The imagination feeds on phantoms.
—Cornell Woolrich, “Mind over Murder,” Dime Detective magazine, 1943
Quindicott, Rhode Island
Present day
A PENNY FOR your thoughts.
“You don’t have a penny, Jack. You haven’t had a penny in decades.”
I beg to differ, doll. You still carry around my Buffalo nickel, don’t you?
“Yes.”
So I got at least five cents in my Penny bank.
The ghost was right. Ever since I pocketed that ancient nickel of his, the one that spilled out of his dusty PI files, I’d made a mobile connection to a gumshoe spirit I couldn’t control (or always comprehend) yet kept talking to anyway.
But then life was like that, wasn’t it? Driven by phantoms we didn’t always understand.
My name is Penelope Thornton-McClure. I’m a widow in my thirties who moved myself and my young son back to my hometown in recent years to help save my aunt Sadie’s bookshop.
Using my late husband’s life insurance money and my New York publishing connections, I revived the family’s dying business, overhauling the stale inventory, restoring the crumbling façade, polishing up the wood-plank floor, and replacing the ancient, rickety decor with beautiful oak bookshelves, standing lamps, and overstuffed armchairs fit for a cozy New England library.
I put us online for global sales and expanded us into the neighboring storefront, adding an event space for author appearances, reading groups, and community gatherings. It was the noise of that expansion that appeared to have roused Jack Shepard from decades of supernatural slumber.
Why exactly the gallant gumshoe was gunned down on our premises, I don’t know, but the question felt fitting, given our shop’s specialty. We sell all kinds of books, you see, but we specialize in crime and mystery fiction. Not that everyone likes a mystery—literary or otherwise.
If a doorway opened to a darkened room, would you walk through it? Or swiftly pass it by? If a disembodied voice started giving you advice, would you listen? Or plug your ears and cover your eyes?
Cornell Woolrich once wrote “the imagination feeds on phantoms,” but I never considered myself especially imaginative—or brave. What I am is incurably curious, intellectually itchy. That’s why I couldn’t stop talking to the ghost. Or asking questions about Norma. She was a curiosity. A puzzle of a person with so many pieces missing that I couldn’t see her big picture.
True, few people in our lives are totally open books. Nearly everyone we know conceals personal secrets. But if someone you knew (and liked) was accused of a major crime, wouldn’t you be shocked enough to ask a few questions?
In Norma’s case, those questions began on a cool autumn afternoon. I’d been working all day in the shop and back office and felt the need for some fresh air and exercise, which is why I ventured out on foot, taking the back, wooded trail that led to the Finch Inn, a lovingly restored Queen Anne Victorian bed-and-breakfast run by my good friends Fiona and Barney Finch.
I usually enjoyed this walk, but today’s trek felt ominous. The dry leaves around me rustled with a kind of death rattle. The shortened days and drop in temperature had choked off their green vibrance and bright fall colors for last-breath pigments of tired yellow and dried-blood brown. Tree branches swished menacingly with every salty gust from the nearby Atlantic, and the air felt raw. I could smell the rain coming. As gathering clouds began to smother the sunlight, even the birds went eerily silent.
Alone on this path, I pulled my jacket closer around me, trying not to shiver, when suddenly I wasn’t alone anymore.
How many times do I have to tell you, baby? There are wolves in this big, bad world. What are you doing wandering through this forest all alone, like a Little Red-headed Riding Hood?
My ghost was back.