The Ghost Manuscript Read online

  Advance Praise for

  The Ghost Manuscript

  “Absolutely addictive—Indiana Jones with a female lead. And I would follow heroine Carys anywhere: she’s funny, warm, smart, and vulnerable. The fact that she’s leading us on a treasure hunt—accompanied by a ghostly monk, no less—makes this a buddy story, a detective story, a thriller, a terrific read you will never forget.”

  —Jenna Blum, bestselling author of Those Who Save Us,

  The Stormchasers, The Lost Family

  A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

  The Ghost Manuscript

  © 2019 by Kris Frieswick

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-64293-024-5

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-025-2

  Cover art by Whitney Scharer

  Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Post Hill Press

  New York • Nashville

  posthillpress.com

  Published in the United States of America

  Contents

  prologue

  Part 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part 2

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part 3

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  acknowledgments

  To Peter and Sylvia—

  who taught me to love Wales.

  To Sidney and Priscilla—

  who taught me to love words.

  To my handsome Welshman—

  who taught me to love.

  prologue

  Thursday, June 21

  The pain pierced Carys Jones’s abdomen, and every other sensation she’d been feeling was consumed. Gone was the hard coldness that had seeped into her core, the unexpectedly deafening sound of her own breath, the confusion of the black water that surrounded her, the throbbing in her ears. Her body drew into a fetal position and she held her breath. She pinched her eyes shut and held perfectly still. If I don’t move, the pain might stop, she thought. Please stop.

  Carys began to drop through the darkness. Then something grabbed one of her shoulders and spun her around. A red light filled her closed lids. She raised her hands to push it away, but hands grabbed hers and the light faded quickly. She slowly opened her eyes. Dafydd stared back through a wall of silvery bubbles, his forehead furrowed behind his mask. He jutted his thumb up. Surface now.

  She could not move. Dafydd held her hand and began to kick slowly, towing her back the way they’d come. Out of the cave. Back to the surface. For an instant, it was all she wanted. To lie down and unfold and die on land. She almost looked forward to it.

  Then a thought broke through the pain.

  In.

  She tentatively inhaled. Then exhaled. The pain eased slightly. The word came again into her mind, louder, more insistent. IN.

  She took another shallow breath and squeezed Dafydd’s hand. He turned back to look at her. She shook her head and pointed behind. In. I want to go in. It’s there. I know it is.

  He sharply jutted his thumb up twice. The dive is over.

  Uncurling, Carys threw off his hand, turned around, and swam. Each kick of her legs shot the pain higher up, into her arms and shoulders, but she would not stop, even if it killed her. They were so close.

  Dafydd grabbed her fin to stop her. She slipped out of his grasp and kicked harder. She pointed her flashlight out in front of her, where its long, thin beam hit nothing but the tiny fish fleeing the light, and sea matter suspended like dust in the water. There were no cave walls anymore, just blackness and water. There was no up or down, left or right, or upside down. It did not matter as long as she was going in, away from the cave mouth, away from Dafydd. She wasn’t going to stop. It had to be here. She beat her legs up and down and searched the darkness with useless eyes.

  Suddenly, Carys’s head emerged out of the water into cool air. She ripped the regulator out of her mouth and gasped. The air was stale and tangy on her tongue, but it was oxygen. She inflated her diving vest. Her legs dangled in the water beneath her as she pulled off her mask. She strained to see something, anything. There was only blank space. She tried to relax, but her entire body felt like stone.

  Then, all at once and completely, the pain subsided as quickly as it had come.

  Dafydd surfaced next to her and pulled the regulator out of his mouth. He pointed his flashlight at her.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, his voice high and scared.

  “I’m okay,” she said, steadying herself with her hands on his shoulders. “I’ll be okay.”

  “We have to get you back out,” he said. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever it was, it’s done.”

  Dafydd’s face clouded over. Carys was breaking every diving rule ever written, and he was angry. Rightfully so. She was endangering them both. Again. But tonight, none of the rules applied, and they both knew it.

  His face softened. He turned away and raised his flashlight to examine the space they were in.

  It was a vast cavern, a cathedral of stone with walls thirty feet high. Yellow and red stalactites, like long, thin statues of the saints, hung down from the ceiling, some extending through the surface of the water. Dafydd turned and swept the beam of the light behind him.

  Carved into the wall of the cavern, clearly made by human hands, was an enormous niche, like the ones built into the walls of churches to display statues of the Virgin Mary and the apostles. This one was much bigger, ten feet high at least, and another ten deep. In it, dirty white and ruggedly chiseled, lay a stone sarcophagus. An ancient Christian cross had been etched into the side facing them.

  “Oh my god,” said Dafydd, his voice barely a whisper. “It’s here.”

