Chapter 1
Laughter, robust and full of youth, rippled through the gathering. Christopher May stood in front of the glass sliding doors leading out to the patio of the magnificent beach house. All eyes were on him and the puppet he was manipulating with his right hand.
“So, Shirley,” Chris said to the puppet designed to look like a frumpy old lady, “you must be happy now that Lainey and Keith are finally married.”
“Ecstatic,” the puppet announced, its mouth dropping open with a comical grin. “Delirious.”
“I see,” commented Chris.
“It’s better than a winning bingo card, a senior discount, and fresh Depends.”
“I think we get that you’re happy about it,” Chris said to the dummy.
Looking up at Chris through oversized lavender-framed glasses attached to a chain hanging around its neck, the puppet whispered loudly, “I was beginning to think those two were going to live in sin forever. It was embarrassing.”
“But,” Chris reminded Shirley, “lots of couples live together before getting married these days. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
The puppet did an exaggerated roll of its large cartoonish eyes. “I wasn’t embarrassed about them living in sin. I was mortified by how much they enjoyed it!” The crowd laughed. “Those two go at it like rabbits trying to outrun apocalyptic zombies in a cabbage patch.” More laughter.
Shirley swiveled her head until she located the couple in question. “Now that you two are married, maybe the neighbors can get some sleep. Not to mention how you’ve thrown off the migration patterns of the whales off the coast. Those are humpback whales, by the way. Not whales to hump by.” The audience exploded with laughter.
Kelly Whitecastle watched from her place on a stool by the wet bar, laughing along with her friends. She glanced over at Elaine Naiman, better known as Lainey, and her new husband, Keith Goldstein, noting that Keith’s face and neck were scarlet with embarrassment even though he was laughing. Lainey was taking it all in stride, enjoying the bawdy humor and good-natured ribbing. She was the daughter of the late Max Naiman, a superstar known for action films. Like Kelly Whitecastle, she’d grown up around show business and the publicity it attracted, and could roll with most anything.
The house was ablaze with lights and filled with about sixty of Lainey and Keith’s closest friends. The two had gotten married in mid-January in Seattle, where Keith’s family lived, far from the prying eyes of paparazzi. It had been a small but lovely wedding. Kelly and her mother, Emma Whitecastle, had been among the very few guests invited from California. Kelly had been Lainey’s maid of honor and shortly after the wedding had flown back to Boston to start her new term at Harvard, where she was in her third year. Lainey and Keith had waited to throw tonight’s party, a delayed wedding reception, until March when they and most of their friends, also college-aged, would be on spring break.
A beer appeared in front of Kelly. She took the bottle and glanced up at Nate Holden. “Thanks,” she said to him. Quietly they touched beer bottles and exchanged smiles.
Kelly and Nate had dated their last two years of high school but upon graduation she’d gone to Harvard and he to Stanford. Since going away to college they’d gotten together whenever their trips home allowed. Both had known Lainey at school and it was natural that they would attend tonight’s party together. Kelly had dated a few people back in Boston and she suspected Nate had also been dating in the last three years. They’d agreed not to be exclusive while away at school but still had an emotional connection that could not be ignored when they saw each other. Kelly often wondered if down the road, after their educations were finished, they’d make their relationship more permanent. She knew both her mother and father liked Nate and his family.
“Better behave,” Nate whispered to her, leaning close. “I think that puppet has its eye on you.” He laughed, his breath warm on her ear.
Kelly gave off a nervous laugh. She’d noticed the puppet’s eyes following her too and found it disconcerting more than funny. “Chris is just messing with me,” she said to Nate.
“Puppet Boy always did have a big crush on you,” Nate told her, still chuckling. “Maybe Shirley knows that and is checking you out to make sure you’re good enough for him.” Nate paused and looked Chris May over. “Although it sure looks like Puppet Boy has been working out since we last saw him.”
Using her shoulder, Kelly bumped into Nate and laughed. “Right.” But it was true. Although he was a year older than she and Nate, Chris had followed her around in high school like a lovesick puppy. And it was also true that Chris looked different than he had in high school. He’d been a real nerd then, thin and bony and bookish, with pale pasty skin and awkward mannerisms. All that had disappeared now behind a trendy makeover that smacked of a professional stylist. His body had filled out and his shoulders were wide and muscled under his fashionable clothing.
