by J. S. Volpe
5
“There it is,” Calvin said. “That’s the place.”
It was the following afternoon. Calvin and Cynthia were heading east down Train Avenue in Kingwood, Cynthia driving her new Prius with the purse-lipped care of a ninety-year-old woman. Reluctantly swiveling her eyes from the midday traffic around them, she followed Calvin’s pointing finger to a long, five-storey brick building coming up on the right. A sign above the glass front doors read “West Train Apartments.” An alley separated the near side of the building from the antique store next door. Glancing down the alley as they passed, they saw only dumpsters, windows, graffiti-covered brick walls.
“Are you sure that’s the right alley?” Cynthia asked.
“It must be,” Calvin said. “I don’t see any other alleys.”
“Huh. I was expecting something more. Swarms of cops, or crowds of reporters, or at least police tape everywhere.”
“Same here. Then again, it’s been thirty-six hours since the murder. I guess that kind of makes it old news by now.”
The parking lot on the far side of the building was barely half full. Bypassing numerous parking spaces amid the rows of cars, Cynthia drove to an area almost devoid of vehicles at the back of the lot. She pulled the Prius into an open space surrounded by other open spaces, then braked.
As Cynthia’s hand moved to the gear shift, Calvin unlatched his seat belt and reached for the door handle, ready to get to work. Much to his surprise, instead of putting the car into Park, she shifted into Reverse and began to back out of the space.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“It’s crooked.”
“It is?” He peered out his window at the yellow line below. “No, it’s not.”
“Yeah, it is. A little bit.”
“So what? People park crooked all the time.”
The car now fully backed out, she put it in Drive and began to inch into the space again, her gaze bouncing back and forth between the yellow lines.
“If it’s crooked,” she said, “there’s a better chance someone might bump into it.”
“Who’s gonna bump into it? Who’s even gonna park back here? We’re fifty miles from the nearest vehicle.”
She braked, then leaned forward and peered over the hood and out the side windows to make sure the car was straight.
“We’re fine,” Calvin said, growing annoyed. “We don’t have time for this. We have work to do. The sooner we get it done, the sooner you can return your delicate little vehicle to the safety of its isolation chamber.”
She smiled thinly at him.
“No need to be snarky.” She put the car into Park, much to Calvin’s immense relief, then said, “I mean, I apologize if I actually give a crap about my vehicle and refuse to let it deteriorate until rusty pieces are falling off of it.”
“It was just that once,” Calvin muttered.
“When was the last time you even ran it through a car wash?”
Calvin opened his mouth to answer. Then, realizing that the answer was last year, he changed the subject: “Let’s just get going. We have a busy afternoon ahead of us.”
They got out and Calvin slung his black messenger bag over his shoulder. The bag contained his investigator’s kit, a variety of items he thought might be helpful in their investigations, everything from a flashlight to a set of lock-picking tools, a compass to a pair of needle-nose pliers. He had originally envisioned keeping everything in an attaché case, mainly because he thought it would look cool, but after some experimentation he found an attaché case impractical and switched to the messenger bag, whose numerous pockets and compartments helped organize the items in the kit and saved him a lot of pointless rummaging.
Meanwhile Cynthia clipped on a white belt pack, which contained a stripped-down version of Calvin’s kit, she being of the opinion that he would never use two-thirds of the junk he was lugging around. The belt pack contained only a notebook, a pen, a high-quality digital camera, a few pairs of latex gloves, a mini-Maglite, and a dozen plastic baggies for evidence.
“So what’s our game plan here?” she said as they crossed the lot to the far side of the building where the alley was. “The front doors will probably be locked, you know. We’d need someone to buzz us in, and finding someone to do that probably won’t be easy.”
“Let’s take a look at the alley before anything else. We can only cross one bridge at a time. A look at the alley might convince us not to pursue the matter any further.”
She glanced at him. “You don’t think that’ll happen, though, do you?”
“I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
“About what?”
“This. This case. I mean, the very day we graduate and can finally start investigating stuff, this case drops right into our laps. And at the same time it looks like we might have a new member of the team. And suddenly, after five years we have a lead on the mystery of our inheritances. It just feels like everything’s coming together.”
