The Ghost and Mrs. McClure
( Haunted Bookshop - 1 )
Alice Kimberly
Young widow Penelope Thornton-McClure and her old Aunt Sadie are making ends meet by managing a mystery bookshop--a quaint Rhode Island landmark rumored to be haunted. Pen may not believe in ghosts, but she does believe in good publicity--like nabbing Timothy Brennan for a book signing. but soon after the bestselling thriller writer reveals a secret about the store's link to the 1940s murder, he keels over dead--and right in the middle of the store's new Community Events space. Who gives Mrs. McClure the first clue that it was murder? The bookstore's full-time ghost--and PI murdered on the very spot more than fifty years ago. Is he a figment of Pen's overactive imaginatin? Or is the oddly likeable fedora-wearing specter the only hope Pen has to solve the crime? You can bet your everlasting life on it ...
The Ghost . . .
When Jack had been alive . . . the very blood in his veins pulsed to the beat of the city streets (when he’d had blood—and veins, that is).
Why couldn’t he have spent eternity in a place like that?
Instead he got eternity in cornpone alley.
Now the only excitement Jack ever had was scaring the crap out of small-town operators . . .
and Mrs. McClure
Her name was Penelope Thornton-McClure. And he had to admit she showed more moxie than a lot of grown men he’d pranked in the past fifty years.
Certainly, she was the first living entity he’d even considered shifting himself toward since he’d crossed over, which was hilarious because, if he’d read her thoughts right, she didn’t even believe in ghosts.
Well, he hadn’t believed in them either . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank
Senior Editor Kimberly Lionetti
and literary agent John Talbot
for their valued support in giving this distinct
physical incarnation to
what began as the ghost of an idea.
And
very special thanks to
Major John J. Leyden, Jr.
Field Operations Officer, Rhode Island State Police
for his helpful answers to procedural questions.
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.
“You mean there is a hell?” asked Lucy. “Some people might call it so,” said the captain. “There’s a dimension that some spirits have to wait in till they realize and admit the truth about themselves.”
—R. A. Dick, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
PROLOGUE
My life is my own, and the opinions of others don’t interest me . . .
—Carroll John Daly, “Three Gun Terry,” Black Mask, May 1923 (cited as the first published appearance of a hard-boiled detective)
Quindicott, Rhode Island 1949
Cranberry. What kind of a cornball name was that for a street?
Jack Shepard hauled his powerful frame out of the black Packard and slammed the heavy door, sending a violent shudder through the mass of metal.
Five hours. He’d just spent five dusty hours behind the wheel of this boiler, hunched up like some luckless clipster trying to crack a bag man’s safe.
With easy fingers, Jack buttoned-closed his double-breasted jacket. The suit was gunmetal gray, rising in a V from his narrow waist to his acre of shoulders. Closing his eyes, he imagined a pretty set of hands working over the kinks and knots. Tonight, thought Jack. After the drive back to Manhattan’s crowded dirty noise, he’d find a willing pair in some suds club, like he always did.
Casing the scene, Jack scanned the two- and three-story buildings that lined this lane—a kiddie version of the towering steel and glass where he usually ranged. “Town,” he muttered. That’s what two farmers had called it about ten miles back, out by the cow pasture and old mill, where he’d asked for directions. The “Welcome to Quindicott” sign came next. Farmland after, more of the monotonous rolling green he’d driven through on the way up. Then came the gradual density of houses. Trees and lawns and hedges trimmed by do-right guys. Barking dogs and chubby-cheeked kids. You had your “quaint” town square, your manicured lawn, and your white bandshell with red trim. The whole thing looked so doggone cheery, Jack expected to see a Norman Rockwell signature in the sidewalk.
The “townsfolk” in this homespun little picture looked cheery enough, too, soaking up the last hours of the orange sun’s late-summer juice. Young men in flannel. Old men with clay pipes. Farmers’ wives in gingham, and shop girls with bare legs.
These people were off the cob, all right, Jack thought, starting a casual stroll. Corny as they came. Some rocked on porches, some gabbed on benches, some ambled along the cobblestone lane—and all eyes were on him—
“Who are ya, fella?”
Curious eyes—
“Waddaya want?”
Small-town eyes—
“Ya don’t belong.”
Jack lit a butt from his deck of Luckies, then used a single finger to push back his fedora. You people want a look at my mug? Go on then, look.
Jack’s face wasn’t pretty, but no dame ever complained. His forehead was broad with thick sandy brows; his cheeks were sunken, and his nose like a boxer’s—slightly crooked with a broken-a-few-times bump. His jaw was iron, his chin flat and square—with a one-inch scar in the shape of a dagger slashing across it—and his eyes were sharper than a skiv. Freddie once told him they were the color of granite and just about as hard.
Maybe he was hard, thought Jack. But baby, this was one hick town. No painted dolls or groghounds here. No nickel rats, cheap grifters, or diamond-dripping dames looking to have their husbands set up. Just clean air, families with kids, potluck socials, and farm-fresh moo juice.
