The Ghost and Mrs. McClure (16 page)

Franken turned to stare at Shelby Cabot. The woman wheeled, deliberately giving him her back, which Kenneth just stared at. So I stood staring at Kenneth. The silence continued until I, for one, was feeling rather embarrassed. I was about to say something to break the obvious tension when Shelby turned around and faced me.

“I am sorry to trouble you,” she said, running her hand through her wet hair. “But could I . . . freshen up somewhere?”

“Certainly,” I said, although her still-flawless makeup seemed
Titanic
proof to me.

“Upstairs?” she asked, gesturing.

“No. We have rest rooms on this level, beyond the events area near the emergency exit.”

Shelby Cabot nodded and walked off.

When she was out of earshot, Kenneth Franken spoke.

“I’m sorry about my behavior earlier today,” he began. “Getting so upset about the makeup case. With my wife so distraught, I’ve been under a strain. You understand, don’t you?”

“Of course I understand.”

“Good, good . . . uhm . . . yes . . . well . . . I came by tonight because”—he looked at the floor, then at the shelves, then off in the direction where Shelby had gone—“I was wondering if you knew anything at all about what my late father-in-law announced last evening. The matter about the real Jack Shepard disappearing in this town, maybe on these premises.”

Call me crazy, but it seemed awfully late for him to suddenly come by just to ask a question like that. He’d been here hours ago and hadn’t mentioned a thing about it.

Nevertheless, he’d asked me a direct question, so I searched my mind, sorting through my past experiences growing up in this town. I thought about Aunt Sadie, who’d inherited the store from her father, who’d inherited the store from his brother—a mysterious figure in the family whom I knew very little about.

The fact was, for this question, I’d need some help.

“Jack?” I said aloud, hoping the ghost would silently supply me some facts. But he clearly wasn’t offering any details at the moment.

“Yes, Jack Shepard,” said Kenneth, who assumed, of course, I had spoken to him.

“I’m sorry,” I said after a long pause—and complete silence from my ghost. “I really don’t know what Mr. Brennan was talking about. Of course, you could come back tomorrow and ask my aunt. Sadie’s memory reaches a lot farther back than mine.”

“Perhaps I shall. I do apologize for coming here so late, but I wanted to speak in private. There were so many people around today—you do understand?”

“Yes, of course,” I replied, feeling like he was trying awfully hard to make me
not
suspect him of anything, which, of course, made me certain he was guilty of
something
. “You’re welcome to come by anytime, Mr. Franken.”

“Thank you. . . .”

He paused, seeing Shelby Cabot emerge from the shadows of the events room. Her hair was combed, her makeup still perfect, but she didn’t seem noticeably “fresher”; in fact, she seemed more pale, more tense than before.

“I think we’ve troubled Mrs. McClure long enough for one evening,” Kenneth said. Then he handed Shelby her coat. “
We
should really be going now.”

The emphasis was on “we,” and despite the fact that Shelby Cabot looked like she wished to remain, good manners forced her to say good night.

“I’ll see you again, Mr. Franken?” I asked as neutrally as possible.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “Detective-Lieutenant Marsh asked my wife and me to stay on for a few days . . . answer any questions that might arise . . . that sort of thing. And you know Deirdre wants to hold a press conference here—when the state medical examiner’s office releases their autopsy findings.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right. Well, good night, then,” I said. I opened the door and ushered the pair into the night.

Immediately, I spoke to the air. “Jack, hurry and follow them.”

“What do you mean, ‘can’t’?”

Through the window, I watched Shelby and Kenneth walk slowly down Cranberry Street, in the direction of Quindicott Pond and Finch’s Inn, which made sense, since they were both checked in there. Suddenly they stopped and began to argue.

“Come on, Jack, get a move on! Get out there!”

“I don’t understand. Why don’t you just try?”

“And? What happens?”

“Great.”

“Me?!”

“Jack, I don’t know—”

“Crap!”

I hurried to the top of the stairs, where wooden pegs held the family coats. Instead of my traditional canary-yellow slicker, I reached for Sadie’s slate gray fisherman’s coat with a wide-brimmed hood—outerwear designed to stand up against stiff nor’easters. My choice was not guided by the weather, however. I needed the camouflage.

Down the stairs and out the door, I caught sight of my “marks” ahead of me on Cranberry Street. Kenneth and Shelby were slowly moving through the drenching rain, their silhouettes outlined by a nearby streetlight.

The air was raw. Gusts of chilly wind blew the pelting rain up under my hood, spattering drops against my face and dewing my black-framed glasses.

I walked at a brisk pace, though it took only a few steps to determine that my low-heeled shoes weren’t nearly as weather-resistant as my outerwear. In only a moment my feet became soaking wet. Fortunately, the wind and the rain were loud enough to muffle the sound of my footsteps as I began to catch up to Shelby and Kenneth.