“Not for Brad Vallance.”
“No,” he conceded. “I suppose not.”
The alley where Brad Vallance died was a tall brick corridor that received no more than an hour of direct sunlight even at the height of summer, and the moment Calvin and Cynthia stepped into its gloom their arms were studded with goose-bumps. At first glance the alley looked no different from any other alley in the city. The ground was gray concrete zigzagged with cracks. Rows of windows lined the walls above the first floors. A trio of dumpsters stood against the wall of West Train Apartments. Virtually every vertical surface within arm’s reach was bright with graffiti. At the far end of the alley pedestrians and traffic moved about in the sunshine on Winchester Street; from the chilly twilight in which Calvin and Cynthia now stood, the bright vista of roadway was like a glimpse of another world.
A closer examination of the alley revealed small irregularities which hinted at recent events. There was no litter anywhere. No cigarette butts, no beer cans, no candy wrappers, nothing. And although it hadn’t rained in close to a week, the pavement and the lower stretches of the brick walls were still slightly dark from having recently been wetted. Dirty puddles filled the depressions and crevices in the old, uneven concrete.
“Jesus,” Cynthia muttered. “It looks like they had to hose everything down all the way to the second floor.” She glanced down the alley. “And most of the way to the back of the building.”
“It must have been like an abattoir in here.”
Calvin unzipped one of the compartments of his messenger bag and pulled out a pair of latex gloves. He snapped them on, then lifted the black plastic lids of the dumpsters one by one.
“They’re all empty,” he said. “Too empty. Even after trash day, there’s usually junk clinging to the interior. These have been stripped clean.”
“The cops probably took all the trash to search through it.” She looked up at the building’s walls, then out the mouth of the alley, then said, “Hmm.”
“What?”
“No lights,” she said. “No security lights on the buildings and no street lamps. It must be really dark here at night. The killer must have had pretty good night vision.”
“Or pretty bad, considering the messiness.”
“I don’t know. To take down a grown man like that, without any screams or obvious commotion…”
“The news said one of the residents heard something.”
“‘Unusual noises,’ wasn’t it? Whatever that means. But according to the news only one resident heard anything, and whatever they heard, it wasn’t alarming enough to prompt them to call the cops.”
“I wonder who the resident was,” Calvin said, looking up at the apartment building’s windows. “I’d love to talk to him, or her.” His eyes dropped to a piece of graffiti in front of him, a string of thick, angular, conjoined letters done in silver with black highlights. It took him a moment to decipher the eccentric writing: “King of Heartz.” Directly below that “Tick-Talk” had been written in simple blue
spray paint, the letters looking skinny and amateurish next to the chunky, stylized writing above it.
Calvin grunted, then looked down the alley at Winchester Street. “Come on, let’s check out farther down.”
They slowly made their way toward Winchester Street. There was a brown metal door near the back of the antique store. After glancing around to make sure no one was watching, Calvin tried the knob. It was locked. They headed on. Halfway down, a fenced-in area on the left divided West Train Apartments from a building on Winchester Street. The fence’s gate was padlocked and too tall to see over, but there were gaps between some of the wooden boards, offering glimpses of a small, weedy field, which, like the alley, was conspicuously litter-free. The whole area had been picked clean by the cops. There was a similar fenced-in area across the alley but without any convenient gaps to look through. This fence’s door was padlocked, too.
They continued on between Winchester Street’s buildings, which were similar to those on Train Avenue: brick walls, windows, graffiti. The two brown dumpsters that sat there were as empty as those at the other end of the alley.
Stepping out into the spring warmth and sunshine on Winchester Street, they found themselves between Emperor’s Gate Chinese Restaurant and Abracadabra Lock and Key Service. Each first-floor business was surmounted by a couple of floors of apartments. Through the restaurant’s plate-glass windows diners sat and ate and talked and laughed as though someone hadn’t recently been butchered a couple hundred feet away.
Calvin and Cynthia headed back down the alley. As they neared Train Avenue, Calvin took his digital camera from his kit.
“There isn’t much left to take pictures of,” Cynthia said.
