It was Kit who befriended the girl at Iona’s instruction and it was Kit who suggested the midnight feast to her, leading her by the hand through the pitch-black of the gym to the picnic she had prepared at the far end. It was Kit who motioned the girl to sit cross-legged on the floor, with her back to the place where Iona stood, waiting in the shadows beside the noose hanging from the bar. It was Kit who lighted the candle and encouraged the girl to eat the sausage rolls and Crunchie bars that Kit had sneaked out of the school to buy, and to drink glass after plastic glass of vodka and Coke from Iona’s secret stash of alcohol.
Iona might have masterminded the murder but Kit was every inch her willing accomplice, helping to heft the drunken girl onto the chair and holding her steady while Iona secured the noose. Iona might have been the one who kicked aside the chair but Kit cleared away the picnic and wiped the chair clean of prints like the good little slave that she was. It didn’t matter if they left their mark on the rope, said Iona, it was a climbing rope they had touched legitimately many times before in gym class.
And then I cursed Martha out loud to the surprise of a passing seagull waddling along the water line. The end of the book was missing. The story stopped dead after the body had been found, the detective had arrived, and Iona appeared to be on the brink of pointing the finger at poor little Kit.
I stomped back to the cabin in a rage and called Martha. There was no reply and I left a message on her machine. “Martha, the end of your book is missing. I need to know what happens! Call me as soon as you can.”
But she didn’t call back and the next day I woke up thinking I would drag Tommy along the beach to her trailer for an early morning walk. I’d beard her in her den and make her hand over the final pages. But when I rolled out of bed I stepped on Tommy’s passport. Distributing the contents of his suitcase around the cabin was clearly not enough for him. Now he had upended his knapsack on the floor beside the bed in search of God knows what and his passport had somehow landed over on my side.
I picked it up and flicked through it to look at his photo—
as you do—and blinked. I found myself staring at a moody and expertly lit head shot of the hulk whose bloated seminaked body was rising and falling under the covers beside me. Lying on his stomach, he had a pillow over his head and all I could see was a bit of stubbled chin resting on one of his huge paws.
I looked again at the picture. There were shadows in the hollows below his cheekbones and you could see every single one of his incredibly long eyelashes. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize him. I’d seen him look like this—hair immaculate, freshly shaved, a suit and tie—but only at weddings and funerals and Very Special Occasions. This wasn’t a passport photo, it was a glamour shot.
I whipped the pillow off his head.
“Oy!” His arm shot out and grabbed it. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”
I put his passport photo within an inch of his nose. “Where on earth did you get this taken? Doesn’t look like it comes from one of those little booths the rest of us go to when we need a passport photo.”
He sat up and gave me a grumpy look. “Those places make you look crap.”
“Tommy, it’s a passport. Everyone looks crap in their passport photo.”
“Not if you have a proper photo done. It’s important what you look like when you go abroad.”
“Ambassador Kennedy?”
“Stop taking the piss. We’re all ambassadors for our country.”
“God, you’re pompous this morning.” Tommy was not normally vain. For some reason it irritated me that he should care so much what he looked like in his passport photo. Probably because I knew I looked so utterly dreadful in mine.
Which reminded me. My visa. What had Evan Morrison said? They’d only given me a month? What was today? September 28 or 29? Oh shit. My time was running out.
I flicked through Tommy’s passport again till I found the little white I-94 card.
“Jesus, Tommy, they’ve given you three months to stay in the country.”
“Is that all? I told them I’d be here for a long time.”
“What do you mean, is that all? They only gave me a month.”
“Can we have pancakes for breakfast?” He was out of bed and padding naked toward the bathroom, scratching his tummy. “Franny made Rufus pancakes the other morning when I was over there. That’s what they do in America, pancakes.”
“Tommy, we are trying to decrease your stomach, not—”
“Okay, okay.” He stopped scratching,
He disappeared behind the shower curtain and I sat down heavily on a barstool.
“You’d better give Rufus a bit of warning that you’re not going to be around for a while,” I shouted to him. “We’re going back to London as soon as I can book a flight. I need to renew my visa.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Tommy, reappearing with a towel wrapped around his waist. “Mine’s good for another three months, as you’ve just pointed out.”
“But don’t you want to come back with me?”
“What’s the point?” he said. “Bit pricey hopping back and forth across the Atlantic. Might as well get my money’s worth and stay here. Besides,” he grinned, “I like America.”
He wasn’t the only one who had no plans to return to England.
To my amazement my mother announced that she wasn’t going to sell the unfinished house Phil had left her. She would continue building it in his memory.
“Maybe there will be some things you can do for me while you’re there,” she said when I told her I was going back to London.
At that point I fled. The last thing I wanted was to be given a list of repairs to deal with. I called the airline and booked myself on a flight leaving three days hence. I was procrastinating as usual, delaying my departure, but constantly running through my head was the distinct feeling that I had a load of unfinished business to attend to before I left.
And then Shotgun suddenly appeared on my doorstep again.
