“I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I know I said I would, but I can’t. Not right now. We’ll have to come back to it another time.”
And that was it.
Once again I found myself driving home in a state of confusion. He’d talk for just so long and then he seemed to go into a kind of panic. I’d left the tapes lying on the sofa. He hadn’t even wanted me to go up and transcribe them as we’d agreed.
I stared straight ahead with my chin up as I approached the cabin, driving slowly along the dark stretch of road with only the blinking light of the radio tower in the dunes to guide me. My resolve broke down and I glanced in the rearview mirror, expecting to see the twin circles of two headlamps following me.
But it was pitch-black all the way. I pottered about the cabin for a little while, making myself a cup of tea and heating up a bowl of clam chowder for my supper. When I’d finished it I picked up my notepad and lay down on the bed to make yet another start on Tommy’s letter.
I got as far as “My dearest Tommy, I was devastated to hear about your losing” before I fell into possibly the deepest sleep I had enjoyed since arriving in America.
CHAPTER 9
THE BACK ROOM OF THE OLD STONE MARKET looked extremely inviting when I walked in the next morning. The smell of freshly brewed coffee wafted around the room and Franny had laid out a plate of doughnuts and placed a vase of brightly colored anemones in the middle of the table.
“She make coffee shop,” explained Jesus, “she want people come in here, sit, drink coffee, be happy—and buy something.”
It made sense to me. But I could tell the minute I walked into the store that her mood did not match the welcoming atmosphere she had created. She didn’t even acknowledge me and went right on yelling at Rufus who was trying to edge his way out the door.
“Why did you have to tell him? Why? Couldn’t you have just left it where it was?”
I looked at Rufus.
“She’s talking about the bow and arrow,” he said. “She’s pissed that I told Detective Morrison about them.”
“You know about this?” she asked me.
“I was there.”
“See!” She advanced upon Rufus. “Lee didn’t go running to the police and tell them my son’s bow and arrow had been found at a construction site.” She paused for a second in her onslaught. “You didn’t, did you?” I shook my head.
“I didn’t say they were Dumpster’s,” said Rufus wearily. “And he was going to find out about them anyway sooner or later. I wasn’t the only one to see them.”
I had an inkling of how Franny must be feeling. She was worried sick about Dumpster and the fact that she didn’t know where he was half the time. She couldn’t even defend him anymore. She’d gone on record at the arraignment saying she hadn’t been home the nights Sean and Bettina were killed so she couldn’t be his alibi.
“I gotta go,” said Rufus and I followed him out the door.
“I had to tell Morrison. Didn’t I?” he appealed to me.
“Of course,” I said but I wasn’t really listening to him. My attention had been distracted by a car that had drawn up to park alongside Rufus’s truck. Louis Nichols, the president of the Stone Landing Residents Association, got out and went into the store but the person who had caught my attention was his passenger. It was the woman who had appeared on the beach in the middle of my mother’s commitment ceremony. She didn’t look quite the same. As she stepped out of the car I saw that her hair, which had been long and flowing as she walked along the beach, was now scraped back into a French twist. Nor was she wearing the hippie caftan I had first seen her in; she had on a crisp white shirt and jeans. Her face was tanned and weather-beaten, and up close I could see it was etched in lines that told me she was well into her fifties, but even so she was definitely what Tommy would call a looker.
She was looking straight at me but she didn’t seem to register me. She went into the store and I said good-bye to Rufus and followed her, intrigued. Louis Nichols was ordering breakfast. I noticed he followed Franny as she moved about the store doing a stock check, trying to engage her in conversation. The woman I had followed went straight to the back room and poured herself a cup of coffee but instead of sitting down at the table, she stood before the notice board, studying it intently. I moved up to stand behind her and saw her remove the card about the wedding dresses and slip it in her pocket. Was she someone who was interested in buying a wedding dress—or was she the person who had put the card there in the first place?
