Ghosts of Columbia

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Murder is untoward enough, I fear,” I said, and added, “but what you say makes sense. Did she have enemies from where she came from?”

  “How?” asked Alfred. “She’s been here for almost fifteen years. The teaching was her life after I went to Louisiana and Rick to California.”

  “It does not make sense,” I agreed. “I assume the watch has questioned every member of the music faculty.”

  “They still are.” Alfred sighed. “But everyone was miles away or with someone else—usually two others.”

  “I am afraid I have taxed your hospitality at a trying time.” I rose. “I did not mean to intrude so long, only to return what should be returned.”

  “And perhaps,” added Kristen with a faint smile, “to try to make some sense out of something you also find senseless?”

  “You are perceptive, young lady. Yes,” I admitted, “that also. But there is no point in overstaying my welcome when you are as baffled as I.” I extended a card. “If there is anything with which I could help, please do not hesitate to ask.”

  “Thank you.” Alfred belatedly rose and took the card. “We appreciate your concern.” He grinned briefly. “And your forthrightness.” He looked at the card, and frowned. “You aren’t the Johan Eschbach?” He handed the card to his wife.

  “I’m afraid you have the better of me.”

  “The former Subminister of Environment that the Hartpencers went after, I mean. Why are you here?”

  “In Vanderbraak Centre?” I smiled—wryly, I hoped. “My family had a home here, and there really was nowhere else to go. I had the doctorate, and I still needed to make a living.”

  “Even stranger,” he murmured.

  “How so, Alfred?” asked Kristen, except her words were too matter-of-fact.

  He shook his head. “Mother once wrote about you. She said you were the only honest man in a den of thieves, carrying about a lantern looking for another honest man. I’m sorry. I just didn’t connect. I guess I am not thinking very well.”

  “Your mother must have been mistaken.” I wouldn’t have characterized myself as a Diogenes.

  “No.” He looked at me. “She also said that you were looking for a ghost in Doktor duBoise, and she—Doktor duBoise—was all too willing to oblige you, as desperate women often are.”

  I must have staggered, or reacted, for Kristen stood at that point. “Forthrightness is all very well, Alfred.”

  “No,” I demurred. “I would hear more, if there is more.”

  “There’s not much. She just wrote that she felt that all the recent arrivals at the university carried secrets too terrible to reveal and too heavy to bear. She meant the newer faculty, I think.”

  “Was your mother psychic?”

  “Sometimes we thought so. But most of the time she kept her secrets—that’s what she called them, her little secrets—to herself.”

  “It’s amazing what you never know about people.”

  “I can see that.” Alfred’s tone was friendlier, for some reason. “How many people at the university really know your past?”

  “You probably know more than most. I have said little, and most of the older Dutch do not ask. I would not, certainly.”

  “You would characterize yourself as older Dutch?” asked Kristen.

  “By birth, but not by inclination.” I frowned. “But how did your mother know? I cannot recall providing so much detail.”

  “I fear I’m the guilty one.” Kristen grinned. “When Mother Miller wrote about you, I was skeptical, afraid that you might not be quite so honest. So I had a Babbage search done on you.”

  “She’s a librarian,” Alfred explained.

  “The articles on you were interesting,” Kristen added.

  “You are too kind.”

  “Not much seems to have happened in your life,” she continued inexorably, “after you got your doctorate from the University of Virginia, not until you were appointed deputy subminister of natural resources.”

  “I was a midrange government employee who did his job, got married, had a child, lost a child, and lost my wife.”

  “Murder is rare in Columbia,” she said. “Yet a number have occurred around you. Why do you attract them?”

  I shrugged. Anything I said would only make things worse in dealing with a very bright young woman who was clearly sharper than her husband.

  “Do you know what I think, Alfred?” She turned to Alfred. “I think Mother Miller was right. Doktor Eschbach is an honest man, but, since there are so few left in our world, many people are afraid of his honesty. Yet killing him would create an uproar, perhaps bring to light the very things people want to hide. So whenever someone learns too much from the doktor’s honesty … they die.”

