The Ghost Manuscript Read online

  “You know perfectly well why not.”

  Annie opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it, and leaned over, wrapping her arm around Carys’s shoulder. They’d been having this same conversation for almost twenty-two years.

  “So, how’s The Dick?” asked Annie.

  “You want the whole story? Or just the highlights?”

  “Highlights.”

  “He’s rushing me through a project on what is probably the most important Dark Age collection on earth. I helped build it. Wants it in two weeks. It’s like his hair’s on fire…which I’d actually pay money to see.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Commissions. We close this sale out by the end of June, or else it’s like it didn’t even happen. If we make the deadline, the entire sale amount will go straight against his bonus. And trust me, it’ll be huge.”

  “A sale?” asked Annie. “I thought Sothington’s was an auction house.”

  “We are, but we also do private sales. It saves the client the risk of not earning the minimum bid. The clients pay double what we charge for auction commissions.”

  “But it sounds like they’d earn more at auction for this collection, right? It must be famous.”

  “The client’s father actually owns the collection. He’s sick. My client is terrified people will find out what’s wrong with him if they have a public auction—he’s at Waggoner Psychiatric Hospital.”

  “Ooh. Not good,” said Annie.

  “Apparently, The Dick convinced the son that a sale will be more discreet than an auction or a donation. The problem is that the minute we approach potential buyers about this sale, every single one of them will know exactly where the manuscripts came from.”

  “So why are they doing it this way?”

  “His housekeeper…”

  “His what?”

  “His housekeeper,” said Carys. “She says that the son wants to donate to a museum and keep the collection intact. But Plourde told me today that the client wants to sell it as fast as he can.”

  “How did the client seem to you?” asked Annie. “Did he seem in a rush?”

  Carys thought for a moment.

  “He seemed sad,” she said. “And tired. He asked how long it would take, but he didn’t seem like he was in a big rush about it.”

  “Why would a housekeeper know so much about his feelings? Isn’t that odd?” asked Annie.

  Annie saw conspiracies everywhere. Hazard of her job as a criminal defense attorney.

  “I guess,” said Carys. “But she’s been working for the Harpers for years, and she’s still living there until they sell the place. She seems more like part of the family.”

  “How do you know what’s wrong with the father?” asked Annie.

  Carys opened her mouth, then stopped. Nicola’s exact words played back in her head: Plourde had said that a private sale with Sothington’s was the only way to preserve the family’s privacy. She hadn’t really heard what Nicola was saying at the time, but now it made perfect sense.

  “Fucking Plourde,” Carys said.

  “What?” asked Annie.

  “Plourde is blackmailing him. The Magic Rolodex.”

  “The what?”

  “The Magic…. Why do you think The Dick has been so successful at Sothington’s? Why do you think he’s my boss, when I know for a fact that he wouldn’t know a first-folio Shakespeare from a Superman comic book?”

  “He slept his way to the top?”

  “He wishes. He makes money. Lots of it. He brings clients in that no one else can snag.”

  “And he does that how?” asked Annie.

  “If shit hits the fan with anyone who owns anything valuable in the northeast corridor—D.C. to Portland—he knows before it even splatters. He has a network of people he pays to get information—nurses, police detectives, psychiatrists, tax collectors, garbagemen who go through trash for him. He’s like the TMZ of the auction world.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Annie.

  “He gets the dirt, reaches out to the unfortunate rich person, offers his condolences on their troubles. They’re horrified, of course. How could he know? He suggests that if they need to raise some ready cash, he would be more than happy to expedite the auction of, say, the Chippendale bureau or the Matisse. He assures them of complete privacy, but he leaves no doubt that their little situation just might find itself all over Page Six if they don’t come through in a timely fashion.”

  “That’s horrifically amazing,” said Annie.

  “None of these clients complain, because they know if they do, he’ll spill. So they sell the Chippendale.”

