The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion: A Haunted Bookshop Mystery

really offensive, either. Miss Underwood is wearing clothes, and we’ve both seen more exposed flesh at the beach.”
    “A nude beach, perhaps,” Mrs. Stuckey countered. “Can’t you get rid of that? Cover it up.”
    Dilbert Randall’s head popped up from behind a stack of Stuart Woods’s latest. “It wouldn’t matter anyway, Mrs. Stuckey. The same author picture is on the book’s cover.”
    Mrs. Stuckey glanced at the standee. “But she’s so . . . so big .”
    I exchanged a glance with Dilbert. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Stuckey,” I said. “At the speed Bang, Bang Baby is selling, by next week we won’t have enough copies to stock the display, and down it will come.”
    “That woman’s book is pure rubbish,” she huffed. “Neither the New York Times nor the Boston Globe chose to review it; therefore, it must not have any literary merit.”
    Dilbert raised an eyebrow. “Clearly you haven’t read B. R. Myers.”
    “Who?”
    “B. R. Myers, author of A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose .”
    “Excuse me?”
    I took a deep breath and did my best to channel my battle-hardened aunt. “You know what, Mrs. Stuckey? I’m not a book critic. I’m a bookseller.”
    “Fine, Mrs. McClure! I won’t come back until next week, then.” The woman gathered her boys and pushed them toward the exit. “Or perhaps I won’t come back at all!”
    As her boys stumbled through the front door, I heard one of them declare, “But I like the big girl’s picture, Mommy!”
    Dilbert turned to me. “She seemed pretty upset.”
    “We’ll see Mrs. Stuckey again. I guarantee it.”
    “What makes you so sure?”
    “I sold a copy of Bang, Bang Baby to Mr. Stuckey two hours ago.”
    Dilbert laughed and I automatically braced for a quip from my resident ghost, but none came. Jack had disappeared on me. Completely disappeared. On Wednesday I’d practically passed out the moment I hit the mattress. I didn’t dream that night, but I wasn’t all that surprised, given my level of exhaustion. Thursday night, however, was another matter.
    Sadie and I had gone to the funeral home, where Miss Todd’s remains were on view. I could have used Jack’s opinion on what I’d observed there. But he hadn’t made contact. He hadn’t shown in my bedroom hours later, either, even though I lay there wide awake, just waiting to feel his cool breeze across my cheek.
    This abrupt disappearance of my ghost had happened many times before, especially after an intense trip into his memories, but it had never been this long a lag.
    I began to worry— seriously worry—that Seymour had contacted those Spirit Zappers people. He’d mentioned something about de-ghosting all of Quindicott. Maybe the Zappers had visited Miss Todd’s mansion in the dead of night, performed some exorcism ritual, and then moved on to zap all of Cranberry Street. Could they have turned on some sort of anti-haunting equipment and scared Jack into limbo for good?
    I couldn’t help choking up at the thought. The dead PI may have started out as an annoyance in my life but he’d become a comforting, cheering . . . okay, even an exciting presence. With my son off to camp, I was starting to feel abandoned. I even began to wonder whether Spencer had swiped that old buffalo nickel of Jack’s, the one I carried with me outside the store to give his spirit passage beyond these walls. But when I checked the little pillbox on my dresser, I found the nickel still safely tucked inside.
    The worst part about Jack’s absence, I realized, was that I couldn’t even tell anyone about missing him; and as I fretted in private, I began to open up the roadblocks on some old mental avenues: Maybe the ghost isn’t gone. Maybe he was never here. Maybe Jack Shepard was—and always has been—nothing but a construct of my imagination . . .
    The phone rang behind the checkout counter and Sadie called me off the selling floor. “It’s Bud,” she said, frowning as she passed me the receiver. “He wants to speak with you.”
    I nodded, happy at least to speak with a living man. “Hi, Bud.”
    “Pen, the city council just refused to rescind the parking permit they granted to Jim Wolfe’s construction company. That damn equipment of his will block my business all summer unless we can do something about it!”
    “Good news on that front. I’ve already spoken with the coordinator of the Seekers reading group and they’re willing to