“You knew,” I said, looking directly at him and speaking in a tone that brooked no evasion on his part, “you knew it was she who killed the groupie. There must have been some clue. You removed the pillow she used, something.”
But he’d had fourteen years to perfect his story.
“It was a long time ago,” was all he said and later on in the book he left out the fact that Dumpster had told him what he had seen so he wasn’t implicated there either.
It was collusion on my part too. Shotgun was taking a big risk. I could easily report what he had said to me but I knew that I never would. Apart from the fact that I would be done for obstruction, it was as I had told Max—I liked Shotgun. And for Franny’s sake, I would keep quiet about Dumpster too.
Shotgun and I established a routine whereby I arrived for work at ten each morning and stayed there the whole day. As a result we were able to get the book done in six months and it was due out before Christmas. The buzz was already growing and Genevieve was beginning to make the kind of clucking noises she emitted when she sensed a best seller in the offing.
As for Tommy, he and I had managed to coexist at the cabin surprisingly well but this was because we hardly saw each other. Tommy had become a workaholic. He left the cabin every morning around six thirty to hook up with Rufus and four evenings a week he was out till 2:OO A.M. embarked upon his new career.
For in my absence in London, Tommy had become a karaoke DJ.
He had discovered it at a bar in Montauk where he proved to be an instant hit with the crowd. He sang all his Johnny Cash favorites—“Ring of Fire,” “I Walk the Line”—and apparently they loved him. The photos he produced with great pride showed him dressed in black from head to toe and in a video he insisted I watch, I had to concede that his voice wasn’t as bad as I expected. He would be performing later on at Franny and Rufus’s wedding party, for which Shotgun had given them permission to use Mallaby—a clear sign that he was emerging from his reclusive state.
The ceremony was over now and as we prepared to follow the rest of the guests in a procession along the beach to Mallaby, Tommy took my hand and whispered.
“So, could this be you and me soon? Shall we get married on the beach too? Hey, I just had a thought? Will our kids be American?”
“You mean if we were to be married on an American beach?”
“Ha-ha! No, I mean if we bring them up in America.”
“Well, no, they won’t,” I leaned in closer to him, “because I’m going back to England now I’ve finished the book.”
Tommy raised his head to a passing seagull. “I don’t know,” he said, “what would you do, mate?” Then he gave me a squeeze. “Well, I guess they’ll have to be mid-Atlantic kids because I’m staying here. I love it in America. Give me one good reason why you would want to go back to London when you could have all this?”
Later that night as I watched him in his element setting up his karaoke equipment—and thinking that being a DJ was the perfect follow-up for a sound engineer—I thought about his question. It would be wonderful to get married on a beach. And my parents looked like they were going to settle in New York for a while. Genevieve had reported lucrative assignments were being rumored for me in America and she seemed convinced that once Shotgun’s book came out, I would be the hottest ghost in town. In fact every time I turned my mind to it, I came up with another reason to stay.
But then I would remember the letter already in an envelope with Tommy’s name on it, the one I had begun on the flight to London almost a year earlier—It’s tricky what I want to say to you and that’s why I’m writing a letter—and which I had finally finished a few hours before Franny and Rufus’s wedding. Franny had it safely stashed under the counter at the Old Stone Market and she was under instructions to give it to Tommy when he contacted her after he’d discovered I’d gone. And she and Rufus would be there for him, to help him understand.
Because by this time tomorrow I would be on my way to the airport because there was one good reason for me to go back to London. Just one, and it was an insane reason given that I had never heard another word from him, but it was the only one that mattered.
Max was there.
How to Marry a Ghost Page 34
