Who Killed the Ghost in the Library: A Ghost writer Mystery Read Free Page B

Stanley died, crying her eyes out. I didn’t buy her phony act for a minute.”
    “What do you mean?”
    She glanced at Stanley before continuing. “Everyone knew she was fooling around behind his back, but no one had the guts to tell him.”
    “I knew.” I looked at him, surprised. “I may have been occupied with work, but I wasn’t a fool. I had her followed.”
    “What self-respecting millionaire doesn’t have their wife followed? I’m sure it was all the craze back then,” I said sarcastically.
    “Y ou women think men are so stupid, that we don’t see what goes on in our own homes. We know more than you think we do. I’m sure your husband knows…”
    “I’m not married.”
    “I’m not surprised. What man would marry a woman who works?”
    “This isn’t the 195 0s anymore, Mr. Ashton. It’s the 21 st century. Women do a lot of things they probably didn’t do back then.” He started to comment, but I held up my hand. “This is not the time to have a discussion about women’s lib. Please continue with your story.”
    “The medical examiner and the police determined that it was a suicide, even though I told them that Mr. Stanley would never do something like that,” Aggie said. “But they wouldn’t listen to me. Mrs. Ashton told me to mind my own business. She played the part of the grieving widow at the funeral, but the day after he was buried, she was on the phone talking to some man. I won’t repeat what she said.”
    “Why did she suddenly leave the house?” I said. “The story is that she took the kids and left town two months after the funeral. Why would she leave all this?”
    “Because I made her leave,” he replied smugly.
    “How?”
    “By appearing in front of her at random times, moving things around, things like that.”
    “In other words, you scared her to death.”
    “Alas, I was not that lucky. She was very much alive when she left this house.”
    “Are you sure about that?”
    “Positive. I watched them get into a taxi out there in the driveway.”
    “And none of them ever came back?”
    Aggie shook her head. “Not once.”
    I turned to look at the desk chair. There was a bullet hole on the left side of the chair. “How many shots were fired that night?”
    Stanley thought about it a moment. “One for sure, obviously.”
    Spinning the chair around, I noticed the hole on the backside. “I wonder if there was a second shot. Aggie, how many shots did you hear?”
    “One, maybe two. I’m not totally for sure.”
    I turned the chair around and sat down. “What exactly is it that you want me to do?”
    Stanley looked at Aggie before answering. “I want you to help me figure out who killed me.”
    “Why?”
    “Your ad in the paper said you were a ghost writer. I assume this means you specialize in dealing with…well, people like me,” he replied.
    “A ghost writer is someone who writes someone else’s stories. For example, say some big shot wants to write their autobiography, but they can’t write very well. They would hire someone like me to write their story, but it would be published under their name.”
    “So you do all the work and they get all the money?” he said.
    “Pretty much.”
    “So you’ve never dealt with…”
    “A ghost,” I finished for him. “No.”
    “I am surprised that you are not upset about sitting here talking to me.”
    “You’re not the only one,” I assured him. “I’m sure I’ll freak out later. Why haven’t you tried to find out who killed you before now?”
    “I tried that once. We discovered that I can’t leave this house.”
    “You mean you’re stuck here? I thought ghosts could go wherever they wanted.”
    “I thought you didn’t know anything about ghosts,” he said.
    “I don’t. Just what I’ve seen in movies or read in books. What about you, Aggie? Didn’t you try?”
    “No one would talk to me,” Aggie said. “They told me it was none of my business, and that I should just leave things