The Ghost and Mrs. McClure

“If Brennan was allergic to nuts, a tiny squirt of peanut oil in his water would do the trick,” said Brainert.

“Nut oil!” I cried. “Yes, of course . . .”

The memory flooded back to me of waking up the night after Brennan’s death, the night I’d seen Jack in the shadows.

You took a drink from the bottle, Jack reminded me. The one you half finished after Brennan’s death and put under the counter before the police came.

And the drink I’d taken had reminded me of Milner’s pastry. Now I knew why. But who set the bottles aside for Brennan?

“Linda, you’re the one who told me about the bottles set aside for Brennan—”

“I didn’t do a thing!”

“Calm down,” I said. “I know you didn’t. Someone told you they’d been set aside, right?”

“That’s right, that’s right,” she said quickly.

The Quibblers leaned slightly forward.

“Well?” said Seymour. “Who told you? Spit it out.”

“Deirdre.”

The whole room erupted, as if Linda had just dropped the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle. But it wasn’t the right piece—and I knew it. Deirdre wouldn’t frame herself. Which meant someone else who was there that night had told Deirdre to tell Linda those bottles were set aside. Someone had saved that syringe for a reason: they’d meant to frame Deirdre all along.

“But what if Deirdre is innocent?” I blurted. All eyes now turned in my direction. And they all looked skeptical.

“Why in the world would you think that?” asked Seymour. “What’s your theory?”

I told the Quibblers what had happened the night before. How both Shelby Cabot and Kenneth Franken turned up at Buy the Book long after closing time, and how I later followed them into the night. Of course, I left out all references to Jack’s ghost, along with any mention of Josh Bernstein finding a syringe in the bookstore’s women’s room.

Privately, though, I made up my mind to track down Josh Bernstein and grill him like a raw T-bone. I told everyone what I’d heard—or thought I’d heard—when I’d eavesdropped on Shelby’s and Kenneth’s conversation under the streetlight. And I wrapped up my revelations with two conclusions:

“I think that the ‘other woman’ Deirdre was referring to was none other than Salient House representative Shelby Cabot,” I said. “And, finally, I believe that it was Kenneth Franken, and not Timothy Brennan, who wrote Shield of Justice.”

CHAPTER 19

Things That Get Bumped in the Night

I distrust a closed-mouth man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously, unless you keep in practice.

—Casper Gutman (a.k.a. “The Fat Man”) to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, 1929

WHEN I DROPPED the bomb about Brennan’s alleged ghostwriter, I heard a few gasps—the loudest from longtime Brennan fan Milner Logan. Frankly, I didn’t know what shocked the Quibblers more: that Kenneth Franken carried on an affair with a publicity manager from his publishing house; or that he’d penned Timothy Brennan’s latest opus.

Either way, I expected such a charge to be greeted with a certain amount of incredulity. And that’s why, before heading off to church with Aunt Sadie earlier today, I’d made a phone call to Brainert.

Reading Timothy Brennan’s book the night before, not to mention having that odd dream, had started me thinking about the book itself. And when it came to solving a literary mystery, Brainert was my go-to guy. I nodded my head in his direction and he rose to his feet.

“After Penelope tipped me off to her suspicions this morning, I went straight to the college library and checked out a copy of this.”

He held up a hardcover book with yellowing pages. The white type on the black cover read The Neglected. A small frame of spot art below the title showed a man’s silhouette, lost in a crowd, and the author’s name: Kenneth Franken.

“Franken was more than Deirdre’s wife and Timothy Brennan’s son-in-law. He was also an author in his own right—a failed one. Franken’s first novel was published in the early 1990s. The genre was ‘dysfunctional family drama,’ and it had been published by Salient House, back when they were an independently owned publisher and not part of a European media conglomerate. The cover copy states the author spent five years writing this novel, his literary debut.”

Brainert passed the book around. When it got to me, I studied the back, which carried an author photo of the younger Kenneth Franken. At that time, he wore oversized horn-rimmed glasses—which he’d obviously traded for either contacts or laser surgery—and there were no silver temples yet in sight. He was just as model handsome, though, and the author was described as “an associate professor of English at New York University,” and a promising young voice “who was single and living in Manhattan.”

“How did you find this?” Linda asked in obvious admiration.

“I never forget a book,” boasted Brainert. “If I never read it, I read about it. And if I didn’t read about it, then I saw the book in the store.”

I passed the volume to Seymour.

“Kenneth Franken’s literary debut was a bust,” Brainert continued. “His novel was greeted by tepid reviews and general indifference.”

He reached into the shirt pocket of his pale blue button-down and drew out several three-by-five cards covered in tiny, cramped handwriting.

“The New Yorker said The Neglected was ‘a flawed effort featuring a cast of uninteresting characters.’ ”

“Ouch!” cried Seymour.

“Publishers Weekly was kinder,” Brainert continued, squinting at his own handwriting. “They said, ‘Mr. Franken has a unique literary voice, and his novel contains some sharp observations, but too few to recommend this raw, freshman effort. . . . ’ ” Brainert shrugged. “So Kenneth Franken vanished from the literary scene as quickly as he appeared. But two years after the disappointing reception for The Neglected, we see the marriage of Kenneth Franken and Deirdre Brennan announced in The New York Times.

“And here’s where it gets really interesting, because eighteen months after Kenneth Franken married Deirdre Brennan, the Jack Shield franchise—which had shown steady decline in sales and quality—was suddenly revived with the publication of three new Shield novels in quick succession. Each of these titles garnered rave reviews, as critics who’d grown bored with the series suddenly became enthusiastic fans again.”

“Coincidence?” said Seymour.

“I thought so,” Brainert replied. “And I didn’t believe Penelope, either, when she called me this morning and suggested that Kenneth Franken might be the real author of Shield of Justice.”

Brainert sighed. “My skepticism vanished this afternoon when I read The Neglected.”

The book made its way around our circle and back to Brainert. He tapped the volume with his index finger.

“Now, remember that Franken’s first novel had a tiny print run and was read only in literary circles—which was darn lucky, because it’s obvious that Franken mined his failed first novel for characterizations, descriptions, and