A Pocketful of Stardust

by J P Barnaby

  He used the I Heart New York keys again, slipping the front door key in almost noiselessly and turning the knob inch by inch, like he didn’t want the body upstairs to hear him coming. He’d forgotten to set the alarm as he ran out like a frightened child, but the wind chimes gave him away anyway, and the tension in his body broke. His father had been the master of putting together a display; it had to be a prop. This wasn’t a horror movie.

  Noah twisted and turned through the aisles back to the staircase, back to the apartment, and back to the attic. There was a skull. He hadn’t imagined it, and it wasn’t a papier-mâché prop either. In fact, there was a whole skeleton, now lying a couple of feet away. It was posed on its side, resting on one elbow, with its other arm casually lying across its waist. It was fully dressed down to the shoes, but the fabric was moth-eaten. The bones were held together with what Noah realized must be old rotten tendons, all except the skull. It sat on the floor next to the skeleton. “Oh, what the fuck?” He didn’t need this.

  “Gracious, what language,” someone said behind him.

  He whipped his head around to see a man sitting cross-legged on the floor. He was wearing a vest and bow tie over a gingham button-down shirt and wool pants—the same clothes as were on the skeleton, but looking whole and new. His feet were encased in the same wingtip shoes, and he wore round, wire-rimmed glasses. His features were African American, but Noah couldn’t tell what color his hair was because he was entirely gray. Clothes, skin, hair, eyes. Gray. And semitransparent. Translucent. Like a….

  “What… the… hell?”

  “Henry McDaniel, at your service.” The figure rose to its feet. “I own this fine establishment. Which brings me to the question—what are you doing in my home, and where the deuce is my furniture?”

  “Um. Actually, I own this place now, I guess. Because you… um… my family bought it back in the seventies…. Oh shit.”

  “Good grief, child. You have a mouth like a longshoreman.” The man sighed. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

  “Um… yeah. I guess so. If that’s yours.” Noah pointed over his shoulder at the skeleton. He’d gone past terror into a weird sort of calm, as if his brain had had all the weirdness it could take for a while and shut down his panic monitor.

  “It’s garbed in my clothing, so I expect it is.” The man—ghost? Noah supposed so—shook his head. “I’ve been up in that attic a while, I guess. But still—you say you own my building now? How did you come to acquire it?”

  “It was my father’s. I told you—my grandfather bought it back in the seventies sometime, when my dad was younger.” Noah cocked his head and regarded the man curiously. He supposed he should be more freaked-out about having a conversation with a ghost, but if there was an opposite to scary, it was Henry McDaniel. He looked more like an elderly schoolteacher than a haint.

  “Grandpa had always wanted to run a bookstore, so when this place came up for sale, he jumped on it. When he left it to my dad, Aster was starting to go through gentrification and….”

  “Gentrification? What’s that?”

  “Um. Where people start buying properties that are run-down or foreclosed on and fixing them up. To bring a neighborhood more upscale.”

  “Son, you’re speaking English, but I’m having a hard time comprehending you.”

  So Noah sat on the floor in an empty room and explained gentrification to an elderly ghost. When he’d finished, Henry shook his head. “I heard of something called ‘white flight’ up in the North, but that seems to be the opposite of what happened here. So Aster is mostly white these days? No colored people?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, it’s still integrated. It’s about half and half, I think. But there are more people moving in. It’s getting trendy. I expect any day there’ll be a Starbucks here.”

  “A Starbucks what?”

  “Coffee shop.”

  Henry frowned. “What does coffee have to do with Moby-Dick?”

  “What?”

  “The character in Moby-Dick. Starbuck.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I’ve never read it.”

  Henry’s eyes grew wide. “You’ve never read Moby-Dick? How can you run a bookstore without having read a classic like that?”

  “I don’t run it. It was my dad’s, and well, we mostly covered contemporary authors in my classes. I did have to take a class on Shakespeare, but that was a disaster.”

  “Child, if I weren’t already dead, you would have killed me right then. What was your high school thinking of, to not teach Moby-Dick?”

  “Well, my high school didn’t teach much of anything, but I do have a degree in English lit.” Noah was starting to feel defensive as he sat on the cobwebbed floor discussing literature with a ghost. Which is a sentence he’d never even thought about saying. “We studied a lot of different writers, but mostly all contemporary. Or at least twentieth century.”

  Henry put his head in his hands and gave a long, shuddering sigh. “Joyce. Hemingway. Langston Hughes. At least tell me you’ve read those.”

  “Joyce who?” At Henry’s moan, Noah laughed. “Just kidding. We did Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Dubliners.”

  “Ulysses?”

  “The professor thought it was too obscure. Some of the students read it for extra credit, but they all said it was almost unintelligible.”

  “Child.”

  “Ghost.”

  Henry raised his head and chuckled. “You can call me Henry. And what’s your name, child?”

  “Noah. Noah Hitchens.”

  “Well, Noah Hitchens, under normal circumstances I probably would never have met you, so it remains to be seen if it’s a pleasure. But I do appreciate your letting me out of that attic. It’s an unpleasant place to spend eternity.”

