic to the period. The clothes weren't right. She even said something about the shoes I was wearing in the scene where I see Opal off at the train station." He bent his head close to mine and whispered, "Should have taken the opportunity while I had it and given her a push."
Elizabeth sneered.
Kurt got back to the matter at hand. "Merilee said a Union officer would never wear those kinds of shoes. Those were the kinds of details she was obsessed about."
"And you never thought that was weird?"
"I never cared enough to think about it." He gave his broad shoulders a twitch. "That's not what I was there for."
"And what difference does it make, anyway?" Elizabeth chimed in. "She was the author of the book and you know how weird writers can be."
"As weird as actors?" Neither one of them got the joke, so I didn't belabor the point. Trying to decide the best way to move ahead, I flipped open Merilee's notebook.
"Chapter fourteen," Elizabeth said. She moved closer to the desk. "That's as far as we've gotten."
I found the right page. Merilee's handwriting was neat, even if it was a little cramped. Because I didn't want either one of these ghosts to get too close, I read the text out loud.
Palmer arrived at the house.
"Aha! See there." Kurt scooted closer. "The chapter starts with Palmer. She likes Palmer better."
"Shut up," I told him, and went back to reading.
He climbed the stairs. He knocked on the door.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
No one answered, and he went back down the stairs. As he did, he thought back to the Panic of 1857 and how it had increased unemployment in Cleveland by twenty-five percent.
Things had improved since then. The war had been good to Cleveland.
"You're kidding me, right?" I looked from one ghost to the other. "People consider this great writing?"
"The first book was better," Kurt admitted. "It had more depth."
"More emotion," Elizabeth added.
"More than none," I mumbled. I thumbed through a few more pages.
This plot didn't thicken. In fact, as far as I could see, it never got past the watery stage. I read through a stilted conversation between Palmer and someone named Betty and a description (not all that descriptive) of a house that sounded a whole lot like the one we were standing in. A few pages after that, the notebook was blank.
I'm not one to criticize. After all, I'd barely made it through college composition. But even I could have done better. Especially if I had fifty years to do it.
I flopped into Merilee's desk chair. "I'm more confused than ever," I admitted to Kurt and Elizabeth. "I might not know best-selling material when I see it, but I know this stuff sucks. If it's nothing like the first book—"
"You mean you've never read it?" Elizabeth's outrage was evident in her question.
"You've never seen the movie?" Kurt was just as stunned.
"I've seen the movie. All right?" I slapped a hand on the desk, just to emphasize my point. "It's about guys in uniform and women in gowns. And horses."
"And the book?"
There was a paperback copy of SFTD on the desk, and I eyed it—and its well over eight hundred pages—warily. "It might not look that way to you right now," I said, "but I've got a pretty busy life. I've got more important things to do than read some silly old book."
"Then how," Kurt asked, "can you possibly make a judgment about who might have written it?"
Damn, but I hate it when ghosts are right.
I grumbled my surrender, grabbed the book, and headed for the door. As long as I was stuck in Merilee's little house of haunted horrors, I might as well do some reading.
Chapter 11
I know it doesn't sound like it, but I had a plan. Really.
Before I went up to the attic to look for the handwritten manuscript Didi swore was stashed away there, I was going to wait until Merilee got home. Then I was going to wait some more. Until the wee hours of the morning, in fact. I wanted to be sure she was in her room and fast asleep. In my mind, this made a whole lot more sense than taking the chance that she would show up—the mayor on her arm—and find me rummaging around in places I didn't belong.
&nbs
p; And hey, who was I kidding? I wanted to wait until Weird Bob was asleep, too. No way did I want to bump into him in some dark hallway.
If the manuscript really did exist and I could get my hands on it, my troubles were over. I'd grab it and run, and not to worry, I'm not a complete philistine. I was planning on leaving ol' Merilee a not-so-fond farewell note. It was the least I could do to thank her for making the last twenty-four hours of my life miserable.
And if the manuscript wasn't there?
