Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities

by F. Paul Wilson

  He noticed groups of grouselike birds here and there along the shoulder of the road, and asked the driver about them.

  “Guinea hens. Cousins to the turkey, only dumber. We imported a bunch of them a few years ago and they’re multiplying like crazy.”

  “For hunting?”

  “No. For ticks. We’re hoping they’ll eat up the deer ticks. Lymes disease, you know.”

  Morley was tempted to tell her that it was Lyme disease—no terminal s-but decided against it.

  Spinnaker Lane was a pair of sandy ruts through the dense thicket of bay-berry and beach plum south of Eel Point Road. Number twelve turned out to be a well-weathered Cape Cod with a large work shed out back.

  “Wait for me,” Morley told the driver.

  He heard the whine of an electric saw from the shed so he headed that way. He found an angular man with wild salty hair leaning over a table saw, skinning the bark off a log. A kiln sat in the far corner. The man looked up at Morley’s approach, squinting his blue eyes through the smoke from the cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth.

  “Charles Ansbach?”

  “That’s me.” His face was as weathered as the siding on his shed. “What’s up?”

  Morley decided to cut to the chase. These islanders would talk your head off about nothing if you gave them half the chance.

  “I’m looking for Anna.”

  “Anna who?”

  “She works for you.”

  “Sorry, mister. No Anna working for me, now or ever.”

  “Oh, no?” Morley said, feeling a flush of anger. He was in no mood for games. “Then why is she working her name into the grain of your furniture?”

  Ansbach’s blue eyes widened, then he grinned. “So, you spotted that too, ay?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Told you: Ain’t no Anna.”

  “Then you’re doing it?”

  “Ain’t me, either. It’s in the grain. Damnedest thing I ever seen.” He glanced down and blew sawdust off the log he’d been working on. He pointed to a spot. “Here’s more of it, right here.”

  Morley stepped closer and leaned over the table. The grain was less prominent in the unstained wood, but his gut began to crawl as he picked out the letters of “ANNA” fitted among the wavy lines.

  “It’s uncanny,” he whispered.

  “More than uncanny, mister. It’s all through every piece of wood I got from that tree. Downright spooky, if you ask me.”

  “What tree?”

  “From the old Lange place. When I heard they was taking down one of the big maples there, I went to see it. When I spotted the grain I realized it was a curly maple. You don’t see many curly maples, and I never seen one like this—magnificent grain. I bought the whole tree. Kept some for myself and sold the rest to a coupla custom wood workers on the mainland. Got a good price for it too. But I never…”

  Ansbach’s voice faded into the growing roar that filled Morley’s ears. The strength seemed to have deserted his legs and he slumped against the table.

  Ansbach’s voice cut through the roar. “Hey, mister, you all right?”

  All right? No, he was not all right—he was far from all right. All right for him was somewhere out near Alpha Centauri. But he nodded and forced himself to straighten and stagger away.

  “What’s wrong, mister?” Ansbach called after him but Morley didn’t reply, didn’t wave good-bye. He sagged into the rear seat of the taxi and sat there trying to catch his breath.

  “You look like you just seen a ghost!” the driver said.

  “Do you know the old Lange place?” Morley gasped.

  “Course. Ain’t been a Lange there for a long time, though.”

  “Take me there.”

  My tree! My tree! Morley thought. Have they cut it down?

  Perhaps not. Perhaps it had been another tree. He couldn’t remember any other maples on the house property, and yet it must have been another tree, not his tree. Because if they’d cut down his tree they would have removed the stump. And in doing so they inevitably would have found Julie’s bones.

  The taxi pulled off Cliff Road and stopped in front of the Lange place. The house itself looked pretty much the same, but Morley barely recognized its surroundings. Once the only dwelling on a fifty-two-acre parcel between Cliff and Madaket Roads, it now stood surrounded by houses. Morley’s doing. He’d sold them the land.

