Read A Temporary Ghost (The Georgia Lee Maxwell Series, Series 2) for Free Online Page B

glittered.
    I thought maybe she had gone berserk. I started to get to my feet.
    She continued, bitterly, “What if I pick up something like— like that rock there” —she pointed to a nearby stone— “and batter—”
    A voice said, vehemently, “Stop it!” I turned to see Ross. His face was hard and angry, his fists clenched. Vivien glared at him, but fell silent.
    He said, “Georgia Lee may not care for amateur theatricals, Vivien, so why don’t you can it?” He looked steadily at her for several seconds, as if daring her to begin again. Then he said, “Coffee’s ready.” He walked back toward the house.
    When he was gone Vivien said, conversationally, “Being known as a killer has its good side, though. You’d be amazed how I always get the best table in restaurants.”
    I was shaking. She stood up beside me. The cream-colored shawl still fluttered below. On an impulse, I pointed and said, “What’s that?”
    She glanced and said, carelessly, “My shawl. The wind was blowing hard earlier and snatched it right out of my hands.”
    The explanation had an air of perfect spontaneity. She picked her way down the hill to retrieve the shawl. I didn’t wait for her. Coffee was ready.

UNDER THE OLIVES
    After that unpromising beginning, the work situation was as rocky as I’d feared. Vivien was quavery and seemed pressed to the limit. She frequently balked, cut our sessions short, or pleaded ill health and wouldn’t work at all. She spent hours on the phone in murmured conversation with her lawyers in New York.
    Still, we managed to refine the working outline we’d agreed on in our previous exchange of letters. The book would start with the night of Carey Howard’s murder: The quarrel between Carey and Vivien, Vivien’s going to spend the evening with Ross, her return to the apartment, where she found the police and learned that Carey had been killed. Then we’d flash back, touching briefly on Vivien’s early life and her first marriage, to the poet Denis McBride, the father of Alexander and Blanche.
    The accounts I’d read portrayed McBride as a rambunctious drunk famous for the mesmerizing, incantatory performance of his work at public readings. Comparisons with Dylan Thomas abounded, more so because McBride had taken his last few-too-many at the White Horse Tavern in New York City, once a Thomas watering hole, and had staggered into Hudson Street to be dispatched by a speeding taxi. His attention-getting demise had conferred a certain chic on Vivien, I gathered, and had led to her meeting and eventually marrying Carey Howard.
    Anyway, after grief-stricken widowhood, we had marriage to Carey, then the marriage going sour, Vivien’s seeking comfort and intimacy with the dashing artist Ross Santee, and back to Carey’s murder. Having come full circle, we’d cover the aftermath: the inquest, the harrowing glare of publicity, the shattering of her life, the tentative attempts to put it back together. We’d end in a blaze of positive thinking with her determination to write this book and put herself on the record.
    It was slick as a whistle and probably ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent horse manure, but I thought it would work. I wouldn’t actually write it until I was back in Paris after the interviewing was over. When I could get her to talk, I could see Vivien had her tale worked out to the last nuance, which was to be expected from a woman who’d spent considerable time being grilled by the New York City police. Plainly, the book would contain no revelations that couldn’t have been found in any newspaper at the time, but as long as nobody claimed it did, I saw no problem.
    Even on the rare occasions when we kept to it, the schedule wasn’t taxing. Vivien and I started late in the mornings, sitting with our notes at the stone table under the olives and working until lunchtime. After a siesta, we’d get together again in mid-afternoon and go on until time for before-dinner