  “Did you die up there?”

  “I think I was dead before they put me up there. It’s starting to come back, but I think it was a robbery—fools thought they’d find money in a bookstore, and when they didn’t, they came up here looking for it. They found me. Whacked me on the head. I guess they got scared when they saw I was dead and stuffed me up in the attic.”

  “How’d they even know it was there? I mean, I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been standing right underneath it.”

  “I’d just finished taking down my Christmas decorations, so the attic door was open. They put me up there, slammed the door, and one of them said, ‘And stay there!’ so I did. Until you let me out.”

  “Wow. That’s bogus.”

  Henry mouthed the words, frowning, then nodded. “Yes. As you said. ‘Bogus.’ I take it that’s a term of disgust?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Language has probably changed a lot since you… um….”

  “Died. And while bits and pieces probably have changed, I doubt if it’s significant. There are many words in English that date back centuries, if not millennia. English changes—but remains English.”

  “Yes, sir. But there are a lot of new things. They probably didn’t have computers or the internet or anything in your day.”

  “Computers, yes, but they weren’t for anything very practical. Basically for running calculations.”

  Noah took his phone out of his pocket. “This is a cell phone, and it has more computer power than the computers that sent Man to the moon.”

  “Man has been to the moon?”

  “Yep. 1969. I can show you on the internet.”

  “What’s the internet?”

  “It’s—well, it’s a bunch of computers hooked together so that anyone can log into them and find information, or talk to people, or post pictures of cats, or pretty much do anything. News stories and stuff. You can look up pretty much anything on the internet.”

  Henry leaned over and looked at the phone curiously. “And all that’s in there?”

  Weirdly delighted that he knew something this dead man didn’t, Noah said, “Yep, and it plays music too!” He queued up the last song he’d been listening to and hit Play. He’d been listening to o
ldies earlier while he’d walked over to the store and queued up the next song in line—U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love).”

  The music started and Henry’s eyes grew wide. “Good gracious. That sound is better than any record I ever heard.”

  “Yeah, U2 is pretty great—that’s the band that’s playing. They’re from Ireland. This is a really good song too.”

  “It’s… interesting,” Henry said diplomatically. “Though I was referring to the sound, not the music itself….”

  After a moment, though, he frowned. “Those words,” he said. “‘Free at last….’ Some things are still fuzzy, but I remember hearing a speech that ended like that. ‘Free at last, I’m free at last, oh Lord, thank God I’m free at last,’ or something of that nature.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it’s referring to. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

  “You know it?”

  “God, yes, it’s famous. Did you—were you there? In person?”

  Henry nodded, but his face was troubled. “The song—it says that his life was taken….”

  “Well, yeah. It’s about his assassination….”

  If a ghost could pale, Henry did. “Reverend King—assassinated? When?”

  “1968, I think.”

  “Then… then the civil rights movement failed?”

  “Jesus, no. His death was kind of a rallying cry for it. I mean, things still aren’t perfect—we’ve got a long way to go for that, but we’ve made progress.” Noah looked at Henry, still distraught, and grinned. “We had a black president.”

  “You are joshing me.”

  “Nope.” Noah grinned so hard his cheeks hurt. “Duly elected—twice. A Harvard-educated lawyer.”

  “Noah… what year is it?”

  “Today is October 21, 2018.”

  “Child,” Henry said, “we need to talk.”

  “Sure. Think you can go downstairs? I’d like to get something to drink—and we kind of need to call the police.”

  “Police? What for?”

  Noah jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “To report a murder.”

  NOAH HALF expected Henry’s ghost to vanish once the police had taken his body away, but when he came back into the downstairs kitchenette, the ghost was sitting on one of the wooden chairs, looking through the papers on the table. “I can’t seem to move much besides my bones,” he said, “and I suppose that’s because they’re mine, but I seem to be able to shuffle paper. Takes an effort, though. My bones get off all right?”

  “Yeah. The police are going to try to track down your daughter and let her know. She’ll have to decide what to do with… you.” Noah sat across from Henry. “The detective said it looked like your skull was cracked and that could have happened if you fell, but the coroner will know for sure. They think you had a heart attack or simply hit your head pretty hard. She said either one would have killed you.”

  “You didn’t tell them someone hit me?”

  “How would I have known that?” Noah put his hands on his hips.

  “Fair point. Well, it’s good to know I didn’t suffer.”

  “It’ll be a comfort to your daughter.”

  “If she’s even still alive. She’d be in her eighties now.” The sadness in his eyes was heartbreaking. “I think of her wondering, not knowing, for all those years. We were so close. Her mama died young, and for the longest time it was just me and her.” He closed his eyes for a long moment. “I’d love to see her again. See how she grew up.”

  He glanced up at Noah with a faint smile. “Have you read The Time Machine?”

  “No, but I’ve seen the movie. And I’ve read lots of time travel stories. It’s kind of like that’s what you are—a time traveler.”

  “Except I can’t go back to where I came from.”

  “It’s all right. You can stay here as long as you want.”