At the time I considered this—again—I was hunkered down in the overstuffed chair that sat in one corner of my room. I was wrapped in a tattered quilt, and I shifted uncomfortably beneath it. The possibility of Didi's story being nothing more than fiction was something I really didn't want to think about. At least not until I had all the facts in front of me. (Or not in front of me, which is where the facts would be if the handwritten manuscript didn't exist.)
Until then, I had to keep my mind distracted, and the conclusions I was all set to jump to firmly grounded.
It was, after all, the way a real private investigator worked.
The good news in all of this was that at least I had something to keep me occupied.
That something was So Far the Dawn. I'd begun reading the book as soon as I walked out on Elizabeth and Kurt and settled myself in my room. Like a first-time sushi eater, I'd been cautious, starting with a nibble, just to see if I could get a sense of either Didi's or Merilee's voice there in the pages. No one was more surprised than I was when that nibble turned into a bite, and the bites into gulps.
By the time I heard the limo deposit Merilee at our front door, I was into chapter two. When I noticed her footsteps on the stairs and heard the squeak of the door on the other side of the landing as it closed, I had already finished chapter four.
The next time I looked at the clock, it was close to two, and I was well into chapter seven, the heretofore mentioned-to-the-point-of-tedium scene where Opal is leaving for her wedding in Baltimore and Palmer is none too happy about it.
Okay, time to come clean. As much as I hate to admit it, the more I read of the book, the more I hoped Merilee wasn't the author.
I didn't want her to be associated with anything this delicious.
I know, I know… admitting that I actually liked the book that launched a million crazy collectors and nearly as many wacky reenactors was something like confessing that I watch the Lifetime Channel (which I don't) or that I think movies that deliberately set out to make women cry aren't lame (which they are).
But honest to gosh, I couldn't help myself.
I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next.
So Far the Dawn was soap opera between two covers. It was salt and vinegar potato chips. It was chocolate in all its most enticing forms.
The book was trashy and decadent. It was pulp fiction at its worst—and its best. It was melodrama. Pure and simple.
And I couldn't stop.
Of course, I knew I had to eventually. After all, I had to do what I had to do. So when Opal stepped onto that train, I sniffed (not that I was crying or anything) and forced myself to close the book.
I set it down and bent my head, listening closely.
There wasn't a sound in the big old house.
"Showtime," I told myself. I twitched off the quilt and reached for the pink cardigan I'd left on one corner of the bed. It was spring, but the nights were still chilly. Obviously, no one had thought to turn on the heat. Or maybe it just didn't work in my half of the house. I slipped on the sweater, then my sneakers, and grabbed the Wal-Mart bag I'd left on the top of my dresser.
Remember, I said I had a plan. On my way to Ohio City, I'd stopped and bought a flashlight. Armed with it but reluctant to turn it on until I was safely in the attic, I inched open my door and stepped into the pitch-black hallway.
I'd already checked out the lay of the land, and I knew the location of the door that led up to the attic. Of course, finding the right door when all the lights were on wasn't the same as finding it in the dark.
In the dark, the old house seemed bigger, emptier, and spookier than ever. The floorboards groaned, and after each step I took, I paused, just to be sure no one had heard me. When no lights flicked on and no one came running, I continued on. One hand on the wall to anchor myself, I inched my way down the hallway, and when I got to the door that led to the third floor, I took a deep breath and wiped my damp palms against my jeans.
As ready as I was ever likely to be, I opened the door and turned on my flashlight. I started up, one creaking stair at a time.
As it turned out, the attic was huge. It was just as cluttered as the first floor. And way more dusty.
I slid the beam of my flashlight over boxes and trunks and furniture covered with old sheets. I sidled between stacks of packing crates and stopped dead when I ran smack into one of those old dress forms that look like a woman's body—minus the head. She swayed and tilted, and good thing I have quick reflexes, I grabbed her by the shoulders right before she crashed to the floor.
Like a million tiny fairies dancing in the shaft of light, a puff of dust rose up from the dress form. I sneezed.
And froze.
I waited for a minute.
