The Ghost and the Dead Man's Library

We mortgaged Buy the Book for renovations, expansion, and inventory overhaul, and, for the most part, brought the nearly defunct store back to life. I was supremely proud of what we’d done thus far. Our little bookstore had led the way in resuscitating Cranberry, Quindicott’s previously depressed main street.

“We have a smart, literate clientele from all over,” I reminded Jack. “We have author chats and—”

Listen, baby, between your pulps, those glorified True Confessions tomes, and the low-rent mooks and grifters you trot in for jawboning, I’ve heard every cliche in the book, going on times ten over.

“They are not mooks and grifters. They are authors, reading their works.”

Jack really was impossible with his complaints about the store. On the other hand, how thrilled would you be about a place where you’d had (as Jack put it) your lights put out and your ticket punched?

Jack Shepard was killed in our bookstore in 1949 while investigating the murder of an old army buddy. That’s all I know. That’s all, apparently, he knows. He claims his case files (hundreds of them), which I have on loan, contain notes on the investigation he’d been running at the time. But I have yet to locate them—and Jack refuses to help me out.

He says whoever killed him wasn’t “playing,” and he doesn’t want me anywhere near that particular murder mystery. It hadn’t stopped me from solving a few others, however, and, I have to admit, Jack had been a big help in that regard. But then, he had been a private detective.

In life, anyway.

A flash of lightning brought me back to the potentially deadly weather.

“It is an ugly night,” Sadie murmured.

Clutched in her wrinkled, seventy-three-year-young hands was a frayed piece of paper containing the directions to our destination. The instructions had been faxed to her just two hours ago, right after the urgent phone call summoning us to Newport, which was between thirty to fifty minutes away from Quindicott, depending on the traffic and the—

BOUMMMMM!

“Jeez-Louise. I hate thunder.”

“I am sorry about the storm, dear,” my aunt said, as if she’d been the one who’d brought on the weather in the first place. “Mr. Chesley said it was important that we come tonight. Urgent, was the word he’d used.”

Her voice was nearly lost under the constant swishing of the windshield wipers.

“Don’t worry about the weather. It’s not so bad,” I fibbed, watching blasts of wind ripple the black water pooling on the roadway. “Anyway, we’ve practically arrived.”

Sadie squinted at the directions in her hands. “You’re right, Pen. The next turn is just ahead. But it’s so dark you’d better slow down, or we might miss it.”

With the autumn sunset around five o’clock, half past seven seemed black as midnight, and lights were plenty scarce along this remote section of the Atlantic coastline, which only magnified the gloom.

We swung off the main highway and onto a winding, two-lane blacktop. According to Peter Chesley’s instructions, we were to follow this route until we reached Roderick Road.

On a sunny, dry day, this route might have been pleasant, even scenic. On a night like this, however, the eerie stretch seemed almost claustrophobic. Tall trees stripped of their leaves flanked our vehicle on either side like old, brown bones, rattling in the night.

On one narrow turn, the road swung onto the ledge of a high, narrow cliff. Jagged rocks swept down to the Atlantic’s roiling black plane. Typically, I’d enjoy the rhythmic sound of the lapping waves. But tonight the nor’easter winds were whipping the surf into a seething froth, then crashing it over the ragged shoreline with a fulminating roar.

“It is so strange to think of Peter living out here,” Sadie said with an eye on the desolate horizon. “When I knew him, he loved being in the middle of things, loved living in the bustle of Providence, loved teaching.”

“What did he teach?”

“He was a professor of American history at Brown University.”

I heard Jack groan. Not another egghead. Maybe I’ll just slip away now, before I croak from boredom.

True to his promise, I felt Jack’s presence recede. Where the spirit went, I don’t know. At first, Jack’s ghost appeared to be confined within the fieldstone walls of our bookstore. But last year I found a stray buffalo nickel in a cache of his yellowing private eye files. As bizarre and irrational as it sounded, as long as I had Jack’s old nickel in my possession, his spirit traveled with me. (Sure, the ghost has tested my limits with his wisecracks, jibes, and off-color barbs, but his streetwise advice has gotten me out of some big, hairy jams, so I held tight to that coin. Frankly, I preferred running with the insurance.)

Of course, I’d already considered that Jack wasn’t real at all, that the ghost was simply a figment of my imagination, some psychological split akin to the schizophrenia of John Nash, the famous Nobel Prize–winning mathematician.

Was Jack my alter ego? That small, buried nugget of id that had all the bravado I didn’t? Maybe he was some composite of all the hard-boiled novels I’d read over the years; a subconscious realization of those Black Mask stories my late police officer dad and I had loved.

But even if that were true (and I doubted it was), it was just one more reason not to inform anyone of Jack’s existence.

The McClure family owned a lot of land in this part of Rhode Island, and they wielded a lot of influence. They also blamed me for Calvin’s suicide (having conveniently forgotten that they themselves had refused to acknowledge the severity of his depression). English boarding school for Spencer had been their idea of a “helpful” suggestion after Calvin died; after which, I’d told them to take a flying leap and then moved in with my aunt in Quindicott.

My former in-laws would be only too happy to find a reason to take Spencer away from me. So telling anyone (including and especially a therapist) that I, Penelope Thornton-McClure, was having regular conversations with Jack Shepard, the friendly PI ghost, wasn’t something I’d be doing anytime soon.

The car radio was finally drowned out by static, so I switched the newscaster off and refocused on the task in front of us.

“Peter Chesley sounds like an impressive man,” I said.

“Yes. Oh, yes…he was.”

“How long have you known him? I don’t remember you ever mentioning him before.”

“I met Peter…let’s see…going on thirty years ago now.”

Sadie leaned back in the passenger seat—the first time since the thunder had started. Despite the tense storm around us, the thought of Peter Chesley appeared to relax her.

“He called to purchase a few titles in an estate library the store had taken on consignment. When he walked in to pick them up, that’s when we first met. He loved the store and he became a regular customer after that…and a friend.”

It sounded to me like he’d been more than “a friend,” but I wasn’t sure how to ask without prying.

“Of course, business was different in those days,” my aunt went on. “You’ve set us up on the Internet now, but back when I was your age, we had buyers dropping by every week, folks from Newport, New Haven, Providence, even New York City….”

She smiled at some memory. “Peter was one of the nicest. He never seemed to have much money, was forever scrimping to purchase rare books for his collection, but he was always well dressed in pressed slacks and a tweed jacket. I remember he had a glorious mop of thick golden hair and blue eyes, like Paul Newman…”

“Hmm.” I smiled. “Can’t wait to meet him.”

Sadie laughed. “Oh, no, no, no, Pen. My description of the man is from my past memories. He must be close to eighty by now.”

“Who cares?” I teased. “I’m a sucker for blue eyes.”

“Ah…but what could you possibly have in common with someone who was in their prime when FDR was president?”

I thought about Jack. “Actually, you might be surprised.”