A Manhattan Ghost Story Read Online Free

liberally on six evenly spaced spots around Flora’s skull, and set each candle in the wax. Then we got down to business.
    The dead were such fine entertainment, then.

CHAPTER FIVE
    January 6
    I had an appointment in Manhattan with Serena Hitchcock, a senior editor for one of the city’s largest publishers. She wanted to talk to me about doing a coffee-table photo book dealing with New York’s parks and tourist attractions. The possibility of doing such a book was why I’d come to New York in the first place. I had done similar work before, for magazines like Yankee and Americana , though never a full-length book, and I enjoyed it. It paid well, and it didn’t demand too much creativity, which—I’m the first to admit—is not my strong suit. I’m very good with a camera; I have a fair idea of what the public will and will not like, and when I was working, I almost always delivered on schedule. But I think, after all, that I was to photography what fast-food restaurants are to eating—I was slick and quick, but I had about as much substance as a snowflake. I knew that no one would ever give me a one-man show or do an “Abner Cray Retrospective.” I knew that I would never set the world on fire. And that was okay, because I didn’t want to set the world on fire. I think that I wanted no more out of my life than to be reasonably comfortable and healthy, never to go hungry, and never to suffer too much pain, and to find pleasure where I could find it. That’s only what most people want, I think. So I wasn’t asking too much.
     
    I’d never met Serena Hitchcock. We’d talked on the phone quite a few times, though, about photography and New York and books, so I had a clear mental image of her. I saw her as tall, fortyish, and thin, with the kind of smart and calculating sexuality that, I was convinced, only tall, fortyish, and thin women can possess (another tacky sexist fantasy). But when I finally did meet her, she was none of those things. She was short, a little chubby (“pleasingly plump” used to be the phrase), had shoulder-length brown hair, gray eyes, and a pleasant but basically unappealing face, like a Tupperware lady. She was wearing a brown pants suit and had stuck a tiny red rose into her lapel. She’d come out to the lobby to meet me, and as she lead me back to her office, she walked briskly several feet ahead and nodded at some of the departments we passed through—”This is the art department, Abner.” … “These are the copy-editors’ desks, Abner.”—and I said “I see” or “Very interesting,” which she didn’t acknowledge. And when we got to her office, I saw that it was a only a cubicle that fronted West 44th Street, twenty stories below. There were some book covers on the walls, a utilitarian-looking, gray metal desk in the center of the room—snapshots of two chunky, flat-faced kids on it—and a much used, black-cloth-on-metal secretarial chair behind it. The office said very loudly that Serena Hitchcock was small potatoes indeed.
    She went around to the back of her desk, sat in her secretarial chair, told me to sit down on a flimsy-looking, armless chair in back of me. I pulled the chair closer to the desk and sat in it.
    She said, “Crummy, huh?”
    I smiled. “I don’t understand.”
    “This office—” she nodded—”it’s pretty crummy, don’t you think?”
    “It’s small,” I said, and smiled again.
    “It’s temporary,” she said. “We’re renovating our old offices.”
    “Oh. Looks are deceiving.”
    “Sorry,” she said, and smiled confusedly.
    “Looks,” I repeated, “are deceiving.”
    Her smile altered slightly. “Yes,” she said, “they are.”
    I had a briefcase on my lap, with some samples of my work in it. I opened it, took out some color shots I’d taken in the Adirondack Mountains two summers before, handed them across the desk. She glanced at them, handed them back. “I’ve seen your work, Abner. That’s why you’re