“He mentioned that,” I said, “not that she was a user but he told me he ‘delivered’ on the high-end living. I think he was rather proud that she chose to stay at his house. It didn’t sound like he had a clue that she was exploiting him in any way.”
“Sounds like Scott,” said Rufus, “pretentious as they come but naïve at the same time. Anyway, the other night, the night Sean Marriott was killed, the night before the commitment ceremony, Bettina told Scott it was over. She probably realized he didn’t have much to tell her and if she went on staying at his house, he’d become a bit of a millstone around her neck. So at the commitment ceremony he’s all bitter and twisted because he never saw it coming. He’s like, I thought we had something special going on. And he was looking for someone to console him so when he’d had quite a bit to drink he started talking about going over to Franny’s.”
He kept glancing up the stairs, obviously hoping that the evening wasn’t over, that she was going to come down and spend more time with him. But there was no sign of her.
“So anyway,” he said, “I tried to stop him but once he had the idea in his head, he was determined to go there. He even started talking about Eliza as if he’d totally forgotten that he’d never acknowledged her as his child. That’s typical Scott. Just because Bettina breaks up with him it doesn’t stop him thinking he’s God’s gift to women. I guess he imagined Franny would welcome him with open arms.”
For a second I wondered how Rufus thought women saw him.
“So did you have a good evening?” I asked him, curious about how things had progressed with him and Franny.
“Fine—till we got back here.” He gave one final glance up the stairs and then turned toward the door. “I guess that’s it for tonight. Everything all right at Dad’s place?”
Okay, so he didn’t want to talk about it.
“It’s wonderful,” I said. “You’ll have to come over soon for dinner if I ever manage to find the time to go food shopping. Franny’s warned me off this place, says I can’t afford it.”
“She’s never going to get this business off the ground if she keeps saying stuff like that. So, give me a call and we’ll get together. I’ll bring take-out. From here, most likely.” He grinned.
After he’d gone I went upstairs and found Franny warming up some milk in the kitchen.
“I know about Scott,” I said immediately. I didn’t see any point in beating about the bush. “About him being Eliza’s father. Rufus told me.”
“Well, God bless Rufus,” she said, somewhat acidly I thought. “Good to know he’s spreading my family business about the place.”
“Franny, you know I wouldn’t take it any further. I would never interfere. But you know Scott was pretty open with me about his involvement with you.”
“There is no involvement with me. And yes, I know you wouldn’t interfere. It’s not your interference I’m worried about.”
“You don’t want Scott to see Eliza?”
Franny turned to me and I saw the anxiety in her face.
“I’m scared, Lee. He’s her father and I guess Rufus told you the circumstances surrounding her conception. But the moment when he could have taken the kind of fatherly interest that I would welcome has long since passed. Now I’m kind of scared of what he might do and it’s all that woman’s fault.”
That woman. Did she mean who I thought she meant?
“She was a damn meddler,” said Franny, “couldn’t keep her nose out of anything. She came around here one day and told me she was seeing Scott and that I ought to give him access to his daughter. What business is it of yours? I felt like saying. As if I’d ever tried to stop him! But then she started going on about how Eliza would be better off with her father, how he could give her a better life, that it wasn’t fair on a child to raise her cooped up above a store like this. I mean, hello, how many children does she have and when did she become the expert?”
Franny rolled her eyes and grinned and I warmed to her more than ever. She was under a lot of stress one way or another and yet she managed to retain her sense of humor in spite of everything.
“And then Scott started turning up,” she said.
“Did you let him see Eliza?”
“I hid from him. He banged on the door to the store downstairs but I didn’t let him in. He probably thought I wasn’t here because sometimes I let Dumpster take my truck in the evening if I’m not using it.”
“Scott told me he came round here the night Sean Marriott was killed—and the next night when Bettina was murdered—and there was no one here.”
“Like I just said, I was hiding. Dumpster was out with my truck.”
“But Franny,” I said, “you told me—and you told Evan Morrison—that Dumpster was here with you both nights.”
She turned away from me and began to walk Eliza up and down the cramped kitchen space, rocking her and crooning to her.
“Franny?”
“Okay, that’s what I told you and that’s what I told Detective Morrison. So what?”
Her back was turned so I couldn’t see her face.
“So you lied and because you lied, Shotgun Marriott’s been arrested because you blew his alibi. Now were you here or weren’t you?”
“No,” she said so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her. “I wasn’t here either night.”
“So you have no idea if Dumpster was here or not? He could easily have been with Shotgun like he says he was.”
“He said he was there? He told you that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He could be lying.”
“You’d call your own son a liar?”
“I don’t want to. That’s why I lied and said I was here and he was with me.”
“But he wasn’t here?”
“I don’t know where he was,” she said. “I wasn’t here because I was out looking for him. He’d been acting strange and I had a feeling he was up to his old ways again, you know, dealing. I’d withheld the use of the truck for a while, pretended I needed it, but that didn’t stop him. He just borrowed one from someone else. So I put Eliza in my truck—and drove around looking for him. That’s why Scott couldn’t find me. I needed to track down Dumpster before Evan Morrison got to him first.”