  Panic gripped him as he searched the roof line and saw no maple branches peeking over from the backyard. He told the driver to wait again and hurried around the north corner of the house, passing a silver Mercedes SUV on the way. He caught his breath when he reached the rear. His maple was gone, and in its place sat…a picnic table.

  As he staggered toward it, he noticed the table’s base—a tree stump. His tree was gone but they hadn’t pulled the stump!

  Morley dropped into a chair by the table and almost wept with relief.

  “Can I help you?”

  Morley looked up and saw a mid-thirties yuppie type walking his way across the lawn. His expression was wary, verging on hostile. With good reason: Who was this stranger in his yard?

  Morley rose from the chair and composed himself. “Sorry for intruding,” he said. “I used to live here. I planted this tree back in the seventies.”

  The man’s expression immediately softened. “No kidding? Are you Lange?”

  “No. It was the Lange place before I moved in, and remained the Lange place while I was living here. It will always be known as the Lange place.”

  “So I’ve gathered.”

  “What happened to my tree?”

  “It got damaged in that nor’easter last fall. Big branch tore off and stripped a lot of bark. I had a tree surgeon patch it up but by last spring it was obvious the tree was doomed. So I had it taken down. But I left the stump. Put it to pretty good use, don’t you think?”

  “Excellent use,” Morley said with heartfelt sincerity. Bless you, sir.

  “The center is drilled to hold an umbrella in season.”

  “How clever. It’s a wonderful addition to the yard. Don’t ever change it.”

  Morley suffered through a little more small talk before he could extract himself. He rode back to the airport in silent exhaustion. When he finally reached his first-class seat for the return to LaGuardia, he ordered a double Macallan on the rocks and settled back to try to sort out what the hell was going on. But when he glanced out his window and saw the Nantucket ferry chugging out of the harbor far below, the events of the most nerve-wracking and potentially catastrophic twenty-four hours of his life engulfed him in a screaming rush…

  The trouble with Julie Lange was that she was a rich girl who didn’t know how to play the part. She didn’t appreciate the finer things money could buy. She was just as happy with something from the JCPenney’s catalog as a one-of-a-kind designer piece. She had no desire for the style of life and level of comfort to which her new husband desperately wished to become accustomed.

  But young Bill Morley hadn’t realized this when he started courting her in the big-haired, long-sideburned, bell-bottomed late sixties and early seventies. All he knew was that she was pretty, bright, fun, and rich. And when they eventually married, he was ecstatic to learn that her father was giving them the Nantucket family summer house and adjacent acreage as a wedding present.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that Julie wanted to live there year round. Bill had said he wanted to write, hadn’t he? Nantucket would be the perfect place, especially in the winter when there were no distractions.

  No distractions…a magnificent understatement. The damn island was virtually deserted in the winter. Bill contracted island fever early on and was a raw nerve by the time spring rolled around. He begged Julie to sell the place and move to the mainland.

  But oh no, she couldn’t sell the family home. She’d spent almost every summer of her life at the Lange place. Besides, who would want to leave Nantucket? It was the best place on earth.
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  She just couldn’t see: The island was paradise to her, but to him it was hell on earth.

  Bill fumed. He could not survive another winter on this island. He cudgeled his brain for a way out, and came up with a brilliant solution: How about we keep the house but sell off the fifty acres of undeveloped land and use the money from that to buy a place near Boston? We can live there in the winter and still summer here. Cool, huh?

  But Julie simply laughed and said she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone but a Lange living on the land where she’d roamed and camped out during her childhood. In fact, she’d been looking into donating it to the conservancy so that it would always remain in its wild, undeveloped state.

  Which left Billy three choices, none of which was particularly appealing. He could stay with Julie on Nantucket and devolve into drooling incoherence.

  Or he could file for divorce and never see this island again, but that would mean cutting himself off from the Lange estate, all of which would go to Julie when her old man died.

  Or Julie could die.

  He reluctantly opted for the last. He wasn’t a killer, and not a particularly violent man, but an entire winter on this glorified sandbar had shaken something loose inside. And besides, he deserved to come out of this marriage with something more than a bad memory.

