How to Marry a Ghost Read online

  He’d had black hair brushed forward to frame a hard, brutal face in a style reminiscent of a Roman emperor, and a Roman nose to match. I suppose he was handsome if you went for the Tony Bennett type but he’d scared me and I’d behaved like a complete wimp. I’d let him walk out of the store and I hadn’t said a word.

  When Franny walked in a few minutes later I knew I had to tell her she’d had a shoplifter.

  “What’d he look like?” she asked me.

  I described the man and she nodded.

  “You know who it was?” I said. “Listen, Franny, I’m sorry I didn’t do anything. I was just thrown. I don’t know what came over me.”

  She nodded again. “Yes, I know exactly who it was,” she said slowly, “and I totally understand why you didn’t do anything. If it makes you feel any better, it’s not the first time it’s happened and I’ve never done a thing about it.”

  And then before I could say anything else, she pushed past me to wheel the baby carriage behind the counter just as the members of the SLRA arrived for their meeting. The president, Louis Nichols, was an attractive well-preserved man who I guessed to be in his middle fifties. Rufus whispered to me that his family had been one of the first to build a vacation home in Stone Landing in the late fifties. In fact his parents had started the SLRA. Some people felt there was an element of droit du seigneur in the way he had assumed the presidency when it became vacant but no one could deny that he had worked tirelessly to keep the Association going.

  He summoned everyone to the table and opened the meeting. “I was going to put forward Franny Cook’s name today since she’s been so kind as to let us use her store.”

  “Did I hear my name mentioned?” Franny sauntered over to them.

  Louis got up and offered her a chair. When he reached out to take her arm, I sensed that maybe Rufus wasn’t the only one interested in her. “Join us for coffee,” he said. “We need another person on the board.”

  “Yes, I heard.” Franny ignored Louis’s hand and remained standing, turning to one of the other members. “Abe, you left a message about some logs. How many you want? Half a cord do you?”

  “What are we going to do about the teenagers drinking on our beach at night?” an elderly woman interjected, getting down to business. “It’s disgusting what you find when you go down there in the mornings.”

  “Condoms?” Franny asked, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Same thing we’re going to do about the beach vehicles that are causing all the disturbance to the beach grass. Write a letter to the town supervisor and the trustees asking them to restrict beach vehicle access. And we’re going to ask for a ban on Jet Skis in the bay. I’ve got a draft right here if anyone wants to read it.” Louis waved it in the air. Nobody took it from him.

  “What’s the point? They’ll say the same thing they always do,” said Abe. “The fishermen need to be able to launch their boats from there and if someone has a heart attack, or gets eaten by a shark, they need to be able to drive the ambulance along the sand.”

  “And they’ll be right,” said Franny. “So there are people launching Jet Skis and racing SUVs and disturbing your peace. That’s the price you pay for turning Stone Landing into a vacation spot. It wasn’t like this when my dad was growing up. Now it’s a weekender’s paradise. I know, I get to watch their homes all winter. Seventy-five percent of the homeowners are from the city. They’re the ones who bring the SUVs and the Jet Skis.”

  “And they’re the ones who’ll keep you in work,” said Abe sharply as Franny towered over him in such a rage that for one second I thought she was going to strike him, but then she wandered back to the cash register.

  “Oh God,” whispered Rufus, “when will Franny learn not to bite the hand that feeds her.”

  “Lou, I think you’ll have a hard time getting us to vote her in,” I heard Abe say. “She’s not one of us, now is she?”

  I wanted to tell him to keep his voice down but too late—Franny had turned on her heel and was marching back.

  “What do you mean, not one of you? I’ve never heard such a crock. I’m a Stone Landing resident, I pay my taxes. I’m—”

  A cell phone started ringing. Everyone fumbled in their pockets until I suddenly realized the sound was coming from Rufus who was standing right beside me. He turned away and began to walk out of the store, his phone clamped to his ear. Franny had abandoned her tirade to go back to the cash register yet again and I followed Rufus, worried he would leave without me. But we almost collided as he came back in again, the screen door banging behind him.

  “They’ve found another one,” he yelled. “Another body. A woman and they found her on his property.”

  “Whose property?” Franny leaned across the counter.

  “Shotgun Marriott’s,” said Rufus and my blood ran cold. “First his son is washed up on the beach and now there’s a woman lying facedown in his woods and they’re saying someone shot her in the back with a bow and arrow.”

  CHAPTER 3

  SHOTGUN MARRIOTT HAD ONCE BEEN HUGE!

  You couldn’t write him off as just another aging British rocker. He’d been a superior bluesman in his time and a legendary womanizer. What’s more, they were classy women, by all accounts. A Shakespearean actress, a lawyer, a prize-winning photojournalist who spent more time in war zones than with him. I’d always wondered whether they actually called him Shotgun in moments of intimacy. Of course there were plenty of scrubbers crawling all over him in nightclubs and his band, the Suits, were rumored to have trashed hotel rooms the world over but even so, Shotgun Marriott had always had more style than your average rock ’n’ roll artist.

