Laying the Music to Rest

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “Beat the truck by five minutes. I should have slept longer.”

  She laughed. “I’ll be hiding in the office doing the damn withholding taxes. Let me know when the coast is clear.”

  “Give it time. It’s only eleven.”

  She grabbed the smallest of the two sacks and tapped the remaining one. “Bar rags. Nice and clean. Just like the old man ordered.” She stuck her tongue out at me and then turned and headed for the office.

  I laughed as she ducked past the sinks and down the back hall, acting as if I might throw something at her at any moment. She loved teasing me about my recent fortieth birthday. Probably because she knew it bothered me.

  I loved Angie as if she were my sister. She was single, thirty-two years old, and the shortest woman I had ever met. Well-proportioned, people said. I remember thinking the same thing the very first time I saw her walk into my class.

  She’d been a student of mine ten years ago and somehow, over the years, we had managed to become friends. She and my wife, Carla, had hit it off from the moment they met. Six months after Carla died, Angie and I decided to buy the Garden. It was one of those “what-the-hell” decisions. Angie had money to invest from her divorce settlement and I was sick of teaching at the university. We both needed the change and the Garden had looked like the ideal way to do it.

  So for the last five years, I had done all the day bartending, becoming more and more bored and set in my ways. Even more than when I was teaching.

  Angie’s side of the partnership was to do the books and help out Friday and Saturday nights. In five years she hadn’t missed a weekend and I’d never asked her if she was bored. And every damn Tuesday over those years something had gone wrong. Sometimes only little things. Sometimes major, like the Tuesday a year ago when we had the grease fire in the grill hood. Shut us down for over a week.

  Besides all the happenings, I had another good reason for not liking Tuesdays. They delivered the bread on Tuesdays at nine in the morning, one hour before I usually had to be at work. One very long, very annoying hour. Someone had to meet the truck to give the driver a check. So Angie and I had agreed. She washed the bar rags. I met the bread truck. I swore every Tuesday morning as I climbed out of bed that I was getting the raw end of the deal.

  This week it wasn’t until after the lunch rush that Tuesday struck.

  Angie had gone home for the afternoon “to hide,” and the normal lunch crowd had left. I had just finished cleaning off the last table, had put a good jazz tape on the sound system, and was sitting at the bar reading the morning paper and eating my normal French-dip sandwich when the front door opened and Constance walked in.

  Alone.

  Just as simple as that, Tuesday struck. The little bit of the sandwich I had already eaten suddenly felt like a hundred pounds of rock pressing me into the bar stool. Something had happened to Fred.

  I swiveled off the bar stool and went to meet her as she weaved her way in and out of the plants and tables. Constance was a robust woman, not really tall, but the way she held herself made her seem tall. She had a full head of curly gray hair, a deep, rich voice, and a smile that made others around her smile without reason. Today she wore tan slacks, a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a blue ribbon that held her hair back away from her face.

  Fred, her husband, was my best friend. We’d known each other since we were in the first grade. Believe me, I can’t go back much further than that and still remember things.

  Fred looked like a bald flagpole. At forty, he maintained his wiry look and incredible strength. Above my fireplace I had a picture of the three of us that Angie took a few years back. Constance, the shortest, was on the right. I was in the middle, wearing one of my usual thick sweaters. I had my beard and mustache trimmed a little closer then and my hair still had a lot more brown in it than gray. Fred, three inches taller than me, clean-cut and bald, was on my left. I always had the feeling that the picture was tipped slightly because of the way we were standing, short to tall.

  During the winter, Fred and Constance both taught at a local high school and were regulars at the Garden. Every summer they would pack up and disappear into the rough central Idaho primitive area to work on small mining claim and some land they’d bought up there before the government locked it all up into wilderness. They were putting a lodge and six small cabins on it. This summer was to be their first season with what they liked to call “guests.”

  For the past three summers I had promised I would go in with them to take a look and maybe help out a little. Every summer something had come up. And not once in all those years had they come out of the primitive area until the week before school started. Yet suddenly, here was Constance without Fred. Something was big-time wrong.

  I gave Constance the best rib-compressing hug I could, and she gave me a quick answer to my question—yes, Fred was all right and had just stayed back up at the lodge to watch the guests. I pointed to the stool beside mine and moved around behind the bar.

  “You had lunch?” I asked as I poured Constance her regular drink—vodka Collins, only half the ice, lime garnish—then slid it in front of her.

  She nodded. “In McCall. Two hours ago.” She held up the drink. “Thanks.” I nodded and then built myself an orange juice and soda and moved back around the bar.

  I pushed my unfinished sandwich down the bar, out of the way. “I give up, I can’t stand the suspense. If Fred’s all right and you’re all right, just what are you doing here?”

  Constance laughed her deep, full laugh. “Always right to the point,” she said. “One of the many things I love about you.” She leaned over and kissed my check, the first time a woman had kissed me in a long time.

  “Well, I’m here for three reasons. One, to talk to you. Two, to get supplies. And three, to place some new advertising. Always use more guests, you know.”

