What was I thinking? Eliza woke up gradually with a little shuffling in her cot and a whimper or two but within minutes she was thrashing around with both little arms and legs in the air, her crying increasing in volume. She stopped for a second when I leaned over the cot and peered at her, probably more out of surprise than anything else because as soon as she had got her breath back, she let rip once again. When she started to bawl, I picked her up and began to carry her around the tiny space of the apartment but she must have sensed I was nervous and unsure of what I was doing because she didn’t stop crying.
I was bewildered when I laid her down on the changing table and discovered her diaper was neither wet nor soiled. Franny had said she had fed her so she couldn’t be hungry. What could be wrong?
An hour later I was at my wits’ end. Eliza’s face was furious and desperate and a virulent shade of puce in color. I couldn’t reach Franny because she’d left her cell phone behind, my mother was on her way to Venice and I couldn’t think who on earth to call for baby advice—until all at once I had a brain wave and picked up Franny’s phone.
Cath sounded befuddled with sleep to begin with and then she hurled abuse at me so loudly I almost dropped Eliza.
“Are you insane, Lee? It’s one thirty in the morning. I was up with Marcus till about half an hour ago and I had just got back to sleep. You just don’t think, do you? You’re so self-absorbed, so self-indulgent, so sel”—she struggled for a second and came back with—“fish.”
Well, she was right. I had completely forgotten London was five hours ahead. I was so used to picking up the phone and asking Cath for advice that I’d sort of imagined she was just around the corner as usual. I stumbled out an apology but Cath wasn’t a particularly gracious woman. She was never one to brush aside your remorse and move on. She always had to make you suffer so I had to listen to more haranguing until in desperation I shifted the receiver and let her get an earful of Eliza’s bawling.
When I got back on I cut her off quickly, said I knew exactly what she was going through with Marcus and then explained why, culminating in a plea for help.
“What do I do, Cath? Should I call a doctor? How can I get her back to sleep?”
“How long has she been crying?”
“Almost an hour.”
“Is that all?” The scorn in Cath’s voice made it sound as if Marcus cried for months on end. “No, I don’t think you need to call the doctor just yet. Here’s what I suggest, Lee, because I really don’t want to get into this for too long. I need to get some sleep before it’s time for Marcus’s next feed. Think about it, at least you’re going to be relieved later on. If you were the mother you wouldn’t get off so lightly. Tell me, does this baby have a pram nearby?”
I remembered the baby carriage behind the cash register. “Yes, downstairs.”
“Well, take her out in it for a while. Walk her up and down. The motion should get her back to sleep. I once took Marcus to Sainsbury’s one night just before they closed and wheeled him up and down the aisles. Worked like a treat.”
I thanked her profusely. I wanted to ask her how she was getting on in our house, what she had thought of the Phillionaire, I wanted to tell her about Shotgun and Franny and the little haven of paradise I’d found myself in at the beach. But most of all I wanted to ask her about Tommy.
It would all have to wait. Cath was right, and my mother had been too. I should have called Cath much earlier and maybe I should have let Tommy know I was going to America. But once again I defended my action—I hadn’t canceled the wedding, he had. I might have done it unconsciously but I had wanted to punish him. I had wanted him to worry about me, to miss me. I had wanted him to be the one to seek me out—and he had but he had found Cath instead and I had no one to blame but myself.
Cath’s plan worked a treat for Eliza as well as Marcus. I wheeled her out of the store in the baby carriage and up and down the Old Stone Highway where the smell of burning charcoal wafted tantalizingly from every backyard I passed and reminded me that Jesus’s lasagna was waiting for me.
When we returned twenty minutes later, I knew enough to leave Eliza asleep in her pram downstairs while I rushed upstairs to put the lasagna in the microwave. Franny’s extensive cable package beckoned—how much did that cost?—and I slumped in front of the TV, shoveled pasta into my mouth, and wondered what I’d do if Franny didn’t come back till the middle of the night and I had to deal with another of Eliza’s tantrums. Maybe next time I’d wheel her all the way to the beach and walk her home to my cabin by the light of the moon.
