Emily's Ghost (17 page)

"All irrelevant," the
librarian snapped. "This town lies under a pall, plain and simple.
The sad thing is," she said, bending over the table in a
confidential whisper, "if it had been a more sensational crime, we
could at least be making some money from it. Look at Fall River.
Fall River has the legend of Lizzie Borden, and that makes all the
difference."

Mrs. Gibbs bounced her
knuckles off the table in a gesture of supreme confidence. "A
female ax-murderer is a number one draw, take my word for it:
'Lizzie Borden took an ax / And gave her mother forty
whacks
.
'
That's what we don't have: a simple, effective
marketing device. The strangling of an heiress by a common burglar
just can't compare," she said, sighing heavily.

Emily stared at the sweet
old librarian -- digger of tulips and defender of spiders -- and
suppressed a scandalized smile. "I see your point. The Talbot Manor
could have been a tourist attraction and the Library a
museum."

"Exactly. But instead,
Talbot Manor struggles as a bed-and-breakfast and the Library needs
a new roof. It's all so tragic," the librarian said, shaking her
head over the injustice of it.

"The Manor is operating as
a B & B? Do you suppose they'd let me have a look
around?"

"I don't see why not,"
Mrs. Gibbs said, hauling her battered weight out of the creaking
chair with an effort. "I'll call Maria Salva and let her know
you'll be over. You won't learn much from Maria, though. She and
her husband bought the place in spite of its history because it was
dirt-cheap. I've told her she's missing a bet not promoting the
crime; people love that kind of thing. She could host
Murder-at-the-Manor weekends and do a booming business on Halloween
if nothing else. She'd be willing, I know, but her husband is not
adventurous. He's a plumber. Most of the rooms have individual
baths now," Mrs. Gibbs added with a shrug, "but they're still
empty."

"It sounds like you should
be running the Manor," Emily said, impressed with the woman's
entrepreneurial spirit.

"Probably," agreed Mrs.
Gibbs, brushing a clump of earth from the hem of her dress. "But
this place needs me more. Which reminds me. Someone just donated
two dozen half-sprouted Asiatic lilies to the garden; if I don't
get them in the ground the poor things are going to consume
themselves. We may not have the biggest library in town, but we do
have the prettiest garden. Come look at it, dear, before you set
off."

*****

Talbot Manor was easy to
find. Presiding over the highest hill in Newarth, the house was an
imposing structure built in 1876 to replace a smaller one, put
there by John Talbot's grandfather, which had burned to the ground
the year before. The new manor had a granite -- and fireproof --
tower on its southeast corner where John Talbot made his family
sleep. The inside doors of the tower were lined with highest-grade
asbestos, and fire escapes from every room were cut into the
outside granite walls. This much Emily had learned from Mrs. Gibbs
during their tour of the library garden.

Emily parked her car at
the bottom of the hill on a street called Stepstone Lane, because
she wanted to get a better feel for the Manor's environs. Stepstone
Lane wasn't the main access to the Manor -- Talbot Street was --
but Emily trekked up the winding, narrow lane anyway, drawn by its
tattered charm. Once there had been cobblestones; she could see the
edges of the stones peeping out through the asphalt every once in a
while. The lane was a shabby little block, a hodgepodge of tiny
cottages with peeling shingles and broken shutters shoehorned into
impossibly narrow lots -- a kind of Nantucket in the
rough.

Emily didn't need a degree
in sociology to recognize the pattern: A grand house falls down on
its luck, the grounds are sold off, and humbler houses pop up like
weeds all around it. When times get tough -- and in Newarth they
had got very tough indeed -- the big house and all its weedy
neighbors slide into ruin together. It seemed impossible that
Talbot Manor could ever succeed, Murder Weekends or no, until the
local economy turned around.