“No, but it can’t hurt to have some photos of the area just to capture the layout. Plus the graffiti, too. Given that those two missing kids were graffitists…” He shrugged. “I know it’s kind of a long shot, but it might be worthwhile to take note of what’s on the walls.”
He spent the next few minutes taking pictures of the alley from different angles, of the dumpsters, of the puddles, and finally of the graffiti.
“Not much to go on,” Cynthia said as Calvin stashed his camera back in his bag.
“No.” He glanced up at the apartment windows above them. “We should try to find some way inside to talk to the residents. We could say we’re reporters or something.”
“Is that really a good idea?”
“What else are we supposed to do? If we’re going to investigate strange phenomena, we need to, you know, investigate. Which means asking questions. Interviewing.”
“Yeah, but it’s one thing if we’re just investigating a UFO sighting, or a haunting, or an out-of-place animal, or something like that. It’s different when a crime’s been committed. Especially murder. The cops don’t look too kindly on amateurs nosing around in their business. We learned that back in college.”
“Yeah, but we made it through that okay, didn’t we?”
“Barely. It was just dumb luck we didn’t get hauled off to jail.”
“It wasn’t luck. It was quick thinking.”
“It was luck that it worked out as well as it did.”
Calvin gave a small, irritated gasp. “So, what, you think we should just give up on this one?”
“No. I’m just saying we should try to be more circumspect, that’s all. Conniving our way into a locked apartment building and banging on strangers’ doors is probably not the wisest approach.”
A chirpy voice above their heads said, “You wouldn’t learn very much that way anyway, you know.”
They looked up, startled. An elderly woman was peering down at them from an open second-storey window. Her white hair was fine and thin. A pair of tortoise-shell granny glasses framed her crinkle-cornered green eyes. Her smiling mouth was neatly lipsticked. The faux-pearl clip-on earrings she wore complemented the faux-pearl necklace swaying from her stringy neck.
“I’m sorry?” Calvin said.
“Nobody here knows anything,” the woman told them. “Except me, of course.”
“You saw something?” Cynthia said.
“No.”
“Oh.”
“But I heard things.”
“Oh!”
“I can tell you all about it, if you like. Come around to the front door. I’ll buzz you in.” She started to disappear inside, then stopped. “Oh.” She reemerged. “Apartment 24A.” She slipped inside, and a pair of daisy-print curtains fluttered back into place, hiding the interior from view.
Calvin smiled at Cynthia and gestured at the window.
“See?” he said. “It’s just like I said: Everything’s coming together.”
“Let’s just get to the front door before she changes her mind. Or forgets about the whole thing.”
They hurried around to the front door. The outer door was unlocked and led to a small vestibule whose inner door was locked. Next to the door was a speaker above rows of buttons, each of which was labeled with an apartment number and a name. Calvin found the button marked “24A – Romero, B” and pressed it.
“Um, we’re here,” he said into the intercom. “From the alley?”
The intercom gave a brief buzz and the interior door unlocked with a quick, sharp clack.
Cynthia grabbed it and pulled it open, and they went inside. Across the lobby was a hallway that ran the length of the building. There, they turned right and headed down to 24A, the last apartment on the right. As they approached, the apartment door, which had been cracked, opened wide, revealing the old lady, who was clad in a navy-blue dress with white lace trim at the collar and cuffs, black stockings, and white orthopedic shoes. She was small and stooped and thin, no more than five feet tall and ninety pounds. But though small and old, she looked healthy and alert, and she seemed delighted to see them.
She shuffled backward, drawing the door back with her, and waved them inside.
“Come in,” she said, sounding as happy as if they were her own long-lost children returning home after decades away. “Come in. Would you like anything to eat or drink? I have iced tea.”
“No, thank you,” Cynthia said.
She looked doubtful. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, we just ate.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “Well, just tell me if you change your mind.”
She led them down a short hallway and into a cluttered but cozy living room that smelled of potpourri and baked beans. Floral prints dominated everything. The sofa, where Calvin and Cynthia were directed to sit, featured roses on a white background. The rocking chair that their hostess settled into sported daffodils on dark blue. The curtains in the front window matched the daisied curtains in the alley window. The walls were decorated with cross-stitch images of farms and flowers and butterflies and aphorisms like “Home Is Where the Heart Is” and “God Bless This Humble Home.” Above the couch was a knickknack shelf lined with bud vases and ceramic bunnies and a few framed photos that showed a younger Ms. Romero with a balding man who had glasses and a long, thick nose.
