Ghost Story (33 page)

Hardie emerged a moment later, grinning like a shark. "Sorry to keep you waiting. Just had to tell our friend in there how much I enjoyed his company. He didn't seem to believe me, so I had to repeat my message several times. He demonstrated what you could call a lack of interest. Fortunately, I managed also to take care of our liquid requirements for the remainder of this pleasant evening." He partially unzipped his jacket and let the neck of a bottle protrude.

"You're a madman."

"I'm crazy like a fox, you mean." Jim opened the car and leaned across the seat to unlock Peter's door. "Now to return to the subject of our previous discussion."

"You really ought to go to college," Peter said as

Jim started the car. "With your talent for bull, you'd be Phi Beta Kappa."

"Well, I used to think I'd be a pretty good lawyer," Jim said surprisingly. "Here, have a jolt." He passed Peter the bottle. "What's a good lawyer besides a superior bullshitter? Look at that old Sears James, man. If I ever saw a guy who looks like he could shit you from here to Key West ..."

Peter remembered his last sight of Sears James, seated massively in a car, his face pale behind the bleary window. Then he remembered the face of the boy sitting on the headstone in front of St. Michael's. "Let's stay away from that woman," he said.

"Now that's just the point I want to discuss." He gave Peter a bright look. "Didn't we reach the point where this mysterious lady is wandering around the house looking for something? As I recall, Clarabelle, I invited you to picture that."

Peter nodded miserably.

"And give me back that bottle if you're not going to do anything with it. Now. There's something in that house, isn't there? Aren't you a little curious about what it is? There's something going on, anyhow, and you and me, old buddy, are the only people who know about it. Am I right so far?"

"You might be."

"CHRIST!" Hardie yelled, making Peter jump. "You dumb SHIT! What else can I be? There's some reason she wanted that house—that's the only thing that makes sense. There's something in there she wants."

"You think she got rid of Robinson?"

"I don't know about that. I didn't see anything but him sort of floating down onto the tracks. What the hell? But I can tell you one thing, I want to get a look at that house."

"Oh no," Peter moaned.

"There's nothing to be afraid of," Jim protested. "She's just a broad, after all. She's got strange habits, but she's just a woman, Clarabelle. And for shit's sake, I'm not really stupid enough to go in there when she's there.

And if you're too chickenshit to go in with me, you can walk from here."

Down, down the dark country road; down the dark road to Milburn.

"How will you know if she's out? She sits in the dark every night, you said."

"You ring the bell, dummy."

Then he saw why. "Jim. Look. All the lights on the west side of town are out."

"Snow pulled down the wires."

"But it's not snowing."

"It snowed when we were in the bar."

"Did you really see a little kid sitting on top of the station that night?"

"Nah. Just thought I did. It must have been snow, or some newspaper or something—shit, Clarabelle, can a kid get up there? You know he can't. Let's be straight, Clarabelle, it was a little spooky out there that night."

They continued on to Milburn through the growing dark.

Peter Barnes thought of what Jim Hardie had seen, Freddy Robinson's body floating down onto the overgrown railway tracks, and of the-little-boy-who-wasn't-there but perched on the tops of stations and headstones. And then he thought:
I was right the last time. Fear sobers you up.
When he looked at Jim, he saw him tense with excitement.

"I thought she never turned them on anyhow."

"Man, I still wish they didn't go off," Jim said, and shivered, his face a grinning mask. "In a place like this"—gesturing out at the respectable neighborhood of three-story houses—"you know, in a Rotarian pig heaven like this, our lady friend might sort of want to blend in. She might keep her lights on just so nobody thinks there's nothing funny about her." He tilted his head. "Like, you know, that old house on Haven Lane where that writer guy lived—Wanderley? You ever go past there at night? All these houses around are all lit up and there's old Wanderley's place as dark as a tomb, man. Gives you the frights."

"This
gives me the frights," Peter admitted. "Besides that, it's illegal."

"You really
are
the pits, you know that?" Hardie turned on his seat and stared at Peter, who saw his barely controlled urge to get
moving,
to
do,
to flail out again at whatever obstacle the world had put in his way. "Do you get the feeling that our lady friend worries about what's legal and what isn't? Do you think she got that house because she was worried about the damned law—about Walt Hardesty, for Chrissake?" Hardie shook his head, either disgusted or pretending to be disgusted. Peter suspected that he was working himself up for an action even he thought might be reckless.

Jim turned away from him and started the car moving; Peter hoped for a moment that Hardie was going to circle around the block and go back to the hotel, but his friend kept the car in first gear and merely crept up the block until they were directly in front of the house.

