Ghosts

by Ed McBain

  Stephanie Craig went into the water for her swim at 3:00 P.M. The Bight was even calmer that day than it normally was. Protected by a natural-rock breakwater that crashed with ocean waves on its eastern side, fringed with a white sand beach rare in these parts, it was a safe, current-free place for swimming and a favorite among locals and tourists alike. There were sixty-four people on the beach that day. Only a dozen of them witnessed the drowning. Each and every one of them told exactly the same story. She suddenly went under, and she drowned. Period. The medical examiner’s report stated that there were no contusions, lacerations, or bruises anywhere on the body, dismissing once and for all the notion that a shark “or some other kind of fish” had seized her from below. The report further stated that the body had been delivered to the morgue clad only in the panties of the bikini bathing suit, the bra top apparently having been lost in Mrs. Craig’s struggle to save herself from drowning. Findings for drugs or alcohol had been negative. The physician conducting the examination could not state whether a cramp had been the cause of her sudden inability to stay afloat, but the board nonetheless decided that the probable cause of the accident was “a severe cramp or series of cramps that rendered Mrs. Craig powerless in water estimated on that day to have been twenty feet deep where she was swimming.” An eyewitness on the beach said that she went under for the last time at ten minutes to 4:00; that meant she’d been swimming for close to an hour in waters not known for their cordial temperatures. But Stephanie Craig had been the winner of three gold medals on Holman University’s swimming team, and the Board’s report made no mention of this fact.

  Carella closed the folder. Hillary passed her hands over the binder and then opened her eyes and said, “It wasn’t an accident. Whoever typed this report knows it wasn’t an accident.”

  Carella checked the report’s first and last pages to see if there was a typist’s name or initials anywhere on them. There was not. He made a mental note to call Hollister and find out who had done the typing.

  “I want to go to the Bight now,” Hillary said. “May we go, please? Before it gets too dark?”

  It was almost too dark when they got there. Whatever light still lingered on the horizon was diffused by the falling snow, which made visibility and footing equally uncertain. They stood on the beach and looked out over the water. Stephanie Craig had drowned some fifty feet from shore, just ten yards within the breakwater protection afforded by the curving natural rock ledge. At Hillary’s insistence, they walked out onto the breakwater now. It was shaped like a fishhook, the shank jutting out from the shore at a northeasterly angle, the rocks at the farthest end curving back upon themselves to form a natural cove. On the ocean side, waves crashed in against the ledge as if determined to pound it to rubble. But the cove on the bay side was as protected as the larger crescent of beach had been, and here only spume and spray intimidated the flying snowflakes. A rusting iron ladder was fastened to the ledge above the cove. Hillary turned her back to it, and Carella realized all at once that she was planning to do down to the stony beach below. He grabbed her arm and said, “Hey, no.”

  “It’s safe down there,” she said. “The ocean’s on the other side.”

  He looked below. The cove did seem safe enough. On the ocean side, towering waves furiously pounded the ledge, but in the protected little cove below he would have trusted his ten-year-old daughter with a rubber duck. He preceded Hillary down the ladder and then turned away circumspectly when she climbed down after him, her skirt whipping about her legs and thighs. There was no wind below. A small cave yawned behind the stony beach, eroded into the ledge. Inside it, they could dimly perceive a beached dinghy painted a green that was flaking and stained red and yellow below its rusting oarlocks. Hillary stopped stock-still just outside the opening to the cave.

  “What is it?” Carella said.

  “He was out here,” she said.

  “Who?”

  The light was fading rapidly; he should have taken his flashlight from the glove compartment of the car, but he hadn’t. The cave seemed not in the least bit inviting. He had always considered spelunkers the choicest sorts of maniacs, and he feared ever being trapped in a small space, unable to move either forward or backward. But he followed Hillary into the cave, ducking his head to avoid banging it on the low ceiling, squinting into the darkness beyond the dinghy. The cave was shallow; it ended abruptly several feet beyond the boat. Its sloping walls were wet. Hillary touched one of the rusting oarlocks and then pulled her hand back as if she’d received an electric shock.

  “No,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “No,” she said, backing away from the boat. “Oh, no, God, please, no.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  She did not answer. She shook her head and backed out of the cave. She was climbing the ladder when he came out onto the stone-strewn beach behind her. When she reached the ledge above, the wind caught at her skirt, whipping it about her long legs. He climbed up after her. She was running along the breakwater now, the waves crashing in on her left, heading for the crescent beach beyond which he’d parked the car. He ran after her, out of breath, almost losing his footing on the rocks, almost realizing his second wildest fear, that of drowning. When he got to the car, she was already inside it, her arms folded over the front of the raccoon coat, her body trembling.