“I’m Betty,” she said once everyone was settled.
“Nice to meet you,” Cynthia said. “I’m Cynthia. This is Calvin.”
“Hi,” Calvin said.
“You’re trying to solve that poor man’s death, aren’t you?” Betty said, then briskly went on before either of them could reply: “Well, of course you are. I could tell from the way you were chatting back there in the alley. And pardon me for overhearing, but with you right there and my window right here and the window being open and all, I really couldn’t help it, now could I? And judging by what little teensy bits of conversation I accidentally overheard you saying I’m guessing you’re not regular run-of-the-mill investigators either, not like police officers or private eyes or anything like that. You investigate weird, scary things, like on that TV show, right?”
“Which show is that?” Calvin said as pleasantly as he could, hoping his annoyance at the question was tucked well out of sight. Why
did everyone always compare them to a TV show? He wondered which one it would be this time: The X-Files? Supernatural? Or maybe it would be Ghost Hunters.
“Oh, what was that called?” Betty thought for a moment, her brows drawn down. Then she brightened again. “Oh, yes. The Night Stalker. George, my husband, loved that silly show, God rest his soul.”
“Sort of like that, yeah,” Calvin said. The Night Stalker, eh? That was a new one.
“But rest assured, you two don’t remind me of that fellow on the show. What was his name? MacGuffin, or something like that. The fellow with the hat. And thank heavens you don’t, either. He was such a smart-mouthed sort. Too clever by half, I say. So full of himself. Not like you two. You two seem like lovely young folks. It’s such a relief to meet nice folks like you. It seems like there aren’t enough people like that around anymore.” She heaved a sad sigh. “Lots of bad sorts running around these days. Bad sorts and bad happenings. The world is getting mighty strange and mighty ugly. I mean, just look at what happened to that poor man in the alley. Right outside my window, too.”
“You said you heard something that night?” Calvin said.
“Oh, yes. I’m the only one here who heard anything. The police officers came back to ask me questions three times. I’m the only one they were interested in talking to. Except Ms. Ruddy, of course, poor girl. She’s gone to stay with her parents now. Don’t know if she’ll ever be back. But she didn’t know anything about the attack. I was the only one, thanks to my sleep troubles. Hardly anyone’s in the building on a Friday night anymore anyway. Not even Mr. Garrett. Nearly eighty now and he spends every Friday night in a bar until the small hours. Comes bumping down the hallway stinking of beer and cigarettes and waking everyone up. The most shocking part is, he used to be a schoolteacher. Eighth grade science, I think it was.”
“So, um, what exactly was it that you heard in the alley the other night?” Calvin asked. He was a little afraid she would get snappish or dejected that he had interrupted her ramble, but she veered happily down this new path without a peep of protest.
“Well, I had just gone to bed and was trying to get to sleep, and I heard a woman’s voice shout, ‘Brad! Wait!’”
“Christine Ruddy,” Cynthia said.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
She held up a finger. “Listen. After that I heard some murmurs of conversation, a little too low for me to make out, even though these old windows are horribly thin. You wouldn’t believe how thin they are. And single panes, too. We get ice on the insides of the windows in the dead of winter. Gets very cold. No matter how often I complain to the management, they never do anything about it. Though in a way, it’s not so bad, because quite frankly I sleep much better when it’s colder. I used to have such arguments with George about the thermostat.”
“I can imagine,” Cynthia said. “So how long did the conversation in the alley go on?”
“Oh, not long at all. Probably not even thirty seconds. Then it stopped, and there was a very faint click-clack click-clack, like dressy shoes walking on the concrete down below. It’s a sound I’ve heard plenty of times before, of course. Everybody and his Aunt Fanny uses that alley, it seems, and always when I’m trying to get to sleep. Oh, the noise can get terrible. Especially those ladies with their heels. Clockety-clock clockety-clock. It’s enough to wake the dead.”