After the set, Chris came up to them with Shirley still in his arms. With him was a young woman, petite with straight raven hair cut bluntly across her brow and at the ends, which hugged her jaw.
“Great to see you guys,” Chris said with enthusiasm to Nate and Kelly. He turned to the woman. “Judy, this is Kelly Whitecastle and Nate Holden, two of my friends from high school.” He looked to his friends. “Guys, this is Judy Jump. She’s a ventriloquist, too.”
“Whitecastle,” Judy repeated after they all said hello. “Any relation to Grant Whitecastle?” she asked Kelly.
“He’s my dad,” Kelly answered.
“But of course he is,” Judy responded with a wry smile. Her voice was high and a bit squeaky. “And Lainey is Max Naiman’s daughter, and that guy over there is related to Angela Bassett in some way. Seems you can’t swing a dead cat in here without hitting the spawn of someone famous.” Before anyone could answer, Judy said to Nate, “What about you, handsome? What’s your celestial tie?”
Nate gave her a crooked grin. “Don’t have one. My dad’s a financial consultant.”
“Oh,” Judy said with a nod of her head. “So he’s like Chris’s dad. He helps the mommies and daddies of the rest of this bunch stay rich and out of trouble. The help, so to speak.”
The little group went silent. Chris broke the awkwardness by saying to the puppet in his arms, “Shirley, this is Kelly, the friend I was telling you about.”
“Well, isn’t she a cutie,” the puppet said, looking Kelly up and down, then it gave Chris an exaggerated wink. Nate chuckled and nudged Kelly with his own shoulder.
Even though she felt a bit foolish, Kelly was happy for the diversion from Judy Jump’s awkward small talk. “Nice to meet you, Shirley,” she said to the puppet. Giggling, she took the dummy’s plaster hand carefully in her right hand and gave it a polite pump. When she did, a slight shock went through her body. Nothing major, just a faint buzz of energy that set the hair on her arms on edge.
“Okay, Chris,” she said, laughing and pulling her hand away, “no more practical jokes.”
“What jokes?” he asked with surprise.
“The shock,” she said. She turned to Nate with a grin. “Be careful. There’s one of those electrical buzzers in the puppet’s hand.”
Chris shook his head. “No, there’s not.”
As if on a dare, Nate picked up the puppet’s hand, the same one Kelly had held. “I don’t feel anything.”
Judy rolled her eyes. “Excuse me, kiddies, but I’m going to rub shoulders with some more stardust.”
“I’m sorry about Judy,” Chris said in a whisper once Judy was gone. “She’s a colleague of mine and we’re going to a gig together after the party.”
“She’s cute,” Nate said. “In a brash but funny way.”
“She’s brilliant onstage,” Chris told them.
Kelly was still examining Shirley. “Okay, Chris, come clean. Is there some sort of button connected to a battery inside the dummy?”
“Who are you calling a dummy, dummy?” came a voice.
Kelly started to gasp, but caught it before it passed her lips. The voice wasn’t the comical, sarcastic voice as delivered by Chris in his act, but a grandmotherly voice rebuking a favorite child with a wink. It was a real voice, not an exaggerated caricature of one. It was also faint, as if spoken from the other side of a thin wall or whispered at bedtime. Kelly stared at the puppet, her blue eyes fixed on the puppet’s large bug-eyes behind the lavender glasses. There was no light in them, no spark of life. They were large wooden orbs with the type of large irises found on big dolls.
“There’s no buzzer. See.” Chris turned the puppet around. There was a slit up the back of the top the puppet was wearing that allowed Chris’s hand to easily slip inside the body of the puppet. Hanging down inside the puppet was a plain wooden dowel with a couple of simple levers and strings attached to them.
“That’s it?” Nate asked with surprise. He peered into the back of Shirley’s body. “I expected more.”
“The body isn’t much more than a wooden cage,” Chris explained, “wrapped in a soft padding.”
