The Legend of Sleepy Harlow (3 page)

Noreen tossed her head. “Not into island legends, are you? It’s why we came out to the middle of nowhere last year in the first place. You know, because of the legend.”

“Of the headless ghost.”

She slapped my back so hard, I nearly toppled. “You got that right, girlfriend. And that’s exactly why we came back this year. You know, to get more evidence. We’re headed out to find the ghost of Sleepy Harlow.”

  2  

“I
’m not sure how many other ways I can say it. No means no. It means absolutely, positively not. No, no, no!”

I’d been going over utility bills, tax statements, and the accounting ledger for Bea & Bees in my private suite, and the sound of the voice in the hallway just outside my door snapped me out of the foggy, groggy daze I’d fallen into. (It was, after all, boring paperwork.)

My head snapped up and I bent an ear to try and hear more, but the only thing I got for my effort was the sound of another voice, lower-pitched than the first, quieter and so undecipherable.

“You’re kidding, right?” That was the first voice again. Blame it on the haze of numbers that clogged my brain, but it took me a couple seconds to realize it sounded familiar and another couple seconds after that to place it.

“Kate?” I popped out of my chair and went out into the hallway, where I found one of my fellow members of the League of Literary Ladies, Kate Wilder, at the bottom of the stairs, fists propped on either side of the stylish brown and gold tweed pencil skirt she wore with a matching jacket. Kate’s cheeks were the same color as her flaming hair, and her eyes shot green fire across the hallway toward the spot where none other than Noreen Turner looked just as miffed.

Chin out, jaw stiff, eyes narrowed, Noreen barely spared me a glance.

But then, the full force of her fury was trained on Kate.

“You don’t mean it,” Noreen growled. “You can’t possibly mean it. We made you famous.”

“You made me angry. Then, and now.” In one movement as graceful as a dancer’s, Kate turned on her stylish pumps and yanked open the door. “I’ll talk to you later, Bea,” she called back to me, right before she stepped outside and slammed the door closed.

“She can’t . . . She wouldn’t . . . You can’t let her . . .”

I turned away from Kate’s dramatic exit just in time to see Noreen’s jaw pump like a piston. The vibration of the banging door still echoed from the high ceiling when she looked my way. “You have to help me,” she said.

“Help you . . . ?”

“Talk some sense into that crazy lady, for one thing!” Noreen scraped a hand through her short-cropped hair. “She’s a hothead! A prima donna! She’s—”

“She’s my friend.”

A smarter person would have taken the warning for what it was worth and been very careful about what she said next. Oh, it wasn’t like Noreen was wrong. Kate was high maintenance, all right. But it was one thing for her friends to point that out (and believe me, we did, frequently—and just as frequently, Kate ignored us). It was another altogether to hear that kind of criticism from a stranger to the island who was also a guest in my home. Noreen, her eyes lit with a fervor that was even more disconcerting than her anger, closed in on me.

“She’s a friend of yours? Then it’s perfect,” she said, and even though she stood three feet away, I couldn’t help but notice that she vibrated with excitement. “You can talk to Ms. Wilder. You can convince her. You can talk some sense into her.”

It wasn’t fair to laugh, but then, it was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard in as long as I could remember. “You don’t know Kate well, do you?”

“I do know her. We met last year when EGG was here. Wilder Winery, that’s where we shot the video.”

“Of the ghost?” I just about kicked myself the moment the words were out of my mouth. Sure, that video Noreen had shown me earlier in the day was startling, but it was also . . .

I searched for the right word and came up with more than just one.

Peculiar.

Suspicious.

Unbelievable.

Improbable.

Unlikely.

I may have seen the transparent shape without a head, but there was no way this girl was ready to believe it was what it looked like it was. Not without a huge helping of proof that amounted to more than a quick glimpse obscured by a swirl of shadows and the flash of that bright pulsing lantern on the floor in front of Noreen.

I shook my head, the better to send the message that I’d misspoken. “The video you showed me earlier,” I said, firmly refusing to use the G-word again. “That was taken at Wilder Winery?”

“If you watched our pilot . . . !” Noreen swallowed the rest of what I was sure was going to be a scathing criticism of my TV-watching habits. Good thing. She was already walking on thin ice, what with taking over my parlor with her alphabetically arranged equipment, then with insulting my friend. Maybe she knew it, because she clutched her hands at her waist and bit her lower lip.

Contrite?

Maybe.

Or maybe Noreen was just cagey enough to see an opportunity and didn’t want to let it pass.

“If Ms. Wilder’s your friend, you could talk to her on my behalf,” she said.

“Talk to her about . . . ?”

Noreen’s sigh was so deep, all those flash drives in all those pockets of her fishing vest rattled. “We’re here to gather more evidence. To see if we can capture another video of the apparition. You know, Sleepy Harlow.”

I refused to groan, but let’s face it, had I been so inclined, no one could have blamed me. First I find out the island is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a Prohibition-era bootlegger, then I discover it’s the same Prohibition-era bootlegger that Marianne Littlejohn’s book is about? It was only natural that from there, my thoughts would scamper to the phone call I’d been putting off, the one I had to make to Marianne to deliver the news about the manuscript that was spoiled, soiled, and soggy.

This time, I did groan. “You shot that video at Wilder Winery.” I didn’t ask Noreen the question because I had no doubt it was true. “And you came back to the island to film there again.”

The smile I got from Noreen told me that maybe I wasn’t as completely dense as she’d thought. “Exactly. We’re here. We’re all set to film. And now she says—”

“Why?”