Emily, a property owner
now, was completely engrossed in such pragmatic thoughts when she
suddenly stopped, held fast by a sharp sense of
d
é
j
à
vu.
I know this
place
, she thought, looking around. She
was in front of what had to be the oldest house on the block, a
down-and-out shingled charmer with a crumbling brick chimney on its
north side and the collapsed frame of a greenhouse still attached
to its south side. Unlike the others, this house was set back from
the street enough for an ancient apple tree, mauled and distorted
from repeated pruning, to be almost able to fit.

It was the gardener's
cottage for the original Talbot Manor, Emily was sure of it. All
the land around it must once have been cultivated -- herb,
vegetable, and cutting gardens, and obviously an orchard. She drew
nearer to the apple tree, the last remnant of an affluent time.
Half of its few remaining limbs were not in leaf; it was very near
the end of its life. She was wondering whether there was any way to
save it when she saw a shadowy form at the base of the tree
gradually assume the shape and depth of Fergus O'Malley. He was
deep in sleep, his mouth slack, snoring noisily. He was, she
realized, dead drunk.

"Fergus! How could you!"
she cried, shocked.

Immediately he opened his
eyes and grinned. "Well, that's just it; I can't any more, can I?"
He scrambled to his feet and fell in alongside her. "Still, I
thought I'd show ye what Hessiah Talbot was up against the day she
run into me."

"I don't blame her for
shipping you off to the mission," Emily said, annoyed. "You make a
disgusting drunk."

"Wasn't me fault. I
dropped by at harvest, innocently looking for work. Turned out I
knew the gardener, who invited me in to sample the cider. He spiced
it with a wee bit o' something, and before long his wife is shooing
me out the door with a broom. I got as far as the apple
tree."

Emily remarked, "Nothing
is ever your fault; have you noticed?" But her mind was puzzling
over the d
é
j
à
vu
business. Fergus had told her of the incident with Hessiah Talbot,
but not the details. How had she known to stop at the apple
tree?

"'I love what ye do fer
me!'" Fergus shouted with sudden glee.

"
What
?"

"Toy-ota," he answered
with an elfin grin, pointing to a Corolla parked in the lane. "I
saw that in yer picture box." Then he did the Toyota leap -- about
twenty feet into the air.

"Oh, for -- look, Fergus,
number one, we call that picture box a television, a T.V.. And
number two, you can't just be out here in broad daylight shouting
ad slogans and jumping up and down."

"Yes I can. Ye're the only
one who knows I'm here."

"What are you saying? That
believing is seeing?"

For an answer he pointed
silently and somberly to her necklace--or to her heart. Either way,
it meant that she'd never be able to parade Fergus past Lee Alden
in the flesh, so to speak. She wanted to ask Fergus what would
happen if she took off the necklace, but she had a real dread of
alarming him, so she let it go. "Don't watch so much T.V.," she
said instead. "It's bad for you."

"T.V. is wonderful. Ye
have a Sony. And that's no baloney," he said happily.

"Stop it. Stop making me
react. Either disappear, or walk alongside in silence."

They were approaching a
frail, elderly man trimming his hedges with an electric shears.
Fergus watched in amazement as the old man flattopped the sprouting
bushes in one clean sweep. Emily saw that Fergus was aching to
comment, but he held his tongue as they walked by. His silence
lasted until they came to a souped-up red Camaro parked in the
middle of the lane with its engine growling through dual exhausts.
Fergus stopped in his tracks -- or whatever they were -- and walked
slowly around the car.

"'The heartbeat of
America,'" he said with awe. "'Today's Chevrolet.'"

"Fergus, for Pete's sake;
the owner could come out any second --"

"You got a problem with
it, lady?" the owner himself asked from behind her. She turned to
see a menacing-looking youth dangling a cigarette from his
lips.

"Hi!" she said, all too
brightly. "I was just thinking out loud that ... that your car had
begun to roll down the hill! Look! There it goes!"

She watched bemused as the
Camaro took off at a pretty good clip, with its owner in hot
pursuit. Fergus rejoined her, smiling beatifically. He was loving
every minute of every step of his little stroll.

"How did you do that?" she
asked under her breath.

