The Ghost and Mrs. McClure

sharper than a skiv. Freddie once told him they were the color of granite and just about as hard.

Maybe he was hard, thought Jack. But baby, this was one hick town. No painted dolls or groghounds here. No nickel rats, cheap grifters, or diamond-dripping dames looking to have their husbands set up. Just clean air, families with kids, potluck socials, and farm-fresh moo juice.

A town for settling down. That’s what this place was, thought Jack. A few of those bare-legged, unpainted country dolls passed him, gave him the shy version of the “what’s-your-name-big-fella?” once-over. Nice, thought Jack, eyeballing them right back. Shapely gams. Milky skin. Curves the way he liked them—bountiful. Jack took a long, slow drag from his Lucky and turned away. A man like him had to be careful in a place like this. Say the right thing to the wrong broad and he’d make her about a thousand times more miserable than he was.

With a slight limp, Jack continued his slow stroll—casual, easy, hands in pockets, the ache in his shin an unwanted souvenir from that underpaid job he’d done for Uncle Sam over in Germany. Jack ignored it. Continued to case the scene.

Ahead of him, a row of shops beckoned. Bakery, grocery, dress joint, beauty parlor. There it was: one twenty-two. A little more class than the other places. Probably did business with that fancy Newport set not far away. Wide plate-glass window. Words etched in: We Buy and Sell Books.

Yeah. But did they have the book he was looking for? The one they were looking for? The one they killed Freddie for?

The sun was sinking like a popped balloon now. The day was done, the lights nearly out, and just around the corner, a shadow stained the sidewalk, a city-suited figure, waiting.

Jack cursed low. Thought he’d shaken that tail.

He turned the brass handle, pushed. The shop’s bell tinkled like a bad girl’s giggle. A chill up his spine like a foot on his grave.

The shadow moved closer.

Jack’s hand rose, dipped into his suitcoat, caressed his rod’s handle, smooth from wear. He got a bad feeling, but Jack had gotten them before. And when he started a thing, he never turned back.

Besides, this job was for Freddie, and Jack promised his dead friend he’d ride this train out. All the way to the end of the line.

I stake my everlasting life on it.

When the shadow receded, Jack refocused his attention on the job at hand. Investigation and interrogation were things he’d polished as a private eye, but he’d learned as a cop—back before he’d joined up. In the service, he’d learned a lot more: About men and the things they’d do and say under pressure. About the enemy: how and why they’d lie, and, more importantly, what methods would pry the truth out of them.

The moment of truth came today.

For Jack it came sharp and hard and quick, landing at the back of his skull. But the blow didn’t kill him. The gunshots did. To the head, to the face, to the heart. Enough to make sure Jack Shepard’s everlasting promise to his friend began today . . . along with his everlasting life.

CHAPTER 1

The Big Ending

Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life, except the murdered and sometimes the murderer’s.

—Nick Charles to Nora Charles in The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, 1933

Quindicott, Rhode Island Today

“We killed him!”

I was beside myself. In a frantic state of hand-wringing and head-shaking, I paced the length of the bookshop’s aisle from Christie to Grafton and back again.

“Calm down, dear,” said my aunt, her slight frame tipping the Shaker rocker back and forth with about as much anxiety as a retiree on a Palm Beach sundeck.

“How can I calm down?” I asked. “We killed a best-selling author on the first night of his book tour!”

“Well, the milk’s gone and spilled now. No use crying over it. If you need help calming down, why don’t you have a belt?”

I was not surprised by this rather unladylike suggestion from my aunt. Sadie may have been seventy-two, and barely four feet eleven, but for an aging bantamweight she had a big mouth and a good right hook. The Quindicott Business Owners’ Association never forgot the day she’d spotted a shoplifter at ten yards (putting a Hammett first edition down his pants). She’d taken him out with one sharp Patricia Cornwell to the head.

For decades, Sadie had run the bookstore as modestly as her late father had. Never once had she considered holding an author appearance like this one. It was stupid, presumptuous me, Mrs. Penelope Thornton “Know It All” McClure, who’d tried to bring twenty-first-century bookselling to Quindicott.

Why? Why in the world did I think I could pull it off?

Sure, right after college I had taken a job in the hard-nosed offices of New York City book publishing. But I hadn’t exactly been wildly successful at it (my nose being as squashy as a Stay Puft marshmallow). The one thing I thought I had gotten from the experience was the knowledge of how to create a hospitable, crowd-drawing store on the book tour circuit.

Of course, that was before Timothy Brennan—the very first best-selling author we were lucky enough to host—began choking in the middle of his televised lecture, then commenced flailing around like a big Irish goldfish ejected from its bowl, and finally dropped dead as a doorknob in the middle of the bookstore’s brand-new community events space.

“Someone get my niece a drink!” Aunt Sadie called from her rocker.

Linda Cooper-Logan heeded Sadie’s call. In her thirties, her short platinum hair still in the spiky, punkish style she’d first worn in the eighties, Linda appeared in a long, flowery skirt and worn denim jacket. Her jade and silver bracelets jangled as she held out a bottle of carrot juice. I reached for it, but Sadie interceded.

“Not that kind of drink,” said my aunt. “A real drink.”

“Oh!” said Linda. She put two fingers in her mouth. A sharp whistle caught the attention of Linda’s husband, Milner Logan. He was at the other end of the store, watching Officers Eddie Franzetti and Welsh Tibbet—one- quarter of the entire patrol division of Quindicott’s lilliputian police department—take down the names of guests who hadn’t already fled, and few had. After all, what better spectacle could be found tonight in the entire state of Rhode Island? Anyone present knew their “I watched Timothy Brennan drop dead” story would render them good as gold at every church social and backyard barbecue for the next ten years.

“Are you puckering up and blowing for me, Linda?” asked Milner sweetly. Quarter-blood Narragansett Native American, Milner frequented our store for crime novels, noir thrillers, and the occasional frontlist Tony Hillerman. Like his wife, he’d held on to some fashion trends of his own youth—a decade before Linda’s. He wore a small gold hoop in his left ear and his long hair in a ponytail, the strands looking more wiry salt-and-pepper these days than midnight black.

Together Linda and Milner ran the Cooper Family Bakery here in Quindicott. Linda handled the comfort food; Milner, the fancy French stuff. (He and Linda had met when Milner was teaching a cooking school class in Boston on the art of French pastry. Linda fell for him over a perfectly mixed ball of pate sablee.)

Having their baked goods as part of tonight’s hospitality refreshments had been a coup for the bookstore. Milner had added French touches to so many of the old Cooper family recipes, the result was a table of goodies to die for—and, unfortunately, tonight someone actually had.

“We need a drink for Penelope!” Linda called to her husband.

“Oh?” Milner strolled closer in his fedora and double-breasted gray suit—like many of those who’d attended