  PART 1

  Boston

  1

  Friday, June 8

  The sight of the envelope on Carys’s desk set her left eyelid twitching. Her name and work address were hand-printed on the center of it in small, compact letters, set in unnaturally straight lines. It could have been her own writing.

  When Carys was thirteen, she’d tried to change how she wrote so it didn’t look like this. She had tried flowery and sloppy, loopy with slashes, exaggerated crosses and dots, and sloping angles. None of it took for very long. Her handwriting still looked just like her father’s.

  She stared at the letter for a couple of minutes. She sipped her coffee and wondered why he was still trying. The eyelid twitching got worse. She turned the envelope over on its face and slid it away. She’d toss it out later.

  “Carys,” said Janice from the adjoining desk. Carys looked over, and Janice notched her chin toward their boss’s glass-walled office.

  The room usually resembled a shaken snow globe. Today, George Plourde’s papers were organized and there was
only one mug on his desk. He’d cleared the floor of the crumpled paper, the stack of extra ties and shoes, his collection of obsolete charging cables, and his ratty briefcase. Plourde sat at his desk, his back rigid and his face frozen in a smile—or what she assumed was a smile beneath the tangled mass of his salt-and-pepper beard. A bald man sat across from him.

  “Who’s that?” asked Carys.

  “Martin Gyles,” said Janice.

  “What?”

  “I know,” said Janice.

  “What’s he doing in Plourde’s office?”

  Janice shrugged.

  “How do you know it’s him? I thought he was never photo­graphed.”

  “Art and Auction got one,” said Janice. “He was in the background in a photo of a crowd at a British Library exhibition. I recognized him when he came in this morning.”

  Carys stared at the back of the man’s shiny head.

  “How long has he been in there?” she asked.

  “About half an hour,” said Janice.

  Martin Gyles rose, slid open Plourde’s door, and strode toward the elevator. He was five foot seven or eight but looked taller in his tailored navy suit, made of a fabric that moved like water over his muscular shoulders. Beneath his left French cuff, a gold watch glinted.

  Gyles pushed the elevator button and turned to survey the office. His eyes connected with Carys’s. She almost looked away but found herself holding his gaze. She nodded a hello. He was not good-looking. Not even close. Slightly bulging eyes, thick eyebrows, and not much of a chin. Yet, he was confident, holding himself as if he owned the company. He probably could if he wanted to. He was likely worth a fortune.

  He did not blink or look away. She broke the gaze first. The elevator door opened, and Gyles, the leading cultural antiquities repatriation expert in the world—the man who had returned more stolen treasures to their owners and countries of origin than anyone else in history—turned and stepped into it. When the elevator door closed, Carys shot Janice a puzzled glance.

  “White whale,” said Janice.

  Carys’s email notification pinged. She slid aside a stack of private-collection catalogs and nineteenth-century English gilt-edge psalm books that blocked the computer screen.

  “Come see me,” the email said. She closed her eyes, inhaled, and exhaled.

  “Time for my morning ogling,” she said.

  “Find out what Gyles was doing here,” said Janice.

  Carys pulled her shoulder-length black hair behind her ears, buttoned her cardigan all the way up to her neck, and draped a scarf around her angular shoulders and full chest.

  “Good morning, Ms. Jones, good morning,” Plourde said as he waved her in, glancing at her breasts.

  “Good morning,” she said. She sat down and crossed her arms. “What was Martin Gyles doing here?”

  Plourde’s dull eyes sparked. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, shuffled some papers from one side of his desk to the other and looked back at Carys.

  “We had some business matters to discuss,” said Plourde.

  “What busin—” she said.

  “We got an interesting call a couple of days ago,” said Plourde. “There’s a collection I want you to look at. The owner is indisposed indefinitely, and his son is selling the family home and wants the books sold as soon as possible. I need you to head out to the house and confirm the catalog, evaluate condition, appraisal estimates, the usual. You can start today. You’ll probably be there a week or two. We’re doing a private sale on this one, not an auction.”

  Carys’s eye twitch got worse. She normally reviewed manuscript collections at Sothington’s Auction House, where she’d worked for nearly a decade, or in private warehouses. She did not like to do appraisals or authentications in the owner’s home. People were messy—especially rich, obsessive book people. The last time she’d been in the home of a collector—an inbred Boston Brahmin with no chin, a Pinckney Street address, family portraits by Jennys on the wall, and a pair of khakis that looked and smelled like he’d been wearing them for two years straight—the man had spent three hours bent over her while she worked, trying to convince her that his Shakespeare first folio of Romeo and Juliet was authentic. It was not. She did not like people interfering with her process. That was just between her and the books.

  “Send Jim,” said Carys. “I’m busy.”

  “No. You’re most familiar with the collection,” said Plourde.

  “Whose is it?”

  “John Harper’s.”

  She blinked.

