Ghost Story (17 page)

Of course they were thinking of John Jaffrey. The news had come near noon of the day following that in which Ricky's premonitions had reached their height: he had known that something dreadful had happened the moment he recognized the shaky voice on the other end of the line as Milly Sheehan's. "It's, it's," she said, her voice trembling and cloudy. "Mr. Hawthorne ... ?"

"Yes, it's me, Milly," he said. "What's happened?" He pushed the buzzer that communicated to Sears's office and told him to switch on the telephone speaker for his extension. "What is it, Milly?" he asked, knowing that his voice would be much too loud for Sears, but momentarily unable to speak softly—the speakers, while reproducing the client's voice at a normal volume, tripled the noise made by anyone at the other office extension. "You're breaking my eardrums," Sears complained over the line.

"Sorry," Ricky said. "Milly, are you there? It's Milly, Sears."

"So I gathered. Milly, can we help you?"

"
Oooo,"
she wailed and the back of his neck went cold.

The phone went dead. "Milly?"

"Pipe down," Sears commanded.

"Are you there, Milly?"

Ricky heard the telephone clattering against some hard surface.

The next voice was Walt Hardesty's. "Hey, this is the sheriff. Is this Mr. Hawthorne?"

"Yes. Mr. James is on the other line. What's going on, Walt? Is Milly all right?"

"She's standin' lookin' out the window. What is she anyhow, his wife? I thought she was his wife."

Sears burst in impatiently, his voice loud as a cannon in Ricky's office. "She is his housekeeper. Now tell us what is happening out there."

"Well, she's fallin' apart like a wife. You two are Dr. Jaffrey's lawyers?"

"Yes," Ricky said.

"Do you know about him yet?"

Both partners were silent. If Sears felt the way Ricky did, his throat was too tight for speech.

"Well, he was a leaper," Hardesty said. "Hey, hang on, lady. Sit down or something."

"HE WAS A WHAT?" Sears bellowed, his voice booming through Ricky's office.

"Well, he took a dive off the bridge this morning. He was a leaper. Lady, calm down and let me talk."

"The lady's name is Mrs. Sheehan," Sears said in a more normal voice. "She might respond better if you called her that. Now since Mrs. Sheehan evidently wished to communicate with us and is unable to do so, please tell us what happened to John Jaffrey."

"He took a dive off ..."

"Be careful. He
fell
off the bridge? Which bridge?"

"Hell, the bridge over the river, what do you think?"

"What's his condition?"

"Dead as a doornail. What do you think it would be? Say, who's gonna take care of the arrangements and all that? This lady's in no shape ..."

"We will," Ricky said.

"And we might take care of more than that," Sears uttered furiously. "Your manner is disgraceful. Your diction is shameful. You are a ninny, Hardesty."

"Just wait a damned—"

"AND! If you are assuming that Dr. Jaffrey committed suicide, then you are on shaky ground indeed, my friend, and you'd be well advised to keep that assumption to yourself."

"Omar Norris saw the whole thing," Hardesty said. "We need ID before we can get set for the autopsy, so why don't you get over here so we can get off the phone?"

Five seconds after Ricky put down his phone Sears appeared in the doorway, already thrusting his arms into his coat. "It's not true," Sears said, pulling on the coat. "It's some mistake, but let's get over there anyway."

The telephone buzzed again. "Don't answer it," Sears said, but Ricky picked it up. "Yes?"

"There's a young woman in reception who wants to see you and Mr. James," said the receptionist.

"Tell her to come back tomorrow, Mrs. Quast. Dr. Jaffrey died this morning, and Mr. James and I are going to his home to meet Walt Hardesty."

"Why ..." Mrs. Quast, who had been on the verge of indiscretion, changed subjects. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Hawthorne. Do you want me to call Mrs. Hawthorne?"

"Yes, and say I'll be in touch as soon as I can." By now, Sears was in a rage of impatience, and when Ricky moved around his desk, his partner was already in the hallway, twirling his hat. Ricky grabbed his coat and hurried to catch up.

Together they went down the paneled hall. "That ponderous, unthinkable oaf," Sears rumbled. "As if you could believe Omar Norris on any subject except bourbon and snowplows."

Ricky stopped short and put his hand on Sears's arm. "We have to think about this, Sears. John might actually have killed himself." It still hadn't sunk into him, and he could see that Sears was determined not to let it sink into
him.
"He'd never have any reason to go walking on the bridge, and especially not in this weather."