  It was a woman who had brought him down, ended his career and dispatched him to oblivion where he’d been for almost fifteen years. A groupie, found dead in his bed after a concert. He wasn’t charged with anything, but he had never revealed what had happened that night. It had become the rock ’n’ roll Chappaquiddick and if he told the whole story in his autobiography, it would be dynamite.

  I was desperate to land the job of working on that autobiography because it might well turn out to be the plum job of my career. I’m a ghostwriter. I am the “as told to” or the “written with” you see in small type underneath the celebrity’s name. For the past ten years I’ve worked in my native London coaxing reminiscences—or in some cases mentally blocking my ears to a torrent of sentimental fabrication—from showbiz personalities, sports stars, a medium, a fashion entrepreneur, you name it. My beloved agent Genevieve kept the work coming on a regular basis and all I had to do was show up, listen—and then go away and write, of course.

  But recently I had encountered a problem in the form of a certain Bettina Pleshette.

  I had always been aware that Genevieve had other clients besides me but until she’d taken on Bettina about eighteen months earlier, I had never been remotely interested in them. Providing Genevieve found me work, I didn’t care a fig what her other clients were up to. But Bettina presented me with something I’d never encountered before: competition. I was used to the interviews Genevieve set up for me being merely a formality. Then, suddenly, whenever she put my name forward for a job, I’d find Bettina was also in the running.

  “They asked for her, they knew about her, what could I do?” was always Genevieve’s excuse. The problem was Bettina invariably got the job.

  I found I wasn’t comfortable being competitive. It comes naturally to some people but I had never even thought about it until Bettina entered the fray. I suppose I should have been grateful to her for single-handedly putting ghostwriters on the map. Until she came along we were backroom people both by nature and profession, content to suppress our egos and remain invisible. But that just wasn’t Bettina’s style. She’d hired a publicist and made herself a star as well as her subjects, so that whenever she ghosted a book, it immediately raised the stakes. This went against every single ghostwriting grain in my body and I hated her long before she ever came up against me for w
ork.

  Cards on the table: She’s twenty-eight, eleven years younger than me. She’s incredibly well-connected. She’s sexier, firmer, and her hair is thicker. She seems to go out with a different guy every night and while Genevieve has never let on, I’m convinced Bettina commands a much higher rate than I do.

  I faced up to the fact that I felt threatened. There was a new breed of ghost for hire and for the first time I felt just a little bit past it. To begin with I could rationalize Bettina’s success by telling myself that the jobs she landed were the fluff stuff, writing the memoirs—Memoirs? Ha! More like the teenage diaries—of MTV chart toppers or someone hailed as the next Paris Hilton. There was a role for her as ghost for the youth market. But then she snatched a job I coveted from right under my nose, that of ghosting the autobiography of a respected BBC newscaster with an addiction to painkillers. That certainly wasn’t a good fit for the youth chronicler niche and I felt the unfamiliar stirrings of rivalry, so much so that the first thing that came out of my mouth when I went to Genevieve’s office for a meeting to discuss future work was:

  “What’s Bettina working on at the moment?”

  Genevieve is a treasure. She is always brisk and efficient but she is also mumsy. There’s no other word for it. She mothers me in a way my own mother never has. There I’ll be in her tiny Covent Garden office, 5' 8" tall with my long Madonna (not the singer!) face and my willowy frame inevitably encased in the most minimalist clothes I can find, fretting about what my next job will be. And there she’ll be, 5' 2", fussing around me in pastel-colored suits. And even though she is tiny, with dainty feet and hands, she is also enormous, like a pretty little hippo in sugary camouflage. But she is so comfortable with her bulk that she almost makes me want to gain thirty pounds.

  And she is the only person, apart from Tommy, who understands that I’m neurotic and antisocial and that I prefer to live vicariously through other people, which is why ghostwriting is so perfect for me. But ever since Bettina had been on her books, I’d had the sense that she wasn’t quite as there for me as she had once been.

  “What’s Bettina doing?” she echoed, lifting a little bottle of Evian to her rosebud lips and taking a tiny sip. “Nothing, dear. She’s just finished the newscaster book and she’s currently in New York for an interview. She’s been there awhile actually, two or three weeks. Went there for a holiday and then this job came up.”

  “Genevieve, I want you to put me up for it too,” I said.

  She blinked in surprise and immediately protested. “You don’t even know what it is. And it’s not right for you, Lee. Anyway, as I just said, it’s in New York.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” I was feeling very tetchy. “I know New York. I’m going there next week anyway because my mother lives there now and she’s getting—” I let it dangle because I couldn’t say she was getting married and I still hadn’t quite got to grips with the partnership affirmation thing. “I could stay with her.” I made eye contact with Genevieve and held it until she looked away. “So who is it?”

  She shrugged. “Shotgun Marriott. Not your thing at all.”

  “Why should it be Bettina’s thing and not mine?” I leaned forward to stare in outrage at Genevieve across her desk. “Well?” I said when she didn’t reply.

  “Oh all right,” she said finally, “it might be something for you but Bettina does have a history with this guy.”

  “She knows him?”

