The Chick and the Dead (15 page)

"We're not waiting for Merilee. Not technically."Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

"We're waiting for her to get to work again." Kurt looked down at the desk. "You know, so she can turn the page. So we can find out what happens next."

Elizabethgroaned. "He thinks he's going to have a bigger part."

"She thinks the world can't go on without Opal."

"He thinks he's hot stuff."

"She knows she's a has-been and that she doesn't stand a chance to—"

"Stop it! Both of you!" I clapped my hands together. That got their attention. "Number one, the sequel isn't written yet, and number two—and this is pretty important so pay attention—it doesn't matter who has the biggest part. Neither one of you is going to be in a movie if a movie is ever made. Get it? You've gone on to the great curtain call in the sky. You're dead!"

Kurt smoothed a hand over the front of his uniform. "That doesn't mean we don't have our pride," he said. He gave his costar a sidelong look. "Or at least I do. But then, I had a career I could be proud of." Elizabeththrew back her head and laughed. "Yeah, you went right from
So Far the Dawn
to a series of B monster movies!"

"And you went from
So Far the Dawn
straight to the bottom of a bottle."

"Yeah, well, if I drank, I had my reasons."

"Your bad acting being one of them?"

"
Your
bad acting being one of them. Why, if you didn't try to upstage me, people would still remember my understated performance in that scene where I help the escaped slaves find safe passage toCanada ."

"Understated? Is that what you call it? The way I remember it—and my memory is excellent, by the way—the
New York Times
said, 'Miss Goddard apparently did not get enough sleep the night before the climactic scene was filmed. Like a sleepwalker, she—'"

"Baloney!"Elizabeth propped her fists on her hips. "They wouldn't know good acting if it hit them over the head. They said yours was—"

"Refined and elegant." Kurt's smile was radiant.

"Which only proves they didn't know what they were talking about."

"Which only proves that you—"

"You're doing it again." I didn't know if ghosts could actually do damage to each other, but I didn't want to find out. I stepped between the two of them. "Listen, both of you. You're waiting for Merilee to come home and get back to work. I can do you one better. How about if I turn the pages of the manuscript for you. Would that work? Then you can see what you want to see and get the hell out of here." Elizabeth and Kurt exchanged looks.

"Exactly what I was going to suggest," he said.

"In your dreams!" She laughed and looked my way. "Let's get going, sister. I can't wait to show this star"—the way she said the word, it wasn't a compliment—"that Merilee really is going to get rid of Palmer in the next book."

"All right. Okay." I rounded the desk. "Only before we look at the manuscript, I need your help."

"Us?" Kurt shot daggers atElizabeth . "You can't be serious. What could we possibly do for—"

"You can tell me about when the book came out. The original book." Merilee's notebook sat in the middle of the desk. It was closed. I put my hand on the cover, just to let these two dueling ghosts know that I wasn't kidding. Their answers were the price of my cooperation. "Back when the book was published, did you think Merilee really wrote it?"

Elizabethrolled her eyes. "We didn't know her then," she said. "No one did. Not until the book came out and caused a sensation. Then, of course, everybody knew her name! I never even met Merilee until she came toHollywood when the movie was being filmed. Before that… " She tossed her head. Her golden hair gleamed. "Before that, I had my career to worry about. I was an ingenue." She said the word like it was something special, and when I didn't react because I didn't know what the hell she was talking about, she made a face at me.

"In-gen-ue. It's French, honey. It means I was young and a very hot property. Oh yeah, back in those days, I had more important things to worry about than who wrote what book."

"Yeah, like who on earth would ever hire you after your horrendous reviews in
Henry IV on
Broadway." His artistic sensibilities offended, Kurt shivered. He looked my way. "Of course Merilee wrote the book. Her name is on the cover, isn't it?"

"You're listed in
Who's Who
as an actor, aren't you?"Elizabeth thought this was very funny. She laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. When she got ahold of herself again, she looked at me through narrowed eyes. "What you're saying is that you don't think she wrote it."