  I shuddered. Could what she said be partly true? If so, it was even more horrible than the truth I knew.

  “You’ve upset the doktor, I believe,” Alfred remarked.

  “It shows his honesty.” Kristen inclined her head. “I apologize for my directness.” She extended a card to me. “If you find out more that you can share with us, please let us know. We have to return to Lake Charles on Wednesday.”

  “That I will,” I promised, taking her card. “I was sorry and have been deeply troubled by your mother’s death.”

  “That is obvious.”

  “We appreciate your kindness and honesty,” added Alfred as he held the door for me.

  “And I yours.”

  By the time I fired up the Stanley and drove back in to town on Emmen Lane, I was almost happy to have escaped Miranda’s children without revealing more than I had. Young Kristen Miller would have tied both Gillaume vanBecton and Hornsby Rogers in knots, I suspected, except that she was too direct to have survived in the Spazi organization. I almost hadn’t, the Lord knew, especially once I’d left field work.

  When I got back to the unlit house, looming like a monument on the hillside, I pulled off my coat and hung it on the knob of the stair railing, intending to take it upstairs when I got ready for bed. Then I went to the study, turned on a single light, and sat down at the old desk, looking into the dark. The more I knew, the worse it got.

  How long I sat there before Carolynne appeared beside the desk, I didn’t know, and really didn’t care. In the dimness relieved only by the single lamp behind the stove, she appeared almost solid, in the recital gown that she always wore. It must be hell for a female ghost to always appear in the same clothes, I mused.

  “Is it, Carolynne? Is it difficult to always wear the same gown?” I didn’t expect an answer, but I got one. As I watched, she flickered, and appeared in another dress, high-necked and lacy.

  “I didn’t know ghosts could do that.” Then again, there was probably a lot I didn’t know about ghosts. “Can a ghost really say who murdered her?” I was thinking about Miranda, not Carolynne.

  “Murder most foul …”

  Her voice sent shivers down my back, but was that because of the fact that I heard her voice in my thoughts as much as in my ears? Or because I had not heard her speak in more than thirty years?

  She drifted next to the window, seemingly more solid there. “A little water clears her of this deed … what need we fear who knows it … Macduff, Macbeth … damned be he who first cries …”

  I considered her words. Who was the woman to whom Carolynne referred? What did the murder have to do with Macbeth? Was murder the deed or the cause of the deed? How did that apply to Miranda Miller?

  “… that death’s unnatural that kills for loving.”

  Death’s unnatural that kills for loving? Like Wilde’s words about men killing the one they love? Or was it a question of not being strong enough to love? Was that why Llysette and I never got too close? But who wasn’t strong enough to love? That brought up another thought.

  “Do we always kill the ones we love? I didn’t fire the shots that killed Waltar and ruined Elspeth’s good lung. I might as well have. Spazi field men shouldn’t have hostages to fortune.” My eyes flic
ked to my sleeve, as if I could see through the pale cotton to the white scars beneath that ran from arm to shoulder.

  Carolynne said nothing. Neither did she flicker or depart. So we remained for a time, ghost and the ghost of a man.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Before I left the house to get Llysette, I walked down the lawn to the remnants of the orchard and picked half a basket of apples and the few pears that actually looked decent. I carted them down to the root cellar, except for a handful of each which I put in the fruit bowl in the kitchen.

  With the box of chocolates on the seat, I waited for the steamer to warm up, then headed down Deacon’s Lane toward town. Vanderbraak Centre was its usual sleepy Sunday afternoon self, with only students passing through the square.

  After passing but a single steamer on the old Hebron Road, I brought the Stanley to a halt beside Llysette’s Reo at almost precisely three o’clock, according to the pocket Ansonia that was nearly a century old. Llysette was not waiting breathlessly on the porch for me, but that was always to be expected. I shut down the steamer and stepped up to the door, holding the chocolates behind my back.

