Chapter One
Felix
The first person I spotted when I stepped into Marlborough Bookstore that blustery May afternoon was Leonard Fuller.
Which, now that I think about it, was rather remarkable given that the room was packed and Josiah Shelton had already begun speaking.
“Is the book a roman à clef? I suppose you might call it that,” Shelton said in his mellifluous voice to the spellbound audience. He was a large man. Not handsome. His iron-gray hair was as wild and unkempt as a roadside hedge in winter. His pale eyes protruded in such a way that he seemed perpetually outraged, even now when he was smiling and cheerful and in his element. His nose was too long, his mouth too wide, but the overall effect was of a powerful intellect, a force to be reckoned with.
I found a place near the back of the crowded room, unwound my scarf, and partially unbuttoned my coat.
Shelton continued, asking rhetorically, “Is it satire? No. It is a sincere effort to capture themes and motifs that have absorbed, nay, consumed me for much of my adult life.”
“Poppycock,” muttered an elderly gentleman in the row seated before me.
His female relations tried to hush him.
“Don’t you shush me,” he hissed right back. “He’s in it for the money. Trading on other people’s misfortunes, that’s what he’s done. That’s all he’s ever done.”
It made me angry to hear him, but no one else seemed to take any notice. Anyway, Shelton didn’t have to prove anything to these people, and certainly not to this old relic who probably thought the pinnacle of Concord’s literary heritage was when Ralph Waldo Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists used to pop into the Marlborough Bookstore to check on their book sales.
An unpleasant draft whispered against the back of my neck—the chilly spring breeze finding its way through the gaps in the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mullioned windows facing the street. The crowded room smelled of wool and tobacco and ladies’ perfume, but mostly it smelled of a century’s worth of old books. I liked the fragrance of ink and paper and thoughts.
“With a second world war now behind us, who here hasn’t wondered what, if anything, lies beyond the gates of death?” Shelton asked. “Though I have the reputation of a skeptic, even a cynic, I began this project without bias.”
That wasn’t true, of course. No one was without bias. Even a great man like Shelton. In fact, it probably followed that a great man would have great biases.
Or perhaps not. But anyone who knew Shelton knew he was rather opinionated. In fact, we’d had quite an argument over practical occultism only a month ago. Shelton was a ferocious arguer, and I always enjoyed a good debate. However, I’d sensed a certain strain since, which was why I’d felt it important to come to his reading that afternoon.
I and everyone else in Concord, it seemed. We’re not Boston, but we pride ourselves that we know a thing or two about books and scholarship.
I glanced at Leonard Fuller, who was—very rudely—engaged in whispering conversation with Georgia Wolfe, the poetess. Women always gravitate to Fuller, which would be amusing if it wasn’t so ludicrous. His blond head bowed toward her still paler one, and he was smirking, which is his usual expression with the fairer sex.
As though feeling my gaze, Fuller lifted his eyelashes and met my eyes. His own are a startling, azure blue. It’s a color one feels in the solar plexus—like jumping out of a plane into cold, empty nothing. You suck in that first harsh breath as the sky punches you in the chest, and your heart seems to stop.
Fuller’s lip curled in greeting. I bared my incisors in reply.
He writes the Inspector Fez so-called mysteries under the moniker L.F. Monarch. Inspector Fez is nothing but a pale imitation of my own Constantine Sphinx, celebrated gentleman sleuth and Egyptologist, which makes all the more laughable Fuller’s accusation that I stole the idea for The Sphinx from him.
Ha!
Happily, my publisher, Mr. James Cornell—coincidentally also Shelton’s publisher—was able to prove to the jury’s satisfaction what hogwash that was when I sued Fuller in open court for slander.
Fuller has never forgiven me—and I have never forgiven him. Which suits us both beautifully.
Of course we are bound to run into each other now and then, given the size of Concord’s literary community, but not so frequently as to make things awkward. For me.
Fuller was once more listening with fake attentiveness to Georgia. I knew what they were discussing given Georgia’s indiscreet glances at a tall, veiled woman sitting a few feet from an open-backed bookshelf that towered all the way to the ceiling.
Though wedged in by people, the veiled woman maintained an air of splendid isolation.
Everyone—well, certainly those of us who had read the advance copies of Shelton’s book—knew that the character of Madam Galen was based on Lucinda Lafe, the society hostess and celebrity medium. It was either very brave or a deliberate ploy for publicity for La Lafe to show up here today.
Did that mean the Woolriches were also attending the reading?
Surely not.
I scanned the crowded seats, and to my dismay, spotted the stony, patrician features of Miranda Woolrich a few rows up. Beside her was Ingram, looking as faded and fragile as papyrus.