A town for settling down. That’s what this place was, thought Jack. A few of those bare-legged, unpainted country dolls passed him, gave him the shy version of the “what’s-your-name-big-fella?” once-over. Nice, thought Jack, eyeballing them right back. Shapely gams. Milky skin. Curves the way he liked them—bountiful. Jack took a long, slow drag from his Lucky and turned away. A man like him had to be careful in a place like this. Say the right thing to the wrong broad and he’d make her about a thousand times more miserable than he was.
With a slight limp, Jack continued his slow stroll—casual, easy, hands in pockets, the ache in his shin an unwanted souvenir from that underpaid job he’d done for Uncle Sam over in Germany. Jack ignored it. Continued to case the scene.
Ahead of him, a row of shops beckoned. Bakery, grocery, dress joint, beauty parlor. There it was: one twenty-two. A little more class than the other places. Probably did business with that fancy Newport set not far away. Wide plate-glass window. Words etched in: We Buy and Sell Books.
Yeah. But did they have the book he was looking for? The one they were looking for? The one they killed Freddie for?
The sun was sinking like a popped balloon now. The day was done, the lights nearly out, and just around the corner, a shadow stained the sidewalk, a city-suited figure, waiting.
Jack cursed low. Thought he’d shaken that tail.
He turned the brass handle, pushed. The shop’s bell tinkled like a bad girl’s giggle. A chill up his spine like a foot on his grave.
The shadow moved closer.
Jack’s hand rose, dipped into his suitcoat, caressed his rod’s handle, smooth from wear. He got a bad feeling, but Jack had gotten them before. And when he started a thing, he never turned back.
Besides,
this job was for Freddie, and Jack promised his dead friend he’d ride this train out. All the way to the end of the line.
I stake my everlasting life on it.
When the shadow receded, Jack refocused his attention on the job at hand. Investigation and interrogation were things he’d polished as a private eye, but he’d learned as a cop—back before he’d joined up. In the service, he’d learned a lot more: About men and the things they’d do and say under pressure. About the enemy: how and why they’d lie, and, more importantly, what methods would pry the truth out of them.
The moment of truth came today.
For Jack it came sharp and hard and quick, landing at the back of his skull. But the blow didn’t kill him. The gunshots did. To the head, to the face, to the heart. Enough to make sure Jack Shepard’s everlasting promise to his friend began today . . . along with his everlasting life.
CHAPTER 1
The Big Ending
Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life, except the murdered and sometimes the murderer’s.
—Nick Charles to Nora Charles in The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, 1933
Quindicott, Rhode Island Today
“We killed him!”
I was beside myself. In a frantic state of hand-wringing and head-shaking, I paced the length of the bookshop’s aisle from Christie to Grafton and back again.
“Calm down, dear,” said my aunt, her slight frame tipping the Shaker rocker back and forth with about as much anxiety as a retiree on a Palm Beach sundeck.
“How can I calm down?” I asked. “We killed a best-selling author on the first night of his book tour!”
“Well, the milk’s gone and spilled now. No use crying over it. If you need help calming down, why don’t you have a belt?”
I was not surprised by this rather unladylike suggestion from my aunt. Sadie may have been seventy-two, and barely four feet eleven, but for an aging bantamweight she had a big mouth and a good right hook. The Quindicott Business Owners’ Association never forgot the day she’d spotted a shoplifter at ten yards (putting a Hammett first edition down his pants). She’d taken him out with one sharp Patricia Cornwell to the head.
For decades, Sadie had run the bookstore as modestly as her late father had. Never once had she considered holding an author appearance like this one. It was stupid, presumptuous me, Mrs. Penelope Thornton “Know It All” McClure, who’d tried to bring twenty-first-century bookselling to Quindicott.
Why? Why in the world did I think I could pull it off?
Sure, right after college I had taken a job in the hard-nosed offices of New York City book publishing. But I hadn’t exactly been wildly successful at it (my nose being as squashy as a Stay Puft marshmallow). The one thing I thought I had gotten from the experience was the knowledge of how to create a hospitable, crowd-drawing store on the book tour circuit.
Of course, that was before Timothy Brennan—the very first best-selling author we were lucky enough to host—began choking in the middle of his televised lecture, then commenced flailing around like a big Irish goldfish ejected from its bowl, and finally dropped dead as a doorknob in the middle of the bookstore’s brand-new community events space.
“Someone get my niece a drink!” Aunt Sadie called from her rocker.
Linda Cooper-Logan heeded Sadie’s call. In her thirties, her short platinum hair still in the spiky, punkish style she’d first worn in the eighties, Linda appeared in a long, flowery skirt and worn denim jacket. Her jade and silver bracelets jangled as she held out a bottle of carrot juice. I reached for it, but Sadie interceded.
“Not that kind of drink,” said my aunt. “A real drink.”