“What about those dress shoes the other night?” Calvin prompted. “What happened with them?”
“Well, after the steps had click-clacked a little ways, I heard the same voice say the same thing I heard before: ‘Brad! Wait!’ And the darnedest part is, it was exactly the same. Exactly. Like an echo or something. It was very peculiar.”
Calvin and Cynthia sat forward excitedly.
“An echo?” Calvin said.
“Yes,” Betty said, sitting forward too, excited by their excitement. “It was exactly the same. Same voice, same rhythm, same…whatever you call it. Intonation, or whatever. Like a recording playing back. Exactly.”
“What happened then?” Calvin asked.
“Then comes another weird thing. I heard a sort of clip-clop sound.”
“Like the dress shoes?”
“No. Like horses.”
“Horses?”
“Like hoofs. Clip-clop, clip-clop.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t just Brad Vallance’s dress shoes, only echoing funny or something?” Cynthia asked.
Betty tutted, looking a little disappointed that Cynthia would ask such a thing. It made Cynthia squirm guiltily on the couch.
“That’s exactly what the police thought,” Betty said. “They thought I couldn’t tell a shoe from a hoof.” She shook her head at the awfulness of it. “But I know hoofs. I grew up on a farm in Freedom Township. And trust me, I know hoofs. And this was a hoof. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Not click-clack. Completely different. And it wasn’t any cutting tool either. That’s something else the police thought it might be. They refused to even consider the possibility that I might know what it is I’m hearing. They were making up malarkey theories that the clip-clop was actually the sound of, I don’t know, a giant pair of scissors that someone was using to cut up that poor man down there. But it was hoofs, I tell you. It wasn’t a tool, and it wasn’t a clip-clop of just one pair of feet, either. Oh, no. It was four legs with hoofs. Like a horse. Or maybe a goat.”
“Well, what happened after you heard the, uh, the hoofs,” Cynthia said.
“Then I heard another voice, a woman’s voice, maybe the same one I heard earlier. It was quieter than before, though, and hard to hear over the clip-clops. I think it said something about tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Calvin said.
“Mm-hmm. And then after that I heard a sort of thumpy noise like something falling over down there. I figured it was just a trash bag falling out of the dumpster. That happens a lot, you know. Those dumpsters fill up awful fast. It’s shocking how much people throw out these days. In my day, we’d find ways to keep using things and reusing things. These days, once the shine’s off something, people think it’s time to throw it away. So wasteful.” She shook her head. “Management really needs to add more dumpsters.”
“It sure sounds like it,” Calvin agreed. “Did you hear anything after the thump?”
“Oh, yes. For a while there were all sorts of, well, eating noises.”
“Eating noises?”
“Chomps and slurps and such. I couldn’t hear it all that well, even with the thin window, but I’m sure that’s what it was. I’ve heard similar noises before. Sometimes we get stray dogs gobbling up the garbage back there after it’s fallen out of the dumpster. Oh, I do so wish management would add another dumpster or two.”
“Definitely,” Cynthia said.
“Anyhow, figuring it was just some stray mutt having itself a nice gristly T-bone or something, I started drifting off to sleep again. But just when I was on the verge of falling asleep, the gobbling stopped and I heard the clip-clop, clip-clop again, only this time moving away down the alley. It got quieter and quieter, then faded away, and I fell asleep.”
“Um, I don’t mean to offend,” Calvin said, “but are you positive you really heard what you think you heard, and that you weren’t actually, say, slipping in and out of sleep and maybe only dreaming parts of it?”
Betty clucked her tongue and looked at Calvin sadly, as if she had hoped for better from such a nice lad like him. Calvin found himself squirming guiltily just as Cynthia had a minute earlier.
“That’s exactly what those policemen asked me,” Betty said. “And like I told them: Yes, I’m sure. I’d like to think I’m old enough to know the difference between being asleep and being awake. And trust me, I know hoofs, too.”
“Understood,” Calvin said. “But I had to ask just to make sure.”