  A smile formed within Plourde’s beard. “Well, he’s not selling it. As I said, the son is.”

  He leaned across the desk slightly, and the cloying scent of his musky, cinnamon-tinged aftershave invaded her nostrils and started her eyes watering.

  “Harper’s been committed to Waggoner Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont. He’s gone quite insane,” he said.

  Carys’s hands went cold.

  “His son, John Jr. or JJ, or whatever he goes by, has power of attorney,” said Plourde. “The doctors don’t know when or if Harper will be coming home, and JJ wants the books gone. Here’s the catalog.”

  He handed Carys a black hardcover Moleskine notebook.

  She opened it, but she already knew what was in it—page after page of handwritten notes, details on the books in the Harper Collection, the finest collection of British Dark Age manuscripts on earth. She had located and authenticated many of these books for Harper and they were like beloved ancient relatives, wizened and wise and keeping their secrets.

  They had been resurrected at great cost, and often great peril, from vaults and monasteries, caves and cathedral walls, war loot stashes and other forbidden places, and pulled into the present, one by one, from the most illiterate era since the birth of Christ. And they all lived now in Harper’s home in Wellesley.

  As she paged through the catalog, the smell of Plourde’s aftershave drifted away and her eyelid stopped twitching.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  “Jesus, you’re ugly,” mumbled Carys.

  The huge gargoyle door knocker on the front door of Adeona, John Harper’s sprawling Greek Revival mansion, stared back at her. Its black wrought-iron beard, wild eyes, and fanged, sneering mouth dared her to reach out and knock. It was out of place on the house, an architectural anachronism, inappropriate aesthetically and historically. Not a mistake, though. She was sure of that.

  If she knew Harper, this was a replica of a gargoyle on a church or cathedral built during the Dark Ages somewhere in the British Isles. Or maybe it was an original. Her breath caught briefly at the idea, and she leaned in to inspect the gargoyle more carefully.

  The door swung open. She jumped back.

  “You must be Carys,” said the man who opened it. He was a good six inches taller than her, which was unusual. She rarely had to look up at men. His tousled bird’s nest of blond hair belonged to a much younger person, not the mid-fortyish one standing there with the dark, gray-black circles under his brown eyes. He had the angular, slightly hollowed-out cheeks of someone who spent his days clenching his teeth from worry or anger.

  “Yes. Carys Jones,” she said. She extended her hand. He shook it once and dismissed it.

  “I’m Mr. Harper’s son, John Jr. Call me JJ.”

  She followed him into the home’s foyer, its pale blue walls soaring above them into a domed ceiling like an early-spring sky. On the walls hung Audubon prints, a Picasso sketch, a blue Rothko, and a Cézanne. A pendulous chandelier hung from the peak of the dome down nearly to the top of the floral arrangement on the circular mahogany table that dominated the center of the foyer. She did not want to be impressed, but the poor kid in her was.

  John Harper had become a tech billionaire in the early 1990s when he invented a new type of computer storage. He and Harper Technologies had been
surfing the smooth face of the tech wave ever since. Adeona, named for the Roman goddess who guides children home, was one of six or seven homes Harper owned. He kept his library here, so Carys assumed this was his favorite, to the extent that she could suppose anything about a man she’d never met in person. They’d done all their work together via email, letters, and FedEx. She’d kept every bit of their correspondence, even the emails, which she printed out, in a folder in her desk drawer.

  “It’s lovely,” she said.

  “Thank you. My mother designed this house,” said JJ. “She died a few years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Breast cancer. She was very brave. More than I can say for myself or my father. Let me show you the library.”

  JJ walked to the wide wooden door on the far side of the foyer, underneath the overhanging second-floor balcony, and produced a skeleton key. He slid it into the brass keyhole, entered the library, and ducked behind the opened door. She heard him typing a code on some kind of electronic device, and then he reappeared.

  “This was the only room my mother didn’t decorate,” said JJ.

  Carys stepped into the library. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the low light. As they did, she smiled. She was completely surrounded by books, manuscripts, pages of parchment. Thousands and thousands of them. They filled her vision and formed a pattern like a geometric quilt of brown leather spines and golden edges and creamy white pages, repeated over and over until it became a rhythm that thrummed in her head, like she’d stepped into her favorite dream. For a moment, she felt drunk.

  It was the most beautiful private library she’d ever seen, built entirely of warm, glowing wood, with a wraparound balcony about eight feet off the floor. The bookcases—every inch of every one packed with manuscripts and parchments—filled the walls of both levels, extending all the way up to the high, coffered ceiling. Directly opposite the door on the far wall were three tall windows, side by side, offering a view of the expansive backyard and providing the only natural light in the room, though it wasn’t much. They were covered with tinted filters—common in home libraries—to keep out UV light.