  “How has he not gotten caught if the Magic Rolodex is such an open secret?” asked Annie.

  Carys wiggled her thumb and middle finger together in the universal sign for money.

  “Most lucrative branch in the entire company—even more than the one in London,” she said. “They’ll just write a check to anyone who complains. It’ll never cost Sothington’s more than what he brings in.”

  “You think he is blackmailing JJ into selling the Harper Collection?”

  “I’d bet my life on it.”

  “It’s a big leap,” said Annie.

  “He’s never done anything on this scale before. I mean, this is a huge collection, Annie. One of the most important in the world. For real. The world. Minimum seventy-five to a hundred million.”

  She could hear her heart beating in her ears, and her skin was growing hot. She caught herself. She did not like the way anger made her feel, like she would jump out of her skin. She sat facing forward on her stool, examining the bottles behind the bar.

  “It’s not right,” she said softly.

  “Whaddaya gonna do about it?” asked Annie.

  “What can I do? He’s still my boss, and the client has agreed to a private sale. My hands are tied.”

  “Maybe not,” said Annie. “Maybe not. Are you pissed off enough to do something?”

  This was an excellent question, and Annie already knew the answer. Since they’d known each other, Carys had made it a point not to allow herself to get too pissed off about anything. Being angry required action, unless one relished being angry all day every day, and she did not. She wanted to go through her life doing her best to ignore the things that sent others through the roof, things like Plourde. Anger was for people who believed they could manage outcomes.

  “I could lose my job if I get involved,” said Carys.

  Annie shook her head.

  “So then, you don’t really care about the collection?” asked Annie.

  “See, I know what you’re trying to do,” she said, waggling a finger at her friend. “First you’ll try to make me feel guilty. When that doesn’t work, you’ll change the subject and tell me all about some big miscarriage of justice you corrected this week and how great it made you feel even though it was really hard.”

  “I don’t even know why I bother showing up for drinks,” said Annie. “You could just play out the whole night in your mind without me here, and I could save a few hundred calories on whiskey.”

  The two sat in silence for a moment.

  “Eventually you have to take part, Carys,” said Annie.

  “Ah, the direct approach. I haven’t seen this move in a while,” she said, staring down at her empty glass.

  “I mean it. You helped to build this collection. Why don’t you take all that energy that you’re using trying to not feel mad and use it to stir some shit up?” asked Annie.

  One of the things that Carys loved about Annie was her willingness to fight. That’s how she got the four-inch scar on her right shoulder. When Annie was fifteen, a Southie punk had started giving her crap about her father, who had just landed in Walpole State Prison after a botched robbery of the downtown Bank of Boston b
ranch. She gave the punk a concussion and a broken jaw, and relieved him of four teeth. She didn’t realize he’d cut her until a friend mentioned the blood soaking through the back of her shirt.

  “A guy like that has to have some skeletons in his closet,” said Annie. “Something that you could use to convince him to keep his mouth shut about your client.”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start,” said Carys.

  “A criminal record search,” said Annie. “I’ve got access to databases you wouldn’t believe. I have friends in the Attorney General’s office who will do a search for me, and whatever I can’t get to through them, Detective Hottiecakes can find. Get me a fingerprint. If he’s ever been booked for a crime of any kind in North America, we can find it. We’ve got two weeks, right?”

  “That’s illegal, isn’t it?”

  “No!” said Annie. “Well, sorta. But procuring a fingerprint is not illegal. Surely you can do that. Just get me his mug. Or a used plastic water bottle.”

  Carys knew that if she agreed to get a fingerprint, they’d be jumping off a cliff. It wouldn’t faze Annie. She jumped off cliffs like this before breakfast. But Carys would free-fall. She’d be risking her job, but more terrifying, she would have to use whatever Annie dug up. She’d have to do something.

  Carys was rooted to the bar stool like a tree growing around a rock. Then she thought of the manuscripts—the hundreds and hundreds of beautiful books, Harper’s manuscripts, but they were her manuscripts, too—flying in a million different directions never to be in the same place together for the rest of eternity.