“Did you go to Shotgun’s? Wouldn’t that be the first place you’d look?”
“I drove to the end of the dirt track but I didn’t go up to the house. I figured Dumpster wouldn’t take drugs to Shotgun’s, he wouldn’t involve him in anything like that. I’ve told you, Dumpster worships Shotgun.”
“And you never found him?”
She shook her head. “I thought I saw something in the woods as I drove up and I got out of the car and yelled his name but I got no response. About a week earlier he’d come home with a deer he’d shot. I was worried that he might be hunting deer on Shotgun’s property, if he wasn’t involved in dirty drug business again.”
“Because Shotgun hadn’t given him permission?”
“Because nobody gave him permission, Shotgun or otherwise. It’s too early. The hunting season doesn’t start till October.”
“Franny, you have to tell Detective Morrison what you’ve told me. How do you know he hasn’t already heard from Scott that you weren’t at home those nights?”
“Oh please!” said Franny. “Don’t tell me you believe what Scott tells you.”
“Do it, Franny,” I said, “otherwise it’s going to be a whole lot harder for you later on—and for Dumpster.”
“You know, I have to open the store for breakfast at six thirty, which means getting up at five thirty to prepare,” she said, “and Eliza’s probably going to get me up before then anyway.”
She said it pleasantly enough but there was an imperceptible trace of impatience in her voice so I took the hint and left.
As I drove along the open stretch of Cranberry Hole Road that led past the cabin, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the headlamps of a lone car behind me. I slowed down and waited for
it to overtake me but it didn’t.
It was tailing me.
I veered off sharply onto the dirt road that led to the cabin, expecting it to follow me, but it continued on down Cranberry Hole Road and I sighed with relief.
But not for long.
Once inside the cabin, I brushed my teeth and flopped down exhausted and fumbled for the remote. But when I switched off the light, intending to let Letterman lull me to sleep once again, I saw the flickering light from the returning headlamps projected through the window onto the wall in front of me.
Why hadn’t I done anything about covering the windows? Now if I went near them I would be silhouetted in full view of whoever was out there. I gunned the TV to life because I knew the sound of an approaching car would so totally freak me out that I would lose it. And maybe the sound of TV voices would make it seem there was someone here with me. And maybe I was delusional. A loud and rackety cartoon series burst into the room and I nearly fell out of bed in shock.
Was it better to watch a talk show or cartoons while awaiting my killer? Would I be attacked during a commercial break? Would the killer turn the TV off after he’d disposed of me? Would he have a shotgun? Or a bow and arrow? What in the world had induced me to stay in such an isolated place? I had been so enchanted with the idea of having such a perfect little retreat to hole up in, I hadn’t stopped to think that I would be a sitting duck for a killer on the prowl.
It was no good telling myself that there was no reason why anyone would have a motive to kill me. I was all alone in a deserted place so it was a given. I slipped out of bed and went to stand beside one of the windows so I wouldn’t be seen. And then, just when it seemed the car was going to crash right into the cabin, it turned around and roared away down the dirt road.
Kids, I told myself. Kids, kids, kids, just as Rufus had said. As usual I’d been imagining myself to be in danger.
The next morning I awoke bright and early and picked up the Phillionaire’s land line because I couldn’t make international calls on my cell phone. Cath was not as antagonistic as I had expected her to be when I called her back to apologize. It was often like this in our friendship. She would be—I felt—overly critical of me, haranguing me for something I had done, and, if I defended myself, then she was quite capable of working herself up into a storm of disapproval that could create a rift between us for weeks. But if I apologized, in other words if I acknowledged that she was right, then she was invariably all charm in twenty seconds.
“Poor little thing,” she cooed when I told her about Eliza’s incessant crying, “she’s probably suffering from colic.”
“Yes, that’s it, she is,” I said, although I had absolutely no idea. I just wanted to be part of the baby club too. I had to own up to a tiny niggle that had taken root at the back of my mind and was festering every day. If Tommy and I had gone ahead with the wedding, we might already be thinking about starting a baby by now, something I wouldn’t have thought about for two seconds a year ago. But seeing Cath with a baby before I had left London—and now Franny—I was beginning to worry that I mustn’t leave it too late.
“Then I really pity the poor mother,” said Cath, not giving me an ounce of sympathy, I noticed. “Who is she by the way?”
I told her the whole story, how I had met Franny via Rufus and how Franny’s son was working for Shotgun Marriott.
“Wait a second,” said Cath, “back up. What’s this about Shotgun Marriott?”
“Well, that’s whose book I’m supposed to be doing. That’s why I came to America in the first place, remember?”
“You never said it was his book,” said Cath.
I could have sworn I did but then I had noticed that since she’d had Marcus, Cath wasn’t as interested in the details of my life as she used to be.
“So anyway,” she said, “you lucked into this job because the first choice got murdered? And now you’re saying his son is dead too?”
