Although a work of fiction, The Ghost of Me is based on actual events and people.
In 1964, Harry Anglemyer was brutally murdered outside a popular nightclub in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, eight miles south of Atlantic City. The Cape May County beat reporter for The Atlantic City Press at the time, my mother covered the crime, which remains unsolved to this day.
Harry Anglemyer was a notable Ocean City, New Jersey, businessman in the mid-1950s / early '60s. Dubbed "The Fudge King" for his successful chain of fudge shops sprinkled throughout coastal South Jersey, Harry had stirred controversy a year earlier by suing the shore town over its decades-old blue laws. Then shortly thereafter, controversy became notoriety when Harry was indicted and prosecuted for acts of "moral indecency" involving an Ocean City police captain of detectives and two other men --- which not just a few then believed had been a set-up, political retribution for his lawsuit against "America's Greatest Family Resort."
My mother's articles on Harry's "morals charges" and subsequent murder, fictively tweaked, are used, along with other reporters' accounts, as the spine of the first volume of the story set in 1965. Seen mostly through the eyes of her eleven-and-a-half-year-old son, Gretchen, the main character, reports on a story that, by all appearances, is about a robbery gone fatally wrong. But as she digs deeper, the possibility that it could be something else altogether becomes apparent --- that "Harry Fenton's" homicide was premeditated and made to look like a tragic byproduct of
a robbery.
Set against the Ocean City and Atlantic City backdrop of 1965, Gretchen doggedly pursues her twisting, turning story of Harry's murder while still coming to terms with her recent divorce, which has brought her back to Ocean City to live with her retired parents, the son, the only child of the marriage, in tow.
While Gretchen chases after her story of Harry's murder, doing her best to keep the daily squabbling with a domineering mother to a minimum, forces are at work in the Atlantic City of 1965 to resurrect the moribund "Queen of Resorts" from its rotting repose by the sea. Having failed the first time to pass a referendum to bring legalized casino gambling to its faded-glory shores, a consortium of city fathers, businessmen, state legislators, and unions is regrouping for another shot at getting it approved. However, another interested party has never hedged its bet placed five years earlier that legalized casino gambling would eventually arrive in Atlantic City and pay off in spades: organized crime.
With help from inside city hall, the Mob has acquired choice blocks of Atlantic City through eminent domain to resell the properties to casino operators when gambling is at last approved. A lead in Harry's murder draws Gretchen into seeming danger when she uncovers the Mob's real estate speculation scheme.
The second volume of The Ghost of Meis set in 2010. The eleven-and-half-year-old son is now fifty-six, and Gretchen has suffered her third fall, fracturing her hip a second time, and is slipping mentally. No longer able to live independently, Gretchen must be moved into an assisted-living facility. Boxing up the last of her possessions for storage, the son discovers the famous missing piece of jewelry that had been stripped from Harry's body outside the long-since demolished nightclub those many years earlier and never recovered: his $10,000 ring --- which, as the prevailing consensus went, was what Harry's assailants were after all along --- in the pocket of an old windbreaker stashed inside a file cabinet.
The fifty-six-year-old wants to know how Gretchen got it, but she can't tell him or won't. She says she doesn't recognize it, doesn't know how it got there, and wants to go home. Now the son must try and put the pieces of the puzzle together with Gretchen's files and articles and go back in time to revisit 1965 and the summer of Harry Fenton's murder to find out how his mother got hold of Harry's ring.