Taking my responsibilities seriously, I turned the TV down from time to time to see if she was crying. Nothing. Not a peep. Until eventually I decided to go down and see if she was still breathing.
I didn’t find out whether she was or not, because the door to the Old Stone Market was wide open and the pram was gone.
CHAPTER 6
I HAVE NEVER MOVED SO FAST IN MY LIFE. I CHARGED out the door and skidded to an abrupt halt beside the white picket fence in front of the picnic tables where Franny served breakfast and lunch. A quick look up and down the Old Stone Highway confirmed my worst fears. There was no sign of Eliza, although I don’t quite know what I expected to see—a six-month-old baby trotting down the middle of the road?
I didn’t have a clue what to do. Should I call the police or go running around Stone Landing looking for her?
A car approached and I flagged it down.
“Have you seen a baby in a baby carriage?” I asked the startled driver who gawked at me suspiciously, as well he might given my demented state.
But his passenger leaned across him and said, “Well, we overtook a man pushing a baby carriage five minutes back. He’s coming this way.”
I thanked her and set off along the Old Stone Highway. I had been walking for about ten minutes and was about to despair when I turned a corner and ran straight into Scott Abernathy pushing a baby carriage. Eliza was fast asleep—but not for long. I snatched her up into my arms and screamed at Scott in a voice that even I could hear was shaking with hysteria.
“What are you doing, Scott? Just what do you think you are doing with this baby?”
“Hey, calm down.” He reached to touch my arm and I literally jumped away from him. Eliza was awake now and staring at me, scrunching up her little face in that oh-so-familiar expression she adopted just as she was about to start bawling.
“I was taking her for a walk,” he said. “Where’s the harm in that? She was asleep, I was just giving her a little fresh air.”
“But what gives you the right to just walk up and take her? Without telling anyone?”
“Well, what gives you?” he countered and that was when I remembered what Rufus had told me. Scott was Eliza’s father. But he didn’t know that I knew that.
“I’m babysitting her. Franny’s out with—” I stopped. It didn’t seem like the best idea to tell Scott Franny was on a date with his brother.
“I didn’t know that, did I?” He sounded so reasonable. “I thought Franny was upstairs and she wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, she’s not there,” I repeated. “And the store’s closed.” As I said that I remembered that I hadn’t locked the door behind me. In fact I’d left it wide open. Anyone could walk in and take something.
“I wasn’t looking to buy anything,” he said. “I needed to see Franny. She knows me. Pretty well, as a matter of fact.”
The look on his face was close to a smirk and I wanted to hit him, but I restrained myself.
“But she never seems to be there,” he went on. “Every time I go around there’s no sign of her. What’s she doing with the baby, I ask myself, out at all hours? I came by the night our parents had their dinky little ceremony and—”
I bristled silently. How dare he refer to my mother and Phil expressing their love for each other as a “dinky little ceremony.”
“—admittedly it was late and I was pretty drunk but where on earth was she? There were no
lights on and her truck was gone. Came back again the next night, same thing.”
Well, this was interesting. Here was Franny insisting Dumpster had been home with her on the nights when Sean Marriott and Bettina were killed, and she hadn’t even been here herself on either night. I thought about asking Scott if Dumpster had been there but then decided I didn’t want to get into discussing Dumpster with Scott.
Instead I changed the subject. “I think the most important thing right now is to get Eliza home and then I think you should leave.”
He threw his arms in the air in an angry gesture. “And I think you should stop being so snotty. I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”
He was right, of course, and that put me even more on the defensive. I wondered what on earth Franny had seen in him even if it had only been for one night. She must have been really drunk because to me he was repellent, son of the Phillionaire or not. He was so awkward, a collection of sharp angles from his curved nose and hunched shoulders to his outturned bony elbows and pigeon toes. And he had the body language to go with it. He didn’t seem to be able to walk straight and he kept lurching much too close to me. I wondered how someone so seemingly uncontrolled could wield a scalpel with the precision required of a surgeon.