“Well, I suppose that’s something you have to do,” Betty conceded grudgingly. “That’s proper scientificness, I suppose. Better than the police, at any rate. They sure we
ren’t being very scientific. Why, they just out-and-out ignored me when I said the second voice was a perfect echo. They didn’t bother asking me about it at all. They probably just thought it was someone repeating themselves in a normal way, and I was just foolish or half deaf. But I know echoes, just as sure as I know hoofs.”
“When you say the voice was like an echo,” Cynthia said, “did it match in every way? I mean, there wasn’t anything different about it?”
Betty opened her mouth, apparently to say yes, then paused and said, “Well, come to think of it, it was a little louder. A little closer. But otherwise, yes, it was exactly the same.”
“But closer. That’s interesting.” She looked around. “Do you mind if we take a look out the window where you heard all this?”
Betty looked doubtful. “Well, it’s my bedroom. I don’t normally let strangers in there.” She hesitated a moment, then patted her knees. “But for you two, I think I can make an exception.” She waggled a finger at them. “Just as long as you don’t go peeking at things you shouldn’t.”
“We’ll keep our minds on the job. Don’t worry.”
Betty led them to her bedroom, which continued the floral motif: roses on the bedspread; sunflowers on the rocking chair in the corner; a whole botanical garden’s worth of flowers on a nightgown hanging on a hook on the closet door. On the walls were half a dozen more framed cross-stitch pictures, the largest, positioned above the head of the bed, showing a pasture full of fluffy white sheep with a big yellow sun above containing the words “The Lord is my shepherd.”
There was only one window in the bedroom, the one with the daisy curtains, and it was still wide open. A faint stink of exhaust drifted through it into the bedroom, where it was quickly overwhelmed by the more pleasant scent of the potpourri that sat in a bowl on the dresser.
Calvin and Cynthia pushed the curtains aside and stuck their heads out. From here, ten feet up, they had a decent overview of the alley. The full breadth of the wet area was clearer. Its epicenter was directly below them.
“It must’ve happened right under her window,” Cynthia said.
“Yeah.” Calvin looked around. One of the distorted, angular pieces of graffiti on the alley’s far wall, which he had been unable to read at ground level, was now foreshortened and surprisingly legible. The huge black-outlined red words read “Nobody’s Bitch!”
Calvin looked toward the alley’s Train Avenue entrance. The row of dumpsters stood between Betty’s window and the alley’s mouth.
“Okay,” he said, speaking too low for Betty to hear him, “so Brad Vallance enters the alley. Before he gets far, his girlfriend pops up to call him back.”
“‘Brad, wait’ number one.”
“Right. She leaves. He heads back down the alley, click-clack click-clack, and then…”
“‘Brad, wait’ redux, only louder.”
“Then clip-clop, clip-clop, something about tomorrow—”
“And thump.” Cynthia twisted around in the window to look back at Betty, who stood a couple of paces behind them, looking vaguely worried, as if she feared they might slip and fall out the window.
“How long did the clip-clopping noise last the first time you heard it?” she asked Betty.
“Oh, just a couple seconds.”
“It wasn’t traveling down the whole length of the alley like it was the second time?”
“No.”
Now Calvin turned and looked back through the curtains at Betty.
“Just how much time did you say passed between the first and second times you heard ‘Brad, wait’?”
“Not too long. Maybe ten seconds.”
“And it was closer the second time, too,” he muttered. He and Cynthia turned forward to look at the alley again. “Which means it was coming from further inside the alley, rather than at its mouth.”
“And that came before the first of the clip-clops,” Cynthia said.
“Right. Which means that whoever or whatever was talking and doing all that clip-clopping was already in the alley down there.”
“Maybe in a dumpster? Or behind the dumpsters?”
“Possibly.” Calvin turned to look at Betty again. “Had you just gotten into bed when you heard this stuff?”
“Why, yes. Yes, I did.”
“Where were you before that?”
“Well, you know…” Looking embarrassed, Betty planted a hand to her upper chest. “In the bathroom.” She whispered the latter word as if it were a dirty word. “I took my bath, and, you know, other things.”
“And then you came right in here and went to bed?”
“Yes.”
“Can you hear sounds from the alley in the bathroom?”
“Oh, no. The bathroom’s not against the alley.”
“Okay.” He looked out the window again.
“So?” Cynthia said.
