“She always argues with me when I got split time—I mean, like if I got a spare five or ten or twenty minutes. I always got a full half hour out of her for it—that was the deal—but she always groused about it. The Sunday before she died, though, she didn’t. I thought that was queer.”
Kaylor thought it was queer too. It might have been an indication that she’d gotten some extra money from someone somewhere, which might make robbery the motive. But it also might have been only an indication that she was full of Pastor Craven’s Christmas spirit sermon. Even if it was a clue, there was nothing to support it. Marie Snyder’s bank account showed no deviation from the norm, and no secret caches of cash, gold coins, or green stamps were discovered when the apartment was searched.
So the police, to Frank Kaylor’s extreme dismay, remained ignorant, Marie Snyder remained dead, and the killer remained undiscovered, for it would be incorrect to say that he was unknown, since Clyde Thornton was still easily the most conspicuous man in Merridale.
The first week after Marie Snyder’s killing was torturous for Thornton. Not a minute passed in which he did not listen for the sound of a police car growling up the driveway. Every phone call was, in his imagination, from Chief Kaylor asking him if he wouldn’t mind coming down to the station to answer a few questions. Thornton did his minimal work, filled out his reports, wrote up the required psychosocial profiles, but every second he expected to feel a steely hand close on his shoulder, to hear the rough click of a handcuff at his wrist.
The Wednesday evening town meeting was the worst. There he sat at the head table, Tom Markley on one side, Frank Kaylor on the other, Pastor Craven two chairs down. The first topic of discussion, of course, had been Marie Snyder’s murder. No, Kaylor had answered, there were no leads at this point and he couldn’t say when they might have a suspect, and Markley had said that he felt confident that between the facilities of the state police and the inside information that their own town force was gleaning there would be an arrest before too long, and Craven had added that it was terribly, terribly tragic that in a place where death was at everyone’s right hand, someone should add even more death. If this person, he went on, would like to come forth and turn himself in, or if he wanted to contact Craven anonymously, Craven would be more than willing to give whatever help he could. We are all God’s children, he said, and he will comfort us no matter what our transgressions.
Thornton had actually shifted in his chair then, preparatory to rising, but he caught himself in time. It was the fear and apprehension that tormented him more than any guilt that he felt, and Craven’s words of comfort, his soft, deep, soothing voice, the promise of rest, had almost brought Thornton to his feet in a public confession, like some tired sinner brought to Jesus under a canvas roof and over a sawdust floor, lured by promises of peace and a ripe ambience of agape. But a face in the mass of townspeople had shifted to his own face at that second, and the eyes of a woman he did not know by name looked into his. It was, for all he knew, one of those random movements of the head, nothing more, but his fancy saw coldness in it, the hardness of a town toward a man who takes one of their own, and the look stopped him, saved him from his own confession, and he held his fear within.
But as the days lengthened into weeks, the fear receded. In its place there grew a quiet triumph, a sense that he had done it all correctly and would not be discovered. Time, place, method—nothing had been linked to him. He remembered reading that most arrests were made within forty-eight hours of the crime. After that, the perpetrator’s odds were better and better that he’d get away with whatever it was he’d done. And now, at the beginning of February, the killing was almost six weeks behind him. He no longer flinched when the phone rang, and had not peered backward over his shoulder for quite a while.
He would not, however, have entered the newsstand under any circumstance, and did not even drive past it, taking side streets and alleyways rather than pass by its green-blinded windows. He bought his papers and magazines, as did nearly all of Marie Snyder’s former patrons, at the Turkey Hill Mini-Mart on Oak Street. The selection was minimal, but at least the clerks were living.
In time, Clyde Thornton forgot the fear that Marie Snyder and her knowledge had caused him. It was almost natural that Thornton, all his life nothing but an unheralded petty bureaucrat in a faceless bureau, should come to think of his now-meteoric course as inspired by something beyond his understanding. Everything that had happened here had been for the best—at least his best. He was known nationwide, he was receiving large amounts of money for doing next to nothing (and that was only the beginning—after all this was over he could make a mint on the speaker circuit, he was sure of it), and the only thing that had stood in his way was gone, gotten rid of forever.