"You're either with me or you're a jerk, you jerk," he said.

"What are you going to do?"

"First off, take a look in a downstairs window. Do you have balls enough for that, Clarabelle?"

"You won't be able to see anything."

"Jesus," Hardie said, and got out of the car.

Peter hesitated only a second. Then he too got out and followed Hardie up across the snowy lawn and around the side of the building. Both boys moved quickly, hunching over to avoid being seen by the neighbors.

In a moment they were sitting on their haunches in drifted snow beneath one of the side windows. "Well, at least you have guts enough to look in a window, Clarabelle."

"Don't call me that," Peter whispered. "I'm sick of that."

"Great time you picked to tell me." Hardie grinned at him, then lifted his head to peer over the sill. "Hey, look at this."

Peter slowly raised his head above the sill. He was looking into a small side room just visible in the moonlight falling in over their shoulders. The room had neither furniture nor carpet.

"Weird lady," Hardy said, and Peter heard laughter hidden in his voice. "Let's go around the back." He scuttled away, still hunching over. Peter followed.

"I'll tell you what, I don't think she's here," Hardie said when Peter reached the back of the building. He was standing up and leaning against the wall between a small window and the back door. "I just get the feeling this house is empty." Here in the back where no one could see them, both boys felt more comfortable.

The long back yard ended in a white hillock of snow which was a buried hedge; a plaster birdbath, the basin covered with snow like frosting on a cake, sat between them and the hedge. Even by moonlight this was a reassuringly commonplace object. You couldn't be frightened with a birdbath looking at you, Peter thought, and managed a smile.

"Don't you believe me?" Hardie challenged.

"It's not that" Both were speaking in their normal voices.

"Okay, you look in there first."

"Okay." Peter turned and stepped boldly in front of the small window. He saw a sink gleaming palely, a hardwood floor, a stove Mrs. Robinson must have left behind. A single water glass, left on the breakfast bar, caught an edge of moonlight. If the birdbath had looked homely, this looked forlorn—one glass gathering dust on the counter—and Peter at once began to agree with Jim that the house was empty. "Nothing," he said.

Hardie nodded beside him. Then he jumped up to the small concrete step before the back door. "Man, if you hear anything, run like hell." He pushed the bell.

The sound of the doorbell trilled through the house.

Both boys braced themselves; held their breath. But no steps came, no voices called.

"Hey?" Jim said, smiling seraphically at Peter. "How about that?"

"We're doing this all wrong," Peter said. "What we ought to do is walk around in front and act like we just came. If anybody sees us, we'll just be two guys looking for her. If she doesn't answer the front doorbell, we'll do what people always do and look in the front windows. If someone sees us crawling around like we did before, they'll call the cops."

"Not bad," Jim said after a moment. "Okay, we'll try it. But if nobody answers, I'm coming around back here and going in. That was the point, remember?"

Peter nodded; he remembered.

As if he too were relieved at having found a way to stop skulking, Jim walked freely and naturally to the front of the house. Peter coming more slowly behind him, Jim went across the lawn to the front door. "Okay, sport," he said.

Peter stood beside him and thought:
I can't go in there.
Empty, but filled with bare rooms and the atmosphere of whatever kind of person chose to live in them, the house seemed to be feigning stillness.

Jim rang the front bell. "We're wasting time," he said, and betrayed his own unease.

"Just wait. Just act normal."

Jim stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket and fidgeted on the doorstep. "Long enough?"

"A few more seconds."

Jim exhaled a billowing cloud of steam. "Okay. A few more seconds. One—two—three. Now what?"

"Ring it again. Just like you would if you thought she was at home."

Jim stabbed the bell a second time: the trilling flared and died inside the house.

Peter looked up and down the block of houses across the street. No cars. No lights. The dim glow of a candle shone in a window four houses away, but no curious faces looked out at the two boys standing on the steps of the new neighbor's house. Old Dr. Jaffrey's house directly across the street looked mournful.

From nowhere at all, utterly inexplicably, distant music floated in the air. A buzzing trombone, an insinuating saxophone: jazz, played a long way off.

"Huh?" Jim Hardie lifted his head and turned from the door. "Sounds like—what?"

Peter had an image of flatbed trucks, black musicians playing freely into the night. "Sounds like a carnival."

"Sure. We get a lot of those in Milburn. In November."

"Must be a record."

"Somebody's got his window open."

"Has to be."

And yet—as if the idea of carnival musicians suddenly appearing to play in Milburn was frightening— neither boy wanted to admit that these lilting sounds were too true to come from a record.

