“Right. I remember. It still sounds crazy, though.”
“Hey,” Sadie suddenly called from the archway connecting the main store with the events space, “what’s my baseball bat doing on the floor?”
I rose so fast from my cross-hatched Shaker seat, I set my head to rocking more violently than the chair. In stockinged feet I managed to stumble over to the archway without landing on my face, although I did end up shredding the last vestiges of nylon covering my toes.
Sadie pointed to the aluminum bat. It rested on the wood plank floor in the exact spot where I’d been talking to the ghost—before I blacked out, that is. My slingbacks were here, too.
“I think . . . I must have been . . . sleepwalking,” I concluded.
“Part of your ghost dream?” asked Sadie, picking up the bat.
“Yes,” I said, slipping back into my shoes. “Let’s just drop it, okay?”
I stuffed the last bit of muffin into my mouth—hoping to swallow my anxieties along with it. Then I drained my coffee mug and headed toward the stairs, intending to check on Spencer, shower, change, and stuff at least one more delicious muffin in (my size fourteen skirt was already tight, but after the night I had, I figured I deserved a little baked-good comfort). That’s when the bell above the front door tinkled and a female voice sharply called out:
“Sadie Thornton!”
Completely ignoring the CLOSED sign, town councilwoman Marjorie Binder-Smith barreled through our front door, wearing one of her numerous pink suits.
“Now, what in hell could she want?” muttered Sadie.
“Have you seen the morning paper?” Marjorie waved a copy of the Saturday morning Quindicott Bulletin in front of our faces and commanded, “Just take a look at this!”
We did. The headline, which stretched the width of the front page in letters at least two inches tall, stated: Noted Author Dies in Local Bookstore Mishap!
“Please tell me, ladies,” said the councilwoman, “why someone choked to death on a doughnut in a business that does not have a license to sell food?”
“Choked to death? On a doughnut?” I repeated. I skimmed the story. The general news was correct, but some of the details were all wrong.
“Well, what have you got to say for yourself?” demanded the sixtyish councilwoman. Her voice sounded outraged, but her eyes, edged by the cracks that came from applying a copious amount of face powder, held the glee of a driller making an oil strike—a timely issue to exploit was just the thing to raise a politico’s profile.
I was about to answer her charge when Aunt Sadie put herself between us.
“Calm down, Marjorie,” she said. “You don’t want to pop any plastic surgery stitches, do you?”
Ha! Hahahahahaha!
The laughter in my ears was deep and loud. The laugh of Jack Shepard. I looked immediately for a reaction from Sadie or Marjorie, but neither appeared to have heard it.
“You can’t be real,” I silently told the Jack Shepard voice. “I dreamed you up. That’s all you are. A delusion.”
Think again, babe, said the deep voice. I’ve been here since before you were born.
“Be quiet now,” I silently told the voice. “I can’t deal with this delusion on top of everything else!”
The councilwoman was now shaking her finger in Sadie’s face. “Don’t you threaten me, Sadie Thornton!”
“Threat?” Sadie said calmly. “That was no threat. Really, Marjorie, can’t you recognize a simple insult when you hear it?”
I so hated confrontations. But whenever Sadie and Marjorie were in a room together, friction seemed inevitable. Sadie would never discuss the reason, but the bad blood between the two women was long-standing. It predated even the feud between Marjorie and the Quindicott small-business owners, which had been going strong for well over a decade.
Linda Cooper-Logan had actually dubbed the woman “the Municipal Zoning Witch” because of the relentless list of regulations and taxes she continually attempted to pass on local businesses.
The woman had very wealthy backers, too, thanks in part to her willingness to advance their private concerns. The McClures were among them. They still owned quite a bit of land in Quindicott, despite the fact that most of their residences were in New York, Palm Beach, and Newport.
In return for her various “favors,” to people such as the McClures, Marjorie expected backing for the Council president’s office next year and maybe even the governor’s office in the future—or so she liked to tell people. Lately, she’d taken to wearing Hillary Clinton pastel suits, and, according to Colleen, she’d even asked for her brown hair to be dyed blond and cut short à la Hillary.
“Hillary Smillary,” Aunt Sadie had said when Colleen had passed along the gossip. “Thirty years ago that woman was obsessed with the Kennedys. Even dyed her hair black like Jackie O’s. Marjorie is just a silly, silly woman.”
“I know your tactics, Marjorie,” said Sadie, tightening her grip on the aluminum bat and raising it up just a fraction from her side. “You’re always looking for some issue to advance your political profile. Well, you’re not latching onto this one—even if it is the biggest news that’s hit this town since Seymour Tarnish won twenty-five thousand dollars on Jeopardy!”
“You’re wrong, Sadie.” Marjorie’s eyes narrowed and she actually poked her manicured finger into Sadie’s small shoulder. “This isn’t about politics, it’s about rules. You haven’t paid the town for the proper license to sell food!”
What a shakedown artist, said the Jack Shepard voice. You want some advice? Grab that bat and give it a swing or two.
“Shut up,” I rasped.
“What did you tell me?” said Marjorie, wheeling to confront me.
“Take it easy,” I said, quickly backing up a step. “We don’t have a license to sell food because we aren’t selling food. You can check with the people who came last night. Welsh and Eddie took down all their statements—”
“You’re denying you had food here? What about the doughnut Brennan choked on, then?”
“We did serve complimentary refreshments during the social gathering, which is within our right,” I said. “But Timothy Brennan didn’t choke to death on a doughnut. He didn’t even eat.”
“What about the news report?” challenged Marjorie, slapping at the paper in my hand.
“It’s the Quindicott Bulletin, not the Boston Globe!” cried Sadie. “It’s Elmer Crabtree, for cripes sake!”
Elmer, the Quindicott Bulletin’s publisher, was pushing eighty these days, but his age wasn’t the issue. His primary business had always been as local printer of things such as supermarket flyers, sales brochures, and wedding invitations. More than forty years ago, he’d started the Bulletin not to extend the fourth estate or to put truth on the kitchen tables of the Quindicott citizenry, but to make a tidy profit from local business ads and grocery store coupons.
The Bulletin’s contents, therefore, mostly consisted of verbatim press releases from town officials, notices for local meetings, sports scores from school teams, and classified ads for selling used cars and the like. He wrote up the occasional “hard news” story on his front page—like the piece on Brennan’s death. But he was almost never an eyewitness—and neither were his usual sources. The accounts, in fact, were primarily told to him third- and fourthhand.