The Ghost

acceptable civilized behavior. I decided that the ten percent of the population who worry about these things would be appalled by the report, assuming they ever managed to locate it; the remaining ninety would probably just shrug. We had been told that the free world was taking a walk on the dark side. What did people expect?
    I had a couple of hours to kill before the car was due to collect me, so I took a walk over the wooden bridge to the lighthouse and then strolled into Edgartown. In daylight it seemed even emptier than it had the previous night. Squirrels chased undisturbed along the sidewalks and scampered up into the trees. I must have passed two dozen of those picturesque nineteenth-century whaling captains’ houses, and it didn’t look as if one was occupied. The widow’s walks on the fronts and sides were deserted. No black-shawled women stared mournfully out to sea, waiting for their menfolk to come home—presumably because the menfolk were all on Wall Street. The restaurants were closed, the little boutiques and galleries stripped bare of stock. I had wanted to buy a windproof jacket but there was no place open. The windows were filled with dust and the husks of insects. “Thanks for a great season!!!” read the cards. “See you in the spring!”
    It was the same in the harbor. The primary colors of the port were gray and white—gray sea, white sky, gray shingle roofs, white clapboard walls, bare white flagpoles, jetties weathered blue-gray and green-gray, on which perched matching gray-and-white gulls. It was as if Martha Stewart had color coordinated the whole place, Man and Nature. Even the sun, now hovering discreetly over Chappaquiddick, had the good taste to shine pale white.
    I put my hand up to shield my eyes and squinted at the distant strand of beach with its isolated holiday houses. That was where Senator Edward Kennedy’s career had taken its disastrous wrong turn. According to my book, the whole of Martha’s Vineyard had been a summer playground for the Kennedys, who liked to sail over for the day from Hyannisport. There was a story of how Jack, when he was president, had wanted to moor his boat at the private jetty of the Edgartown Yacht Club but had decided to sail away when he saw the massed ranks of the members, Republicans to a man, lined up with their arms folded, watching him, daring him to land. It was the summer before he was shot.
    The few yachts moored now were shrouded for winter. The only movement was a solitary fishing boat with an outboard motor heading for the lobster traps. I sat for a while on a bench and waited to see if anything would happen. Gulls swooped and cried. On a nearby yacht the wind rattled the cables against a metal mast. There was hammering in the distance as property was renovated for the summer. An old guy walked a dog. Apart from that, nothing occurred in almost an hour that could possibly have distracted an author from his work. It was a nonwriter’s idea of a writer’s paradise. I could see why McAra might have gone insane.

FOUR
    The ghost will also be under pressure from the publishers to dig up something controversial that they can use to sell serial rights and to generate publicity at the time of publication.
    Ghostwriting
    IT WAS MY OLD friend the deaf taxi driver who picked me up from the hotel later that morning. Because I’d been booked into a hotel in Edgartown, I’d naturally assumed that Rhinehart’s property must be somewhere in the port itself. There were some big houses overlooking the harbor, with gardens sloping down to private moorings, that looked to me to be ideal billionaire real estate—which shows how ignorant I was about what serious wealth can buy. Instead, we drove out of town for about ten minutes, following signs to West Tisbury, into flat, thickly wooded country, and then, before I’d even noticed a gap in the trees, swung left down an unmade, sandy track.
    Until that moment I was unfamiliar with scrub oak. Maybe it looks good in full leaf. But in winter I doubt if nature has a more depressing vista to offer in its entire flora department than mile after mile of those twisted, dwarfish, ash-colored trees. A few curled brown leaves were the only evidence they might once have been alive. We rocked and bounced down a narrow forest road for almost three miles and the only creature we saw was a run-over skunk, until at last we came to a closed gate, and there materialized from this petrified wilderness a man