For some reason the image of a scalpel reminded me of his association with Bettina. Instead of an arrow flying through the air and piercing her heart, I imagined Scott plunging his scalpel into her aorta. I pictured him slicing her up into little pieces and then I stopped because the last thing I needed to do at this point was to indulge in my futile tendency to obsess about violence.
As for Bettina, I wasn’t sure of my ground in talking about her with him. I had been eavesdropping when I overheard Detective Morrison tell Shotgun about Scott’s dinner with her—but then it appeared most of East Hampton had seen them dining together at the Palm so presumably their date was common knowledge. I rocked Eliza who, wonder of wonders, was actually drifting off to sleep again, and looked at Scott, briefly flashing a prayer that Eliza would not grow up to resemble him in any way.
I softened my tone. “I understand you knew Bettina Pleshette?” I resisted the temptation to repeat his words “pretty well.” “You must be very upset by what happened. I’m sorry.”
I needn’t have worried about whether I should mention him and Bettina in the same breath. It was as if I’d opened some kind of floodgate. He smiled, not exactly the reaction you’d expect from a grieving lover, and puffed up visibly with apparent pride.
“What a terrible loss,” he said.
This had about as much sincerity as when he had first greeted me with “Pleased to meet you, heard a lot about you.”
“You know,” he continued, “I’ve been a terrific help to Detective Morrison. You’ve met Evan Morrison?”
I nodded.
“Oh yes. I told him stuff about Shotgun Marriott. You know, without my input, he’d be nowhere. I had a lot of dope on Shotgun, stuff he couldn’t have got from anyone else.”
“How did you know so much about Shotgun?” I was both intrigued and suspicious. Shotgun and Scott didn’t seem like a good fit. “Were you and he close?”
Scott’s smile faded. “Yeah, well, I never met the guy, actually,” he admitted. “Bettina told me what she’d learned about him. Pillow talk.” The smirk again and I gripped the handle of the baby carriage hard.
“What did she tell you exactly?”
“She was speaking to his son every day in the weeks before she died—before young Sean died.” He said young Sean implying familiarity with Shotgun’s son but I guessed Scott had never met Sean either. And as for Bettina “speaking” to Shotgun, I knew from Shotgun himself that all she was doing was pestering him on the telephone without much success. “And when she was meeting with Sean, she was getting the lowdown on the whole family situation.”
“Which was?”
“An unholy mess. Sean hadn’t seen his mother since she left Shotgun. He’d been raised by his father and he was a—you know, a queer.”
Ah, well, what did I expect? It figured that Scott should be homophobic.
“But here’s where it gets interesting.” He veered toward me again and I stepped aside so that Eliza’s pram was between us. “Sean told Bettina his mother had gotten in touch with him recently. He was very excited because he was going to see her again soon. He told Bettina all about it.”
“He was going to London? Angela Marriott lives in London.”
“I know that,” Scott said quickly. “No, she was coming here. I told Detective Morrison about Bettina’s meetings with Sean and he was pretty interested. He was looking for a link between Bettina and Sean’s father.”
“But they never met, Shotgun and Bettina,” I said. “He told me.”
“Yeah, well, Evan Morrison, he doesn’t necessarily want to believe everything Shotgun Marriott tells him. Not right away at any rate, not without dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every goddamn ‘t’ of every single word the guy says to him.”
“And why do you think that is?”
Scott shrugged. “Guy’s a detective. It’s what they do.”
“So you’ll be going to Bettina’s funeral?” I asked him.
He looked away. “Doubt I’ll have the time. It’s bound to be in California—I think her folks are there—and I don’t think they’ve released the body yet. I’m on call for surgery at Southampton Hospital this week.”
I had the impression it wasn’t just his work that was preventing him from going. There was something else.
“But I’m going to have to do something about her stuff,” he said.
“Her stuff?”
