How to Marry a Ghost Read online

  She had gone white and she was shaking but she managed a faint smile.

  “It’s okay. I need to talk about it. Yes, you’re right, his body was pulled out of the water but before that he was shot and his killer cleaned him up, dressed him in a wedding dress, and threw him in the bay. Underneath that dress there was a gaping hole the size of a dinner plate in his chest. Have you any idea what a shotgun can do to you?”

  I shook my head and I was pretty thrown by her question. Did she think I encountered bodies blasted by shotguns on a regular basis?

  “Well, the fact that he’d been drifting in the bay for twenty-four hours probably meant most of his blood had drained out of him but what I really found horrific was that they told me the wound was plugged before he was dressed in the wedding dress.”

  “What do you mean, ‘plugged’?”

  “I don’t know—filled in with cotton, bandages, some kind of dressing, whatever you do to stop blood flowing from a wound.”

  “Do they have any idea who killed him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s a detective on the case and he’s a pretty mean bastard by the looks of things, comes to us from the city and he was originally a patrolman in the South Bronx. He’s new out here so he’s going to be working this case pretty hard to prove himself. You’re going to come across him if you’re working with Kip, and good luck. He got nowhere with me but then I’m pretty tough myself. Anyway, I told him who I think he should regard as his prime suspect.”

  “You did? Who?”

  “Oh, you’ll find out soon enough,” she said mysteriously. “So you’ve met Kip?”

  Her abrupt switch threw me for a second and thinking of Shotgun as Kip was not going to be easy.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “You’ll like working with him. He’s a very nice man, decent, kind. A wonderful man.” She was on the verge of tears again.

  Oh my God, I thought, she still loves him.

  “How long since you and he—” I faltered, not quite sure this was an area I ought to be getting into.

  “Split up? I left him fourteen years ago.”

  “You left him?”

  “Oh yes. You haven’t done your homework, have you? Your predecessor was pretty thorough by the sounds of things.”

  “You met her?”

  Angie shook her head. “No, but a few years ago she tried to get Kip to do a book and she was pretty persistent then, sent me a ton of e-mails to which I never replied. Apparently he wasn’t interested and she thought she could get me to make him change his mind. But she didn’t get anywhere with me either. And now I hear she’s been sniffing round here for a few weeks, talking to people, trying to get them to tell her stuff about Kip.”

  “Did she speak to your son?”

  “I’m guessing she did.”

  “Did you ask him about her? I mean, before he—”

  Angela Marriott turned away from me so I couldn’t see her face.

  “No,” she said, “I never asked him. You see, my son and I didn’t speak for a very long time. When Kip and I split up, he stayed with his father. He was—” Her voice broke. “He was only ten.”

  I laid Eliza in her baby carriage and moved toward Angela, thinking she was on the point of collapse, but her back remained rigid and she didn’t buckle.

  When she turned around she had regained her composure to the extent that she was able to smile at me. She had replaced her dark glasses and they added to the overall glamorous image she presented. To me, she didn’t look like the wife of a rock star—more like a corporate businesswoman, authoritative, decisive, very much a leader. I wondered what her life had been like since the breakup of her marriage.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I got a little out of control there.”

  Oh God! Here was someone who really resented loss of control. She hadn’t seen her son in fourteen years and then he winds up murdered. Nobody would blame her if she went into a month-long total freak-out, whereas here she was apologizing for a five-second tremor in her voice.

  She was a tough customer all right but then I thought of how tender she had been when changing Eliza’s diaper. Maybe that’s what being around a baby did to people, because in spite of her tattoo, her wood-chopping, her lawn-mowing, and her tough-guy attitude, Franny too had demonstrated a soft and utterly feminine side to her nature with Eliza in her arms.

  “I have to get going,” said Angela, picking up the urn.

  “Wait,” I said as she moved toward the door. There was something I had to ask her. “Will you talk to me for the book?”

  She shook her head firmly. Then she paused at the door and turned to me. “Actually, I might. It depends.”