  “What happened back there?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “When you touched that boat…”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  He started the car. There were at least two inches of snow in the parking lot. The dashboard clock read 4:00 P.M. He turned on the radio at once, hoping to catch the local news, and listened first to a report on the president’s new plan for fighting inflation, then to a report on the latest trouble in the Middle East, and finally to a report on the weather. The storm that had inundated the city had finally reached Massachusetts and was expected to dump somewhere between eight and ten inches of snow before morning. Route 44 was closed, and the turnpike south and west was treacherous. Travelers’ advisories were in effect; the state’s Highway Department had asked that all vehicles be kept off the roads to allow the plows free access.

  “We’d better get back to town,” he said, “see if we can’t get a couple of rooms for the night.”

  “No,” she said. She was still shivering. “I want to see the house Greg rented that summer.”

  “I don’t want to get stuck out here in the middle of no—”

  “It’s on the way,” she said. “Two miles from the Bight. Isn’t that what she told you? Isn’t that what his daughter told you?”

  Abigail Craig had said, She drowned in the Bight, two miles from where my father was renting his famous haunted house. Partial believer that he was, Carella was willing to accept the fact that Hillary could not have known of his conversation with Craig’s daughter and had therefore divined it through her psychic powers. But skeptic that he still was, he realized Hillary was no doubt familiar with the book Craig had written about the house, so wasn’t it now reasonable to assume he’d described it in detail, right down to its geographical location?

  “Two miles from the Bight could be two miles in either direction,” he said. “I don’t want to be driving out into the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “No, it’s on the way to town,” she said.

  “Did he say so in his book?”

  “I recognized it when we passed it,” she said.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “No, he did not give its exact location in the book.”

  “Why didn’t you say something when we passed it?”

  “Because the field was so strong.”

  “What field?”

  “The electromagnetic field.”

  “So strong that it silenced you?”

  “So strong that it frightened me.”

  “But the Bight didn’t, huh? When we passed the Bight…”

  “The Bight was only w
here she drowned. The house…” She shivered again and hunkered down inside her coat. He had never really heard a person’s teeth chattering; he’d always thought that was for fiction. But her teeth were truly chattering now; he could hear the tiny click of them above the hum of the car heater.

  “What about the house?” he said.

  “I have to see it. The house was the beginning. The house was where it all started.”

  “Where all what started?”

  “The four murders.”

  “Four?” he said. “There’ve only been three.”

  “Four,” she repeated.

  “Gregory Craig, Marian Esposito, Daniel Corbett…”

  “And Stephanie Craig,” she said.

  The house was on the edge of the ocean, 1.8 miles from the Bight, according to the odometer. He parked the car in a rutted sand driveway covered with snow and flanked by withered beach grass and plum. A solitary pine, its branches weighted by the snow upon them, stood to the left of the entrance door like a giant Napoleonic soldier outside Moscow. The house was almost entirely gray: weathered gray shingles on all of its sides; gray shingles of a darker hue on its roof; the door, the shutters, and the window trim all painted a gray that was flaking and faded. A brick chimney climbed the two stories on its northern end, contributing a column of color as red as blood, a piercing vertical shriek against the gray of the house and the white of the whirling snow. This time he had remembered to take along the flashlight. He played it first on a small sign in the window closest to the entrance door. The sign advised that the house was for rent or for sale and provided the name and address of the real estate agent to be contacted. He moved the light to the tarnished doorknob and then tried the knob. The door was locked.

  “That’s that,” he said.

  Hillary put her hand on the knob. She closed her eyes. He waited, never knowing what the hell to expect when she touched something. A snowflake landed on the back of his neck and melted down his collar.

  “There’s a back door,” she said.

  They trudged through the snow around the side of the house, past a thorny patch of brambles, and then onto a gray wooden porch on the ocean side. The wind here had banked the snow against the storm door. He kicked the snow away with the side of his shoe, yanked open the storm door, and then tried the knob on the inner door.

  “Locked,” he said. “Let’s get back to town.”