  But he’d have to make his move soon, before Julie handed fifty acres of prime land over to the stupid damn conservancy.

  So he convinced Julie that the backyard needed some landscaping. And on a bright Friday afternoon in June, after solidifying the plan and setting up all the props he’d need, Bill Morley sat on his back porch and watched the landscapers put the finishing touches on the free-form plantings in the backyard. He waved to them as they left, then waited for Julie to return from town where she’d been running errands and shopping and doing whatever she did.

  Carrying a three-iron casually across a shoulder, he met her in the foyer when she came home, and she looked so bright, so cheery, so happy to be alive that he gave her one last chance to change her mind. But Julie barely listened. She brushed off the whole subject, saying she didn’t want to talk about selling houses or land or moving because she had something to tell him.

  Whatever it was, she never got the chance. He hit her with the golf club. Hard. Three times. She dropped to the floor like a sack of sand, not moving, not breathing.

  As soon as it was dark, Bill began digging up one of the landscapers’ plantings. He removed the burlap-wrapped root ball of a young maple and dug a much larger hole under it. Julie and the three iron went into the bottom of that, the maple went on top of her, and everything was packed down with a nice thick layer of dirt. He wheelbarrowed the leftover soil into the woods she’d planned to give away, and spread it in the brush. He cleaned up before dawn, took a nap, then headed for town.

  He parked their car in the Steamship Authority lot and bought two tickets to Hyannis on the next ferry, making sure to purchase them with a credit card. Then he ducked into the men’s room. In a stall, he turned one of Julie’s dark blue sweatshirts inside out and squeezed into it—luckily she liked them big and baggy. He put on the fake mustache he’d bought in Falmouth two weeks before, added big, dark sunglasses, then pulled the sweatshirt hood over his head.

  The mustachioed man paid cash for his ticket and waited in line with the rest of the ferry passengers. As he stood there, he used the cover of his sunglasses to check out the women with long blond hair, cataloging their attire. He spotted at least four wearing flowered tops and bell-bottom jeans. Good. Now he knew what he’d say Julie was wearing.

  Once aboard, the mustachioed man entered one of the ship’s rest rooms where he broke the sunglasses and threw them in the trash. After flushing the mustache he emerged as Bill Morley with the sweatshirt—now right-side out—balled in his hand. While passengers milled about the aft deck, he discreetly draped the sweatshirt over the back of a chair and headed for the snack bar.

  After that he played an increasingly confused, frightened, and eventually panicked young husband looking for his lost wife. He’d gone to get her a cup of coffee, and when he came back she was…gone.

  Morley smiled at how perfectly the plan had worked. The police and his father-in-law had been suspicious—wasn’t the husband always suspect?—but hadn’t been able to punch a hole in his story. And since Julie wasn’t carrying a speck of life insurance, no clear motive.

  The disguise had proved a big help. If he’d stood on line as Bill Morley, someone very well might have remembered that he’d been alone. But as it turned out, no one could say they’d noticed Bill Morley at all, with or without his wife, until he’d begun wandering the decks, looking for her.

  But it had been his fellow passengers who’d helped him the most. A number of them swore they’d seen a woman aboard matching Julie’s description. Of course they had—Morley had made sure of that. One couple even identified Julie’s picture. As a result, the long, unsuccessful search focused on the thirty-mile ferry route. No one gave a thought to digging up the yard back on Nantucket.

  Final consensus: 1) Julia Lange Morley either fell or jumped unnoticed from the ferry; or 2) she was a victim of foul play—killed or knocked unconscious and transported off the ferry in the trunk of one of the cars riding on the lower deck.

  Neither seemed likely, but once one accepted the fact that Julie had embarked but not debarked, those were the possibilities that remained.