She was the latter, I discovered with a little frisson of excitement when she sat down at the table and smiled at me, patting the bench beside her. I was a little taken aback. I had come in to get breakfast, not to socialize, loner that I was, but before I could politely decline, Franny came over.
“You two should get to know each other,” she said. “Lee, this is Martha Farrell. Martha, this is Lee Bartholomew. She’s the daughter of the woman Rufus’s dad married.”
“They weren’t married,” I said automatically.
“Yeah, well, whatever.” Franny didn’t look convinced. “But Martha, Lee here is a writer. I mean, a professional writer. She’s published, unlike most of the folks who hang out in writing groups around here and never get anywhere.”
“Like me,” said Martha, giving me a wink. “Only I don’t even go to groups. I just slave away on my own, getting nowhere.”
“Well, anyway, I just thought you guys might have something in common.” Franny was edging away. Louis Nichols had followed her to the table and was sitting down to eat his breakfast. I saw Martha Farrell’s fingers reach out in a fleeting, stroking gesture to his hand on the table. And I noted the way he quickly snatched it away.
“So what do you write?” asked Martha.
I explained about being a ghostwriter and then asked about her work.
“I’m trying to write a novel and the truth is I need guidance,” she said. “I have a confession to make. Franny already told me about you, said you often came by the store in the mornings and maybe I could run into you—you know, accidentally.”
“Ah.” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of this.
“I was kind of wondering if you’d read my manuscript, give me your take on it. I’d pay you, of course,” she added quickly.
“I’m not a novelist,” I pointed out, “or an editor.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m desperate. I just want it read by a professional.”
It was a pretty outrageous request and I cursed Franny silently for setting me up like this.
“I saw you take your card off the notice board,” I said, stalling for time. “Why did you do that?”
“Why? Do you need a wedding dress?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Who knows?” She had caught me by surprise with the question.
“Doesn’t sound like you’d be my best bet as a customer. Actually, I took the card down for two reasons. I’m not really selling my dresses anymore.” She made it sound as if they were her own wedding dresses. “And the other reason is a little darker. Franny said you’re going to be working with Shotgun Marriott on his book. Well, Sean Marriott’s body was found in one of my dresses and I’m not wild about anyone being reminded of the fact that I once sold them.”
“He was wearing one of your dresses?”
“When they pulled him out of the ocean, yes.”
Louis Nichols had been listening silently beside us. Now he finished his breakfast and prepared to leave. Martha clasped his forearm as he stood up. I noticed he looked rather uncomfortable and didn’t return the gesture. “I’ll see you later,” she said. And when he didn’t reply, “Won’t I?”
When he’d gone she turned to me.
“Do you have wheels?”
I nodded. “Do you need a ride?”
“I don’t have a car.” She laughed. “I never learned to drive. Where are you staying? If it’s anywhere near me, it’d be great if you could drop me off.”
When I told her she clapp
ed her hands and said, “Yes, that’s not far away.” She lived farther along the bay.
“Yes, Sean was wearing one of my dresses,” she resumed when we set off in the Jeep.
“You were there when they pulled him out?”
“I was over by the ocean that day. There was a big storm and I love walking by the ocean when the sea’s rough and seeing the breakers. It’s exhilarating. Earlier in the day I’d been walking along the bay and there was a wedding in progress, can you believe it? They went ahead with the weather like that. I like to watch weddings and see what the brides are wearing. This was an older woman—”
“That was my mother,” I said.
She turned in the Jeep and looked at me. “You know, I knew I’d seen you somewhere before. Your mother getting married, you’ll have to tell me that story. Sorry to gate-crash the ceremony but weddings at the water’s edge are perfect. There’s no law to stop me walking along the beach providing I keep below the high-water mark but I’m afraid it’s got me a bit of a reputation. They say I was jilted at the altar and I go to other people’s weddings because I never had one of my own.”
Her cackle reverberated against the canvas roof of the Jeep. I wondered what on earth I was doing with this woman. Was she a nutcase? I suspected her nonstop chatter masked a bundle of nerves.
