The Ghost and Mrs. McClure

And pissed.

Brennan didn’t know it yet, but he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life: he’d finally walked into Jack’s bookstore.

CHAPTER 4

A Drink before Dying

I’m just not sure we need this . . . mess right now.

—Angie Gennaro to Patrick Kenzie, Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane, 1998

I WAS STANDING next to the refreshment table. It had been dragged, on Brennan’s orders, to the back end of the room—unappealingly close, in my opinion, to the rest rooms. Before me, a surreal sea of battered fedoras bobbed with excitement. Murmurs of approval rose and fell amid the dark ties and three-piece suits.

Timothy Brennan was leaning forward against a carved oak podium (which I’d bought for a song at a Newport estate sale), captivating the crowd with his prepared speech:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Brennan read aloud. “Such words could have been applied easily to my fictional private detective, Jack Shield, a man who was a complete man and a common man, and above all a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”

I winced.

Brennan had just asserted that “Such words could have been applied easily to Jack Shield.” But he’d somehow forgotten to mention that they were Raymond Chandler’s exact words in his famous essay describing the quintessential detective.

I searched out Brainert, seated near the front. Not surprisingly, he was shaking his head with all the perfected disappointment of an English professor reviewing a badly footnoted paper. He caught my eye and together we mutely mouthed “Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder.”

I shrugged and lifted my hands palm up, as if to say, Perhaps it had been an innocent oversight.

Brainert rolled his eyes.

J. Brainert Parker (the J. was for Jarvis, a first name he’d utterly rejected since age six) was one of my closest childhood friends. A single, gay St. Francis College English professor in his thirties with a stringbean body, blanched complexion, and self-described “Ichabod Crane” style, he was also (as Sadie put it) one of those “relentlessly sober” types.

Brainert claimed to be a distant relative of the Providence occult author H. P. Lovecraft; and, like his supposed ancestor, he was extremely well-read. All the regular customers respected his opinions. And his enthusiasm for out-of-print Holmes books kept the store’s lights on—his most recent purchase being a forty-eight- dollar copy of a P. F. Collier & Son Holmes collection decorated red cloth hardcover, circa 1903.

In any event, I was feeling pretty badly about Brennan’s unhappiness with our bookstore in general and me in particular. Before his speech, I’d actually tried to make peace by fetching him a cup of coffee and a plate of the Cooper Family Bakery goodies. The incoming guests were already digging into the food, and I was afraid Brennan wouldn’t get to sample any of it.

Wrong. He’d practically slapped the five-nut tarts and Vermont maple doughnuts out of my hand, barking that he never ate anything before, during, or after his lectures.

“Are you running a bookstore or a diner?” he’d snapped at me. “Water only. Just be sure there’s water.”

Okay, I admit it: Timothy Brennan wasn’t exactly the nicest author on the best-seller list. But I was willing to forgive his rudeness, his pomposity, his blustery impatience, even his quoting of Chandler without mentioning Chandler. Why? Because I myself was a huge fan of his books, purple prose and all. Maybe it was because Jack Shield could always say the sorts of things I wouldn’t. Do the sorts of things I couldn’t.

Whatever the reason, I enjoyed the Shield yarns as much as those old hard-boiled detective tales in the pulps of the twenties and thirties that my father had collected. Brennan himself hadn’t been published in Black Mask (the magazine that had launched writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett), but he’d known some of the men who had, and he wrote in their tradition. That was good enough for me. So like a pathetic kid defending some sports hero caught strung out on steroids, a part of me was still looking for excuses to defend the bad-behaving Brennan.

“It was back when I was wet-behind-the-ears reporter that I first met and then knocked around with Jack Shepard,” Brennan continued to tell the audience. “The model for my fictional detective was a tough-talking, no- nonsense, street-smart private eye dedicated to uncovering the truth, no matter where it leads.”

Some members of the audience actually mouthed these familiar words right along with Brennan. They’d been part of the jacket copy for decades. Hoots and applause followed.

“Jack Shepard left me his case files. Changing the names to protect the guilty, I used them as the basis for my stories—”

A deep voice interrupted: You did what?! You “used” them for your stories? Then you stole them, you low-down, dirty grifter. No one “left” you those files.

Every muscle in my body froze in mortification. Some man had just heckled this beloved author. At my store! Brennan would never forgive me! And the crowd would tear the place to pieces!

I waited for the typhoon to hit.

But it didn’t.

Brennan simply continued his speech. Ignoring the heckler, the audience obviously followed Brennan’s lead.

“Lately, readers have been asking me if the real Jack Shepard was the equal of fictional Jack Shield,” said Brennan. “I tell them that truthfully Shields is Shepard with Timothy Brennan mixed in. Shepard wasn’t exactly leading-man material, y’know.”

Yeah. Right. Not like you, ya bloated, barstool raconteur!

Once more, I braced for impact. Surely there would be a reaction this time. . . .

But Brennan disregarded the man—and so did his audience.

I scanned the crowded room, desperate to locate this deep-voiced pest. He sounded very close. But the only people standing near me, in front of the refreshment table, were women—Linda Cooper-Logan and Fiona Finch, the sixty-year-old owner of Finch’s Inn, the only hotel in Quindicott.

“Shepard had a ton of weaknesses and sad problems—”

Oh, and you didn’t, ya degenerate, gambling ginhead!

What in heaven’s name is going on? I thought. Was I the only one hearing this?

“And, frankly, he wasn’t that smart,” continued Brennan. “It took me—my writing, my words, and my ingenuity—to make him a hero that would span nineteen best-sellers and inspire two television shows. You might say I’m responsible for adding the heroism to the antihero.”

No, Tim-bo. Sounds to me like you’re responsible for stealing my stories, my life, and making a mint on it!

With a nauseating abruptness, I knew why no one else was reacting to the voice. And why I was the only one hearing it.

That voice wasn’t in the room; it was inside my own head.

But how can that be? How? I asked myself. It wasn’t my voice. Or my thoughts. I’d never thought such crude things in my entire life!

Of course you haven’t, said the male voice. You’re one of those nice- thinking, fair-play Janes—gullible as a corn-fed calf and just about as defenseless.