  “Thank you, child. It’s most generous of you.” Henry’s smirk was transparent but still visible.

  “And I’m sure they’ll find your daughter. What was her name?”

  “Berenice.” He pronounced it with a French accent: Behr-eh-nees. “That was my maman’s middle name. Everyone called her Bernie, but I always called her Berenice. I don’t know how they’ll find her. It was so long ago.”

  “They’ll search public records on the internet. It won’t take long to find her. I could tell them her name, that would speed things up.”

  Henry snorted. “And they would wonder how you knew that.”

  “Hey, my granddad bought this place from her. For all anyone knows, he used to talk to me about it. Was she married?”

  “Yes. Her husband died in Viet Nam.” He separated the name into two, the way Noah’s dad had. “That war is over by now, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yeah. The North won, but they’re our friends now.”

  “Huh. Same thing happened with the Germans and the Japs after Dubya Dubya Two.”

  Noah winced. “The Japanese. We don’t call them Japs. It’s not polite.”

  Henry blinked. “Well. I guess there’s quite a lot I need to get caught up with. Having a Negro president is only the start.”

  Noah flinched again.

  “What now?”

  “African American. Not Negro. Or… the other n word.”

  “Son, it’s okay to swear like a sailor, but you have to be careful about what you call people?”

  “Yes, sir. Swearing doesn’t hurt anyone. But calling people names—it sucks.”

  “Well, that could have been worded more elegantly, but I get the picture.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  “These seem to be documents regarding the store. Are you managing it now?”

  “My dad died and left it to me. I still have to talk to the lawyer about the estate and probate and all that stuff. Jeez, I don’t know anything about that.” Noah sighed. “But I think there are some financial issues. See anything in those papers that might give us a clue what to do to get this place back on its feet?”

  “Just this.” Henry slid a folder across the table toward Noah.

  It was an application to add a coffee bar to the business. He found a letter attached from the state business department approving the application and then some other kinds of documents. They were dated some two weeks before his father’s death. Both the application and the other documents gave the name of the store as Stardust Books, LLC.

  “I didn’t know he incorporated. I guess I’ll have to talk to the lawyer to find out more about what that means.”

  “That isn’t the point, Noah. He’s gotten approval to add a coffee bar to the shop. That’s extra income. Your father had already come up with a way to save the store.”

  “Oh. Oh!”

  Chapter Seven

  THE LAWYER’S office was in a high-rise near Midtown, and Noah was glad he’d taken MARTA in from College Park. The drive to the MARTA station took about an hour, but the ride on the transit line was faster than if he’d tried to drive downtown on a Monday in midday Atlanta traffic. And the stop was only a block or so from the office, so he didn’t even have time to build up a sweat in his one suit jacket. He showed his ID to the guard in the lobby and took the elevator to the thirty-seventh floor.

  His laptop case was doing double duty as a briefcase, and he dug through the stack of papers for the business card he’d found with his dad’s stuff. The receptionist in the office took the card and picked up the phone. “Mr. Gorwin’s two o’clock is here.” To Noah she said, “Please take a seat. Mr. Gorwin will be out shortly.”

  He wandered over to the big window overlooking Piedmont Park and the botanical gardens. He was standing there when a voice said, “Pretty view. Too bad we rarely have time to enjoy it.”

  Noah turned to see a slightly rumpled middle-aged man giving him a wry smile. He held out his hand. “Mr. Gorwin?”

  “Please. Call me Steve. Come on into the conference room here and let’s get started. I’m sure you don’t want to spend such a lovely a
fternoon in a boring old office.” He led the way down a short hall to a room with an expensive-looking marble table and leather chairs. Crap, Noah thought in despair. How much is this gonna cost me?

  His expression must have shown his thoughts, because the lawyer grinned. “Don’t worry,” he said in an exaggerated whisper, “this is all covered by your dad’s retainer. Prepaid.”

  “Phew,” Noah said.

  This time the guy laughed out loud. “Yeah, I hear that a lot. Okay. Introductions. I’m Steve Gorwin—I’m a partner here even though my name’s not on the door. We have about three hundred partners in this law firm, so not everyone gets that honor—the name would wrap around the building a couple dozen times. I specialize in business succession and private client law, so I work a lot with small businesses like your dad’s. I was really sorry to hear about his death—Charlie was a great guy. Smart man.” He pulled out a chair and sat down.

  Noah followed suit and took out the file folders he’d amassed from Charlie’s desk. “He seemed pretty organized, but I was surprised when I saw he’d gone here for his will and stuff rather than just the lawyer in town he usually worked with.”

  “Ray Sanders is a good guy and a good lawyer. He referred Charlie to me because he doesn’t handle a lot of corporate work, and he wanted to make sure Charlie had a good handle on his business succession plans.”

  “What does that mean, business succession?”

  “It’s what happens to a corporation when an officer or primary—in this case, your dad—dies while still managing the corporation. Rather than getting all tied up in probate, as it would be as a sole proprietorship, a company with a good plan transfers seamlessly to the other stockholders. The stock itself is stuck in probate, but the board can continue to run the business just as it had all along.”