And he had gotten rid of it, neatly, tidily, the only evidence a blue half ghost that could say nothing. And though Clyde Thornton had not believed in a God since his tenth birthday, he was now beginning to believe very strongly in a destiny of his own making, and to slowly see himself as something more than one of the poor, blind fools who walked the streets of sad, chilly Merridale.
I am meant for something more, Clyde Thornton thought as he carefully took his money and even more carefully disposed of it. I am meant for greatness, he thought as in the cocktail lounges he took his pick of the lonely ladies who were so hungry to fuck fame.
And how much more? he wondered. He was what, forty-two? Not too old to do big things, was it? He was known, he had charisma, he had trust, and soon he would have money as well. Politics? He had already proven he could lead. The people in Merridale thought he could walk on water. He had their trust and their respect. It still amazed him how quickly they’d turned to him, leaving their own mayor in the lurch.
He grinned as he remembered Tom Markley’s wife after the town meeting just a week ago, the two of them suddenly alone in the lobby. She had made it damn plain what she wanted, and he’d almost been ready to take her up on it when he thought it might be getting a little too close to home. Divorcees and single women (and all right, maybe an occasional married one, very discreetly) were one thing, but the mayor’s wife was another. Besides, she was older, nearly fifty, he guessed (though a damn solid fifty), and he could do better. But if Markley became any more of a prick than he already was, well, maybe he’d still consider it. Hell, Clyde Thornton could have whatever he wanted.
“Whatever he wants, y’know? Livin’ out there in that big house. I bet your ass he’s got orgies out there.” Fred Hibbs popped the tab on a can of Rolling Rock and took a swig. The top of the can reeked of cigarette smoke that had accumulated from weeks of sitting in the Anchor’s cooler, but Fred didn’t seem to mind.
Eddie Karl did, and he poured his beer into a glass with “America-200 Years of Glory 1776-1976” etched crudely on the side, leaned his chair back, and propped his shoes on the edge of his kitchen table. “He don’t have no orgies,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Nobody’s never had no orgies in Merridale. It’s in the town code. If you have an orgy, you get hit by lightning.”
“Bullshit,” said Fred Hibbs.
“You ever read the town code?”
“Well, maybe he don’t have orgies, but I bet he fucks a lot of women.”
“Nothin’ about that in the town code,” Eddie said. “I even heard he’s fuckin’ Mim Markley.”
“Now that’s bullshit.”
“Why? You think she wouldn’t?”
“No, I think maybe she would. Women’re damn funny when it comes to doin’ it and who they’ll do it with.” Eddie stuck out his lower lip and balanced the salt shaker on top of the pepper shaker. “I don’t think he’d do it.”
“Thornton?”
“Uh-huh. Besides, I got spies. They’d tell me if Mim was screwin’ around.”
“What spies?”
“Ned Phillips for one. He’s right near Markley’s.”
Fred screwed up his face and pushed his chair back
from the table. “I’m gonna watch TV.”
“Ned’d know.”
“News is on.” Fred stood up and moved toward the living room.
Eddie looked at Fred’s retreating form. “You don’t think Ned would know, do ya?”
“Ned is dead, goddammit!” Fred shouted, twisting around. “He’s dead! Now how the hell is he gonna tell you anything?”
“Well, you could humor me,” said Eddie, standing up.
“You’re supposed to humor us loonies, y’know?”
“I tried to humor you, you old fart, but you kept at me! Now can we just forget it and go in and watch the dumbass news?”
“Can’t tonight.”
“Why not?”
“I got a date.”
“What in hell are you talkin’ about?”
“I’m takin’ Harriet Viner to the movies, if it’s any of your business.”
“Aw, shit.” Fred shook his head in frustration. Harriet Viner had died in a rest home ten years before, and the town’s sole movie theater had closed its doors for good in 1974. “I’m gonna watch the news.” He walked into the dimly lit living room, turned the switch on the old Emerson, and committed his bulk to the tired cushions of the highbacked davenport.
“Ain’tcha gonna wish me a good time?” asked Eddie, standing in the doorway.
