Ghost Story (28 page)

Freddy Robinson had driven past their farm one day not long after he had moved to Milburn and what made him reverse and go up the drive was the name on the mailbox, Col. T. Dedham—he didn't know that Rea Dedham repainted her father's name on the box every two years. Even though Colonel Thomas Dedham had died of malaria in 1910, she was too superstitious to take it off. Rea explained it to him; and she was so pleased to have a spruce young man across the table from her that she bought three thousand dollars' worth of insurance. What she insured were her horses. She was thinking of Jim Hardie, but she didn't tell that to Freddy Robinson. Jim Hardie was a bad 'un, and he'd had a grudge against the girls ever since Rea shooed him away from the horse barn when he was a little boy: the way young Robinson explained it to her, a little insurance was just what she needed, in case Jim Hardie ever came back with a can of gasoline and a match.

It was not his marriage or children which had changed Freddy, but living across the street from John Jaffrey's house. At first, he had thought that the old boys he saw trooping in once a month or so were comic, unbelievably stuffy-looking. Dinner jackets! They had looked unprecedentedly grave—five Methuselahs padding out their time.

Then he began to notice that after sales meetings in New York he returned home with relief; his marriage was going badly (he was finding himself attracted to the high school girls his wife, two children ago, had rather resembled), but home was more than Montgomery Street—it was all of Milburn, and most of Milburn was quieter and prettier than anywhere he'd ever lived. Gradually he felt that he had a secret relationship to Milburn; his wife and children were eternal, but Milburn was a temporary restful oasis, not the provincial backwater he had first thought it. And once at a conference, a new agent sitting next to him unpinned his Humdinger badge and dropped it under the table, saying, "I can stand most of it, but this Mickey Mouse crap drives me up the wall."

Two further events, as unremarkable as these, assisted Freddy's conversion. One night, aimlessly walking about an ordinary section of Milburn, he went past Edward Wanderley's house on Haven Lane and saw the Chowder Society through a window. There they sat, his Methuselahs, talking among themselves; one raised a hand, one smiled. Freddy was lonely, and they seemed very close. He stopped to stare in at them. Since moving to Milburn, he had gone from twenty-six to thirty-one, and the men no longer seemed so old; while they had stayed the same, he had aged toward them. They were not grotesque, but dignified. Also, something he had never considered, they were enjoying themselves. He wondered what they were talking about, and was assailed by the sense that it was something
secret
—something not business, not sport, not sex, not politics. It simply washed through him that their conversation would be of a sort he had never heard. Two weeks later he took one of the high school girls to a restaurant in Binghamton, and saw Lewis Benedikt across the room with one of the waitresses from Humphrey Stalladge's bar. (Both had sweetly rejected Freddy's advances.) He had begun to envy the Chowder Society; before long he would begin to love what he considered they represented, a way of combining civilization with a quiet good time.

Lewis was the focus of Freddy's feelings. Closer to Freddy's age than the others, he showed what Freddy might become.

He watched his idol at Humphrey's Place, noticing how he raised his eyebrows before answering a question and how he tilted his head to one side, often, when smiling; how he used his eyes. Freddy began to copy these mannerisms. He copied too what he thought was Lewis's sexual pattern, but scaling down the ages of the girls from Lewis's twenty-five or twenty-six to seventeen or eighteen, which was the age of the girls who interested him anyhow. He bought jackets like those he saw Lewis wearing.

When Dr. Jaffrey invited him to his party for Ann-Veronica Moore, Freddy thought the doors of heaven had opened. He pictured a quiet evening, the Chowder Society and himself and the actress, and told his wife to stay home; when he saw the crowd, he began behaving like a fool. He stayed downstairs, too shy and disappointed to approach the older men he wanted to befriend; he made eyes at Stella Hawthorne; when he finally gathered the nerve to approach Sears James— who had always terrified him—he found himself talking about insurance as if under a curse. After Edward Wanderley's body was discovered, Freddy crawled away with the other guests.

After Dr. Jaffrey's suicide, Freddy was desperate. The Chowder Society was disintegrating before he had even had a chance to prove his worthiness for it. On that night, he saw Lewis's Morgan pull up to the doctor's house, and ran out to comfort Lewis—to make his impression. But again it had not worked. He was too nervous, he had been fighting with his wife, and he had been unable to keep from mentioning insurance; he had lost Lewis again.

At first it seemed like another morning's work—another tiresome claim to be settled. Rea Dedham made him wait ten minutes on her frozen porch. From time to time he heard a horse neighing in the stables. Finally she appeared, wrinkled and hunched in a plaid shawl over her dress, saying that she knew who did it, yessir, she knew, but she'd looked at her policy and it didn't say anywhere that you didn't get your money if you knew, did it? And would he like any coffee?

"Yes, thank you," Freddy said, and pulled some papers from his briefcase. "Now if we could get into some of these claim forms, the company can start processing them as soon as possible. I'll have to look at the damage, of course, Miss Dedham. I guess you had some kind of accident?"

"I told you," she said. "I know who did it. It wasn't any accident. Mr. Hardesty is coming out too, so you'll just have to wait for him."

"So this is a case of criminal loss," Freddy said, checking off a box on one of his papers. "Could you just tell me about it in your own words?"

"They're the only words I have, Mr. Robinson, but you'll wait until Mr. Hardesty is here. I'm too old to say it all twice. And I'm not going out in that cold twice, not even for money. Brr!" She hugged herself with her bony arms and shivered theatrically. "Now you sit still and get some coffee into yourself."