Nothing.
I waited for another minute.
Still nothing.
If either Merilee or Bob had heard the sound in the attic, neither one of them was heading up to investigate.
Reminding myself to be quick and more quiet than ever, I whispered the directions I'd gotten from Didi, my voice muffled by the head-high wall of boxes on either side of me. "The windows that look out over the front sidewalk. The board below the windows is loose and if you lift up one corner…"
I arced the thin beam of light around me, heading in the direction I thought was the front of the house, carefully threading my way between one of those mirrors on a swivel stand and an old metal storage closet taller than me. Just on the other side of it, I found the window and breathed a sigh of relief.
There were no boxes piled nearby, and I was grateful. At least I didn't have to move anything.
I'd just knelt down for a closer look at the floorboards when I heard a sound from across the attic.
Like the tread of a footstep.
I held my breath, listening for I don't know how long. When I didn't hear the sound again, I told myself my imagination was on overdrive and the sooner I got out of the attic and back to my room, the better.
With that it mind, I ran my hands over the floorboards.
Just as Didi said, one of them was loose. Just as she assured me it would, when I pressed on the corner of the loose board, it tipped up. Just as she told me to, I wiggled it out of position and looked beneath it.
There was a twelve-by-twelve space below the floorboards. Just as Didi promised. And just as she'd described it, it was big enough to hide a manuscript.
Trouble was, it was empty.
In spite of the way I sometimes act, I'm not stupid. I'd known all along that this was a possibility. Still, facing the reality of the empty hiding space, and the fact that it meant that Didi's claim to authorship of So Far the Dawn was as close to fiction as she'd ever get, made me feel as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. I struggled to catch my breath and listened to the words that echoed inside my head.
You actually believed me? How naive can you be?
The voice was my dad's. No big surprise there. My reaction, however, was.
Though I'd spent close to two years dealing with Dad's lies and the maze of legal troubles (not to mention the social pariah-ness) caused by his selfishness and his greed, I guess I had yet to come to grips.
A tear slid down my cheek.
I wiped it away, sniffled, and scrubbed a finger under my nose.
That's when I realized my hands were clean.
All right, I know I just said I wasn't stupid, but honest to gosh, I'd been so busy concentrating on Didi's directions and the thrill of finding her hi
ding place, it never occurred to me when I knelt down that the floor was bare.
I mean, really bare.
I arced the beam of my light over the boards.
Not two feet away, the floor was coated with dust. But here near the window, it was clean. As if something had been piled here and that something had been moved.
Someone had been here before me.
I was so busy thinking through this new discovery, I didn't pay any attention to the catlike sound behind me. Not until it was too late, anyway.
The next thing I knew, I heard a thump and then a crash. I jerked upright and aimed my light across the room, but it was already too late.
The last thing I saw was the metal storage cabinet. It was falling. And it was headed right at me.
I knew what it felt like to be knocked out. After all, that's how this whole Gift nonsense started in the first place. After I got knocked out from knocking my head on Gus Scarpetti's mausoleum.
That time, I'd come to my senses in the ER of the hospital.
This time…
The sound of a groan penetrated the fog that filled my head. It took me a couple of seconds to realize the noise was coming out of me.
I opened my eyes to total darkness. I knew I wasn't dead because I could feel my cheek pressed to the attic floorboards. My stomach was flat to the floor. My legs were asleep, and I tried to move them. I wasn't worried until I realized I couldn't.
I tried my arms, and this time had more success. I swept my left arm over my head at the same time I groped around for my flashlight with my right hand. I didn't find the flashlight, but I did figure out why I couldn't see anything. There was something soft and warm over me. Something that felt like an animal.
It's not every day you wake up and feel as if you're being smothered by a Wookiee. With a screech, I plucked at the thing. My hand closed around fur and something that felt like silk lining.
"Fur coat," I told myself with a little hiccup of relief, and just to prove it, I pulled the coat off me and flung it as far away as I could.
That's when I saw that it was already morning.
The Chick and the Dead Page 12