"Ain't really sure," he
said. "Should we try another one?" He looked around, spied a little
blue Escort, and said, "'Have ye driven a Ford -- lately?'" He
rubbed his hands together.

"No! That isn't what they
mean. You're supposed to get actually behind the wheel."

Emily looked up to see a
middle-aged woman who'd been shaking out a dustmop from the
second-floor window yank the mop back in and slam the window shut,
then peer down suspiciously at her. Perfect. She was terrorizing
the whole neighborhood.

She resolved not to be
provoked again; Fergus was too dangerously exuberant, too
uncontainable. But a minute later they passed a parked Oldsmobile,
and she saw his eyes light up.

"Fergus! This is
not
," she said wryly,
"your father's Oldsmobile."

He threw his head back in
a belly laugh. "What a world! What wealth! Everyone has a car! When
I think what me life could've been -- but a motorized carriage was
a fantasy then. There was talk in Finchie's Tavern of a man, a
German, who was said to be designing a horseless carriage in the
year before I was tried -- but who knew? Daimler! That was his
name."

"Today that name has a
long and venerable history, Fergus," Emily said, smiling despite
herself. He reminded her of her brother Gerry, an automotive nut
who'd spent his puberty under a car chassis and now had his own
thriving mechanic's shop back home.

She sneaked a look at
Fergus in profile, so animated, so raring to go.
O'Malley's Auto
. Yes. It
had a ring to it. If she could, she'd co-sign a loan for
him.

They were at the top of
the hill now, at the entrance to a circular drive leading to Talbot
Manor. The manor gates, pitted and rusted in their hinges, were
swung open in a permanent position. "Hush, now," she commanded
Fergus. "Not a word."

"Just one," the
irrepressible ghost begged. "Look at this rose," he said, pausing
before an enormous bush buried in rose-pink blossoms. "I remember
it well. It's a Bourbon--Madame Isaac Perriere--and there is no
finer smelling rose in all the world. The gardener had half a dozen
of 'em out back in Talbot's rose garden. Only do this one thing,"
he said in a voice gone heavy with emotion. "Smell the blossom for
me, would ye?"

"You want me to smell the
roses?" she murmured. "That's pretty funny." But she said it in a
shy and thoughtful way, and when she leaned her face into the
petals of a huge, cabbagy blossom, it took her breath away. It was
heavenly, glorious; and, until Fergus O'Malley made her stick her
nose in it, just another pink flower.

When she straightened up
again, Fergus smiled and nodded forlornly. "I thought
so."

They walked up the
flagstone walk in companionable silence, but as they got nearer the
house the ghost began to hang back. Emily slowed her pace to his,
thinking he was enthusing over something or other, but his steps
dragged, and finally he stopped.

"I cannot go in there," he
said in a choking voice. His voice was breathless, his eyes wide
with alarm; his arms were raised up against the looming presence of
the huge house as if he were warding it off.

And then he disappeared,
leaving Emily standing alone on the threshold of a set of huge,
oak-paneled double doors swung wide in greeting.

The woman who greeted
Emily had the kind of beauty instantly recognizable as
Mediterranean: glossy blue-black hair; dark brown eyes ringed by
thick black lashes; olive-skinned cheeks setting off a straight
nose and white teeth. Her smile was not so much reserved as it was
otherworldly: Maria Salva knew things that other people could only
begin to guess at. When she took Emily's hand in her own, Emily had
to resist an urge to fall on one knee and kiss her ring.

And yet Maria was a young
woman. As they exchanged pleasantries about Mrs. Gibbs, Emily tried
to pin down the essence of Maria's spirituality. Maybe it was her
voice, soft and low and breathless. Maybe it was her size: She was
thin and fragile and dressed in flowing challis. Or maybe it was
something as basic as the look in her eyes, which was unfocused and
vague.

"Have you owned the manor
for long?" Emily asked as they walked through an entry hall of
gleaming paneled walnut. She could see that the restoration work
was first-rate, right down to the electrified verdigris chandelier
that hung a dozen feet above the slate floor.