  Morley had kept the house for a while but didn’t live there. Instead he mortgaged it and used the money to lease an apartment in Greenwich Village. It was the disco seventies, with long nights of dancing, drugs, and debauchery. In the summers he rented out the Lange place for a tidy sum, and forced himself to pay a visit every so often. He was especially interested in the growth of a certain young maple—his maple.

  And now it seemed his maple had come back to haunt him.

  Haunt…poor choice of words.

  And perhaps he should start calling it Julie’s maple.

  All right: What did he know—really know?

  Whether through extreme coincidence, fate, or a manipulation of destiny, he had purchased a piece of maple furniture made from the very tree he’d placed over Julie’s corpse nearly thirty years ago. That seemed to be the only hard fact he could rely on.

  After that, the assumptions grew murky and fantastic. Much as he hated saying it, he had no choice: The wood from that tree appeared to be possessed.

  Two days ago he would have laughed aloud at the very suggestion of a haunted footstool, but after numerous injuries and one potentially fatal close call, Morley was unable to muster even a sneer today.

  He didn’t believe in ghosts or haunted houses, let alone haunted footstools, but how else to explain the events of the past two days?

  But just for the sake of argument, even if it were possible for Julie’s soul or essence or whatever to become a part of that young maple as it grew—after all, its roots had fed on the nutrients released by her decomposing body—why wasn’t JULIE worked into the grain? Why ANNA?

  Morley’s second scotch hit him and he felt his eyelids growing heavy. He let them close and drifted into a semiconscious state where floating woodgrains morphed from JULIE to ANNA and back again…JULIE…ANNA…JULIE…ANNA…JULIE—

  “Dear God!” he cried, awakening with a start.

  The flight attendant rushed to his side. “Is something wrong, sir?”

  “No,” he gasped. “I’m all right. Really.”

  But Morley wasn’t all right. His insides were strangling themselves in a Gordian knot. He’d just had an inkling about Anna, and if he was correct, nothing was all right. Nothing at all.

  As soon as Morley was through the airport gate, he found a seat, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed Nantucket information. He asked the operator to read off all the names on the short list of doctors practicing on the island. She did, but none of them rang a bell.

  “He might not be in practice anymore.” Might not ev
en be alive, though Morley prayed he was. “He was a GP—my wife saw him back in the seventies.”

  “That was probably Doc Lawrence. He’s retired now but his home phone’s listed.”

  Lawrence! Yes, that was it! He dialed the number and a moment later found himself talking to Charles Lawrence, M.D., elderly, somewhat hard of hearing, but still in possession of most of his marbles.

  “Of course I remember your wife. Saw Julie Lange at least twice a summer for one thing or another all the years she was growing up. Did they ever find her?”

  “Not a trace.”

  “What a shame. Such a nice girl.”

  “She certainly was. But let me ask you something, Doctor. I was just out visiting the old place and it occurred to me that Julie had an appointment with you the day before she disappeared. Did you…discover anything that might have upset her?”

  “Not at all. In fact, quite the opposite. She was absolutely overjoyed about being pregnant.”

  Morley was glad he was already sitting as all of LaGuardia seemed to tilt under him. Even so, he feared he might tumble from the chair.

  “Hello?” Dr. Lawrence said. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” he croaked. His tongue felt like Velcro.

  “You sound as if this is news to you. I assumed she told you.”

  “Yes, of course she did,” Morley said, his mind racing. “That’s why we were heading for the mainland—to surprise her father. I never had the heart to tell him after she…”

  “Yeah, I know. That made it a double tragedy.”

  Morley extricated himself from the conversation as quickly as possible, then sat and stared at nothing, the cell phone resting in his sweating palm, cold damp terror clutching at his heart.

  On the last day of her life, Julie had driven into town to run some errands and to see Doc Lawrence for “a check-up.” A check-up…young Bill Morley had been too involved in planning his wife’s demise to question her about that, but now he knew what had been going on. Julie must have missed her period. No such thing as a home pregnancy test back then, so she’d gone to the doctor to have it done. That was what she’d wanted to tell him before he cracked her skull with the three iron.