A great writer couldn’t be inhibited by other people’s feelings. He had to write the words the Muse whispered in his ear. Even so. I wished the Woolriches hadn’t attended today’s event. It was bound to be painful for them. Even more so once Shelton had finished speaking and the press began to ask their questions.
That was another thing. I hadn’t realized there would be reporters. Not only were representatives of Concord’s three weekly papers the Enterprise, Herald, and Journal in attendance, I counted at least two other newshawks. From Boston? New York? If the New York press had resumed interest in Shelton, he truly was restored to his prewar status and rightful place in the New England literary pantheon.
I risked another glance at Fuller.
Georgia had wandered away to interrupt someone else’s enjoyment of Shelton’s talk, and Fuller was now striking a pose to the left of a marble bust of Emerson. He—Fuller—had the kind of cinematic good looks that appeal to some people; still, there was an uncanny likeness to Emerson’s profile, particularly about the nose. Their twin aquiline appendages tilted upward as though some noxious odor had assaulted their chiseled nostrils.
Fuller was no admirer of Shelton’s—he was too much the egotist to admire anyone he didn’t recognize off a reflective surface—but he could never bear to miss an opportunity to suck up to James. Ha! The free food was probably another inducement. It was hard to imagine the Inspector Fez books were still selling well.
Perhaps when the reading was over we would meet upstairs in the lending library and exchange a few unpleasantries over the inevitable tea and cookies. I always looked forward to our skirmishes.
Meanwhile, Shelton was in fine form.
“It is easy to become a Theosophist: any person of average intellectual capacities and a leaning toward the metaphysical; of pure, unselfish life, who finds more joy in helping his neighbor than in receiving help himself; one who is ever ready to sacrifice his own pleasures for the sake of other people, and who loves Truth, Goodness, and Wisdom for their own sake, not for the benefit they may confer—is a Theosophist.”
God Almighty, he could—and did—talk.
“Mr. Shelton, do you consider yourself a Theosophist?” called someone from the audience.
The voice was male and mocking. I couldn’t make out the speaker, hidden as he was amid the blooms of a garden’s worth of ladies’ hats. I suspected the heckler was still another reporter. We seemed to have a regular infestation of them that afternoon.
“I consider myself to be an artist,” Shelton said. “Art is its own philosophy. My only allegiance is to the written word.”
On the dais behind him, Donald Marlborough, owner of Marlborough Bookstore, and James were beaming. They knew the book was going to do wonderfully well and make them all pots of money.
Which was excellent news given how unfairly Shelton’s books had been received by the reading public during the war years. Not the critics. The critics never failed to appreciate his genius. But a man couldn’t live on praise, however warm.
And speaking of warmth, it was getting stuffy. Maybe I wouldn’t stay to the end. I hated crowds, though I was glad for Shelton’s sake he was getting such a good audience.
I hoped when the time came he would not read the chapter where the first séance takes place. It was well written, naturally, but it would be impossible not to wonder what the Woolriches felt hearing those things aloud. Yes, the book was fiction, but it was also the truth. Viktor had told me at lunch over a month ago that he believed this time for sure Shelton would be sued for libel.
Shelton never cared about such things. And even Viktor hadn’t seemed unduly worried. He thought the publicity would sell even more copies of the book.
Were it 1918 and not 1948, few would find ridiculous the Woolriches’ desire to make contact with their dead son by any means possible. But we were all more cynical now that the war to end war had turned out to be merely another stop along the way.
“Maybe that sounds arrogant,” Shelton was saying. “But the true artist has to remove himself from the artificial restraints of a bourgeois morality.”
Fuller yawned widely.
A sigh rippled through the other latecomers standing in the back of the room with me. There were soft whispers, some shifting of weight. Shelton had been speaking for over forty minutes. I wouldn’t have minded a real drink.
Shelton’s expression changed.
BANG!
A shot rang out.
Shelton jerked back a step at the loud and unmistakable crack sounding even louder and more unmistakable in the confines of the crowded room. The tang of gunpowder—no, that was cordite—cut the woolly fug that had settled over the audience.
A .32, I thought. That sounded like a .32. A gunshot in Marlborough Bookstore?
My wits were infuriatingly slow and sluggish. That’s what peacetime will do to you. At one time, the report of a pistol had been as familiar as the brassy morning bell on my alarm clock. Now it was utterly, shockingly alien.
Alien and terrifying in this environment where there were so many civilians.
As I stared, still trying to assemble my thoughts, Shelton swayed and crashed down on top of the table that had been set up for his signing. The stacks of books tumbled over, thudding, unautographed, to the floor.
Shelton landed facedown atop them.
