When all’s said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it’s not so much which road you take, as how you take it.
—Charles de Lint, Greenmantle
Quindicott, Rhode Island
Nine months later
“OH, THAT’S A lovely cover,” Aunt Sadie proclaimed, and I agreed.
Together we stood over the box packed with Amanda Pilgrim’s new novel, delivered to our shop fresh from Salient House.
“That dust jacket is matte,” I noted, “and the crow is embossed. Publishers seldom spend that kind of money on covers anymore.”
Sadie nodded sagely. “They knew this book would be a winner.”
I stacked copies of The Crows Will Carry Your Soul in a neat pile on the Staff Picks table. I carefully set aside four copies—one for display in the window, and one each for Seymour, Brainert, and Fiona Finch.
“Spencer’s forensic science book came in with the special orders,” Sadie said. “I’m surprised he’s still obsessed with that subject.”
So was I, especially after he lost the science fair prize to Susan Trencher’s ecologic display. Seymour thought the choice was political, but I didn’t. Susan won because her subject was local, so locals gave her the trophy. Anyway, Susan couldn’t lose after Tim Morton’s do-it-yourself rocket crashed through the roof of the school gym.
Your little tyke did a lot more with his skills than win some rinky-dink trophy.
Jack Shepard—who’d been teasing Bookmark by floating loose packing paper around the room on his ghostly breeze—suddenly spoke up.
It’s true, Jack. Spencer’s self-taught skill at fingerprinting helped save Norma from life as a fugitive and expose Hollis West as a murderer. And all from that tiny television knob that Seymour grabbed from Louis Kritzer’s apartment . . .
Bookmark, losing her battle with the elusive paper, pawed the air as if trying to catch her invisible playmate.
One thing is strange, Jack.
Just one? And this from a gal with a dead PI living in her head.
When all this started, you warned me that death always surrounded the Tears of Valentino, and I guess you were right. But in the end, the murders had nothing to do with the jewels.
You’re not making sense, Penny.
Of course I am. Hollis West, aka Hal Ballard, killed Dottie Willard after she was forced to reveal where Norma was—and he had to cover his tracks. Ditto Louis Kritzer since both of those victims were potential witnesses against him for the murder of his half brother. None of these things involved the Tears of Valentino.
Jack’s reply was a revelation.
Maybe the murders didn’t involve the Tears of Valentino because the real Tears were gone.
That’s true.
In the end, Peyton Pemberton’s priceless jewels were fake, just paste and paint. Most of the teardrop diamonds had been sold off. All that remained of the original legendary necklace was the gold setting and a single diamond embedded in the earring, which was planted on Norma’s maid’s cart to fool the insurance company.
Peyton had run out of the funds she needed to support her lavish lifestyle. So she sold off the teardrop diamonds, one at a time. When they ran out, she cooked up an insurance fraud scheme with the help of her boyfriend, Hollis.
After Hollis was arrested and the Tears recovered, the police confronted Peyton with a host of criminal charges, and she quickly turned informer. To reduce her own sentence, she confessed that her boyfriend had helped her carry out the scheme to defraud the insurance company.
According to Peyton, Hollis was the one who insisted they frame Norma Stanton for the theft. After Norma’s church videos went viral, Hollis panicked. He confessed his past crime to Peyton, the killing of his own half brother, and she agreed that framing Norma for the theft of the Tears would not only solve her financial problems (with a huge insurance settlement) but also close the book on the unsolved murder of Julian Ballard Jr. They’d be killing two crows with one stone. Only, as it turned out, Quindicott’s crows dropped the stone on them.
I have to admit, I told Jack, I’m a little surprised Peyton turned on Hollis so completely.
You shouldn’t be, doll. There’s no honor among thieves—or cheesecake grifters.
I guess not . . .
As I considered that sad truth, I noticed Bookmark suddenly sit on her haunches in the middle of the room, roll over, and expose her striped belly, the same way she would for Sadie or Spencer or me. Could our cat actually sense or even see Jack Shepard?
Getting back to those Tears, I said to the ghost. It’s nice to know Mr. Santoro turned out to be just who he said he was, a representative of a man who wanted to purchase the Tears of Valentino at any price—and he did.
That I don’t get. Why lay out all that lettuce when the hot rocks are gone?
The collector thought the setting was worth the price anyway. It was the connection to Rudolph Valentino he wanted. For him it was never about the jewels.
I don’t follow, doll. Why not?
Do you remember the movie Spencer, Sadie, and I watched on the Intrigue Channel last week, The Maltese Falcon?
Sure. Just like the bird manual it was based on, the movie had nothing to do with real detective work.
Not my point. The statue in the movie turned out to be a worthless piece of lead, right?
Sure.
Well, that worthless piece of lead sold at auction for four million dollars.
The ghost whistled, incredulous.
It’s true, I told him. That falcon is now considered one of the most valuable movie props in the world.
A crazy world, I say.
You’re right, Jack, but as Norma showed us, there’s a lot of good in the world, too.
Once again, I picked up a copy of The Crows Will Carry Your Soul and looked it over. There was no author photo to speak of, and the “biography” consisted of one sentence: Amanda Pilgrim is the pseudonym for an author who travels like a bird, moving with the seasons and the whim of the wind.
I wasn’t surprised. I already knew Norma cherished her anonymity as much as she loved her freedom. A few weeks after the Tears of Valentino affair, she climbed into her van and left Quindicott. No one knew if she’d ever return to our little town. I hoped she would but suspected otherwise.
Norma was part of an American literary tradition that spanned the history of our nation. She was one of those wandering Americans—seekers like Herman Melville, who sailed the South Pacific and hunted whales decades before he wrote Moby-Dick. Or the author of The Call of the Wild. Jack London was just a teenager when he hunted in the Bering Sea and visited Japan—and he really did seek his fortune in the Alaska gold rush before writing books about it.
And then there was Jack Kerouac, perhaps the most famous literary traveler of all time.
So, Jack said, interrupting my thoughts about Norma. Did you enjoy your dinner at Sardi’s?
Yes, I did. You brought me on the perfect night. Being just feet away from Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra—it was like a dream! Which, I guess, it was. But do you know what the best thing about that night was?
You tell me, Penny.
That wonderful gift you left Cora Ingham—and after you convinced me she couldn’t possibly become the stage actress that Peyton Pemberton described as her great aunt.
The ghost laughed. I think you convinced yourself of that.
By the way, Jack, do you know what Cora did with the money the Tears brought her?
Wasn’t around long enough to follow up.
Well, I did. She went to Ithaca, New York, and started a theater company. They just celebrated their seventy-fifth anniversary. And do you know what else? Every five years they perform Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. They say it’s the wish of the group’s founder, the late Cora Ingham.
Don’t that beat all, Jack said. So, Penny, what’s next?
Well, I have to get the new releases on the shelves and get ready for a Quibblers meeting tonight. And tomorrow there’s a PTA meeting, and then a bake sale, and—
Jack made a rude yawning noise in my head.
As I suspected, he groused. This burg is settling back into its sleepy, small-town ways. Why, it’s enough to bore a guy like me to death.
A sudden draft made me shiver, despite the warmth of the sunny day, and I swore I saw Jack Shepard’s towering form appear before me to send a ghostly smile my way.
I’ll see you in your dreams, he whispered, touching the tip of his fedora.
Then the ghost was gone, fading back into the fieldstone walls that had become his tomb.