Freddy, who had been awkwardly holding all his papers, his pen and his briefcase, looking around for a vacant chair. The Dedham girls' kitchen was a dirty cave filled with junk. One chair supported a couple of table lamps, another a stack of
Urbanites
so old they were yellow. A tall mirror in an oakleaf frame on one wall dully gave him back his reflection, a figure of bureaucratic incompetence engulfed by disorderly papers. He backed up to one dark wall, bent down and knocked a cardboard box off a chair with his bottom. It fell to the floor with a loud crash. The only sunlight in the room streamed over him. "Heavens," Rea Dedham said, shrugging. "Noise!" Freddy cautiously extended his legs and arranged his papers on his lap. "Dead horse, is that it?"

"That's it. You people owe me some money—a
lot
of money, the way I see it."

Freddy heard something heavy rolling toward the kitchen through the house, and soundlessly groaned. "I'll just get started on the preliminary details," he said, and bent over so that he would not have to look at Nettie Dedham.

"Nettie wants to say hello," Rea said. So he had to look up anyhow.

A moment later the door creaked inward, admitting a heap of blankets in a wheelchair. "Hello, Miss Dedham," Freddy said, half-standing and clutching the briefcase with one hand, the papers with the other. He gave her a quick glance, then fled back into his papers.

Nettie uttered a noise. Her head seemed to Freddy to be chiefly gaping mouth. Nettie was covered up to the chin in blankets, and her head was pulled back by some terrible constriction of the muscles so that her mouth was permanently open.

"You remember nice Mr. Robinson," Rea said to her sister, putting down cups of coffee on the table. Rea apparently ate all her meals standing up, for she made no move to sit now. "He's going to get our money for poor dear Chocolate. He's filling out the forms now, isn't he? He's filling out the forms."

"Ruar,"
Nettie uttered, waggling her head as she spoke.
"Glr ror."

"Get us our money, that's right," Rea said. "There's nothing wrong with Nettie, Mr. Robinson."

"I should say not," he said, and looked away again. His eye fell on a stuffed robin under a glass bell, surrounded by dark brown leaves. "Let's get down to business, shall we? I gather the animal was named—"

"Here's Mr. Hardesty," Rea said. Freddy could hear another car coming up the drive, and lay the pen across the papers in his lap. He glanced uneasily at Nettie who was working her mouth and staring dreamily at the mottled ceiling. Rea set down her cup and began to struggle toward the door.
Lewis would open it for her,
he thought, still clutching his awkward pile of papers.

"Sit down, for heaven's sake," the old woman snapped.

Hardesty's boots crunched across the snow, mounted the porch. He had knocked twice before Rea got to the door.

Freddy had seen Walt Hardesty in Humphrey's place too often, sneaking into the back room at eight and lurching out at twelve, to think much of him as a sheriff. He looked like a bad-tempered failure, the sort of cop who'd enjoy using his gunbutt on someone's head. When Rea got the door open, Hardesty stood on the porch with his hands in his pockets, his sunglasses like armor over his eyes, and made no move to come in. " 'Lo, Miss Dedham," he said. "Well, where's your problem?"

Rea pulled the shawl more tightly around herself and went through the door. Freddy hesitated a moment and then realized that she was not coming back in; he dumped his papers on the chair and followed. Nettie waggled her head at him as he passed.

"I know who did it," he heard her saying to Hardesty as he went toward them. The old lady's voice was high and indignant. "It was that Jim Hardie, that's who."

"Oh, yeah?" Hardesty said. Freddy joined them, and the sheriff nodded at him over Rea's head. "Didn't take you long to get here, Mr. Robinson."

"Company paperwork," Freddy mumbled. "Official paperwork."

"Guys like you always got papers up the old kazoo," Hardesty said, and gave him a taut smile.

"It was Jim Hardie for sure," Rea insisted. "That boy's crazy."

"Well, we'll see about that," Hardesty said. They were nearly at the stables. "You find the dead animal?"

"We have a boy these days," Rea said. "He comes out to feed and water and change the straw. He's a nancy-boy," she added, and Freddy jerked his head up in surprise. Now he could smell the stables. "He found Chocolate in his stall. That's six hundred dollars' worth of horsemeat, Mr. Robinson, no matter who did it."

"Uh, how did you reach that figure?" Freddy asked. Hardesty was opening the stable doors. One horse whinnied, another kicked at its stall door. All the horses, to Freddy's untrained eye, looked dangerous. Their enormous lips and eyes flared at him.

"Because his sire was General Hershey and his dam was Sweet Tooth and they were two fine horses, that's because why. We could have sold General Hershey for stud anywhere—he looked just like Seabiscuit, Nettie used to say."

"Seabiscuit,"
Hardesty said under his breath.

"You're too young to remember any of the good horses," Rea said. "You write that down in your papers. Six hundred dollars." She was leading them into the stables, and the horses in the stalls shied back or swung their heads, according to their nature.

"These animals ain't too damn clean," Hardesty said. Freddy looked more closely and saw a huge patch of dried mud on the side of a gray.

"Skittish," Freddy said.

"He says they're skittish, the other one says they're dirty. I'm too
old,
that's the problem. Well, here's poor old Chocolate." The statement was unnecessary; the two men were staring over the stall door at the body of a big reddish animal on the straw-littered floor. To Freddy it looked like the body of a huge rat.

"Hell," Hardesty said, and opened the stall door. He stepped over the stiff legs and began to straddle the neck. The horse in the next stall whinnied, and Hardesty nearly fell down. "Hell." He steadied himself by propping an arm against the wooden side of the stall. "Hell, I can see it from here." He reached down to the horse's nose and tugged the entire head back toward him.

Rea Dedham screamed.