“Just establishing that the clip-clopper could have had an opportunity to get into position without Betty hearing it.” He glanced behind him to make sure Betty wasn’t too near, then lowered his voice to a barely audible murmur. “Although frankly, I’m still not convinced that the police’s theory is wrong. Given the weirdness of the injuries, it’s entirely conceivable that they were made by some kind of bizarre, home-made cutting implement with a unique sound.”
“Why don’t we discuss it more once we’re out of here,” Cynthia whispered.
“Agreed.”
They withdrew from the window and turned to Betty.
“Thank you so much, Ms. Romero,” Calvin said, smiling. “You’ve helped us out quite a bit.”
He had hoped his smile and kind words would make Betty feel proud and helpful. Instead she looked dismayed, as if their imminent departure were a deviation from the way things were meant to go.
“Oh!” she said. “Well, I…I’m glad. But…”
“Yeah, thanks for everything,” Cynthia said with a kindly, grateful smile that she hoped would assuage the old woman’s distress. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect. Cynthia felt a twinge of guilt about abandoning Betty to her lonely, husbandless apartment again, but what choice did they have? They couldn’t sit here and let her talk their ears off all day. “We need to get going now. We have a lot more to do if we hope to solve this case.”
“But…”
Calvin and Cynthia strode out of the bedroom and toward the front door. Betty hurried after them, still looking dismayed.
At the door Calvin and Cynthia turned and smiled at Betty once again.
“Thanks again,” Calvin said.
“But…” Betty said.
“Yeah,” Cynthia agreed. “You’ve been a huge help.”
Calvin put his hand on the knob and started to turn it.
“But don’t you want to hear about how the alley’s haunted?” Betty blurted out.
Calvin and Cynthia froze dead, looked at each other, then turned to look at Betty.
“What?” Calvin said.
“Oh, yes. The alley’s haunted. Sort of. I think. It started after Mr. Bradley killed himself.”
“Bradley?” Calvin looked at Cynthia. She just shrugged, as baffled as he was. “You mean Bradley Vallance?”
“No, Simon Bradley,” Betty said. “He lived in 12E.” Noting their utter befuddlement, she backed toward the living room and motioned for them to follow. “Come. Sit. I’ll tell you all about it. Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to nibble on? Or a nice drink? If you don’t like iced tea, I have ginger ale. And milk.”
“Uh, no. We’re fine, thanks.”
They all trooped back to the living room and sat down where they had sat before.
“So…” Cynthia frowned, trying to puzzle out what Betty had just revealed. “Some guy named Simon Bradley committed suicide in apartment 12A?”
“12E, dear. Top floor.”
“Who was he? Was he a friend of yours or something?”
“Oh, no. I barely knew him. He was a young fellow, about your age. I think he was in college
. I really don’t know much about him.”
“Except that he killed himself,” Calvin said.
“That’s right.”
“When was this, exactly?”
Betty thought hard. “Well, let’s see. It was just a year before George passed on. So that would have been…” A pause, then: “2008.”
Calvin and Cynthia looked at each other, amazed. He had told her on the drive here about his discoveries in the office last night, including how Mr. May had first added them to his trust in 2008, the same year the battery had been installed in the Thunderbird.
“There were strange doings and loud voices in the alley on the night of Mr. Bradley’s death, too,” Betty said. “It’s all a little bit hazy after so long, but I remember that George and I had been getting ready to go to bed when we heard the sounds of a scuffle and some shouts from the alley down below. I heard the word, ‘No,’ and then a few seconds later I heard, ‘I did it.’ It was a woman’s voice each time, though I couldn’t tell if it was the same woman or two different ones. And in between the two voices we heard a faint bang, which George immediately recognized as a gunshot. He had done a lot of hunting in his day, you know. Never caught a whole lot, as I recall. A few rabbits and pheasants here and there. I suspect he took his little hunting trips just to get away from it all for a few hours and spend some time in the great outdoors. He needed it, too. Worked a hard job. Construction. The foreman was a real ogre. A slave-driver, George always called him. Drank way too much. The foreman that is, not George. He’d show up drunk after lunch and shout at the men for no reason at all.”
