Ghostheart

T
he bestselling author of A Quiet Belief in Angels and City of Lies is back, this time with a story packed full of mystery, betrayal, and one unassuming woman’s shocking family history.

Annie O’Neill has it all: a cozy Manhattan apartment, a beautiful bookshop, and a network of supportive friends. But at the heart of her life is a hole—a place vacated by her father when he died in her childhood. So when a mysterious man named Forrester enters the shop and claims to be her father’s oldest friend, she jumps at the chance to discover more of her own past. But Forrester’s not being free with the answers she needs: he’s much more interested in telling her a story about a ruthless ganglord and a fifty-year-old betrayal. A betrayal that, she will realize far too slowly, has something very much to do with her.

Saints of New York

A Quiet Vendetta

A Quiet Belief in Angels

A Simple Act of Violence

The Anniversary Man

City of Lies

Bad Signs

A Dark and Broken Heart

Three Days in Chicagoland

Candlemoth

First published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

141 Wooster Street

New York, NY 10012

www.overlookpress.com

For bulk and special sales, please contact
[email protected]
,

or write us at the address above.

Copyright © 2004 by Roger Jon Ellory

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-4683-1126-6

ISBN 978-1-4683-1225-6 (e-book)

By the Same Author

Copyright

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

About the Author

Beyond the writing of a book, there are those who make it happen.

In this case, the usual suspects are as follows:

My agent, soundboard and co-conspirator, Euan Thorneycroft.

My assistant editor, compadre and text-buddy, Nicky Jeanes.

My editor, my friend, the modest genius, Jon Wood.

And to Robyn Karney (aka Thelma),

for her balanced eye and faultless precision.

To all those whose words captivated my imagination:

Raymond Chandler

William Carlos Williams

Walt Whitman

Jerzy Kosinski

Rene Lafayette

Anita Shreve

William Gay

Stephen King

Tim O’Brien

and an unnamed hundred more …

To my wife and son, constant reminders of all that makes life worth living.

My surface is myself
.

Under which

to witness, youth is

buried. Roots?

Everybody has roots
.

William Carlos Williams – ‘Paterson’

The sound from the street was bold, bellying up against the breeze like a bright colored streamer, and from the sidewalk vents the smoke and steam crawled like tired ghosts from the subway below. It was early, a little after eight a.m., and from the boulevards, from the junctions and corners and storefronts, people emerged to meet the world as it surfaced from sleep.

Manhattan came to life, here on the Upper East Side. Columbia University, Barnard College and Morningside Park, bordered to the west by Hudson River Park, to the east by Central, and then the West nineties and hundreds, roads that skipped out in parallel lines – a mathematician’s archipelago. Here was academia – the students and bookshops, the Nicholas Roerich Museum, Grant’s Tomb and The Cloisters – and wrapped around it the smell of the Hudson River, the sound of the 79th Street Boat Basin and the Passenger Ship Terminal to the south.

Amidst these things was the haunt of freshly baked bread and donuts, frosted sugar and frying bacon; the sound of bolts being drawn, of voices merging one into another like the murmur of thunder somewhere along the horizon; the rumble of traffic, of cars, of wagons, of delivery vans bearing fresh fruit and ham hocks, newspapers and cigarettes and new-drawn churns of cream for the coffee houses and delicatessens: all these things, and more.

And into this ripe medley of life’s small pleasures, rough edges, and sharp corners a young woman walked past the steps that climbed from the tunnels below, her movements swift
and deliberate, her windswept hair clouding her face, her hand clutching her coat up around her throat against the bitter fists of wind that seemed to lunge at her from behind doorways, from around corners. Her skin pale, her features aquiline, her lips rouged with aubergine, she hurried forward until she reached the junction between Duke Ellington and West 107th. Here she paused, glancing left and right and left again like a child, and stepped from the curb, hurrying across the hot-top to the other side. Here, almost unnoticeably, she paused again and, turning left, she made her way along a sidestreet to a narrow-fronted bookstore. Pausing there in the doorway she searched her coat pockets, found keys and leaned into the lee of the frame to unlock the door. Once inside she turned on the lights, flipped the sign and hurried into the back room where she filled a coffee jug with water. She switched on the antique percolator, filled the glass reservoir, set the jug beneath, and with the deft motions that came from endless repetition, lined the bowl beneath the reservoir with paper and coffee grounds and slid it home. She removed her coat, tossed it nonchalantly onto a chair beside a small deal table, and made her way back to the front of the shop.