Of course I knew the answer to my question. I was with her because Sean Marriott had been wearing one of her dresses when he died and because her name began with “M.” M saw something. M saw something. M saw something. The words repeated themselves over and over in my head as the Jeep hurtled down Cranberry Hole Road. Meet M Mallaby beach at 9.
“Anyway, yes,” she said, “I walked along the bay all the way to Lazy Point and the Shellfish Hatchery guys were there with this veil that had become entangled in a clam raft they were towing. Everybody was standing around and going ooh and aah. What was a wedding veil doing floating in the bay? It was drenched but I recognized it immediately as one of mine. Then we got word that a body had been pulled out of the ocean so I called Louis Nichols on my cell phone and asked him to come and pick me up and drive me over there.”
“But how come Sean was wearing one of your wedding dresses?”
“Because he used to come over and borrow them. He liked dressing up in them. He’d go for walks through the woods in them and I’m here to tell you—he made a seriously beautiful bride.”
“When did you give him that particular dress?”
“Oh, I don’t know. About a week earlier. Wait a minute, slow down, you make a left here.”
She directed me to take a turn off Cranberry Hole Road not far from the one that led to Shotgun’s house. Like the dirt track going to Mallaby, this road ran through woods, but instead of leading to a proper driveway, it petered out into a sandy lane. We arrived at a clearing in the beach grass on which stood two beaten-up trailers.
“Here we are. Home sweet home.”
“You live here?” I said before I could stop myself. What was a woman like her doing living in a makeshift trailer park? “Sorry, that was rude. I just expected—”
“You just expected me to live in a fancy Hamptons home. Well, get real. There’s plenty of us who live out here who don’t have a bean to our name.”
“Do you own this land?”
“Not an inch of it. It belongs to the town, although I got this spot from an old fisherman I met when I first came here. He leased it. He came back from several years working on long-liners or gillnetters or draggers or whatever work he could find and discovered his little shack had fallen down, been blown over in a hurricane or something. So he took off again—but not before he’d told me I could do whatever I wanted with his spot. See, we’re on Lazy Point here—”
“We are?” I looked along the bay and recognized the inlet where I’d gone after my first visit to Shotgun.
“—and as I said, this old bayman, he doesn’t own the land. The town does. At the end of WWII the town fathers divided the beach around here into various lots and assigned leases. You could own a house but not the land. The town kept that. And you can only sell your house, catch-22 style, to someone who already lives at Lazy Point. So when his shack fell down, the old guy didn’t really have anything.”
“So these trailers?”
“I found them, had them towed to the lot and deposited right onto the beach. I scoured all the yard sales and the dump for a mass of broken-down furniture and then I found someone to fix all of it. I talked a ship’s carpenter I knew into working for next to nothing alongside local plumbers and electricians and pretty soon I had a home. Come on in and take a look.”
She opened the door to the first trailer and it was like entering another world. Right in front of us was a wood-burning stove, the chimney going out through the roof of the trailer. There were no chairs, only benches built into the wall around a table that was nailed to the floor.
“For when the next hurricane hits,” said Martha ominously.
In the window of the trailer overlooking the water there was a big ship’s wheel and a telescope.
“In the eyes of the town these trailers are his so I kind of wanted them to have a masculine, seafaring feel.” Martha stood behind the wheel. “See, it’s like you’re steering a ship, looking out to sea. I figured if he ever came back, he’d feel right at home.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Oh, about twenty years. He’s probably dead.” The infuriating cackle again.
“So the town could turn you out at any time?”
Her laughter subsided instantly. “You’ve got it in one,” she said. Her manic self-assurance faltered and for a second I saw a vulnerable middle-aged woman of no means whatsoever.
At the other end was a kitchen area. All the appliances were pretty basic with the exception of a giant stainless-steel fridge that dwarfed the rest of the confined space.
“Isn’t she a beaut?” said Martha. “Just got her in a sale. Now come and meet my girls.”