“Is this how you tailed ‘marks’ when you were a detective, Jack?” I asked to dispel my nervousness. But before I even finished the question, I knew he wouldn’t reply.

I wanted to believe he’d lied to me, that he’d played me just to get me out here on a tail, but the gaping feeling of emptiness told me he’d been truthful. A void seemed to open up inside me, and I suddenly felt very alone.

“I wish you were here, Jack Shepard,” I murmured.

By now I was close enough to hear Kenneth’s and Shelby’s voices, though I couldn’t quite make out the words. They were agitated; that much was obvious. At one point, Kenneth reached out and grabbed Shelby’s elbow. He tried to push her forward, but she yanked her arm free. I dared to move a little closer.

“Brennan was a bastard . . .” I heard Kenneth say, his tone bitter. “He stood in the way . . .”

The rest of his words were lost in the downpour. Luckily the pair paused at the corner and faced one another. I moved closer, aware that darkness and rain were my only covers.

“Are you sorry you did it?” Shelby asked.

“Of course not,” said Kenneth. “I’d do it again. If only Tim had been reasonable, or even a little grateful, but ‘thank you’ just wasn’t in that man’s vocabulary.”

“Who cares if he never thanked you,” Shelby said, grabbing his wrists. “It doesn’t matter now. Think of the future. Now you can divorce Deirdre. We can have a life. Together.”

Now,
this
is interesting, I thought.

“Don’t be stupid, Shelby. The police know I had a motive. Deirdre saw to that. She told that lieutenant everything. Who do you think they’re going to arrest, if it comes to that?”

“Don’t worry, darling—”

Kenneth pulled his hands free of her grasp. “Stop it, Shelby!” Kenneth cried. “What’s done is done. It’s over now. All of it.”

Shelby stared at him in silence for a moment. I waited to hear what would come next, but a mechanical roar drowned out her words. A large truck, its driver most likely lost, thundered around the corner and down Cranberry—and I was standing in the street.

For a moment, I froze like the proverbial trapped deer as the glare of headlights bared down. I blindly leaped, falling into a shadowy stairwell just under the fire escape of Lew’s Plumbing and Heating Contractors, Inc.

I had successfully avoided being flattened by the truck
or
detected by my marks—unfortunately, I’d also landed face first in a puddle of water. Spitting in disgust, I rose to my knees, crawled up the steps, and peeked above the edge of the stairwell. But the rain-swept sidewalk under the streetlight was now deserted. Kenneth and Shelby were gone.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves . . . far distant in time . . . speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.

—Gilbert Highet

 

 

 

AFTER I RETURNED to the bookstore, I locked the door behind me, shut down the lights, and went straight to the second-floor bathroom to clean up and dry off.

Several times, I tried addressing Jack to discuss what I’d overheard between Shelby and Kenneth, but he wasn’t there—or wasn’t answering. So I kissed my sleeping Spencer and went to bed.

For a good fifteen minutes, I lay uncomfortably stiff in the dark, wondering vaguely if my ghost had any interest in me—in this particular position. But I assumed he didn’t. Or else he’d chosen to honor my request that he not haunt the second floor—or else he
was
here and had clammed up for fear of the grief I’d give him.

Such were my thoughts as I tossed and turned. Finally I gave up, reached to click on the bedside gooseneck, and grabbed
Shield of Justice
off my nightstand.

To my surprise, even though my eyes were burning from fatigue, I couldn’t put the book down. Page after page went by with exhilarating ease.

Brainert had told me he thought the last three books, and especially this one, represented a marked improvement on the older entries in the series, and I had to agree.

Whatever his faults as a human being, Timothy Brennan had, in his waning years, revived his skills as a writer. The story structure of
Shield of Justice
was more sophisticated than in novels past. The expected hard-boiled patois was there, but the speech patterns that had once felt dated and at times corny were now portrayed with a kind of bravado—a false front erected by the world-weary characters to hide their damaged souls. More like the Shamus Award-winning Dennis Lehane than the retro purple prose of Mickey Spillane. In fact, the overall use of language was more refined—adjectives in particular were restrained. And the characters felt richer, deeper.

As one critic had recently put it, where the first sixteen entries in the
Shield
series felt canned and stale, like warmed-over leftovers from tales already told, these latest offerings felt fresh, like the first time Brennan ever put ink to paper:

I rubbed my eyes. It was nearly 2:00 a.m., and I had promised Aunt Sadie I would be up for church.

“One more chapter,” I told myself, even as I yawned and my eyes half-closed. Readers of these books had their favorite parts, and I had just reached mine. The ingenue had entered the story—and the lady was about to enter the lair of Jack Shepard, er, Shield. . . .

I wanted to read more. I really did. But about then, my eyelids closed completely, and my limbs went limp. . . .