“That sounds pretty bad,” Cynthia agreed. “So what happened after you heard the voices and the gunshot?”
“Well, not more than ten minutes later an ambulance shows up out front, and it turns out that poor Mr. Bradley shot himself.”
“Had the noises in the alley stopped by then?” Calvin asked.
“Oh, yes. That only lasted a minute or two. Like I said, it happened right around the same time as the gunshot. You’d think there might be some kind of connection between the two, but the police said there was no doubt Mr. Bradley shot himself, right in the mouth and through the brain, no mistake about it, and in any case, he was halfway down the building and five floors up from whatever was going on in the alley. Besides, like I think I told you before, we get all kinds of folks traipsing up and down the alley at all hours, making the devil’s own racket.”
“So, um, how exactly is the alley haunted?” Calvin asked.
“Well, admittedly, I don’t know if ‘haunted’ is exactly the right word. I just use that because I don’t know a better one. But whatever you call it, it’s the oddest thing. See, a few nights later George and I were in bed again, and I heard the exact same voices repeating the exact same things, plus the gunshot between them, only they were fainter, and kind of muffled and distorted, like I was hearing them from far away, or through layers. For a second I thought I had fallen asleep for a moment and had a weird little dream about what had already happened. But then George sat up next to me and grumbled, ‘Didn’t we already hear that?’ Turned out he heard the exact same thing I did, which was the exact same thing we heard the night Mr. Bradley shot himself.”
Calvin and Cynthia looked at each other.
“Echoes,” Cynthia said. “Same as last night.”
“No,” Betty said with a firm shake of her head. “Not really. Well, I suppose it was the same in one sense, given that it was a sound that came again, but it wasn’t really the same. With the ‘no’ and all that, it was—it was…” She winced a little as if she hated to say what she was about to say but had to say it anyway. “It was like I was hearing it in my head after that first time, like they weren’t real sounds anymore. It was more like they were the ghosts of sounds, or the memories of sounds, if that makes any sense. But last night, that was a real voice repeating itself, in the real alley, I’m sure of that.” She gave an embarrassed, self-conscious smile. “Am I making any sense?”
“I think so,” Calvin said.
“Yeah,” Cynthia said. “I get it. It’s almost like the echo a few years ago was more of a psychic event, whereas last night it was definitely physical.”
“Yes,” Betty said. “That’s about it. Except the echo a few years ago wasn’t just one echo. It kept happening every so often. The same voices saying the same things, with the gunshot between them. But each time they were fainter and fainter and more and more muffled.”
“How often did these echoes recur?” Calvin said.
“The period between them grew longer and longer as time went on. Like I told you, the first time it happened was just a few days after the original incident. The next time was maybe a week after that. Then two weeks. Then about a month. And so on, until we were hearing it only every six months or so, and barely hearing it at that, since the sounds had gotten so distant and fuzzy.”
“And George kept hearing them, too?” Cynthia said.
“Oh, yes. He used to joke about it, though I think deep down it kind of scared him a little. He used to say, ‘That darn Mr. Bradley and his girlfriends are at it again.’”
“Do you know if anyone else heard the sounds?”
“I asked a few folks in a roundabout kind of way if they’d been hearing any weird noises, but no one ever admitted to anything.”
“Are you still experiencing these echoes?” Calvin asked.
“Oh, no. Not for a couple of years now. They just kind of faded away in the end. Whatever it was all about, everything seems back to normal now.” She paused, then added, “Well, except last night. I suppose what happened last night is probably another aftereffect of the earlier incident, in its own queer way.”
“How so?”
“Well, because weird stuff has already happened here. Even if we’re not hearing the fuzzy voices anymore, stuff like that leaves traces, you know. Prints, like an animal’s. Or a bad smell that lingers. Some folks are saying it was a crazy person who killed that man last night, and others are saying it was some kind of strange deformed animal, but either way it’s someone or something mighty weird. And it stands to reason something weird would be drawn to a place that’s already got the stink of weirdness about it. I mean, it’s common sense, isn’t it? Like calls to like. Weird calls to weird. It all converges.” She cocked her head as if reflecting on what she had just said. Then, pleased with her assessment, she nodded and said it again. “It all converges.”