Hemingway's Ghost Read Free

he can’t think it’s 1961 and he’s with Pauline. I guess one of our subconscious screwed that one up.”
    “It’s him all right,” Bumby said. “He’s just confused.”
    “It’s not him.”
    “We’re about to find out once and for all,” Bumby said.
    “How’s that?”
    “Because I know where Tolstoy is.”
    They followed Bumby up the stairs and into the humid night air. He led them down the garden path around the back of the house, then veered off to the right once they passed the pool house. The caretaker’s house was now visible to their right, a grim patch of blighted architecture hovering on the corner of the property.
    Papa leered at Bumby. “I love you? You’re creeping me out with that shit.”
    “He thought we were Pauline, and I was giving him some peace. I think he deserves it.”
    “That’s sure not what it sounded like.”
    Bumby cut onto a smaller path that wound through dense vegetation. They shrank from the spider webs strewn between the palms and banana trees. After a short ways the path opened onto a small clearing filled with miniature headstones and a number of carved stone blocks set into the ground. The stones bore the names of famous people: Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, Errol Flynn.
    “The cat graveyard?” Ernie said. “There’s no Tolstoy here.”
    “This graveyard was built after his death,” Papa said. “So it can’t be him.”
    Bumby grinned, then plunged into the foliage, brushing aside fronds and vines, the others on his heels. “The graveyard was built after he died, but Tolstoy was his cat—he revered Tolstoy for his descriptions of war—and it’s a little known fact that Tolstoy was the first cat buried on the property, and that he was buried
by Hemingway himself
.”
    Champ snapped his fingers. “Yeah, I remember reading that in one of the bios.”
    Ten feet behind the cat cemetery, almost obscured by the vegetation, was a rectangular stone set into the ground. Bumby kicked away the vines and weeds and bent down.
    He read aloud. “Here lies Tolstoi, our beloved friend and ally.”
    Ernie and Champ looked shocked, and Ernie reached down and pried the stone loose. Packed earth lay beneath. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured.
    Bumby said, “It’s clear, gentleman, that this grave hasn’t been disturbed in quite some time.” He looked upwards, at the night sky that was already tinged with pink light. Lester would be up soon, and the first worshippers were probably already drooling at the gates. “We’ll come back tomorrow night with a shovel, and I think it’s safe to say that if we find something, we can know for sure who led us to it.”
    Ernie and Champ nodded, and Papa crossed his arms and said nothing.
    The next day they lost Champ.
    A fishermen found him face up in the harbor, his poor lifeless head bumping gently against the concrete wall next to Monty’s Seafood Palace. The fisherman screamed, and then a group of early-bird tourists from Utah rushed over and screamed, the people across the street in Key Lime Nirvana screamed, and then it was business as usual on the block.
    Papa heard the news first. He was down the street in Mallory Square, preening for the morning crowd, and when he heard the screams he felt a cold prickle of fear. He gathered up his tips and went down to the harbor to see what the fuss was about. His face went white when he saw the police gathered around poor Champ, and he called Bumby and Ernie and told them to meet him right goddamn now at the pastry place on Duval.
    Papa was shoving down his second apple cinnamon croissant when Ernie and Bumby joined him at the patio table, both as pale as he had been. Ernie’s eyes were red and he was about to lose it, which the Man most certainly would have frowned upon in public.
    Papa looked straight at Bumby. He didn’t really think Bumby had done it, or Papa wouldn’t have been sitting there, but it was a good opportunity to act tough and put Bumby in his place. “So where’d you