Remembrance

Cathy Martin doesn't believe in ghosts. Until she wakes up from a nap on the beach with a dark-haired Irishman, the image of her long-dead grandfather as a young man, leaning over her with a smile on his handsome face. When she closes her eyes and opens them again, he's gone. Of course, Cathy thinks, because he really wasn't there. Was he? Cathy is on Martha's Vineyard to help her grandmother, Catherine Lindsay, a long retired but still revered Broadway actress write her memoirs. Eight other writers have already fled the island, all of them "glassy-eyed and mumbling" according to Cat Lindsay's gardener. Cathy wonders if they saw the ghost, who turns out to be Phineas McGraw, Fin for short. Phineas was her grandfather's first name. While Cathy was married and living in England, Fin became Cat's constant companion. He claims to be a struggling actor, but Cat's majordomo Helmut calls him "the bum what lives down the beach." Hmmm, Cathy thinks, something is off here. When she finds her grandfather's meerschaum pipe lite and smoking in the pipe rack in the library -- in the middle of the night, behind locked doors -- Cathy thinks she might be off her rocker from the stress of her divorce and moving back to Boston. Then one of Cat's former coauthors gives an interview that appears with the headline: 'Actress' Island Mansion Haunted by Ghost'. Within twenty-four hours the world thinks Cat is off her rocker. Cathy is distraught, but Cat laughs it off. Until her mercenary daughter, Cathy's Aunt Patsy, and her despised cousin Mellody, show up. Now it's time to fight. The first objective: get rid of the gold diggers. How? Make them believe Cat's House really is haunted. "Which of course it isn't," Cathy says. "Is it?" But Cat only smiles. Old houses hold a lot of secrets. And so, Cathy discovers, does the human heart.

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