As he showed off the workings of his puppet, several people gathered around for the demonstration.
“This lever moves the eyes,” Chris said, pointing to one of the metal levers attached to the dowel. He flicked it and Shirley’s eyes rotated. “The other moves the mouth.” He demonstrated that, too. “You can make them with more bells and whistles, if you want. Their ears can wiggle, eyebrows can move up and down, smoke can even come out of any orifice in the head. But even those are fairly simple mechanisms and all within reach of the fingers when grasping the pole.”
“Whoever thought my grandson would be making his living on the pole?” said Shirley.
The group around them roared.
A few seconds later came another voice, “I feel like I’m getting a physical in public. If he lifts my skirt, I’m biting him.”
Kelly laughed out loud, then put a hand to her lips when everyone turned to look at her.
“Did you just get that?” asked Nate. “Or don’t they have poles is Boston?” He pronounced it Bahston. Again everyone laughed.
“But the puppet . . . Shirley . . . just said something else very funny,” Kelly insisted. “At least I thought it was funny.”
Chris stared at her, his lips tight as he held back a laugh of his own. “Sorry, Kel, but I didn’t say anything else and if I don’t talk, Shirley doesn’t talk, whether my lips move or not.”
Nate took her beer from her. “You’re cut off.” Again their friends laughed.
Kelly joined the amusement but inside she was confused. She knew she’d felt a zing when she touched the puppet and she knew she’d heard the crack about getting a public physical. Kelly fixed her eyes on the puppet’s face but saw nothing but exaggerated comical features.
Chris started moving away from them. “I’m going to put Shirley away so I can grab a beer with the rest of you guys,” he told them. “Be right back.”
It was then, as Chris turned, that Kelly saw something that nearly stopped her heart. It was something she hadn’t seen when Chris was performing but now recognized immediately—a hazy shimmer. It surrounded the puppet like a cloud of dust catching the last rays of the sun, beckoning to her, pulling her to it like a magnet. If it was what she suspected, she also knew no one else in the room could probably see it. She watched as Chris carted Shirley away, stopping every now and then to speak with people.
Part of her hesitated, telling herself to forget she ever saw the shimmering lights. But a bigger part of Kelly wanted to know more about them and why they were presented to her here and now.
After a glance at Nate, who was now engrossed in sports talk with two guys, Kelly followed Chris. As she got closer, the shimmer deepened until the puppet seemed bathed in a soft light. She was just a foot away when she held her breath. Two eyes were staring at her from the back of the puppet’s head. Not huge, exaggerated eyes, but soft eyes, hooded with age, like her grandmother Elizabeth’s. Then a mouth with thin lips and finally a small sharp nose came into view. Now Kelly was sure of what she'd suspected—Shirley the puppet was haunted.
“You can see and hear me, can’t you?” asked the ghost peering out of the back of the puppet’s head. When Kelly remained still, her eyes transfixed on the face, the image added, “I’m the dummy here, remember?” Then the lips parted in a soft smile. “Nod if you can hear and see me.”
Kelly nodded.
“That’s a good girl,” the ghost said.
Chris turned and noticed her standing behind him with a startled look on her face. “I can assure you, Kelly,” he said with a smile, “I wasn’t playing a joke on you.”
“Oh, I know that, Chris,” she answered quickly. “I was just wondering about your puppet, like where you got it. It’s amazing.”
“Come with me while I pack her away and I’ll tell you.”
Chapter 2
Kelly followed Chris down a hallway just past the kitchen, where the caterers were busy fixing food and filling plates with appetizers to be passed around. Off the hallway, Chris opened a door that led to a nice size laundry room with the latest in appliances. The smell of fabric softener mingled with the savory smells coming from the kitchen as they entered. On a counter built over gleaming white cabinets was a hard-sided suitcase with wheels on one end. Chris opened it and gently laid Shirley inside, carefully arranging her head and limbs inside the soft-lined case.
“Doesn’t he tuck me in nicely?” a disembodied voice said. “Just like I did to him when he was a little boy.”
Kelly almost answered automatically, but held her tongue. “I’m so excited that your career is taking off, Chris,” she said instead. “How is school going?”
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