Later

12

He came walking toward us, which didn’t surprise me. Most of them, not all but most, are attracted to living people for awhile, like bugs to a bug-light. That’s kind of a horrible way to put it, but it’s all I can think of. I would have known he was dead even if I didn’t know he was dead, because of what he was wearing. It was a chilly day, but he was dressed in a plain white tee, baggy shorts, and those strappy sandals Mom calls Jesus shoes. Plus there was something else, something weird: a yellow sash with a blue ribbon pinned to it.

Liz was saying something to my mother about how there was no one there and I was just pretending, but I paid no attention. I pulled free of Mom’s hand and walked toward Mr. Thomas. He stopped.

“Hello, Mr. Thomas,” I said. “I’m Jamie Conklin. Tia’s son. I’ve never met you.”

“Oh, come on,” Liz said from behind me.

“Be quiet,” Mom said, but some of Liz’s skepticism must have gotten through, because she asked me if I was sure Mr. Thomas was really there.

I ignored this, too. I was curious about the sash he was wearing. Had been wearing when he died.

“I was at my desk,” he said. “I always wear my sash when I’m writing. It’s my good luck charm.”

“What’s the blue ribbon for?”

“The Regional Spelling Bee I won when I was in the sixth grade. Spelled down kids from twenty other schools. I lost in the state competition, but I got this blue ribbon for the Regional. My mother made the sash and pinned the ribbon on it.”

In my opinion I thought that was sort of a weird thing to still be wearing, since sixth grade must have been a zillion years ago for Mr. Thomas, but he said it without any embarrassment or self-consciousness. Some dead people can feel love—remember me telling you about Mrs. Burkett kissing Mr. Burkett’s cheek?—and they can feel hate (something I found out in due time), but most of the other emotions seem to leave when they die. Even the love never seemed all that strong to me. I don’t like to tell you this, but hate stays stronger and lasts longer. I think when people see ghosts (as opposed to dead people), it’s because they are hateful. People think ghosts are scary because they are.

I turned back to Mom and Liz. “Mom, did you know Mr. Thomas wears a sash when he writes?”

Her eyes widened. “That was in the Salon interview he did five or six years ago. He’s wearing it now?”

“Yeah. It’s got a blue ribbon on it. From—”

“The spelling bee he won! In the interview, he laughed and called it ‘my silly affectation.’ ”

“Maybe so,” Mr. Thomas said, “but most writers have silly affectations and superstitions. We’re like baseball players that way, Jimmy. And who can argue with nine straight New York Times bestsellers?”

“I’m Jamie,” I said.

Liz said, “You told Champ there about the interview, Tee. Must have. Or he read it himself. He’s a hell of a good reader. He knew, that’s all, and he—”

“Be quiet,” my mother said fiercely. Liz raised her hands, like surrendering.

Mom stepped up beside me, looking at what to her was just a gravel path with nobody on it. Mr. Thomas was standing right in front of her with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. They were loose, and I hoped he wouldn’t push down on his pockets too hard, because it looked to me like he wasn’t wearing any undies.

“Tell him what I told you to tell him!”

What Mom wanted me to tell him was that he had to help us or the thin financial ice we’d been walking on for a year or more was going to break and we’d drown in a sea of debt. Also that the agency had begun to bleed clients because some of her writers knew we were in trouble and might be forced to close. Rats deserting a sinking ship was what she called them one night when Liz wasn’t there and Mom was into her fourth glass of wine.

I didn’t bother with all that blah-de-blah, though. Dead people have to answer your questions—at least until they disappear—and they have to tell the truth. So I just cut to the chase.

“Mom wants to know what The Secret of Roanoke is about. She wants to know the whole story. Do you know the whole story, Mr. Thomas?”

“Of course.” He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, and now I could see a little line of hair running down the middle of his stomach from below his navel. I didn’t want to see that, but I did. “I always have everything before I write anything.”

“And keep it all in your head?”

“I have to. Otherwise someone might steal it. Put it on the Internet. Spoil the surprises.”

If he’d been alive, that might have come out sounding paranoid. Dead, he was just stating a fact, or what he believed was a fact. And hey, I thought he had a point. Computer trolls were always spilling stuff on the Net, everything from boring shit like political secrets to the really important things, like what was going to happen in the season finale of Fringe.

Liz walked away from me and Mom, sat on one of the benches beside the pool, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette. She had apparently decided to let the lunatics run the asylum. That was okay with me. Liz had her good points, but that morning she was basically in the way.

“Mom wants you to tell me everything,” I said to Mr. Thomas. “I’ll tell her, and she’ll write the last Roanoke book. She’ll say you sent her almost all of it before you died, along with notes about how to finish the last couple of chapters.”

Alive, he would have howled at the idea of someone else finishing his book; his work was the most important thing in his life and he was very possessive of it. But now the rest of him was lying on a mortician’s table somewhere, dressed in the khaki shorts and the yellow sash he’d been wearing as he wrote his last few sentences. The version of him talking to me was no longer jealous or possessive of his secrets.

“Can she do that?” was all he asked.

Mom had assured me (and Liz) on the way out to Cobblestone Cottage that she really could do that. Regis Thomas insisted that no copyeditor should sully a single one of his precious words, but in fact Mom had been copyediting his books for years without telling him—even back when Uncle Harry was still in his right mind and running the business. Some of the changes were pretty big, but he never knew… or at least never said anything. If anyone in the world could copy Mr. Thomas’s style, it was my mother. But style wasn’t the problem. The problem was story.

“She can,” I said, because it was simpler than telling him all of that.

“Who is that other woman?” Mr. Thomas asked, pointing at Liz.

“That’s my mother’s friend. Her name is Liz Dutton.” Liz looked up briefly, then lit another cigarette.

“Are she and your mother fucking?” Mr. Thomas asked.

s“Pretty sure, yeah.”

“I thought so. It’s how they look at each other.”

“What did he say?” Mom asked anxiously.

“He asked if you and Liz were close friends,” I said. Kind of lame, but all I could think of on the spur of the moment. “So will you tell us The Secret of Roanoke?” I asked Mr. Thomas. “I mean the whole book, not just the secret part.”

“Yes.”

“He says yes,” I told Mom, and she took both her phone and a little tape recorder out of her bag. She didn’t want to miss a single word.

“Tell him to be as detailed as he can.”

“Mom says to be—”

“I heard her,” Mr. Thomas said. “I’m dead, not deaf.” His shorts were lower than ever.

“Cool,” I said. “Listen, maybe you better pull up your shorts, Mr. Thomas, or your willy’s gonna get chilly.”

He pulled up his shorts so they hung off his bony hips. “Is it chilly? It doesn’t feel that way to me.” Then, with no change in tone: “Tia is starting to look old, Jimmy.”

I didn’t bother to tell him again that my name was Jamie. Instead I looked at my mother and holy God, she did look old. Was starting to, anyway. When had that happened?

“Tell us the story,” I said. “Begin at the beginning.”

“Where else?” Mr. Thomas said.