She looked around the room, a room not unlike some narrow closeted library, the ceiling-high bookshelves racked from left to right with not so much as breathing space in between, and in no order, and with no formality, and discounting any such thing as alphabet or barcode, these books, these battered hand-worn, dog-eared, musty-smelling books, challenged her with their totality of words, with their myriad silent voices, with the pictures that each paragraph and sentence, each phrase and clause inspired. These were her words. Her books. Her life. Here on Lincoln Street, in the backyard of nowhere special, she had created a brief oasis of sanity. Her name was Annie O’Neill. She would be thirty-one come November. Sagittarius. The Archer. With her hair a rich burnished auburn, her features clear and concise, her eyes almost aquamarine, she was beautiful, and single, and often a
little lonely. She wore open-necked blouses and cumbersome sweaters, constantly tugging the sleeves up above her elbows and revealing a man’s wristwatch, given to her by her mother. The watch had belonged to her father, and it was too big, and the leather strap was drawn to its tightest hole, but still that watch ran up and down her forearm like a mischievous child. Her eyes were sometimes clouded and quiet, other times bright and fierce, and her temperament unpredictable – often mellow, sometimes challenging and thunderous and awkward. She read poetry by Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, and prose too – Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
, and Shapiro’s
Travelogue For Exiles
. And other things, many things, and though not all the books that lined the shelves, perhaps a thousand of them, or two, or five.

This was Annie O’Neill’s world and few people came here, the majority because they did not know of it, others because they did not care, because they were rushing to some other place that bore greater importance than the written word. And there were things that did not belong here: vanity; ostentation; falsity; cowardice; greed; superficiality.

And there were things that did: love; lust; magic; definitiveness; compassion; empathy; perfection.

Idealistic, passionate, decisive – fingers grasping for life in handfuls too broad to be held – Annie O’Neill wished for something. Something unspecific, but dangerous. She wanted to be loved, she wanted to be touched, she wanted to be held. She desired; she longed; she ached; she hurt.

These were her feelings, her emotions, her thoughts. These were the unfolding patterns of her unsettled and brooding life. These were her colors, her deliberations, her emptinesses.

And this was Thursday morning, a Thursday in August towards the closing chapters of an uncharacteristically cold summer, and even as she considered her life she knew she was an anachronism, a woman out of time, out of place. For this was the beginning of the twenty-first century, and she knew, she
knew
, that she didn’t belong here. She belonged with Scott
Fitzgerald, with Hemingway and Steinbeck, with
To A God Unknown
and
The Outsiders
. That was where her heart could be found, and she struggled with this, struggled with each new dawning day as she went about the business of her narrow life, turning in ever-narrowing circles and centrifugally spiralling away into the hollowness of solitude.

Something had to change. Something had to be
made
to change, and she was pragmatic enough to realize that she herself would be the fulcrum of any change. Such changes did not come unprecipitated, nor did they come through divine intervention. They came through decision, through action, through example. People changed with you or they stayed behind. Like Grand Central. You took the train, the 5:36 for Two Harbors, nestling there beneath the Sawtooth Mountains where, on a clear day, you could almost reach out and touch the Apostle Islands and Thunder Bay, and those that walked with you came too, or they did not. And if not, they were content to stand and wave, to watch as you rolled away soundlessly into the indistinct distance of memory. And if travelling alone you packed only sufficient for your needs and did not burden yourself with things too weighty, like lost loves, forgotten dreams, jealousies, frustrations and hatred. You carried with you the finer things. Things to share. Things that weighed next to nothing but held the significance of everything. These were what you carried, and in some small way they also carried you.