  On what, I wondered.

  “Where can I reach you?” I said.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to be around here much longer and if I am, I don’t know where I’ll be. If I decide to speak to you, I’ll find you.”

  After she left I sold four tomatoes on the vine, a couple of lemon cream doughnuts and a tub of crème fraîche to people who were in and out before I could even notice what they were like. I put the cash in the Maxwell House tin and when Franny came back, I handed it to her proudly with a list of the items I’d sold.

  I drove home wishing I’d had a chance to talk further with her about Angela Marriott before Eliza claimed her attention. Back at the cabin I made up my bed, made sure my tape recorder was in my bag, and checked Rufus’s directions to Shotgun Marriott’s house. The press were still camped out on Cranberry Hole Road and when they saw me turn into the lane leading to Shotgun’s house, they started to stir. But the cop who let me through when I gave him my name waved them away. The lane ended in a circular cul-de-sac and between two of the driveways facing me, Rufus had told me to look for a hidden dirt track.

  “You get on that,” he’d said, “and you’ll find it’ll take you deep into the woods—the woods where Bettina’s body was found—and you keep going and finally you come to the house. I had to drop someone off once but I never got as far as the house. Apparently he doesn’t like strangers getting too close so my passenger walked the last bit.”

  As I drove down the dirt track, I began to feel queasy with nerves. Okay, so part of it was due to the fact that since I’d arrived in America two people indirectly connected to me had wound up murdered, but the main reason was that I was about to come face to face with Shotgun Marriott and I wasn’t prepared. I was hopelessly ill-informed about the rock music world and probably the last person who should be attempting to chronicle the life of one of its former giants. He’d probably cite umpteen points of reference and I’d have no clue as to what he was talking about. But most of all I was apprehensive about spending time with a hell-raiser. I have the worst stamina of anyone I know and if he expected me to stay up carousing with him every night, knocking back Southern Comfort and supping off illegal substances instead of a nourishing bowl of pasta and a salad, then I’d be in big trouble.

  As I drove up Shotgun’s endless dirt track, I caught a glimpse of more yellow tape in the woods and realized I was passing the spot where they’d found Bettina’s body. I swallowed hard and looked the other way. I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to get as far away from a murder scene as I could.

  And then Bettina Pleshette reached out from beyond the grave—or, more likely, a slab at the morgue. I had a momentary vision of her body lying there with horrible cavities exposed by knives and rib spreaders, and her blood trickling away down runnels or whatever they have as a drain, and of course I nearly drove into a tree. But the weird thing was that she actually came to my rescue. I found myself thinking What would Bettina do? And the thought that she might have already shown Shotgun that she could go the distance with him, chemically fueled or otherwise, stirred me into action. I propelled the Phillionaire’s Jeep—surely Shotgun would be impressed by my wheels?—a little faster down the track until we came into a clearing and once again I nearly veered off into the woods in surprise.
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  The dirt track had become an avenue lined with magnificent oak trees and there before me, standing majestically across an expanse of lawn, was an English manor house.

  As I drew closer I saw that in fact the house was a mishmash of several different types of architecture. The two wings of the house looked to be Jacobean, flanking a more solid, almost fortified central building with a tower. There were additional outbuildings—stables, a coach house with a weathervane on the roof, and a bell tower on one side and a glass-roofed conservatory on the other. I saw that the dirt track continued on beyond the house toward the two barn buildings Rufus had mentioned off to the right.

  But what really gave the house its English look was the mass of ivy covering virtually all the walls, climbing high to the attic windows below the eaves. Beneath it, here and there, I glimpsed a beautiful dusky pink stone on the frontal facade. Despite its assorted periods in style, this was, I decided, an unbelievably romantic house.

  My immediate problem when I approached the main entrance was how to make anyone aware of my arrival. There was no bell, no door knocker, just a solid block of medieval paneling that looked as if it would take a battering ram to break down. But then when I touched it, it gave a little and when I gave it a push, it swung open, not with the groaning wrench of a horror movie but with inviting well-oiled ease, and a shaft of sunlight gave me a path to follow on the flagstone floors inside.

