The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion: A Haunted Bookshop Mystery

boyfriend.”
    Jack nodded. “So how are you going to find him?”
    “I’ll bet I can find a clue in here somewhere . . .” I paused and tried to think like a woman—not a stretch since I was one. “J. J., where do you and your mom sleep in this apartment?”
    “I use this sofa.” He pointed. “And Mom uses the bedroom.”
    I went into the small room and began to search it. The burglar had already tossed the drawers; the contents were scattered on the bed and floor. I looked for an address book or letters or a diary—and came up with nothing. I searched a worn handbag but found only white gloves, tissues, and an old lipstick.
    Finally I located what would have been the contents of the woman’s lingerie drawer and started pawing through her underthings. “Got something!”
    “What, baby?” Jack moved in.
    I held up a small gift box. I opened it and found a business card and a velvet-lined jewelry box with nothing inside. Jack watched me closely. “Now what, baby?”
    I went to J. J. “What was in this jewelry box?”
    “Pearl earrings,” the boy said. “I pawned them for twenty dollars, to pay Mr. Shepard.”
    I fingered the small cream-colored card. “BROADWAY’S BEST JEWELRY,” I read. The address was near Times Square and the Theater District. “Happy Birthday! Love, Frankie.”
    I waved the card at J. J. “The earrings were a gift from your mom’s boyfriend? Frankie Papps, right?”
    J. J. nodded. “My mom’s had a lot of them. Boyfriends, I mean, but she’s been with Frankie the longest—almost six months now.”
    I exchanged glances with Jack and waved the card again. “I think we should talk to this jeweler.”
    Jack gave me a nod of approval. We finished up with the apartment search and then Jack told J. J. to pack a bag with his clothes and underwear and anything else he might need for a little trip.
    “Where am I going?” he asked.
    “Don’t give me any lip, kid. If you want me on your case, then just do as I say.”
    Jack took us back up on the street, hailed a cab, and had the driver take us to a building on Second Avenue. He left us on the stone stoop for a few minutes while he walked upstairs to have a word with somebody. When he came back down, his previously grim expression appeared a little lighter.
    “Come on up,” he said.
    We walked up three flights and paused by the open front door of a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a housedress and glasses. She had a kind face with a gently creased olive complexion and black curls threaded with gray.
    “This is Mrs. Dellarusso,” Jack told J. J. “She says she’d be very pleased to look after you.”
    “That’s nice, but I don’t need lookin’ after,” J. J. whispered.
    Mrs. Dellarusso smiled and bent down closer to J. J. “You don’t want to taste my spaghetti and meatballs? Or my fresh blueberry pie?”
    J. J.’s eyes went wide. “Blueberry pie?”
    “Sure. And with ice cream, too. And you can listen to any show you like on my radio.”
    “You have a radio?”
    Mrs. Dellarusso stepped back from the doorway. “Come on in and look.”
    J. J. glanced at Jack. “Just for a minute . . .”
    A minute later, J. J. was shoveling blueberry pie and ice cream into his mouth. Then he checked out the big bedroom Mrs. Dellarusso said could be all his for as long as he wanted—the one with a large window looking out on Second Avenue.
    “Jiminy crickets, what a view! You can see all the way down the block!”
    When it was finally decided that J. J. was going to stay with Mrs. Dellarusso until Jack could find his mother, we headed for the door. I noticed Jack handing the woman something and realized it was the twenty dollars J. J. had paid him for his PI services.
    “That should help with the food and the rent for the boy,” Jack said quietly.
    “You don’t need to give me anything, Mr. Shepard,” Mrs. Dellarusso insisted. “Not after what you did for my son.”
    But Jack pressed the money into her hand.
    “Who’s the woman’s son?” I asked as we descended the stairs.
    “A young sergeant I knew over there. I just made sure she got his last letters and personals, that’s all.”
    “ Was her only son? You mean he—”
    “Caught a round in the guts. Bled to death in the field.”
    I thought of my own son and felt the air go out of my lungs. In almost the next second, I reconsidered the bright look in the woman’s lined face when she first laid eyes on the scruffy, smudged-face J. J. Conway.
    “You did a