Sears's face suffused with blood. "If you think that, you're a ninny too. I don't care if John was
birdwatching,
he was doing something." His eyes avoided Ricky's. "I don't know and can't imagine what, but something. Did he seem suicidal to you last night?"

"No, but ..."

"Therefore, let's not wrangle. Let's get over to his house." He sped down the hall ahead of Ricky and banged open the reception room door with his shoulders. Ricky Hawthorne, hurrying after, came out into the reception room and was mildly surprised to see him confronting a tall girl with dark hair, an oval face and small, chiseled features.

"Sears, we don't have time now, and I told this young woman to drop in tomorrow."

"She says—" Sears took off his hat. He looked as if he'd been hit on the head with a plank. "Tell him what you told me," he said to the girl.

She said, "Eva Galli was my aunt, and I'm looking for a job."

"I gather that a good friend of yours has just died," the girl said to Ricky. "I'm sorry to be coming at such an awkward time," and ruefully smiled with what looked like genuine concern. "Please don't let me delay you."

He glanced once more at her foxlike features before turning to Sears and the door—Sears reflectively buttoning up his coat, white faced—and it seemed to him that maybe Sears's instincts were right, maybe this girl's coming was a part of the puzzle, nothing seemed accidental anymore: as if there were some kind of plan and if they could only get all the pieces together they'd see what it was.

"It's probably not even John," Sears said in the car. "Hardesty is such an incompetent that I wouldn't be surprised if he took Omar Norris's word ..." His voice died out; both partners knew this was only fancy. "Too cold," Sears said, his lips puckering out childishly. "Too damn cold," Ricky agreed, and finally thought of another thing to say. "At least Milly won't starve." Sears sighed, almost amused. "Good thing too, she'd never get another job with eavesdropping privileges." Then there was silence again as they recognized that they were agreeing that John Jaffrey probably had stepped off the Milburn bridge and drowned in the freezing river.

After they had picked up Hardesty and driven to the tiny jail where the body was being kept until the arrival of the morgue truck, they found that Omar Norris had not been mistaken. The dead man was John—he looked even more wasted than he had in life. His sparse hair adhered to his scalp, his lips drew back over blue gums—his whole being was vacant, as in Ricky Hawthorne's nightmare. "Jesus," Ricky said. Walt Hardesty grinned and said, "That ain't the name we got, Mr. Lawyer."

"Give us the forms, Hardesty," Sears said quietly, and then, being Sears, added, "We'll take his effects too, unless you managed to lose them along with his dentures."

They thought they might find a clue to Jaffrey's death in the few things contained in the manila envelope Hardesty gave them. But in the collection taken from John Jaffrey's pockets they could read nothing at all. A comb, six studs and matching cufflinks, a copy of
The Making of a Surgeon,
a ballpoint pen, a bundle of keys in a worn leather pouch, three quarters and a dime—Sears spread it over his lap in the front seat of Ricky's old Buick. "A note was too much to hope for," Sears said, and then leaned gigantically back and rubbed his eyes. "I'm beginning to feel like a member of an endangered species." He straightened up again and looked at the mute assortment of objects. "Do you want to keep any of this yourself, or should we just give it to Milly?"

"Maybe Lewis would like the studs and cufflinks."

"Let's give them to him. Oh. Lewis. We'll have to tell him. Do you want to go back to the office?"

They sat numbly on the warm cushions of Ricky's old car. Sears removed a long cigar from his case, snipped off the tip, and without bothering to go through the usual rituals of sniffing and looking, applied his cigar lighter to it. Ricky wound his window down uncomplaining: He knew that Sears was smoking out of reflex, that he was unconscious of the cigar.

"Do you know, Ricky," he said around it, "John is dead and we've been talking about his cufflinks?"

Ricky started his car. "Let's get back to Melrose Avenue and have a drink."

Sears put the pathetic collection back into the manila envelope, folded it in half and slid it into one of the pockets of his coat. "Watch where you're driving. Has it escaped your attention that it's snowing again?"

"No, it has not," Ricky said. "If it starts this early and if it gets much worse, we could find ourselves snowed in before the end of winter. Maybe we should lay in some canned food, just to be on the safe side." Ricky flicked on his headlights, knowing that Sears would soon begin to issue commands about this. The gray sky which had hung over the town for weeks had darkened nearly to black, broken by clouds like combers.

