The Ghost and Mrs. McClure

—the chairs I’d painstakingly arranged into rows rectilinear enough for a military parade ground—turned upside down.

I’d raced back upstairs to find Spencer watching an old Mike Hammer episode. My son had claimed innocence. So I went to find Sadie.

Once she’d put on her shoes and found her belt, she came downstairs with me to see “the deed for herself,” as she’d put it. Spencer had already gone downstairs to look, and we’d found him just standing there in the community events space, staring.

“Mom,” he’d said, “there’s nothing wrong with the chairs.”

In no more than five minutes, all the chairs had been righted again.

Now, a seven-year-old boy may have been able to turn over one hundred chairs upside down in forty-five minutes, I’d thought, but not in five.

“Do you think you imagined it?” Sadie had asked me.

“No. I did not,” I’d told her. “I know what I saw. And five minutes ago, those chairs were upside down.”

Sadie gave me a sidelong glance.

“I was not hallucinating.”

“Must be the ghost,” she’d said with a shrug.

“The ghost?” I’d said.

“Sure. Quite a few stories like yours over the years with this part of the building. Even the construction boys had some strange things happen, you have to admit.”

Okay, so during the renovations some of the workmen complained about vanishing tools and unexplained power surges. But I’d chalked all of it up to ancient wiring and maybe Spencer playing a practical joke with the hardware.

“Goes to show how gullible some of us can be,” I’d muttered, annoyed by the accelerated pounding of my stupid heart.

“Some say ghosts can affect your senses,” Sadie had pointed out. “Make you see things that aren’t there . . . see things the way they want you to see them.”

“Humbug” had been my muttered reply. “What are we? Cavewomen? We see lightning and right away think some sky god is angry at us?”

Sadie had just shrugged again. Then we’d searched the entire building for some intruder. But there’d been none. And the doors and windows had all been secure.

“No more ghost talk,” I’d told her when she gave me an annoyingly knowing look. “There is no ghost here. Some hand turned those chairs. Some human hand.”

But whose? I still wondered.

Could Spencer really have been so disturbed and angry that he’d managed to pull off a nearly impossible prank for a boy of his size and age—turning them first upside down, then, in mere minutes, right side up again?

“That’s right!” a loud voice suddenly boomed from the new events space. “Let’s get this crap out of the way.”

I told Spence to help Aunt Sadie at the register. Then I rushed over to the adjoining storefront in time to see a padded folding chair clatter to the wood plank floor.

“Good lord,” I muttered, “not my chairs again!”

My gaze lifted to the center of the events room. There, shouting commands to a trio of well-dressed people, stood a man in his seventies: Timothy Brennan.

I hadn’t recognized him at first because he looked at least twenty-five years older than the photos on his book jacket, floor display, and life-size standee. His hair was gray and thin; his bushy brows crowned bloodshot eyes; and his ruddy, jowl-framed face reflected the hundred additional pounds he was now carrying.

Two young men in baggy jeans and flapping flannel suddenly barreled into the room, carrying a video camera, tripod, and heavy silver cases. Mr. Brennan waved his pudgy finger under their noses.

“The camera goes on my right,” Brennan garbled to them around a foul-smelling cigar. “I want those lucky C-SPAN book TV viewers to see my best side.” Then he glanced at the well-dressed couple moving my meticulously arranged refreshment table. “Come on, Ken, move that thing already! We haven’t got all night!”

The staccato thumping of a dozen plastic water bottles came next. I had personally set them on the goodies table near the room’s entrance to make our guests feel welcome. Juices, sodas, and plastic bottles of Sutter Spring water now tumbled to the floor as the man named Ken, and a well-dressed woman about his age, jostled the table toward the back of the room.

Ken was fiftyish with salt-and-pepper hair and silver temples, model-perfect features, and a well-tailored camel-haired jacket that flattered his strong physique. The middle-aged woman, holding the other end, was a slender redhead whose impeccably tailored burgundy suit and matching scarf helped take the bite out of her otherwise very plain face.

Another woman, much younger, wearing a chic black pantsuit with a very pretty face in contrast, and short, shiny, raven hair, was pushing the neatly arranged chairs in haphazard directions. I winced at the scraping sound the chairs made as they were dragged across the newly polished floorboards.

“Excuse me,” I said, approaching the pretty young woman in the chic black pantsuit, who was sliding the chairs around. “I’m Mrs. Penelope Thornton-McClure, the co-owner of this store.”

The young woman stopped pushing and smiled at me. Well, at least her mouth did. As far as I could tell, no other discernible facial tendon had been enlisted for the exercise.

“Hello, there,” she said, “I’m Shelby Cabot from Salient House.”

I had lived and worked in New York long enough to spot—from at least five paces—that plastic, time-to- handle-the- non-New-Yorker (i.e., simpleton) expression.

I extended my hand.

“Get those chairs rearranged, Shelby!” Brennan shouted. “These idiots gave me nothing but a blank wall and a rest room exit for a backdrop!”

Shelby shrugged, then turned away from me without a backward glance.

“Mr. Brennan,” I said, dropping my unshaken hand, “perhaps I can help. I’m the co-owner of Buy the Book.”

“Oh, yeah? So you’re the one to blame, then? Didn’t you even take the trouble to learn anything about how I like my appearances set up? We’ve got to turn this whole room forty-five degrees to the right. Get my back to those bookshelves over there. And put my novels on that bookshelf. Where’s your brain? In your backside?”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Brennan,” I said, praying the sudden heat on my cheeks didn’t come with the usual accompanying scarlet flush. (Feeling humiliated was one thing, but having one’s own coloring announce it to the world was beyond excruciating.) “I didn’t realize that your talk was being taped for television, or that you’d require a special arrangement of the space.”

The truth was, George Young, the beloved and knowledgeable sales rep for Salient House who was based in Boston but handled all the independent bookstore orders for the state of Rhode Island, had gone off on a well-earned cruise vacation. Before he left, George advised us to call Salient House directly and ask for Shelby Cabot, the manager handling the publicity tour for Brennan.

I’d called, all right. Not once. Not twice. But six times. Six times I’d left messages in an effort to get the correct information. Nobody, not Shelby or anyone else, bothered to return my calls. I wanted to scream all of this back at Brennan, I really did, but I knew Brennan would find a way to turn things around and claim I was simply trying to get Shelby into trouble. Believe me, I’d encountered this sort of unfortunate blame game countless times while working in New York City publishing. There was no winning it.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled again, feeling like the wimp of the century.

“You should be,” said Brennan. “This place is a mess, but my daughter Deirdre and her husband, Kenneth, over there know how to fix it. They’ve done this many times before.”

Another folding chair crashed to the floor. Kenneth, who was moving the refreshment table, almost tripped over it.

“God, Deirdre, your husband’s such a klutz!” Brennan barked, kicking the chair out of the way.