He was looking very English in a cream linen blazer over a white shirt, a pair of floppy navy linen trousers, and a pair of plimsolls—the canvas shoes we used to wear at school before they invented trainers. All he needed was a panama hat or a boater to complete the picture of an English village gent. But his face was wretched. Dark shadows beneath his eyes and hard lines had suddenly appeared running down either side of his mouth.
We stood facing each other in awkward silence for about twenty seconds until I remembered my manners and gestured for him to come inside.
“Cup of tea?” I said. “Marmite sandwich?” I held up Tommy’s jar.
He smiled and shook his head. “I won’t stay long. I wanted to ask you if you took away the disk you were working on the last time you left Mallaby? I thought it was beside the computer but it’s gone. I found the tape but I couldn’t find the disk. Do you have it?”
“Well, yes, I did,” I said, startled at the reminder of how paranoid he was about anything leaving his possession. “I sort of got the idea you were a bit clueless when it came to computers. I thought if I took the disk, then I could begin work on the book here—on my laptop.” I pointed to it.
“But you’re not going to be working on the book anymore so I need it back.” He spoke with exaggerated patience but there was a distinct edge to his voice.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Surely you took it the other day when you were here?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head at me, “I didn’t.”
“Well, it’s not here. When I looked for it, it was gone and it was right after you were here so I assumed you’d taken it. I’d labeled it with your name so I thought you must have seen it and pocketed it. I was rather annoyed that you didn’t say anything, to tell you the truth.”
“Try to get it through your head,” he was on his feet now, “that I did not take it. Someone else must have and that’s a bit of a disaster. The last thing I want is for some unauthorized person to be in possession of the tr
anscripts of everything I said on those tapes. It’s a disaster, Lee. You had absolutely no right to take that disk.”
I was beginning to get angry so I went on the defensive. “Well, perhaps I’ve just mislaid it but I have to tell you, Shotgun—I mean Kip—that anyone writing a book on a computer needs disks so I was completely within my rights to take it. What’s more if I find it I’m going to hang on to it. I’ve decided I’m going to do a book on you whether you cooperate or not. It’ll be a favorable portrait, I promise you. And I won’t turn it in until I have all the facts about the murders. All of them,” I added. “The murder of the groupie in London and what happened to Sean and Bettina.”
“Cooperate?” Shotgun virtually spat out the word. “What do you mean ‘cooperate’? It’s my story and if anything I would enlist your cooperation in telling it, not the other way around.”
“No, you don’t get it,” I said, exasperated, “I’m going to do my book now. I’m willing to ghost your story for you but if you’re still refusing to continue with that then I have no option but to do my own book. And I’ll hunt down the facts on my own.”
“You can’t!” Now he was totally enraged. “Don’t you understand what I’ve been trying to tell you? I thought I was going to be able to, I did want to do a book, I swear to you I did, but I’ve changed my mind.” He looked at me suddenly and the expression in his eyes unnerved me for a second. “For your sake,” he said, “I’m canceling the book for you.”
“For my sake?” I was mystified. “But why?”
“You can work it out,” he said, softer now. “Bettina was all set to do the book even without my cooperation and look what happened to her. I’ve grown fond of you, Lee. Don’t worry”—he must have seen the look of alarm on my face—“I’m not going to make any more moves on you—unless you want me to, that is—but I don’t want anything to happen to you. I think you should just walk away from this project and anything else that has to do with me. Go back to London—for your own good.”
“I am going back to London,” I said slowly, not looking at him. “My visa’s run out.”
“Well, don’t come back. Believe me, I’m not happy saying this. I’ll miss you. I’d have liked to have the chance to see a lot of you. But you have to get away from me. And if that disk turns up,” he was standing very close to me now, “destroy it.”
And then he leaned forward, gave me a lingering kiss just above my left ear that sent an electric shiver through me, and disappeared out the door. I watched him through the window as he hurtled through the beach grass, his long legs striding up and down the dunes until all I could see was the top of his head receding down the bay.
Would I ever see him again? I wondered. Why had he pulled the plug on the book at this late stage? Was he covering up for Dumpster? I didn’t like any of it, least of all the implication that Bettina’s fate awaited me if I continued with the book. Was that a threat?
Whatever it was I was going to ignore it. I needed something practical to do to calm my quaking nerves so I set about searching for the missing disk. But after twenty minutes I was forced to admit that it was nowhere in the cabin.
But who on earth could have taken it?
Martha still hadn’t called me back by lunchtime so I set off along the beach to seek her out at the trailers. It was a gray overcast day and the wind rippled the waters in the bay and caused the beach grass to rustle all around me. How did Martha survive out here in winter, I wondered, when the bay was an expanse of ice, the snow had piled up on the beach, and there was a gale howling so loudly she probably couldn’t hear herself think? No wonder she was trying to find a rich savior.
Tommy’s take on Martha had disturbed me in its vehemence.
“She sounds like a nutter,” he said after I had described her to him in bed the night before. “I don’t know why you’re hanging out with her.”
I was astonished. “What makes you say that? You don’t even know her.”
