Free Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost by Hope McIntyre Page B

wait in was a shock.
    There was nothing wrong with the room per se. It turned out to be a small L-shaped sitting room combined with a bigger library area at the far end. It was warm and inviting with a fireplace and a couple of high-backed sofas, the kind you more or less had to climb into like a dog. It was just that if you’d asked me whose home it was a part of, I’d never have said a rock star. I’d have told you a middle-aged country gent. A hunting, shooting, and fishing type. All right, so Shotgun had to be middle-aged by now and maybe he hunted and shot and fished but this wasn’t a room with a “look” to that effect created by a decorator. It wasn’t an Amer-
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    How to Marry a Ghost
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    ican’s idea of shabby chic that somehow always managed to look brand new. This was the real thing, straight out of an English country house that had accumulated centuries of family belongings. It was a room that was lived in and cluttered, brimming with personal possessions abandoned at random on surfaces and chairs. The furniture looked genuinely worn and the faded rose chintz on the sofas had some seriously threadbare patches. A couple of rather battered looking trunks served as end tables on which perched two jade green china lamps, one with a distinct crack zigzagging down the bowl. A cricket bat was propped up against a log basket by the fireplace.The oak floors, well-polished I noticed, were intermittently covered by a motley collection of rugs, worn kilims, colorful Indian dhurries, a jute runner, and what looked like a rather garish prayer mat. They were not at all in keeping with the rest of the room and their cheekiness made me smile.Whoever used this room clearly didn’t take themselves too seriously.
    As I regarded my reflection in the mirror above the marble fireplace—a sheet of mottled but wistful old glass in an ornate gold frame—I became aware of the murmur of voices above me and one in particular was quite distinct. Instinctively I stood on tiptoe, drawn toward the source of the sound, and I saw that it was an open heating—or air-conditioning—duct. I looked around and saw some library steps in the corner. I placed them below the duct and climbed up so I was as close as possible to the opening above, and I listened.
    I realized they were moving about the room—or at least one of them was—because I could hear footsteps. I identified the voice I could hear as that of Detective Morrison. He appeared to have settled in one spot because I heard him quite clearly whereas Shotgun—for it had to be he—was merely a murmur that came and went.

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    Hope McIntyre
    “Okay, Mr. Marriott, I want you to listen,” I heard Evan Morrison say, “it seems there are some discrepancies in your statements—the one you made following the discovery of your son Sean’s body and the one you made at the time the body of Bettina Pleshette was found on your property.
    “We now know,” he went on, “that your son Sean was killed with a bullet to the chest from a twelve-bore shotgun on the night of Friday September tenth between the hours of eight p.m.
    and midnight. You have confirmed that you own a Purdey shotgun.”
    There was a murmur from Shotgun to which Evan Morrison replied: “Yes.We have that. It has not been fired for some considerable time.
    “Now, on the night in question, Friday, you say you were alone here because you were expecting Bettina Pleshette to arrive for a meeting with you at seven thirty. You say you have no idea whether your son Sean was home or not. He lived in an apartment above the stables and the two of you rarely saw each other.
    We have established that Sean was in Manhattan the day he died and returned that night on the jitney, leaving Fortieth Street in the city at six and arriving in Amagansett around eight forty p.m.
    He called a cab on his cell phone and the cab driver confirms that Sean asked to be dropped off at the bay so that he could walk home along the beach and