“Have a good time.”
“Goin’ to the Anchor after the movie. If I ain’t home tonight, you’ll know I got lucky. Or maybe I’ll bring her back here.”
Fred Hibbs swallowed heavily, closed his eyes, and kept them closed until he heard the front door open and shut. When he looked, Eddie was gone.
It’s nice here, Fred thought. It is nice here. There were no ghosts—nowhere in the house and none in the small backyard. There, garages encroached upon the property, hiding any distant blue forms from view, so that when you stood outside the back door, it was as though you were in Merridale before the phenomenon had taken place. From the front of the house, which looked out onto the street, the forms were visible, but they kept the front shades drawn. Fred Hibbs spent nearly all his time in the house, going out only to cash his Social Security check, or to have breakfast at the Hitching Post or to help Eddie with the grocery shopping. It was not an unpleasant prison. The house, though small from the outside, used its space wisely. It was a frame two-story building built at the turn of the century. Though its front door was less than six feet from the sidewalk on Market Street, it was in the southern, less busy section of town, where the residential atmosphere was broken only occasionally by a convenience store or gas station. The rooms, devoid of a woman’s touch for decades, were nonetheless cozy and comfortable, the walls dark, the furniture old and friendly. Fred had been amazed by the great quantity of books that, jammed into homemade bookcases of every conceivable size and shape, filled each corner of each room. Hardcovers from the twenties shared shelf space with eighties paperbacks, the smaller books stuffed above and beside the hardbacks as though used for packing. One cellar room held a profusion of magazines, from a stack of 1932 Argosy, to fifties’ Popular Mechanics, to last year’s Susquehanna.
“Jesus, Eddie,” said Fred when he first saw them. “I didn’t know you read so much.”
“Gotta do somethin’ when you’re a single man. Whatta you do with your time?”
Fred had shrugged. “Watch TV a lot, I guess.”
“Well, I got one. Don’t watch much myself, though I liked that Charlie’s Angels show. And Milton Berle. Not much worth watching now.”
“How come you keep all these?”
“The books? I keep ’em long enough I forget I read ’em, so it’s like readin’ a new book. But don’t worry, there ain’t too many of ’em in your room.” And there weren’t just one small bookcase by the bed, filled mostly with Executioner and Nick Carter—Killmaster novels. Fred tried to read one, but the word-by-word effort he had to put forth was not worth it, and he put it aside after three chapters, thankful that the television worked.
To Fred’s surprise, he had gotten along well with Eddie for the first few weeks. They cooked and ate together, watched TV (Eddie discovered that he liked the Star Trek reruns Fred tuned in), played cards (gin was the favorite, Eddie winning most of the time), and drank on Saturday nights. They’d start with a few beers at Ted’s Place, a small neighborhood bar a few blocks away, and then wend their way back to Eddie’s, where they would split a six-pack of Rolling Rock. Fred Hibbs was a Schmidt’s drinker, but Eddie protested that Schmidt’s made him fart.
Five beers each over a two-hour period never made either of them drunk, but it did slip them into a garrulous camaraderie, the ease of which later extended into their comparatively sober moments. At such times, Eddie seemed to forget his half promise not to be cozy with the dead when Fred was around. Lounging with his feet up on the shabby elephant-foot ottoman, Eddie would launch into a narrative of whom he had run into that day, both dead and alive. Fred would feel his stomach churn the way it did when he’d had to go into the kitchen of his own house, and he’d try to change the subject. But Eddie would be nonplussed, rambling on about Clete Wilkins or Rouamie Hack, and how goddamn good they looked for their age, until Fred would finally get mad and call Eddie a loony and Eddie would laugh and tell Fred to sit down, sit down, and then start to talk about something else.
It had been getting worse, though, in the last week or two. It was bad enough when Fred walked the streets with Eddie, and Eddie would call out a greeting to a dim, blue shape or, even more absurdly, stop and chat with empty air. But lately Eddie had taken to talking to the dead in his own house (their house, Fred thought). As yet he had not done it in front of Fred, but Fred had heard him from another room and, at first thinking there was someone in the house, had gone to see who was there. But it was only Eddie, Eddie alone, who snapped his mouth shut in midword and glared at Fred as though irked at having been interrupted.