“Dunno. She sounds weird. What’s she doing out here anyway?”
And of course when I told him about her “girls,” the wedding dresses in whose company she spent most of her time, he punched the air above him.
“What’d I tell you? She’s been living out in those trailers with forty-mile winds doing her head in for years on end. Stands to reason. She’s loony tunes.” He tickled me and I yelped. “Of course you know what they say, takes one to know one. She took one look at a neurotic old bat like you and thought There’s my soul mate. You never had a prayer.”
I’d thrown a pillow at him and he’d pounced on me and within minutes we were enjoying the best sex we’d had in months, literally. And now, I thought as I walked along the water’s edge, skipping out of reach of the incoming tide, I was leaving him.
Martha wasn’t at her trailers. I banged on both doors and peered through the windows and then I got a shock.
Inside, the place was totally bare. All that remained was the built-in bunks and appliances. All Martha’s belongings were gone. And it was when I saw that the eerie silhouettes of the wedding dresses were no longer hanging in their plastic bags that I knew she had gone for good. Martha would never leave her girls behind.
I backed away so quickly I overbalanced onto the sand.
And felt something hard under my right buttock.
I rolled onto my side to see what it was. At first it looked to me like hard sand. I was at a part of the trailer nearest the beach where the water ran underneath it at high tide. Then I noticed little specks of something dark protruding here and there. There appeared to be an object buried under the sand that the tide must have gradually uncovered. Or maybe it was something that had been tossed into the sea and then washed up on shore.
I scrabbled away at the wet sand until I had exposed it.
“Need a hand there?” I looked up quickly to see Louis Nichols standing above me. “What you got there?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said as he helped me to my feet.
I kicked sand over the quiver quickly, thinking right away that Dumpster must have come here to bury it after throwing his bow and arrow in the cement pit along the bay. I had serious difficulty in accepting that Dumpster was involved in either Sean or Bettina’s killing yet there was no denying the facts were mounting against him. And Shotgun appeared to be covering for him. He had made no secret that he was harboring him at Mallaby.
“I came here to look for Martha,” I said to distract Louis Nichols’s attention from the quiver.
“Me too,” said Louis. “I’ve been trying to reach her for a couple of days.”
“Well, it looks like she’s gone,” I said. “There’s no sign of her belongings.”
“You’re kidding?” he said and he looked so alarmed that I began to feel anxious.
“No, I’m not. Take a look.”
“I came here to apologize,” he said. “There’s no other way to put this but I dumped her the other night. Said some pretty awful things as a matter of fact. Told her she was becoming like an albatross around my neck and that we should maybe cool it for a while. She took it pretty bad.”
“And you’re surprised?” I said bitterly. Poor Martha. She probably had been a bit clingy but I imagined he must have been pretty rough on her.
Once again I dismissed the thought that I should go straight to Detective Morrison and tell him about the quiver. I had to get it back into Dumpster’s possession before Evan Morrison got hold of it.
“Do you want a ride?” said Louis. “It’s getting pretty bleak out here.”
“No, I’m fine,” I told him. “I’m just along the beach.”
“Okay,” he said. “If you hear where Martha’s gone, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know. I just hope she hasn’t gone and done something stupid.”
“Like what?” I had been wondering if the old fisherman had come back and reclaimed his lot on the beach from Martha. Or maybe the town had finally figured out that she had no right to be there.
“She could work her
self up into a pretty emotional state when she got upset,” said Louis. “She never actually said she was going to kill herself but I always thought she was the type.”
I said good-bye to Louis and watched him drive away. I was horrified by his words but I had to admit they had a ring of truth. Desperate, unstable, and disappearing without a word, Martha was a prime example that life in the Hamptons was not always a walk on the beach. As I made my way back to the cabin, with the quiver bundled up in my sweatshirt, I looked out over the bay and prayed that she too would not be dragged from the water in a wedding dress.
CHAPTER 16
TOMMY DROVE ME TO THE AIRPORT WITH MUSIC BLAR-ing all the way. I had thought we might use the journey to have a serious talk about our future but I couldn’t compete with his favorite tape of the Blues Brothers blasting at full volume, followed by Gretchen Wilson, his new country music passion.
“Now I’m in America,” he yelled above the music, “it’s probably only a hop, skip, and a jump to Nashville.”
“Planning a visit to the Grand Ole Opry?” I said, burrowing in my bag for my passport. I’d been known to leave it behind before.
“Well, that too, but I thought maybe I could do a bit of singing myself. Something I’ve always wanted to try, you know, Lee?”
“Tommy, you can’t—” I was about to say You can’t sing, because no one in their right mind would call the tuneless moaning he emitted in the bath every morning singing. But the little boy side of Tommy with his hopeless dreams had always been the part of him that I loved the most. I needed his eternal optimism to balance my crabby neuroses and keep me on an even keel. So I couldn’t pour cold water on his ludicrous assumption that he might have a chance at being a country singer. I just couldn’t.
How to Marry a Ghost Page 26