  “Let’s do it,” said Carys, lowering her head. “But if anything even smells like it might go wrong, I’m going to abort. And I advise you to do the same.”

  Annie beamed next to her.

  “Excellent.”

  They clinked their glasses and drank whiskey and remembered the bad old days.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Carys was drunker than she’d been in a long time. With great effort, she opened the front door of the Sothington’s building and committed herself to the task of acting sober. Speak clearly to the security guard. Smile. Yup, forgot a reference book I need. Good to see you, too. Have a good night. Smile again.

  Carys’s purse slipped off her shoulder as she walked to the elevator, and she overreacted while trying to catch it. A lipstick, a sunglasses case, and house keys spilled onto the floor. “Fuck,” she murmured.

  She turned back and saw the guard glance at her. She waved, collected the items, and put them back in the purse. Key fob swiped. Elevator button pushed. Door opened. She stepped in; door closed. No, don’t hold on to the guardrail to steady yourself. The guard is probably watching the elevator camera. Still, better than falling over in here. She grabbed the railing. Who cares if I’m drunk? The guard probably is, too.

  The elevator door opened on her floor. The computer monitors and exit signs over the stairwell doors bathed the vast, darkened space in a pink light. Carys took a deep breath and navigated her way to her desk. She picked up a small, hardbound guide to Latin idioms and stuffed it into her bag. Plausible deniability.

  Plourde’s office was lit by the glow of his computer screen. Probably doesn’t know how to turn it off, she thought. She walked unsteadily toward his office door, willing it to be locked. It wasn’t. The glass door slid silently to one side with a push.

  She stepped in and scanned the top of his desk. There was a smudged water glass on his blotter. Probably residual grease from his morning doughnut. Krispy Kreme. Who eats Krispy Kremes in Boston? She pulled a tissue out of her purse, picked the glass up by the rim, and put it in a plastic bag provided by Annie. ‘Cause my badass best friend drives around with evidence bags in her glove box, she thought, grinning.

  Waved to the guard on the way out. “Thanks much. Have a good night.” She stepped through the glass doors back out into the cool spring air and let her shoulders drop.

  Annie beamed as Carys hopped into her car. Then the two women fell silent. It wasn’t the comfortable silence they had developed over the years. It was more like a stopper in a sink. If they didn’t talk, then Carys couldn’t talk herself out of what was going to happen. Annie drove her home—she’d always held her liquor better than Carys. She would take a cab into the city to retrieve her car before heading back out to Adeona in the morning.

  “I’ll call ya tomorrow as soon as I hear something,” said Annie.

  “Thank you,” said Carys as she clumsily extricated herself from the car.

  “You know it, babe.”

  Once back in the brightly colored triple-decker Victorian in West Newton she called home, Carys felt like some boundary had been crossed. She was now on Annie’s side of the invisible line that had always divided them. Annie always did what needed to be done. Carys thought if something required too much work, it wasn’t worth having.

  She walked up the two flights to her top-floor apartment. There were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves throughout, books in stacks on the floor, books on just about every flat surface. There was very little furniture except for the antiques from the tiny apartment she had shared with her mother, Patricia.

  Carys was fifteen when Patricia finally made good on her threats to kill herself. The next day, Carys had moved in with Annie and her mother, Priscilla, who had been Patricia’s best friend. There, she waited for her father to come back from Wales to collect her. He never did.

  When it became clear that Carys would be staying for a while, Priscilla emptied Patricia’s apartment into a storage unit to save for Carys until she had a place of her own. Carys didn’t know she’d done that until the day the movers unloaded the deep red leather lounge chair from the truck in front of her first apartment in Somerville. The sight of it wrenched free the first tears Carys had cried in many years.