As if I’d slapped her rather than just asked a question, Noreen flinched.

I pressed my advantage. “Why?” I asked again. “I heard what she said. Why did Kate tell you not to come back to the winery?”

Her shrug wasn’t exactly convincing. “Like I said, she’s crazy. You’d think after we put that tacky little winery on the map—”

“Their really good wine already did that. Long before you showed up here last year.”

“Sure. Yeah. Of course.” When she flashed me a quick smile, Noreen’s teeth showed. “Good wine. I get that. But when a place is a hotbed of paranormal activity, the people who own that place owe it to the public in general and to the scientific community in particular to—”

“You think?” I stepped back and cocked my head, as if I really had to think about it. “You don’t suppose that private property is private property and the person who owns that private property has the right to say who comes and goes and what they do there?”

“I would. I do. But we gave the winery plenty of publicity in our pilot, and we’ve talked it up in the promo spots for the new show, too. We said we’d be filming there. The network’s already airing the commercial for our first show. And in it, we talk about returning to the winery.”

“But you never actually asked Kate’s permission.”

“We did.” Noreen nodded. “I wrote to her and—”

“She said no.”

“I figured there was no way she actually meant it. Not with all the publicity she’s going to get. Our show is going to be huge. You’d think she’d understand that. That’s what I was going to tell her. That’s why I asked her to stop by. You know, so I could explain all that to her and try to get it through that thick skull of hers that there are only a very few spots, really, where the paranormal activity is that powerful. I figured she’d understand.”

I glanced at the door Kate had so recently slammed behind her. “She didn’t.”

“But if you’d just talk to her.” Noreen looked out one of the long, narrow windows that flanked the door on either side. “She’s just crossing the street. If you hurry, you can still catch her. You can talk to her. If you’re her friend, you can convince her, right?”

I was pretty sure I couldn’t, but there is something about a woman in camo and a fishing vest that gives a whole new and pitiful meaning to needy and pathetic. I gave in and walked out the door.

“Hey, Kate!” When I called out to her, Kate stopped and turned my way. She’d just crossed the street and was on her way over to her house, which was catty-corner from mine. Kate’s backyard is a bluff that overlooks the lake and her front yard is pretty much nonexistent: a streamer of grass that undulates between the road and the single-story cedar-sided house with its deep front porch and low-maintenance and very minimal landscaping.

When I caught up to her, Kate was breathing hard. I knew it had nothing to do with the stroll toward her house and everything to do with the pushy EGG-head who was my guest.

“Sorry,” I said, even though she had no idea what I was about to say. “Noreen Turner asked me to talk to you and—”

The rest of my sentence was lost beneath Kate’s aggravated screech. “That woman . . .” She pointed one perfectly manicured finger back toward my house. “The woman is a nutcase. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know she’s a guest, and I told her I’d try to smooth things over. Except I don’t really understand what went wrong. They filmed at the winery last year?”

When Kate nodded, her fiery hair glistened in the late afternoon light. “They showed up here. You know, because of the ghost.” Kate studied my blank expression. “You don’t know.”

“Not about a ghost. Come on, Kate. You don’t really believe—”

She waved away my concern. “Of course I don’t. But hey, what’s a little legend going to hurt? There really was a gangster named Charlie Harlow around here back during Prohibition. And everyone really did call him Sleepy. If you don’t believe me, stop at the cemetery and check out his grave. He died on October third, nineteen thirty.” She barked out a laugh. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not some sort of Sleepy groupie. Anybody who grew up on the island knows Sleepy’s history. He’s our local celebrity. You know—Al Capone, South Bass–style.”

“But you believe his headless ghost haunts the island?”

“When I was a kid and I’d go to sleepovers at friends’ houses, we’d sit up all night and see who could tell the spookiest Sleepy story. Then when we were teenagers . . .” Kate shivered. “Well, you don’t have to believe in ghosts to get scared when your friends drag you out to a cemetery in the middle of the night to try and see if they can raise Sleepy from the dead. Looking back on it, it was crazy and fun. But at the time, I’ll tell you, it’s like the book we’re reading for the discussion group, right?
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
. This story’s got Washington Irving beat. Ichabod Crane only had to deal with the headless horseman scaring him as he walked through the woods at night. But our ghost . . . They say a rival gang killed ol’ Sleepy and cut off his head.” Kate slid a finger across her throat and made a face. “Every year in October, his ghost comes back to the island in search of his head.”

“And last October, Noreen says she got a video of the ghost. At your winery.”

Kate’s lips twisted. “If you believe that sort of hogwash!”

“Last fall, you let them film at the winery.”

“I figured it would be good for business. And it’s not like I thought they’d find anything. There’s no such thing as ghosts. Except . . .”

A cloud scuttled across the sun and, for a moment, we were plunged into cold shadow. A second later, the sun was back, but Kate’s mind was still a million miles away.

“Except?” I asked.

She twitched away her misgivings. “It was nothing. Really. It’s just that last night I worked late and when I was leaving the winery . . . well, like I said, it was nothing. Maybe a stray cat got in. Or a car went by and threw some crazy light against the wall and that caused the shadows to look weird for a second. I thought I saw . . . something.”

Of all the Ladies in the League, Kate is the most practical and the most hardheaded. She is not prone to flights of fancy, and not inclined to believe what she doesn’t see, hear, taste, and feel. If asked, I’d have to admit it was one of the reasons Kate was having such a hard time falling as much in love with ferryboat captain Jayce Martin as he was with her. But I hadn’t been asked. I stuck to the matter at hand.