Did she have daughters stashed away somewhere? Cats?
The trailers stood opposite each other, leaving a sandy patio in between. There was a screened-in porch attached to the back of one trailer.
“See, I’ve got a little fridge set up out here and a grill. This is my summer living room.” She pointed to a little card table and some wrought-iron weatherproof beach furniture. There were little feminine touches here and there, window boxes with geraniums, brightly colored cushions, displays of conches and other shells.
The layout of the other trailer was weird. We walked straight into a primitive bathroom—a shower and loo behind a curtain. To the left was Martha’s bedroom—a double bunk bed built into the wall covered with a patchwork quilt, a little rocker, and another wood-burning stove. Were they her only way of heating the place? High up, just underneath the ceiling, bookshelves ran around the walls but when I glanced up I saw they were crammed with magazines, not books. I looked closer and saw they were all back issues of Brides magazine. A tiny feeling of unease began to work its way around my head.
“Isn’t it great?” she said. “I can lie in bed and listen to the waves lapping away outside.”
“What about in the winter? Doesn’t it get a little bracing out here on the beach?”
Her enthusiasm evaporated in a second. “It’s a nightmare,” she conceded. “And it can be pretty terrifying. Of course it’s calmer over here on the bay side but there are times when I think the waves are going to rise up and obliterate me. The tide comes up underneath the trailers and I just sit in here and quake.”
Suddenly I realized she was in a far more precarious state than I had begun to imagine. Whatever image she tried to present to the world, by living here right on the beach she was bordering on bag lady status.
“But hey!” she said, the smile returning. “It’s free and you know what? I could put up with everything if it wasn’t for the wind. Wind destroys me, it always has. It’s not just my arthritis, it’s what it does to my head. Sometimes I
think I’m going to go crazy. I know it looks cozy in here but the wind always finds a way to get to me.”
“I hate the wind too,” I said. “I can’t write a word when it’s howling outside.”
“Me either,” she said, pointing to a corner, and I noticed a little laptop set up on a makeshift trestle table. I couldn’t help but admire how organized she was.
“So, time you met the girls.”
Her “girls” were her wedding dresses. They were in the other end of the trailer on the far side of the bathroom. A tiny portion of the area housed Martha’s own clothes in a built-in closet and a chest of drawers, while the rest of the room was given over to racks, the kind they use in garment districts to wheel clothes up and down streets. And hanging from them, encased in transparent plastic covers blurring the sight of them and rendering them as lines of girlish wraiths, were wedding dresses. There must have been at least fifty and they spooked me because they looked like an assembly of reproachful brides who had been put in storage and forgotten.
“Aren’t they just the most beautiful things you have ever seen?” Martha plunged into them, unzipping the covers and fingering the lace or the satin or the silk. “So your mother got married in a short dress. Makes a change. What happened to your dad?”
“She’s still married to him.” The look on her face when I said that made me rush to explain about the Phillionaire. Then I asked her flat out. “Why do you collect wedding dresses?”
“Well, it’s a long story but, you know, there’s no smoke without fire.” She led me back outside to sit in the screened-in porch and I was relieved. I really couldn’t wait to get away from the wedding dresses. I felt they were watching me.
“You want some lemonade?” She took a pitcher out of the little fridge and poured me a glass. “You see, I was jilted a long time ago right before the wedding and it nearly destroyed me. But you know, I’m from an era when women didn’t give in to their neuroses, didn’t fall apart and start spouting a lot of self-help claptrap like they do now.” She reached across and patted my hand to show she didn’t mean me. “So I pulled myself together and I decided I wouldn’t become bitter and twisted. I would start over and somehow I would make something out of what had happened to me. So I moved out here and all I had left was my wedding dress. I was an actress back then and I was working off-Broadway. I was moving around all the time, wherever my work took me. I really didn’t have that many possessions. It was June. I went for a walk along the beach. I walked by three weddings and I thought to myself, this is big business out here.”
How to Marry a Ghost Page 16