  It had been her father’s chair, and there was a round worn spot on the left armrest where he had always placed his glass of beer between swigs. She’d sit in his lap in that chair and watch the news with him, his warm heart beating against her back, his free arm wrapped around her. It was one of her few memories of him, and like the rest, it started happy and then turned dark.

  Carys tossed her coat onto her green muslin couch and bent over to pick up her tabby, Harleian—Harley for short. She nuzzled him and put him down, filled his food and water bowls, and threw herself into the red chair. It smelled like her mother’s house, even after all these years. She drifted off with her shoes still on and woke with a start at four in the morning. She dragged herself to bed and slept more deeply than she had in months.

  4

  Tuesday, June 12

  The next morning, Carys’s cell phone rang at nine and jolted her out of a dreamless sleep. It was Annie, laughing so hard she could hardly speak.

  Three hours later, palms sweating, heart beating, Carys rapped lightly on Plourde’s door.

  “What a nice surprise!” Plourde bellowed as he waved Carys in. His eyes landed on her breasts. “How goes it at the Harper asy—”

  “It goes fine,” she said. She closed the slider behind her. “I think you should reconsider the private sale.” She sat in the chair in front of his desk.

  “We’ve already discussed this, Carys.”

  “A donation is the right thing for JJ to do,” she said, leaning back in her chair. She was sure she was pitting out her sweater dress.

  “JJ Harper has signed a contract. We will respect the client’s wishes,” said Plourde.

  “These are not the client’s wishes, and we both know it. He’s only doing it because you threatened to expose his father’s illness.”

  “Ms. Jones,” said Plourde, glaring. “I resent the accusation.”

  Something shrank inside of her. I can’t do this, she thought. I’m throwing everything away.

  Plourde sat there, his arms crossed, a defiant half-smile on his face.
He was poised for a fight. He wanted one. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t.

  But Annie could. Annie would take no prisoners. What would Annie say?

  Carys’s shoulders relaxed a bit.

  “George, you’re making a mistake,” she said. “A big one.”

  Plourde lowered his chin, leaned toward Carys, and glared.

  “I told you. We are doing the….” Then he stopped. His eyes notched slightly wider, and the corners of his mouth inched up into the beginning of a smirk. “Fine. Why don’t you tell me why I am making a big mistake?”

  Carys cocked her head to the side and lowered her chin, as if she were examining an insect, considering whether to crush it. Just as Annie did during closing arguments. She swallowed.

  “It’s wrong to use people’s secrets to make them do what you want. It’s blackmail,” she said softly.

  “I have not blackmailed anyone,” said Plourde with half-hearted indignation. “We have a contract that JJ signed of his own free will.”

  Plourde paused. His face cracked into the full grin he’d been stifling. “And frankly, even if I had used some information that has come into my possession to persuade young Mr. Harper to sell the collection, that’s just good business, is it not?”

  She was struck dumb. She had prepared for every type of denial that Plourde could possibly concoct, but she hadn’t expected that he’d just admit it. Why on earth would he do that? Didn’t he realize he was confessing to a crime? The answer became obvious as his eyes danced over her breasts again, then brazenly lingered. He was bragging. He was trying to impress her.

  The male ego, she thought. So dangerous and fragile. A mix of delight and rage shivered through her as she reached into her purse and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

  “No one deserves to be blackmailed,” she said. She slowly slid the paper across the desk to Plourde.

  He furrowed his brow and took the paper. He unfolded it quickly, impatiently. Then he froze.

  It was a thirty-year-old Los Angeles County Record of Arrests and Prosecutions—a rap sheet. Plourde’s rap sheet. The mug shots had surprised Carys, too, but not for the same reason they were surprising Plourde, who was now ashen. She was amazed by how very skinny and very young he’d been. In the photos, he was nineteen, and he’d been named Mark Littleton, a Pittsburgh street kid charged with two counts of indecent exposure, two counts of resisting arrest, one count of solicitation, and one count of possession of narcotics.