“Didn’t you read about it in the papers?”
“Lee,” said Cath in the overly patient tone she sometimes adopted that always made me feel like an idiot, “with Marcus in my life, when do I have time to read the papers? But you working for Shotgun Marriott, I can’t wait to tell Richie.”
“Why? I didn’t know Richie was a fan of his.”
“Lee, for Christ’s sake! You don’t know about the groupie that was found dead on Shotgun Marriott’s bed?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, don’t you remember? Max Austin was working for the detective that investigated that case.”
“Well, I didn’t know that,” I said.
Max Austin. There was someone I hadn’t thought about for a while. He was Richie’s boss and the detective who had been in charge of the arson murders in my London neighborhood. He was a bit of a moody curmudgeon and at first I had found him distant and a little scary. But the more I had got to know about him, the more I began to feel sorry for him. I found it particularly poignant that his wife had been murdered and her killer had never been found. He seemed to me a really sad case, still mourning his wife after five years as a widower with no one new on the horizon. I’d witnessed him starting to spruce himself up a bit—a haircut, smart clothes—and in my own dippy romantic way I had assumed he’d found a girlfriend.
I was an ostrich. I dug my head in the sand and ignored the signs. The reason Max Austin was giving himself a makeover was because he had developed a big fat brooding crush on me and I didn’t realize it until it was too late.
“Yes,” said Cath. It had been she who had pointed out to me the reason Inspector Austin was knocking on my door every day to ask yet another question regarding his investigation. “He told us all about it when we were out for dinner one night. He was pretty junior then, of course. Not the big wheel he is now. By the way, did you know he’d got a promotion? He’s detective superintendent now. Anyway, he did quite a bit of the legwork, questioning the people at the place where it happened. He had to deal with the groupie’s family when they all came rushing over from the States pointing the finger.”
“At Shotgun?”
“Well, who else?”
“I didn’t even know the groupie was American.”
“Well, now you do. So tell me, how did this Franny person get you to babysit? You never helped me out with Marcus in London.”
“You never asked, Cath,” I protested. “I had the impression you didn’t trust me with him.”
Cath had been obsessively protective of Marcus, barely allowing me to hold him for more than a minute. She must be coming to the end of her maternity leave from her job as a teacher and I wondered how she would cope with leaving him in someone else’s care.
“Franny’s pretty relaxed about Eliza,” I said and waited to see if she would rise to the bait. When she didn’t say anything, I went on: “It’s so ironic, she has this little white picket fence all around her store and it makes you think she must live this apple-pie American dream but I’m telling you, Cath, her life is a nightmare.”
I expected Cath to ask me why and I was looking forward to a good gossip about Franny. She intrigued me and I regretted that there was no one with whom I could discuss her. Rufus was the closest bet but it was unlikely that he would have an objective take on her anymore.
“We’re all surrounding ourselves with a dream to a certain extent, Lee.” Oh, okay, she was in “wise Cath preaches to irresponsible Lee” mode. It was best to say nothing and just listen with one ear. “I expect you’re putting up a bit of a white picket fence around your own life at the moment even though your dream’s been shattered.”
Was she referring to my wedding being called off?
“How is Tommy?” I asked. “My mother told me you’d seen him.”
“He’s in a pretty bad way. He devoted his life to two things—the BBC and you—and both of them are gone.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” I knew I sounded pretty sour but I couldn’t help myself.
“He was let go by
the BBC and you went off to America.”
“How many times have I told you, Cath, he was the one who put a stop to the wedding. I know I’ve been putting him off all these years but this time I was so ready to marry him, I really was.”
Then she surprised me.
“I think he knows he made a mistake, Lee. He really misses you.”
“He does?”
“He came round here to tell me he’d lost his job but once he’d got that out the way all he did was talk about you. Got pretty boring, actually.” She laughed.
I didn’t know what to say.
“Lee? You still there? Call him. He’s dying to hear from you.”
“So why doesn’t he call me?”
“He told me he had.”
Well, that was true enough.
“It would be so great if you two could get back together,” said Cath, “but you’ve got to strike now while the proverbial iron’s hot and your absence is making his heart grow fonder and all that crap.”
“Okay.” I laughed. “I’ll call him.” That was the thing about Cath. No matter how annoying I found her, I had to admit she always had my best interests at heart.
But every time I called Tommy, he wasn’t home. I tried at odd moments throughout the day and I always got the machine. I was beginning to worry about not having heard from him. I had left a message telling him I loved him and received a resounding silence in return. In desperation I sent him an e-mail. “Did you get my message? Call me back.” Tommy doesn’t do e-mail if he can help it. He’s a great text-messager and I had been used to constantly picking up my mobile only to read “what’s 4 dinner” or “gone 2 pub” on my screen. But for some reason he finds e-mailing a big effort, too much like writing a letter.
It boomeranged back and after a second I realized why. I had sent it to his old e-mail address at the BBC and of course he was no longer there. So there was nothing left to do but wait for him to get in touch of his own accord.
How to Marry a Ghost Page 11