“She stayed a few days at my house. She’d rented this place in the woods up near Shotgun but she didn’t like being there at all. It wasn’t her idea of the Hamptons—north of the highway, nowhere near the ocean. She was pretty classy, she appreciated high-end living and what can I say, my house delivers. She could step out of our bedroom right onto the sand and—”
I noted a wistful air in the way he said “our bedroom.” Scott had clearly been a bit smitten by Bettina. I reckoned he’d have had to be to describe her as classy.
“Her stuff?” I prompted.
“She was always on her cell phone and she’d take endless notes as she talked. It used to drive me insane, she’d scribble on whatever was close to hand, didn’t matter if it was my mail or my calendar, a menu in a restaurant. She’d rip pages out and go off with them.”
“How inconsiderate.” Sounded just how I’d imagined Bettina to behave.
“Yeah, right. So she left all these notes—little scraps of paper—in a drawer in our bedroom along with a whole lot of beauty products in the bathroom.”
“But didn’t the cops come to your house too? If you were seeing Bettina, surely they must have been very interested in what she did there?”
“Sure they were. I told you, Evan Morrison and I have spent a lot of time together. But I put this stuff I was telling you about in a bag and I threw the bag in my car right away when—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. When he heard Bettina was dead?
“I guess I meant to take it to the cops but I forgot all about it.”
“You mean her notes are still in your car?”
He nodded. He was looking at me intently.
I decided to plunge right in.
“Scott, you know I’ve taken over from Bettina with Shotgun Marriott’s book?”
“My dad said something about it. He called me last night, actually. I had no idea that’s what you did, you never mentioned it at the wedding.”
“You never asked,” I said, “and you never mentioned you were seeing Bettina.”
“Well, if I’d known you were in the same line of work—”
“So, I was thinking maybe I might find her notes helpful when I come to write the book. I could give her a big credit.” Like hell I would!
“Hey, that’s a nice gesture. And maybe you could, like, credit me
too?”
“Of course.” Oh boy, was he a piece of work!
“So, great.” He was all smiles now, smarmy, patronizing. We were back at the Old Stone Market and he opened the door of a gleaming Mercedes sedan that was parked in front of the store and reached in to get something. “Here you are.” He handed me a Citarella shopping bag and then a few seconds later I was rid of him. I knew I should be feeling relieved, even triumphant that I had lucked into what would inevitably be valuable material. But somehow I knew that by giving me Bettina’s notes—as opposed to giving them to Detective Morrison—Scott would feel he had something on me and sooner or later it would be payback time.
After he left I wheeled the pram into the store and let Eliza stay sleeping in it while I perched on the stool by the cash register and fretted about the inconsistencies surrounding Franny and Dumpster’s whereabouts on those fateful nights when Sean and then Bettina were murdered. When I heard Rufus’s truck pull in, I raced out to meet them. Rufus gave me what I thought was quite a dirty look and I realized I’d probably scuppered his chances of a good-night kiss. And once I told Franny about Scott’s visit, she barely gave him another glance. She rushed inside to see Eliza and I told Rufus about Scott coming to the Old Stone Market the night of the commitment ceremony, while he and I had been down at the ocean witnessing Sean’s body being pulled out of the water.
“Oh Jesus,” said Rufus, “I had a feeling he might do something like that. He was pretty drunk that night. He told me about Bettina and the truth is he was pretty hooked.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I can see exactly how it went down. The thing about Scott is that he’s pretty full of himself and this woman, Bettina, she was asking everyone a ton of questions, getting background history on the area where Shotgun Marriott had made his home. My guess is that she met Scott and asked if she could interview him, and he took it as a sign she was interested in him. With Scott it’s always about him.” Rufus shook his head but he was smiling. I sensed that his brother infuriated him but that he tolerated Scott in his good-natured way. “I think they had a bit of a fling, she spent some time at his house and found it to be more comfortable than the place she’d rented so she moved in with him for a while. Strikes me she was a bit of a user.”
How to Marry a Ghost Page 10