"Humph," Sears snorted. "The last time that happened—"

"I was back from Europe. Nineteen-forty-seven. Terrible winter."

"And the time before that was in the twenties."

"Nineteen-twenty-six. The snow almost covered the houses."

"People died. A neighbor of mine died in that snow."

"Who was that?" Ricky asked.

"Her name was Viola Frederickson. She was caught in her buggy. She just froze to death. The Fredericksons had John's house, in fact." Sears sighed again, wearily, as Ricky turned into the square and went past the hotel. Snowflakes like balls of cotton streaked past the dark windows of the hotel. "For God's sake, Ricky, your window's open. Do you want to freeze us both?" He raised his hands to lift the fur collar nearer his chin, and saw the cigar protruding from between his fingers. "Oh. Sorry. Habit" He lowered his own window and dropped the cigar through it. "What a waste."

Ricky thought of John Jaffrey's body lying on a stretcher in a cell; of breaking the news to Lewis; of the bluish skin stretched over John's skull.

Sears coughed. "I can't understand why we haven't heard from Edward's nephew."

"He'll probably just turn up." The snow slackened off. "That's better." Then thought,
well, maybe not:
the air had a peculiar midday darkness which seemed unaffected by his headlights. These were no more than a glow nearly invisible at the front of the car. It was the objects and oddments of the town which instead seemed to glow, not with the yellow glow of headlights but whitely, with the white of the clouds still boiling and foaming overhead—here a picket fence, there a door and molding shone. Here a scattering of stones in a wall, there naked poplars on a lawn. Their bloodless color reminded Ricky eerily of John Jaffrey's face. Above these random shining things the sky beyond the boiling clouds was even blacker.

"Well, what do you flunk happened?" Sears demanded.

Ricky turned into Melrose Avenue. "Do you want to stop off at your house for anything first?"

"No. Do you have an opinion or don't you?"

"I wish I knew what happened to Elmer Scales's sheep."

Now they were pulling up in front of Ricky's house and Sears was showing obvious signs of impatience. "I don't give a gold-plated damn for Our Vergil's sheep," he said; he wanted to get out of the car, he wanted to end the discussion, he would have growled like a bear if Ricky had mentioned the apparition of barefooted, boneheaded Fenny Bate on his staircase—Ricky saw all this, but after he and Sears had left the car and were walking up the path to the door he said, "About that girl this morning."

"What about her?"

Ricky put his key in the slot. "If you want to pretend that we need a secretary, fine, but ..."

Stella opened the door from within, already talking. "I'm so glad both of you are here. I was so afraid you'd go back to stuffy Wheat Row and pretend that nothing had happened. Pretend to work and keep me in the dark! Sears, please, come in out of the cold, we don't want to heat all outdoors. Come in!" They shuffled into the hall and moving like two tired carthorses, took off their coats. "You both look just awful. There's no question of mistaken identity then, it was John?"

"It was John," Ricky said. "We can't really tell you any more, Stella. It looks like he jumped from the bridge."

"Dear me," Stella said, all her momentary brightness gone. "The poor Chowder Society."

"Amen," Sears said.

After late lunch Stella said that she'd make up a tray for Milly. "Maybe she'll want to nibble something."

"Milly?" Ricky asked, startled.

"Milly Sheehan, need I remind you? I couldn't just let her rattle around in that big house of John's. I picked her up and drove her back here. She's absolutely wrecked, the poor darling, so I put her to bed. She woke up this morning and couldn't find John, and she fretted in that house for hours until horrible Walter Hardesty came by."

"Fine," Ricky said.

"Fine, he says. If you and Sears hadn't been so wrapped up in yourselves, you might have spared a thought for her."

Attacked, Sears raised his head and blinked. "Milly has no worries. She's been left John's house and a disproportionate amount of money."

"Disproportionate, Sears? Why don't you take her tray up and tell her how grateful she should be. Do you think that would cheer her up? That John Jaffrey left her a few thousand dollars?"

"Scarcely a few thousand, Stella," said Ricky. "John willed almost everything he owned to Milly."

"Well, that's as it should be," Stella declared, and stamped off to the kitchen, leaving them both mystified.

Sears asked, "You ever have any trouble deciphering what she's talking about?"

"Now and then," Ricky answered. "There used to be a code book, but I think she threw it out shortly after our wedding. Shall we call Lewis and tell him? We've put it off too long already."

"Give me the phone," Sears said.