  I found myself standing in a great hall with a magnificent Jacobean staircase rising up out of it to a gallery running around the upper level. A stag’s head above a doorway to the left had a host of baseball caps hanging from its antlers. In the gloom I peered at several oil paintings that lined the walls and saw that they appeared to be ancestral portraits of men who bore a strange resemblance to Shotgun. Maybe they had been purchased specially for this reason.

  I cleared my throat. “Hello?” It came out as little more than a squeak and I tried again. “HELLO?”

  A door opened above me and a figure emerged through one of the doors leading from the gallery.

  “Can I help you?” the man called down to me but he was standing too far back for me to see his face clearly. Was this Shotgun? The accent was American so probably not.

  “I have an appointment with Sho—with Mr. Marriott.”

  “And you are?”

  “Nathalie Bartholomew.”

  “What’s your business with Shotgun Marriott?”

  I sensed hostility in his tone.

  “I’m here to meet with him about a book he wants to do. It was set up by my agent.”

  “Hold on a second.”

  The man disappeared and I heard mutterings. Then he reappeared and leaned over the banister and now I had a clear view of him.

  “I’m Detective Evan Morrison and I’m in the middle of interviewing Mr. Marriott but he asks if you will wait downstairs till we’re done. Go straight ahead”—he pointed to a door directly below him across the hall—“make yourself at home in that room, there. Okay?”

  I nodded, too stunned to speak. Not because I’d walked in on an interview that was obviously connected with the murder but because Detective Evan Morrison was the man I’d seen shoplifting in the Old Stone Market.

  CHAPTER 4

  IF HE RECOGNIZED ME, HE DIDN’T LET ON.

  I didn’t like him and not just because he’d stolen from Franny. And what was that all about? A detective who shoplifted? Whatever it meant, and it couldn’t be good, I didn’t like his fleshy face with its mean eyes—too narrow and no eyebrows to speak of so they appeared like hard little raisins in a mass of dough. I didn’t like his huge nose, his thin strip of a mouth below it, and most of all I didn’t like the supercilious expression on his face. This was the second time I’d seen it and I knew it was part and parcel of him.

  So what would I make of Shotgun Marriott? Only time would tell but maybe I could get a head start by checking out his home.

  The room Evan Morrison had told me to wait in was a shock. There was nothing wrong with the room per se. It turned out to be a small L-shaped sitting room combined with a bigger library area at the far end. It was warm and inviting with a fireplace and a couple of high-backed sofas, the kind you more or less had to climb into like a dog. It was just that if you’d asked me whose home it was a part of, I’d never have said a rock star. I’d have told you a middle-aged country gent. A hunting, shooting, and fishing type. All right, so Shotgun had to be middle-aged by now and maybe he hunted and shot and fished but this wasn’t a room with a “look” to that effect created by a decorator. It wasn’t an American’s idea of shabby chic that somehow always managed to look brand new. This was the real thing, straight out of an English country house that had accumulated centuries of family belongings. It was a room that was lived in and cluttered, brimming with personal possessions abandoned at random on surfaces and chairs. The furniture looked genuinely worn and the faded rose chintz on the sofas had some seriously threadbare patches. A couple of rather battered looking trunks served as end tables on which perched two jade green china lamps, one with a distinct crack zigzagging down the bowl. A cricket bat was propped up against a log basket by the fireplace. The oak floors, well-polished I noticed, were intermittently covered by a motley collection of rugs, worn kilims, colorful Indian dhurries, a jute runner, and what looked like a rather garish prayer mat. They were not at all in keeping with the rest of the room and their cheekiness made me smile. Whoever used this room clearly didn’t take themselves too seriously.