  “You been getting some?” I tried to keep the disbelief out of my voice. I had always thought the idea of a lodge twenty miles inside the most rugged primitive area in the lower forty-eight was something on the other side of crazy. Of course, being crazy was part of Fred. But this idea was beyond even Fred’s normal sense of looney. Hell, from the maps and pictures they had shown me, there wasn’t a stretch in that valley wide enough or long enough to put a landing strip. The ranches down on the Salmon River at least had that. All of Fred and Constance’s guests had to pack in on horseback. Or worse yet, walk.

  Again Constance laughed. “Of course we are. At one point we had nine guests. Not bad for our first year.”

  I nodded, but I could tell now that Constance wasn’t giving me the entire story. She had that little wrinkle above her eyes that she always used to get when she worried about Fred and me doing something stupid. Carla used to just frown and shake her head. I hadn’t seen that look on Constance in years. And it suddenly occurred to me that I had missed it.

  “So why advertise? Isn’t nine about maximum for what you’ve got built?”

  She nodded. “But we only have two left.” She took a long sip of her drink, then turned to face me. “That’s why we need your help. Fred wanted to do it alone, but I wouldn’t let him. I really don’t like the idea of the both of you doing it, but—”

  I touched Constance’s arm. “Back up a minute. What was it Fred wanted to do alone? And exactly what is this about needing my help?”

  “Sorry,” she said, then laughed an uneasy laugh. “Fred wants to make a dive into the lake.”

  It felt as if the air conditioning had kicked on twenty degrees too low. The old mining claim they had bought ran along the side of a small mountain lake. The lake had been formed back in the early part of the century when a mudslide filled the narrow Monumental Valley and backed water up over a booming mining town called Roosevelt. Constance had brought in pictures one September in which you could clearly see a huge logjam that Fred claimed was the remains of the old buildings.

  When they had first bought the claim I asked them why no one had e
ver heard of this huge disaster. It seemed to me that losing a town of over five thousand people would be a big deal. Yet the fact that it had happened had become one of those forgotten notes of Idaho history. Constance said the people down at the State Historical Society didn’t even know much about it. It appeared that only Zane Grey, in his book Thunder Mountain, had even noticed and everyone thought that was just fiction.

  “Into the old ghost town?” I asked. “Fred wants to dive into the old ghost town?” Fred had said a few years back that to his knowledge, no one had ever made a dive into the lake. The water was too cold, it was too tough to get equipment into the area, and it was just too dangerous. Twenty years ago Fred and I might have tried it. I didn’t like the sound of it now.

  Constance nodded. “There’s not going to be much of any town down there. But he still wants to make the dive.”

  “Hell, that’s crazy. Fred knows better than to think about making a dive alone, especially into a mountain lake like that. Anything could happen.” The knot in my stomach that was clamped around the first few bites of my French-dip sandwich wasn’t letting go. In fact, it was getting worse and I was getting slowly mad at Fred for even thinking about being so stupid. I’d lost Carla and losing Fred scared me more than I wanted to admit.

  “Tell him that.”

  “I will,” I said. “And damn loud. That fool knows better. Jesus, it’s been ten years since either one of us strapped on a tank. What could be so important that he’d even think of making that dive alone?”

  “Try twelve years,” Constance said. “We figured it up one night. The last time you both did any diving was on that rescue operation over near the Snake. Remember?”

  I nodded. I remembered real well. How could I forget? It hadn’t been so much a rescue mission as pure and simple stupidity. A five-year-old boy went under in a millpond in front of two dozen witnesses. Two days and no one could find the body. Fred and I were called in by a friend of the family to help only because the regular Search and Rescue divers were needed elsewhere. From the report of what the body looked like when it finally did surface, we were damn lucky we couldn’t find it. And once Fred ended up tangled in weeds for a good ten minutes before he could work his way free and surface.

  For months I dreamed of that boy’s bloated face appearing out of the muck of the pond in front of my facemask like some bad special effect in a slasher movie. On top of that, I didn’t believe in risking lives in a weed-choked pond just to find a body that was going to float to the surface in a day or two anyway. The only thing that practice did was create more bodies.

  Before that nightmare Fred and I had done a lot of diving. We had made excursions in the Gulf of Mexico, Canadian mountain lakes, and a bunch of places in between. Strapping on scuba tanks and exploring was one of the crazy things we prided ourselves in doing, even though it worried the hell out of both Carla and Constance. I wondered what ever happened to our doing crazy things.

  “So,” I said after a long moment of silence interrupted only by the traffic sounds from Grove Street. “Why make a dive?”

  “I’m not really sure, exactly,” Constance said. She looked uncomfortable as she twisted her drink slowly in her strong hands. “Professor Jerome says that’s what we need to do to help the ghost.”

  “I—hang on a minute.” I swiveled away from Constance and went around behind the bar. She was making no sense at all. I built her a new drink, slid it across the bar, and then sat on the counter behind the bar so I could look directly at her. If whatever brought her into town was as complicated as it was beginning to seem, I wanted to be able to see her eyes. With Constance, everything came through her green eyes.

  “All right,” I said, “how about you starting from the beginning?”