  After lifting the heavy brass knocker and letting it fall, I waited, and waited. Finally the sound of footsteps neared the door, and the lock clicked.

  “Come inside, Johan. Only a moment will I be.”

  As I watched her figure, shapely even through the robe she had thrown on, retreat to the hallway leading to her bedroom, I doubted her estimate of the time.

  Rather than sit, with a drive up the valley ahead, I wandered to the table that served for both filing and food. I put the Ghirardelli chocolates on the corner. On the other corner, the one closest the small kitchen, was the same stack of old-fashioned vinyl discs I had seen the last time. Beside them were piled various music publications—Musical Heritage, Opera News, Main Line Musical. A higher stack of letters, notices, circulars, and the like spilled around the dried floral centerpiece and came to rest against the dog-eared news magazines—Look, Life, Newsweek, and Columbian World Report.

  I picked up the latest issue of World Report, which I had not seen, since subscribing to two news magazines and a daily still seemed extravagant. In some matters, my Dutch heritage did linger.

  Newsweek arrived in my postbox, perhaps because World Report had always seemed somewhat more liberal in its speculations on the meaning of the news. Flicking through the pages of World Report, I caught a glimpse of red and stopped to read the article.

  The ghost of Pope Julius Paul II appeared before the College of Cardinals last week, prompting speculation that his death earlier this month had not been from the natural causes announced by the Vatican. “The Pope clearly wished to convey his blessing upon the college and offered the traditional benediction before his shade vanished,” stated Cardinal Guilermo Moro, spokesman for the Vatican.

  Julius Paul had been thought to favor easing the absolute Roman Catholic ban on psychic research. Earlier this year, he had remarked in a small audience that the “true mysteries of God are not so easily solved by mere mortals.”

  After that audience, Pope Julius Paul had been visited by the ambassadors from both Columbia and Austro-Hungary, and later by Archbishop Konstantin from the Apostolic Eastern Catholic Church …

  Psychic research seemed to be an increasingly touchy subject. Why now? Ghosts had been around forever.

  “Johan?”

  Llysette stood there, in stylishly quilted blue trousers and a matching jacket, carrying a heavy quilted down coat and an overnight case.

  “You are ready in a moment, indeed. Are we headed for the Arctic?”

  “You a polar bear are. I am not. The wind is blowing from the north, is it not?” She arched both eyebrows.

  I grinned in submission and set down World Report. “You know best for you.” Then I glanced toward the table, and her eyes followed mine.

  “Oh …” She moved to the table and looked at the box. “You are very sweet.”

  “Those are because I care, and because I never did bring you something at your recital.”

  “Would you mind if I had one now?”

  “Of course not. Instead of lunch?”

  She smiled and opened the box, but she offered it to me. I guessed, looking for a caramel, and was lucky. Llysette actually had three before we walked to the door. I waited on the porch while she locked up.

  After seating her in the Stanley and setting her case in the back seat, by the time I was behind the wheel and had lit off the steamer, the wind made me glad that I had worn a sweater and the heavy Harris Tweed jacket. I wondered if young Ferdinand would let the Scots continue with Harris Tweeds when he overran the isles in the next century.

  The center of town was nearly deserted, even by the students, except for a few steamers gathered around the Reformed Church, when we circled the square and headed north on Route Five.

  The winds had ripped away the last of the leaves, and the birches, oaks, and maples were bare, stark, letting the evergreens stand out against the brown and gray of the harvested fields and leaf-stripped woodlots. The white enameled windowsills of the colonial stone houses stood out more, too.

  “It is quiet,” noted Llysette as we passed the empty car park at Vanderwerk Textiles, the sole remaining mill north of Zuider. The sign read VANDERWERK TEXTILES, A DIVISION OF AZKO FIBERS. The plant had been expanded a decade earlier when Azko bought it and a number of other facilities. That had been when Azko had moved the last of its operations out of the Low Countries before Ferdinand’s final push to the English Channel.

