Never get out of bed before noon.
—Charles Bukowski
THE HAUNTING RUMBLE continued into darkness like an endless train chugging through an infinite tunnel. It rumbled and rattled until it transformed into something else—a buzzing, but not like a bee. More like a clattering buzz.
I opened my eyes to the sound of my smartphone vibrating itself to the edge of my night table.
Shoot! Rolling onto my stomach, I reached out and grabbed the thing before it went off the cliff.
“Hello?”
“Pen! Thank God you picked up.”
Barely awake, I yawned as my mind scrambled to place the voice. “Fiona? Is that you?”
“I’m sorry to bother you so early, but it’s about Barney . . .”
Barney? I thought, still fuzzy, until I realized she was talking about her husband, Barney Finch.
Longtime friends of our family, the Finches were beloved in the town of Quindicott and scrupulous caretakers of the late Harriet McClure’s magnificent Queen Anne Victorian, which they ran as a bed-and-breakfast.
Fiona herself was a slight, fastidious woman in her fifties. From the day she’d taken the Finch name, she’d begun collecting a vast assortment of pins and brooches in the shape of feathered friends. She herself had sparrow-brown hair, which she often coiffed as high as a rooster’s crown. Why she was calling me about her husband on a weekday morning (at 6:45 a.m.!) I had no idea, but it couldn’t be good.
Sitting up quickly, I was painfully reminded of the bumps and bruises I’d gotten the night before.
“Is Barney okay?”
“I don’t know! He’s been gone all night. I called his phone, but all I got was voice mail. Have you seen him?”
I hadn’t seen the man, not lately. But I had seen his name, scribbled in Clifford Conway’s appointment book:
Barney Finch, 7:30 p.m.
Closing my eyes, I took a breath and asked the question I was dreading—
“Fiona, did Barney have a business meeting last night?”
“No! Last night was Barney’s bowling night. He never misses it. He and his friends get together every week at Millstone Bowl-a-Rama. He usually gets back late, but he’s never stayed out all night—not after bowling, anyway.”
“Have you tried contacting any of his other bowling pals?”
“I sent messages but haven’t heard back.”
“How about Linda at the bakery—”
“Of course!” Fiona cried. “Barney and his friends might be there right now, stuffing themselves with doughnuts.”
Twenty minutes later I joined Sadie and Spencer at the breakfast table and gently broke the news of Conway’s death to them both.
After getting my son off to school, I gave my aunt the disturbing details—including my head making an unfortunate connection with a Comfy-Time doorjamb right before I found the man’s battered corpse.
Sadie cringed, then worriedly fussed over my wounded noggin. As she did, I could sense her relief. Neither of us said it out loud, but we were thinking the same thing. With Conway dead, the threat of his lawsuit against us was gone, too.
I SPENT THE rest of the morning in the privacy of our shop’s stockroom, preparing for our upcoming book launch with the Palantines. Paging through By Its Cover, I pulled out passages to create information cards for each of the cover art paintings on display. These cards would replace Walt’s price tags.
Since “Nathan Brock” had no listing in their book, I selected some general comments about the days of pulp publishing to caption his brilliant rendering of Ruby Tyler as victim and Kosmo Spanos as killer.
When I got to the listing on Roland Prince, I shuddered.
With new eyes, I saw the similarities between Nathan Brock’s signed work and the so-called Roland Prince painting of the cowboy shooting a T. rex. My hand passed over the small B in a circle, placed in the lower right of the painting, which Prince had nearly obliterated with his bold signature.
I now knew what that little B stood for. It stood for Brock, and so much more . . .
That little B was Nathan’s own secret message to the future, not unlike Da Vinci’s or Caravaggio’s or the messages of countless other artists who left something behind, a spirit they hoped would haunt their canvas long after they were gone, a bridge from one time to another that said—
“I was here. I existed. I did this.”
I couldn’t prove that, of course. Some proofs and truths were destined to be lost in time. Like what really happened to Ruby Tyler and Nathan Brock.
As images from my dream rushed back to me, so did my feelings of anger and frustration. Jack Shepard must have been frustrated, too, all those years ago, trying to get answers out of that smug man.
Roland Prince had pretended he knew nothing about Nathan or Ruby when he obviously did.
What did you do next? I asked the ghost. Were you able to save Nathan? And find Ruby’s killer?
I waited for an answer, but none came.
The ghost had vanished. Jack did that sometimes, especially after a powerful dream. It seemed to sap his energy. It certainly drained me of mine.
Shaking myself out of my reverie, I went back to work.