  Constance nodded, then finished her first drink, set it aside, and swirled the straws in the second. “You remember Fred mentioning that the lake was haunted?”

  I nodded. A few years back they had returned with stories about a woman ghost walking around the lake. It had been the joke of the bar for most of that September. I remembered being surprised that they would even talk about such stuff, let alone act as if they believed it. That wasn’t like Fred or Constance. I ended up not knowing what to believe and they never mentioned it again.

  “Well, we weren’t fooling,” she said, “even though everyone thought we were. The ghost has been there right from the first time Fred and I camped at the old mine site. With all the people who lived in Roosevelt before it was flooded, I guess a ghost or two should be expected. We got used to seeing her walking down along the old mudslide and then into the water. It just never occurred to us that she would be any more than a historical curiosity to our guests.”

  “She wasn’t, I gather?” I didn’t know what to make of this story. If it hadn’t been Constance and she hadn’t been sitting in the Garden in the middle of the summer, I would have laughed. I didn’t feel close to laughing right now.

  Constance shook her head slowly. “She doesn’t hurt anything, except there’s this mighty cold feeling if you get too close to her.”

  “I’ll bet. Scared your customers?”

  Constance nodded. “We had to refund a lot of money we were planning on using to build a seventh cabin up on the summit. Doesn’t seem much reason to now, though. Not if she’s going to keep spooking everyone.”

  “What about using her to bring in people? Seems to me if word got out about your ghost, there would be a lot of folks who would just love to see her.”

  “Crazies. The wrong kind of people. All we wanted was a place we could enjoy, back away from everything. The kind of people we want staying with us should want the same thing. Hiking. Fishing. Exploring. And lots and lots of quiet. That’s not exactly what we would get if we had every weirdo in the country looking at our house ghost. Plus, imagine the fuss there’d be if she suddenly decided to not show up. It’s not like we have any control over her.”

  For a moment Constance had a faraway look in her eyes and then she shook her head like a woman accepting the loss of a dream. “And now, with the guests going home and telling people, we might as well shut down next year.”

  I leaned back against the liquor cabinet. Constance was serious. I didn’t believe what she was telling me, but at the same time I couldn’t just laugh at her. “So she scared away all but two of your customers. What happened then?”

  “No, she scared them all right back up over the summit. We have one new customer, a young woman who we warned about the ghost right up front. She doesn’t seem to mind. And then Professor Jerome, who is our guest. He’s from the University of California parapsychological studies department. We paid for him to fly into McCall. We picked him up there.”

  “You brought in a psychic? Fred agreed to this?” I just couldn’t believe Fred would go for anything outside the reality of a tall bottle of Bud, a good game of chess, and a turkey sandwich.

  “Not a psychic in the way you’re thinking,” Constance said. “Dr. Jerome is very respected and—”

  “I know, I know,” I said, waving away the obvious list of credentials Constance was about to spew all over the bar. I had had my share of letters stenciled after my name on my old office door. The only good those letters had done was get me a little more money and intimidate the hell out of students. They might as well have been carved on my tombstone, for all the years I spent buried behind them. Deadly dull years. Fred should have known better than to be taken in.

  “So what has this professor done so far?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

  “Mostly just study the ghost,” she said. “He’s spent the last five days following her around the shore of the lake like a little puppy. He must have taken a hundred pictures and done who knows what with a couple strange-looking instruments with names too long for me to remember. He seems to think he knows what she wants.”

  Now I really wanted to laugh. It was everything I could do not to burst out right then. Constance was serious, I could tell
that without a doubt. Her eyes didn’t lie. But the thought of a ghost talking to some hokey professor from California was damn near too much. I forced my laughter back down like swallowing a bad pill and ended up just shaking my head and then taking a long drink off my orange juice. Maybe I was getting too cynical. Fifteen years ago I might have bought this story. Why didn’t I today?

  Because it was too stupid to believe, that was why. The real question was why Fred was being sucked in by whatever scam this California nut was spouting. Not like Fred at all. No wonder Constance had come down to get me.

  I sidestepped the part about the guy knowing what the ghost wanted and went back to my main question. “You still haven’t told me why Fred wants to make a dive into the lake.”

  Constance sighed, stirred her drink for a moment, then looked up at me. “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “I’m already having trouble,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed. So you might as well hit me with everything.”

  “Professor Jerome says the ghost wants to find someone named Alex. There’s something in the lake that might help. The professor thinks that if we find it, whatever it is might, as he calls it, let her rest.”

  “And Fred believes all this?” I had a clear look at Constance’s eyes as she spoke. She believed everything she was saying. Everything. And I could tell she didn’t like it any more than I did.

  “Yes,” she said, without hesitation.

  “And you want me to make this dive with Fred to keep him from killing himself in that cold water?”

  She nodded. “You know we wouldn’t ask you to do something like this if it wasn’t important.”

  “Fred would,” I said.

  Constance started to object until she saw I was kidding. I dropped down off the counter and fixed us both another drink, only this time I laced my orange juice and soda with vodka.

  “You know how special the lodge is to us, don’t you?”