“Oh!” said Linda. She put two fingers in her mouth. A sharp whistle caught the attention of Linda’s husband, Milner Logan. He was at the other end of the store, watching Officers Eddie Franzetti and Welsh Tibbet—one-quarter of the entire patrol division of Quindicott’s lilliputian police department—take down the names of guests who hadn’t already fled, and few had. After all, what better spectacle could be found tonight in the entire state of Rhode Island? Anyone present knew their “I watched Timothy Brennan drop dead” story would render them good as gold at every church social and backyard barbecue for the next ten years.
“Are you puckering up and blowing for me, Linda?” asked Milner sweetly. Quarter-blood Narragansett Native American, Milner frequented our store for crime novels, noir thrillers, and the occasional frontlist Tony Hillerman. Like his wife, he’d held on to some fashion trends of his own youth—a decade before Linda’s. He wore a small gold hoop in his left ear and his long hair in a ponytail, the strands looking more wiry salt-and-pepper these days than midnight black.
Together Linda and Milner ran the Cooper Family Bakery here in Quindicott. Linda handled the comfort food; Milner, the fancy French stuff. (He and Linda had met when Milner was teaching a cooking school class in Boston on the art of French pastry. Linda fell for him over a perfectly mixed ball of pâte sablée.)
Having their baked goods as part of tonight’s hospitality refreshments had been a coup for the bookstore. Milner had added French touches to so many of the old Cooper family recipes, the result was a table of goodies to die for—and, unfortunately, tonight someone actually had.
“We need a drink for Penelope!” Linda called to her husband.
“Oh?” Milner strolled closer in his fedora and double-breasted gray suit—like many of those who’d attended tonight’s event, Milner had come dressed as Jack Shield, the hard-boiled detective star of Timothy Brennan’s internationally best-selling series.
And I’d actually encouraged it.
From Providence and Boston to high-toned Newport and Greenwich, the newspaper ads I’d placed invited Brennan’s fans to come dressed as the famous hard-boiled detective. Every fan knew how Jack Shield dressed, of course, because Shield had been based on a real private investigator of the late 1940s named Jack Shepard. And Shepard’s chilling, anvil-chinned grimace appeared (in black-and-white) on the back flap of every Brennan dust jacket, right under the author’s own photo (in living color).
“You mean the hard stuff? Joy juice? Hooch?” asked Milner, nudging up the front brim of his fedora one-finger style, like Shield.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” cried Sadie. “Just get the bottle from under the register already!”
Milner brought over the bottle of whiskey and a few paper cups. Sadie poured shots all around. “After the shock of tonight’s events, I’d say we could all use a belt.”
I didn’t want to partake, but Sadie pressed the cup into my wringing hands. “Now, Penelope, honey, listen to your elder. Drink.”
I did. The liquid burned, but I trusted my aunt knew what was best at the moment—at least she seemed much calmer than I.
“Feel better?” asked Sadie.
“Don’t worry, Pen,” said Milner. “I overheard Eddie say there’s going to be an autopsy, because it’s a suspicious death. It’s just like a crime novel. Kinda cool, actually.”
“What killed him?” I said, noting that the room was both too bright and too dark. Was that possible?
Milner shrugged.
I took another swig from the cup. “What’s going to happen, do you think?” I asked. “Because of Timothy Brennan’s death, I mean. Do you think we should close the store? Forever?”
He shrugged again.
I took another swig.
Hard liquor was new to me. A glass of white wine or light beer once a month or so was my usual consumption rate. Whiskey, it would seem, sure hit faster than Chardonnay.
Linda and Milner were speaking, saying something like all this was in no way the store’s fault, and I should just go on as if nothing had happened. But their voices seemed as fuzzy as their faces. And then the room began a slow spin.
How could this have happened? I wondered. How?
I’d worked so hard to prepare. Just two hours ago, everything had been in perfect order . . . just two hours ago . . .
CHAPTER 2
The Author Arrives
[N]ice men often write bad verse and good poets can be monsters. . . . It seemed easier all around not to be able to put a face to a name, and judge solely on the printed page.
—A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study in Suicide
Two Hours Ago . . .
“How are things going?” I asked my aunt as she rang up—thank the ISBN gods!—four Shield of Justice purchases for one of the early guests now browsing the stacks. Timothy Brennan was scheduled to appear in exactly fifty-three minutes, and I was trying not to worry.
I had dressed with care in a crisply ironed black skirt, baby blue short-sleeved sweater set, nude stockings, and slingback heels. Sadie had made an effort, too. She’d actually brought out one of her few dresses—the belted, pine green number that matched her eyes and complemented her short gray hair, colored auburn and accented at Colleen’s Beauty Shop with “Shirley MacLaine” strawberry blond highlights.
“Hard to tell how things are going,” said my aunt. “Not many arrivals yet.”
“This event will bring us heaps of new business. You’ll see,” I told her.
“Well, if it doesn’t, look on the bright side. We can stack those three hundred hardcovers in the back room straight up to the part of the ceiling where it’s starting to droop and call it a literary pillar.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Okay. We’ll burn them for kindling, then. We haven’t used that potbellied stove on the back porch since my father was breathing.”
“Still not funny,” I said. “And you know very well we’d have to return them unsold or else pay the publisher fifty-four percent of each copy’s retail cover price.”
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