  As I regarded my reflection in the mirror above the marble fireplace—a sheet of mottled but wistful old glass in an ornate gold frame—I became aware of the murmur of voices above me and one in particular was quite distinct. Instinctively I stood on tiptoe, drawn toward the source of the sound, and I saw that it was an open heating—or air-conditioning—duct. I looked around and saw some library steps in the corner. I placed them below the duct and climbed up so I was as close as possible to the opening above, and I listened.

  I realized they were moving about the room—or at least one of them was—because I could hear footsteps. I identified the voice I could hear as that of Detective Morrison. He appeared to have settled in one spot because I heard him quite clearly whereas Shotgun—for it had to be he—was merely a murmur that came and went.

  “Okay, Mr. Marriott, I want you to listen,” I heard Evan Morrison say, “it seems there are some discrepancies in your statements—the one you made following the discovery of your son Sean’s body and the one you made at the time the body of Bettina Pleshette was found on your property.

  “We now know,” he went on, “that your son Sean was killed with a bullet to the chest from a twelve-bore shotgun on the night of Friday September tenth between the hours of eight P.M. and midnight. You have confirmed that you own a Purdey shotgun.”

  There was a murmur from Shotgun to which Evan Morrison replied: “Yes. We have that. It has not been fired for some considerable time.

  “Now, on the night in question, Friday, you say you were alone here because you were expecting Bettina Pleshette to arrive for a meeting with you at seven thirty. You say you have no idea whether your son Sean was home or not. He lived in an apartment above the stables and the two of you rarely saw each other. We have established that Sean was in Manhattan the day he died and returned that night on the jitney, leaving Fortieth Street in the city at six and arriving in Amagansett around eight forty P.M. He called a cab on his cell phone and the cab driver confirms that Sean asked to be dropped off at the bay so that he could walk home along the beach and through the woods. The driver said he seemed to know exactly where he was going even though it was pitch-black. We can assume that it was on this walk that he was shot. Maybe he had an assignation on the beach. Was it a problem for you that your son was gay, Mr. Marriott?”

  Evan Morrison was speaking loudly. This was a bonus for me as it meant I could hear every word, but I winced at the harshness of his tone with the last question, which came out of the bl
ue and, to me, seemed unnecessarily personal. Shotgun said something but I couldn’t make it out.

  “Okay, so you didn’t have a problem,” said Detective Morrison, “but you weren’t close to your son, were you, Mr. Marriott? He lived with you and yet you led totally separate lives. Can you explain why that was?”

  Again there was a murmur and from Evan Morrison’s reply, I deduced that Shotgun had declined to explain.

  “Well, we can return to that later,” said Detective Morrison. “I want to go over your movements the night of September tenth. You say you fixed yourself a drink and waited for Miss Pleshette in the room below this one, that you were listening to music so you would not have heard her car if she did arrive. But that is not the reason you didn’t hear anything, is it, Mr. Marriott?”

  I didn’t hear Shotgun’s reply.

  “You didn’t hear anything because she never came here that night, did she? We have a witness, a Mr. Scott Abernathy, who came forward after her body was found to say that she’d spent the evening and indeed the night of September tenth with him.”

  Shotgun said something very quickly.

  “No, it was definitely that night. Mr. Abernathy was quite specific,” said Evan Morrison with exaggerated patience. “He took Miss Pleshette to dinner at eight o’clock at the Palm in East Hampton. We have this from the maître d’, the waitress who served them their steaks, and several other diners. On the way home they went into BookHampton where the manager observed Miss Pleshette pointing out to Mr. Abernathy several books she had ghosted. Then they had a drink at the bar Cittanuova, several drinks in fact. This takes us to past eleven o’clock. Are you saying she turned up for her meeting after that, Mr. Marriott? No, I thought not.”

  I shifted my balance on the steps to ease a certain stiffness that was creeping into my neck while I strained to listen. Shotgun said something but I didn’t catch it.

  “Ah!” said Evan Morrison. “So here we have a problem. Suddenly you remember that you canceled her but you just forgot to mention that. You knew she wouldn’t be coming here that night. So this places you alone here on the night your son was killed—with no alibi.”