"What I'm saying is that I don't know." There was no use beating around the bush. Not with these two. It wouldn't get me anywhere, and besides, maybe they knew something that could help. "I've heard from Merilee's sister, Didi. She says she wrote the book."

Elizabethlit another cigarette. "Don't know Didi."

"Never heard of her," Kurt said.

"Are you sure?" I looked at him hard. "She says she was in a movie with you." He grinned, and as much as I hate to admit it about a dead guy, I could see why the millions of women who'd seen his movies had fallen in love with him. Kurt Benjamin had a twinkle in his eyes that said S-E-X. That must have been very appealing to women back in the Stone Age fifties. He was good-looking, too, even if he did have that goofy mustache.

He glanced over my body before he looked me in the eye. "My dear, I've been in movies with plenty of people. If she was a bit player, I might never have known her name."

"But I need to know if she's lying about this."

He smiled an apology. "Can't help you. She might have been in one of my movies. She might not have been."

I was getting nowhere fast, and I scrambled to come up with the right questions, hoping something these two knew might help. Maybe if I concentrated on what—if the clothes they were wearing meant anything—must have been the highlight of their acting careers, I might get somewhere.

"What about when you were filming the movie?
So Far the Dawn
, I mean. When you were filming the movie, was there anything about Merilee that made you think maybe she didn't know as much as she should know about the book?"

Kurt shook his head. "It wasn't that she knew too little. It was that she knew too much. She complained to the set designers and the costume folks a lot. The lamps weren't authentic to the period. The clothes weren't right. She even said something about the shoes I was wearing in the scene where I see Opal off at the train station." He bent his head close to mine and whispered, "Should have taken the opportunity while I had it and given her a push."

Elizabethsneered.

Kurt got back to the matter at hand. "Merilee said a Union officer would never wear those kinds of shoes. Those were the kinds of details she was obsessed about."

"And you never thought that was weird?"

"I never cared enough to think about it." He gave his broad shoulders a twitch. "That's not what I was there for."

"And what difference does it make, anyway?"Elizabeth chimed in. "She was the author of the book and you know how weird writers can be."

"As weird as actors?" Neither one of them got the joke, so I didn't belabor the point. Trying to decide the best way to move ahead, I flipped open Merilee's notebook.

"Chapter fourteen,"Elizabeth said. She moved closer to the desk. "That's as far as we've gotten." I found the right page. Merilee's handwriting was neat, even if it was a little cramped. Because I didn't want either one of these ghosts to get too close, I read the text out loud.

Palmer arrived at the house.

"Aha! See there." Kurt scooted closer. "The chapter starts with Palmer. She likes Palmer better."

"Shut up," I told him, and went back to reading.

He climbed the stairs. He knocked on the door.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

No one answered, and he went back down the stairs. As he did, he thought back to the Panic of
1857 and how it had increased unemployment inCleveland by twenty-five percent.
Things had improved since then. The war had been good toCleveland .

"You're kidding me, right?" I looked from one ghost to the other. "People consider this great writing?"

"The first book was better," Kurt admitted. "It had more depth."

"More emotion,"Elizabeth added.

"More than none," I mumbled. I thumbed through a few more pages. This plot didn't thicken. In fact, as far as I could see, it never got past the watery stage. I read through a stilted conversation between Palmer and someone named Betty and a description (not all that descriptive) of a house that sounded a whole lot like the one we were standing in. A few pages after that, the notebook was blank.

I'm not one to criticize. After all, I'd barely made it through college composition. But even I could have done better. Especially if I had fifty years to do it.

I flopped into Merilee's desk chair. "I'm more confused than ever," I admitted to Kurt and Elizabeth. "I might not know best-selling material when I see it, but I know this stuff sucks. If it's nothing like the first book—"

"You mean you've never read it?"Elizabeth 's outrage was evident in her question.

"You've never seen the movie?" Kurt was just as stunned.

"I've seen the movie. All right?" I slapped a hand on the desk, just to emphasize my point. "It's about guys in uniform and women in gowns. And horses."

"And the book?"

