Brennan raised his hand, frantically waving it as if warding away some evil spirit.
“Jack!” rasped Brennan, staring right up at Milner, who was now clutching his fedora in a white-knuckled grip. “J-J-Jack Shepard. It c-c-can’t be. You’re dead. You’re dead!”
That’s when Brennan’s eyes closed. His face turned as gray as the fieldstone walls, and his rib cage collapsed with his last living breath.
CHAPTER 5
The guy was dead as hell.
“PEN? PENELOPE? CAN you hear me?”
“She just drank too much, Sadie. Let her sleep it off down here.”
“Okay, Milner. I’ll walk you and Linda out.”
I heard the voices, tried to open my eyelids, but for some reason they seemed to weigh more than a pair of unedited Stephen King manuscripts. “We gave him the heart attack,” I murmured. “Half the audience . . . costumed like Jack Shepard . . . Oh, god . . . we killed him.”
“Oh, no, she’s starting
“It’s too bad what happened, Sadie.”
“Forget it,” said Sadie. “Fate’s fate. When your number’s up, it’s up. But thanks again for those baked goods. The crowd certainly devoured them.”
“More of a wake than a party.”
“So it was. But Brennan didn’t go anywhere we’re all not headed.”
“True, Sadie. Good night.”
“ ’Night, Milner. ’Night, Linda . . .”
MY POUNDING HEAD lolled from side to side as I wrestled with dreamland. When consciousness finally won, I rose from the rocking chair and moved shakily through the dimly lit store.
“Anyone here?”
My mouth was cotton. I checked my watch. Big hand on twelve, little on four.
Well, the party’s certainly over, I thought, looking at our beautifully renovated store, all the new inventory, the antiques, the fixtures. All our hopes and efforts . . .
More than the party was over, and I knew it.
Timothy Brennan had been Buy the Book’s very first author appearance, and he’d ended up dead. Talk about cursed. Now authors would avoid our store in droves—right along with the customers. Not that they hadn’t before. This incident just gave them a new reason.
I sighed. Who in the world would patronize us now?
Maybe Brennan’s ghost, I thought. If I believed in ghosts.
Brainert once said that ghosts in stories meant unfinished business. But he’d been talking about literary devices.
As my shaky legs moved beneath the archway that led to the community events space, I tried to recall the last time I’d considered actual spirits. It had been years. Back when I’d watched them lower my mother into the muddy earth of the Quindicott Village Cemetery.
At the ripe old age of thirteen, I had been certain that death was not the end. Every night I’d whisper into the dark from beneath my blanket. I’d tell my mother about my day at school, a boy I liked, a grade I got. I was certain my mom could hear, just couldn’t answer. Not in a normal way but in signs.
I had looked for signs of my mother everywhere, and I’d found them. In the shape of a cloud, or a piece of music on the radio. In the way a bird would follow me home or a phrase some stranger might utter on the street.
After school every day, rain or shine or snow, I used to visit my mother’s grave at the old Q cemetery, bring her a flower, read her a poem. Sometimes I’d visit other graves, too. A neighbor boy who’d been hit by a car. A favorite teacher who’d suffered a massive heart attack. A teenage girl who’d drowned.
I’d become an expert at talking to the dead. And, a few times, when I’d been under great stress at school, I even thought I could hear the dead speaking to me. A voice here or there.
But then I lost my older brother. And my dad.
At seventeen, I suddenly stopped looking for signs. Or visiting graves to talk to the dead. It seemed pointless: I was alive, and they were not. Wherever they’d gone, they’d left me behind. And it suddenly seemed clear that the only thing the dead left the living was
One of the store’s dim night-lights shone in the corner. The chairs had been folded up and stacked against the far wall, leaving a wide expanse of empty floor. No police tape or chalk lines or anything out of the ordinary. Why should there be? Brennan died of natural causes—a heart attack, perhaps. Or a stroke. I deliberately chose not to think about the other possibility: fright!
Sadly, I saw that the refreshment table was empty. Totally clean. No goodies, no soda, no bottled water. I sighed. My mouth felt as dry as the Sahara desert. No doubt from the whiskey. I could use a stiff drink of something wholesome and nonalcoholic, preferably bottled water.
I gazed at the carved oak podium, now standing in the corner, the spot where Brennan had fallen. A doctor in the audience had performed CPR on the author for ten minutes before the paramedics finally arrived to pronounce him done for. There would be no ghost.
“When you’re dead you’re dead and that’s all there is,” I mumbled.
I froze.
No, I thought. No way. I couldn’t be hearing the very same deep male voice that had heckled Brennan’s speech.
I took a step back, searched. But there was no one. Still, the room was too dark to see through every shadow.
“Whoever you are, the party’s over, okay?” I said, trying and failing to sound commanding. “You have to leave now.”
I told myself to keep steady. Sadie and Spencer were upstairs. I had to get this guy out. Now.
“What do you want? Money? I doubt we sold many books today.”
“What?”
I wanted to run full speed to the back room, but I hesitated. What if this man were hiding in the corner shadows? What if he were luring me into a trap?
“How did you know what I was thinking?”
I went back to the main part of the store, reached under the counter where the register sat, and let my fingers close on Sadie’s aluminum baseball bat. Sadie would have locked up the money in the safe upstairs, so the back room was the only evidence.
As I drew the bat out, I knocked over a half-filled bottle of water. After Brennan had collapsed, I remembered grabbing it off the table as a pacifier, drinking half the contents, then stashing it here during the craziness of the ambulance and police coming in.
I was dying of thirst, so I unscrewed the cap, took a swig from the bottle, put the cap back on, and started