Late that same night Fred had lain awake in his bed, listening to Eddie’s voice droning in his own bedroom. The words were soft, and Fred was unsuccessful at interpreting any complete sentences. But the few words he was able to understand told him that Eddie Karl was talking to a woman, telling her how lovely she was as he ran his hand over her body, or the memory of her body.
Fred got out of bed, pulled his flannel bathrobe tightly around his pajama-clad body, and stepped quietly into the short, upstairs hall. Keeping against the wall so the floorboards would creak as little as possible, he shuffled the few steps to Eddie’s door, from under which poured a puddle of dim, yellow light. What Fred wanted to do was to throw the door open and shout, “Shut up, shut up, you crazy old fart,” but there was something about the singsong voice, an intensity, an edge, that prevented him.
In truth, Fred Hibbs was afraid of what he would see if he opened that door. At the least it would repulse him; at the worst, horrify him. Turning and walking away would leave him with the idea (illusion?) that he was the guest of only a harmless old coot with cobwebs where some of his brains used to be, and not a truly fucked-up, whacked-out pervert weirdo madman who really had seen the dead people before anybody else. So he turned slowly, hesitating for a moment as he noticed the keyhole and thought about how easy it would be to peek through it.
But the fear drew him away, back to his own room, where he lay listening, and Where comfort finally conquered fear so that he thought, pullin’ his pud … pullin’ his old wrinkled pud to Playboy or somethin’, that’s all, and he rolled over and made himself sleep as the words in the next room grew softer and more infrequent, passing at length into silence.
But there were no grounds for Fred Hibbs’s suspicions. Eddie Karl had not masturbated, nor had he been able to, for eight years. He only lay on his bed naked, keeping his eyes from his own withered body, watching instead how the warm glow of the Bakelite reading lamp illuminated the soft, rosy flesh of a young woman who had lain there beside him forty years before, letting his shaking hand trail down the length of her body as she lay on her si
de facing him, from the hillock of her hip down the slope of her waist and up again to where her breast met her side, and then down to touch that smooth breast, and Eddie always telling her, telling her how absolutely beautiful she was, how he’d never seen a woman more beautiful, no not even in the movies or in the magazines, and now she was reaching for him again, and when she did, the memory faded, because he could not remember what had happened next. Always, when it came to that, he just could not remember.
He was tired now, too tired to bring her back again, so he switched off the lamp, whispered good night to the darkness, and went to sleep, his arm over the place where she would be when he wanted to see her again.
The next morning over breakfast Fred Hibbs had looked at him oddly. “You talk in your sleep?”
“Why?” Eddie asked. “You hear me?”
“I heard you talkin’.”
“I had comp’ny. Couldn’t be rude, could I?”
“What kinda company?”
“I wanted you to know, I’d tell ya.”
“You’re not goin’ screwy on me, are you?”
“I had comp’ny , Fred.”
“Somebody dead, wasn’t it?”
Eddie looked down at his dirty plate, stood up, and put it into the sink. “No,” he said softly. “She ain’t dead. She’ll never be dead.”
“Who?”
Eddie sighed. “A woman. A woman I knew once.”
Fred Hibbs frowned, confused. “There ain’t no ghosts in this house, so how can you be talkin’ to someone here?”
“I can talk to her everywhere,” Eddie replied with a crooked smile, “until I find her somewhere.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The love of my life, my boy. Everybody oughta have a love of his life.”
“But who was she?”
“Her name wouldn’t mean nothin’ to you. I was mighty young, so you woulda been just a little boy at the time. But Jesus Christ she was beautiful, and how I did love her.” He sat back down at the table with a third cup of coffee. “She was married, but her husband was an asshole. He didn’t know what he had.” Eddie’s face wrinkled in bitter memory. “Or maybe he did at that. Anyways, he made it pretty miserable for her. So she started to drink. That’s how I met her—over a drink.” He looked up at Fred Hibbs. “Am I borin’ you?”
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