  Sometimes I bought sweaters and heavy work shirts at the factory store, but not often, since their woolens generally lasted forever.

  “It’s Sunday, and even the industrious Dutch like time off.”

  We passed the road that led to the Wiler River covered bridge and beyond to Grolle Mountain and one or two other smaller skiing slopes. The Covered Bridge Restaurant was out that road, as well. Llysette smiled.

  “Stop smiling,” I commanded sternly.

  She smiled more broadly, and I smiled back. What else could I do? Our second dinner, I had actually run out of fuel coming back from the restaurant—and who could I tell that I hadn’t even planned it?

  North of Vanderbraak Centre, Route Five generally follows the River Wijk, at least until you get near the top of the notch. The wind rose as we climbed northward, and heavy gusts rocked the Stanley when I pulled off the main road.

  The parking lot for the state park that holds the Devil’s Cauldron was nearly empty, and the wind blew down from the notch, past the craggy Old Dutchman jutting from the mountain, picking up force as it swept southward. Had I worn a hat, it would have blown halfway to Asten or Haartsford.

  Llysette tightened her scarf after she stepped out of the Stanley and onto the blacktop.

  “The wind, it is energetic today.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  We walked past a battered Ford petrol car—there weren’t many around—and then past a Reo and a Williams and a long six-wheeled Packard limousine with registration plates from New Ostend. It even had the dark-tinted windows that made me think of the high-tech trupps of Asten.

  The damp clay path, lined with matched and stripped logs, wound through the nearly bare birches and maples and the pines along the high side of the stream. A jay became a flash of blue, and even the stiff and cold breeze couldn’t quite dispel the odor of damp leaves.

  The river twisted over a flat bed of rock before it turned and shot at an angle into the Devil’s Cauldron itself, a circular hollow in the rock that extended nearly twenty feet beneath the surface of the swirling and foaming water. In spring, the Cauldron literally spewed water in all directions.

  We stopped at the vacant overlook.

  “They say that the Pemigewasset Indians called this the cauldron of the seasons, where the spring waters washed away the ice and dank water of the old season, mixing the old and the new.”

  “That story, Johan, it sou
nds as though you just made it up.”

  “Perhaps I did. Don’t we all make up history to suit the present?”

  “You are cynical this afternoon.” Another gust of cold air blew past us, and she shivered, even in the heavy quilted coat.

  “Just this afternoon?” I tried not to shiver. I should have brought the heavy tweed overcoat that would have stopped a midwinter blitzwehr.

  “Johan, cynical you are not. That is why the government, it was hard on you.”

  “You are kinder than you know.”

  “Mais non, je crois.” She smiled crookedly, and added, “This, it is fascinating, but it is seulement a river, and I am cold.”

  “It is cold,” I admitted, taking her arm.

  Even just getting out of the wind and into the Stanley warmed me enough, but Llysette kept shivering until the heater really got going and I was sweating. By then we were passing the turnoff for Grolle Mountain.

  “Do you want to stop for some fresh cider?”

  “If you wish.”

  I decided against stopping.

  Whitecaps actually dotted the surface of the River Wijk when we crossed the bridge and headed up the bluff road toward Deacon’s Lane. The trees were bending in the wind when the Stanley rolled to a stop outside the house.

  I brought in her case and took it upstairs. The house was cold, despite the closed and double-glazed windows, and a trace damp. Llysette stepped inside, but did not take off her heavy coat.

  Since I had laid the fire, with shavings and paper, in the solid Ostwerk Castings stove that dominated one wall of the main parlor, it took only a moment and a single match to start it up.

  I offered Llysette the tartan blanket in place of her coat, which she surrendered reluctantly. She immediately huddled under the blanket.

  “In a bit, the chill will begin to lift.”

  “I’m sorry, Johan.” Her teeth chattered.

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s damp out there. It’s a bit damp in here. Coffee or chocolate?”