"Now we look in the window," Jim said. "Finally."

He jumped off the steps and went to the large front window. Peter stayed on the porch, softly clapping his hands together, listening to the fading music: the flatbed was going into the center of town, toward the square, he thought. But what sense did that make? The sound died away.

"You'll never guess what I'm looking at," Jim said.

Startled, Peter looked at his friend. Jim's face was determinedly bland. "An empty room."

"Not quite."

He knew that Jim would not tell him: he would have to look for himself. Peter jumped off the step and walked up to the window.

At first he saw what he had expected: a bare room where the carpet had been taken up and invisible dust lay everywhere. On the other side, the black arch of a doorway; on his side, the reflection of his own face, looking out from the glass.

He felt for a second the terror of being trapped in there like his reflection, of being forced to go through that doorway, to walk the bare floorboards: the terror made no more sense than the band music, but like it, it was there.

Then he saw what Jim had meant. On one side, up against the baseboards, a brown suitcase lay on the floor.

"That's hers!" Jim said in his ear. "You know what that means?"

"She still there. She's in there."

"No. Whatever she wanted is still in there."

Peter backed away from the window and looked at Jim's set, red face. "That's enough screwing around," Jim said. "I'm going inside. You coming—Clarabelle?"

Peter could not answer; Jim simply stepped around him and set off around the side of the house.

Seconds later he heard the pop and tinkle of breaking glass. He groaned; turned around and saw his features reproduced in the window; they were pulled by fear and indecision.

Get out. No. You have to help him. Get out. No, you have to—

He went around the side of the house as quickly as he could without running.

Jim was up on the back steps, reaching in through the little pane of glass he had broken. In the dim light, bent over, he was the image of a burglar: Jim's words came back to him.
So the worst has already happened, and you might as well relax and enjoy it.

"Oh, it's you," Jim said. "Thought you'd be home under the bed by now."

"What happens if she comes home?"

"We run out the back, idiot. Two doors in this house, remember? Or don't you think you can run as fast as a woman?" His face stilled with concentration for a moment; then the lock clicked open. "Coming?"

"Maybe. But I'm not going to steal anything. And you aren't either."

Jim snorted derisively and went through the door.

Peter went up the steps and peered in. Hardie was moving across the kitchen floor, going deeper into the house, not bothering to look back.

Might as well relax and enjoy it.
He stepped over the doorframe. Ahead of him, Hardie was thumping around in the hallway, opening doors and cabinets.

"Quiet,"
Peter hissed.

"Quiet yourself," Jim called back, but the noises immediately ceased, and Peter understood that whether or not he admitted it, Jim also was afraid.

"Where do you want to look?" Peter asked. "What are we looking for, anyway?"

"How should I know? We'll know when we see it."

"It's too dark in here to see anything. You could see better from the outside."

Jim pulled his matches out of his jacket and lit one. "How is that?" In truth, it was worse: where they previously had a dim vision of the entire hallway, now they could see only within a small circle of light.

"Okay, but we stick together," Peter said.

"We could cover the house faster if we split up."

"No way."

Jim shrugged. "Whatever you want." He led Peter down the hall into the living room. This was even bleaker than they had been able to see from the outside. The walls, dotted here and there by children's crayons, also showed the pale rectangles where pictures had hung. Paint flaked off in chips and patches. Jim was going around the room, knocking on the walls, lighting one match after another.

"Look at the suitcase."

"Oh yeah, the suitcase."

Jim knelt down and opened the case. "Nothing." Peter watched over his shoulder as Jim turned the suitcase over, shook it, and replaced it on the bare floor.

He whispered, "We're not going to find anything."

"Christ, we look in two rooms and you're ready to give up." Jim stood up abruptly, and his match went out.

For a moment pure blackness enveloped them. "Light another one," Peter whispered.

"Better this way. No one outside can see a light. Your eyes'll adjust."

They stood in silence and darkness for five or six seconds, letting the image of flame fade from their eyes, become a pinpoint in sheer black; then waited longer seconds while the features of the house took shape around them.

Peter heard a noise from somewhere in the house and jumped.

"For God's sake, calm down."

"What was that?" Peter whispered, and heard the hysteria rising in his voice.

"A stair creaked. The back door clicked shut. Nothing."

Peter touched his forehead with his fingers and felt them trembling against his skin.

"Listen. We've been talking, pounding walls, we broke a window—don't you think she'd come out if she was here?"

"I guess so."

"Okay, let's try the next floor."