There was a paperback copy of
SFTD
on the desk, and I eyed it—and its well over eight hundred pages—warily. "It might not look that way to you right now," I said, "but I've got a pretty busy life. I've got more important things to do than read some silly old book."

"Then how," Kurt asked, "can you possibly make a judgment about who might have written it?" Damn, but I hate it when ghosts are right.

I grumbled my surrender, grabbed the book, and headed for the door. As long as I was stuck in Merilee's little house of haunted horrors, I might as well do some reading.

I know it doesn't sound like it, but I had a plan
. Really.

Before I went up to the attic to look for the handwritten manuscript Didi swore was stashed away there, I was going to wait until Merilee got home. Then I was going to wait some more. Until the wee hours of the morning, in fact. I wanted to be sure she was in her room and fast asleep. In my mind, this made a whole lot more sense than taking the chance that she would show up—the mayor on her arm—and find me rummaging around in places I didn't belong.

And hey, who was I kidding? I wanted to wait until Weird Bob was asleep, too. No way did I want to bump into him in some dark hallway.

If the manuscript really did exist and I could get my hands on it, my troubles were over. I'd grab it and run, and not to worry, I'm not a complete philistine. I was planning on leaving ol' Merilee a not-so-fond farewell note. It was the least I could do to thank her for making the last twenty-four hours of my life miserable.

And if the manuscript wasn't there?

At the time I considered this—again—I was hunkered down in the overstuffed chair that sat in one corner of my room. I was wrapped in a tattered quilt, and I shifted uncomfortably beneath it. The possibility of Didi's story being nothing more than fiction was something I really didn't want to think about. At least not until I had all the facts in front of me. (Or not in front of me, which is where the facts would be if the handwritten manuscript didn't exist.)

Until then, I had to keep my mind distracted, and the conclusions I was all set to jump to firmly grounded.

It was, after all, the way a real private investigator worked.

The good news in all of this was that at least I had something to keep me occupied. That something was
So Far the Dawn
. I'd begun reading the book as soon as I walked out on Elizabeth and Kurt and settled myself in my room. Like a first-time sushi eater, I'd been cautious, starting with a nibble, just to see if I could get a sense of either Didi's or Merilee's voice there in the pages. No one was more surprised than I was when that nibble turned into a bite, and the bites into gulps. By the time I heard the limo deposit Merilee at our front door, I was into chapter two. When I noticed her footsteps on the stairs and heard the squeak of the door on the other side of the landing as it closed, I had already finished chapter four.

The next time I looked at the clock, it was close to two, and I was well into chapter seven, the heretofore mentioned-to-the-point-of-tedium scene where Opal is leaving for her wedding in Baltimore and Palmer is none too happy about it.

Okay, time to come clean. As much as I hate to admit it, the more I read of the book, the more I hoped Merilee wasn't the author.

I didn't want her to be associated with anything this delicious.

I know, I know… admitting that I actually liked the book that launched a million crazy collectors and nearly as many wacky reenactors was something like confessing that I watch the Lifetime Channel (which I don't) or that I think movies that deliberately set out to make women cry aren't lame (which they are). But honest to gosh, I couldn't help myself.

I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next.

So Far the Dawn
was soap opera between two covers. It was salt and vinegar potato chips. It was chocolate in all its most enticing forms.

The book was trashy and decadent. It was pulp fiction at its worst—and its best. It was melodrama. Pure and simple.

And I couldn't stop.

Of course, I knew I had to eventually. After all, I had to do what I had to do. So when Opal stepped onto that train, I sniffed (not that I was crying or anything) and forced myself to close the book. I set it down and bent my head, listening closely.

There wasn't a sound in the big old house.

"Showtime," I told myself. I twitched off the quilt and reached for the pink cardigan I'd left on one corner of the bed. It was spring, but the nights were still chilly. Obviously, no one had thought to turn on the heat. Or maybe it just didn't work in my half of the house. I slipped on the sweater, then my sneakers, and grabbed the Wal-Mart bag I'd left on the top of my dresser.