  “Not exactly. When I first took her on as a client she told me the one person whose book she wanted to ghost was Shotgun Marriott’s. She said she’d tried to nail him—her words—once before a few years ago but he wasn’t interested in doing a book. She said she was alerted to the idea of doing his story when she was ghosting the tell-all book by Patsy White, Smokey White’s wife, remember?”

  I nodded. Smokey White, another rock legend, had made the mistake of dumping his wife who had promptly dished the considerable dirt on their marriage to Bettina.

  “Well, Patsy had been on the road with Shotgun and his wife and she hinted to Bettina that there was a story to tell about the Marriott marriage.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing as far as I know. Bettina said she did some digging around at the time but since neither Shotgun nor his ex-wife would talk to her, she didn’t get very far. So it’s understandable that when a rumor started to spread about a month ago that Shotgun wanted to do a book, she was determined to be first in line to ghost it. She said she was going to America on vacation but I shouldn’t be surprised if she went there just to be strategically positioned geographically when he was ready to start interviewing.”

  “But she hasn’t actually got the job yet?”

  “Well, I haven’t heard anything,” Genevieve conceded.

  Well, that was it! I’d been dithering at the thought of attending my mother’s ceremony, telling myself I shouldn’t go out of some kind of deep-rooted loyalty to my father, but the next day I called my mother and told her I was on my way.

  But now, as I wandered about the mausoleum a couple of days after my mother’s ceremony, dwelling on the drama of not one but two bodies being found with a connection to Shotgun Marriott and fretting about the fact that I still hadn’t had a summons for an interview with him, I began to give up hope. Bettina had got there ahead of me and yet again she had landed the job.

  I wished it could be me all alone in the pool house instead of Rufus. I needed a place where I could hole up and be on my own for a while. I’d had enough socializing and excitement over the last few days to last me a lifetime and if I didn’t get some space and private time to recharge my batteries, pretty soon I’d begin to freak out.

  I was right about the dust sheets in the mausoleum. The day after the beachfront ceremony, all the furniture on the ground floor had been covered up except for the breakfast room beside the kitchen. I set up my laptop there and settled down to wait. I went for long walks from one end of the sweeping curve of the bay to the other, cursing the fact that I had not brought a swimsuit. I had no car in which to explore the area and while Rufus was an angel, coming back from work in the evening bearing steaming aluminum cartons of delicious take-out food to share with me, during the day I felt somewhat cut off from reality.

  He brought tantalizing bits of gossip about the recent deaths.

  “There’s no freakin’ word on who she is,” he said, plunging his hand into a pile of barbecued ribs with such relish that he evoked a painful vision of Tommy who had a habit of getting more food on his face than in his mouth. “Shotgun Marriott’s place is off limits to the world. There are police lines wherever you look.”

  “Is he there?” I asked.

  “They say he is but no one’s seen him. The press are camped out on Cranberry Hole Road but no one’s given them anything yet.”

  The next day I went for an early morning walk along the beach to the far end of the bay where I caught a glimpse of something yellow in the woods. The mist was still coming in off the water and I thought maybe I had imagined something but looking closer, I saw it was a police line. This had to be the edge of Shotgun’s property. I hung about for a few minutes feeling edgy and then I saw them searching the area, dogs straining at their leashes. One man looked up and saw me and said something to another and they started coming toward me. I turned and ran. It was pure instinct and after a few seconds I slowed to a jog, imagining it must look very suspicious. Were they coming after me?

  But when I looked around, the beach was empty. I arrived back at the Stucco House, as Rufus told me they called it—I thought “mausoleum” a much more appropriate name—and found a note on the kitchen table from Lucia. “Jenny called.” Who was Jenny? Oh, Genny, as Genevieve liked to be called.

  “So,” she said triumphantly when I called her back, “it’s a go. You got the job.”

  “I did? But I haven’t even had an interview.” Now that it had happened I was amazed. “He didn’t want Bettina?”

  “App
arently not. You know, I’m not talking directly with him. With someone like him, you deal with their ‘people.’ But now I come to think of it, they didn’t mention Bettina. It’s odd. I’ve been calling them every day for some kind of reaction about either you or Bettina and the last time I spoke to them, I mentioned that you were out in East Hampton. I said you’d need two or three hours’ warning if you had to go into the city to meet with him. Anyway, it turns out he’s out there too. They called back pretty quickly and said he wanted you. And he wants to see you right away. Have they buried his son yet? It’s all over the papers in London this morning. Dreadful!”

  “He’s being cremated this morning,” I said, repeating what Rufus had heard on the grapevine.

  “This morning? Good God, and he wants to see you the same day!”

  “For an interview?”

  “They were talking as if you were already hired,” said Genevieve. “Call his office in the city and they’ll tell you where to go.”

  “What time?” I reached for a pen. My hand was shaking slightly. Going to meet a subject for the first time the day he had cremated his son. It was almost unthinkable.

  But Genevieve was moving right along. “Two o’clock and if you find out where Bettina’s got to, let me know. She seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. Her cell phone’s been turned off for days. For once I’m going to have to tell her she hasn’t got the job.”

  This should have been music to my ears but when I hung up I was feeling weirdly uneasy.