  Hillary reached for the knob. Carella sighed. She held the knob for what seemed an inordinately long time, the wind whistling in over the ocean and lashing the small porch, the storm door banging against the side of the house. When she released the knob, she said, “There’s a key behind the drainpipe.”

  Carella played the light over the drainpipe. The spout was perhaps eight inches above the ground. He felt behind it with his hand. Fastened to the back of the spout was one of those magnetic little key holders designed to make entrance by burglars even easier than it had to be. He slid open the lid on the metal container, took out a key, and tried it on the lock. It slid easily into the keyway; when he twisted it, he heard the tumblers fall with a small oiled click. He tried the knob again, and the door opened. Fumbling on the wall to the right of the door, he found a light switch and flicked it on. He took a step into the room; Hillary, behind him, closed the door.

  They were standing in a living room furnished in what might have been termed Beach House Haphazard. A sofa covered with floral-patterned slipcovers was on the window wall overlooking the ocean. Two mismatched upholstered easy chairs faced the sofa like ugly suitors petitioning for the hand of a princess. A stained oval braided rug was on the floor between the sofa and the chairs, and a cobbler’s bench coffee table rested on it slightly off-center. An upright piano was on a wall bearing two doors, one leading to the kitchen, the other to a pantry. A flight of steps at the far end of the room led to the upper story of the house.

  “This isn’t it,” Hillary said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t the house Greg wrote about.”

  “I thought you said…”

  “I said it started here. But this isn’t the house in Deadly Shades.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There are no ghosts in this house,” she said flatly. “There never were any ghosts in this house.”

  They went through it top to bottom nonetheless. Hillary’s manner was calm, almost detached. She went through the place like a disinterested buyer whose husband was trying to force upon her an unwanted purchase—until they reached the basement. In the basement, and Carella was becoming used to these sudden shifts of psychic mood, she bristled at the sight of a closed door. Her hands began flailing the air, the fingers on each widespread like those of a blind person searching for obstacles. Trembling, she approached the door. She lifted the primitive latch and entered a shelf-lined room that contained the house’s furnace. Carella was aware all at once that the house was frighteningly cold. His feet were leaden, his hands were numb. On one of the shelves were a diver’s mask, a pair of rubber fins, and an oxygen tank. Hillary approached the shelf, but she did not touch anything on it. Again, as she had with the dinghy in the cave, she backed away and said, “No, oh, God, no.”

  He felt something almost palpable in that room, but he knew better than to believe he was intuiting whatever Hillary was. His response was hard-nosed, that of a detective in one of the world’s largest cities, compounded of years of experience and miles of empirical deduction, seasoned with a pinch of guesswork and a heaping tablespoon of hope—but hope was the thing with feathers. Stephanie Craig, an expert swimmer, had drowned in the Bight in a calmer sea than anyone could remember that summer. At least one of the witnesses had suggested that she’d been seized from below by a shark or some other kind of fish. In the basement room of the house her former husband, Gregory, had rented for the summer, they had just stumbled upon a diver’s gear. Wasn’t it possible…?

  “It was Greg,” Hillary said. “Greg drowned her.”

  At the Hampstead Arms they booked a pair of connecting rooms for the night. As Carella dialed his home in Riverhead, he could hear Hillary on the phone next door. He did not know whom she was calling. He knew only that in the car on the way back to town she had refused to amplify her blunt accusation. Fanny answered the phone on the fourth ring.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m stuck up here.”

  “And where’s up there?” Fanny asked.

  “I asked Cotton to call…”

  “He didn’t.”

  “I’m in Massachusetts.”

  “Ah,” Fanny said. “And what, may I ask, are you doing in Massachusetts?”

  “Checking out haunted houses.”

  “Your Italian sense of humor leaves much to be desired,” Fanny said. “Teddy’ll have a fit. She’s been thinking you were killed in some dark alley.”

  “Tell her I’m all right and I’ll call again in the morning.”

  “It won’t mollify her.”

  “Then tell her I love her.”

  “If you love her, then what the hell are you doing in Massachusetts?”

  “Is everything all right there?”

  “Everything’s fine and dandy.”

  “It hasn’t snowed again, has it?”

  “Not a flake.”

  “It’s already snowed eight inches up here.”

  “Serves you right,” Fanny said, and hung up.

  He dialed Hawes at the squadroom and got him on the third ring.

  “You were supposed to call and tell my wife I went to Massachusetts,” he said.

  “Shit,” Hawes said.

  “You forgot.”

  “It was jumping today. Three guys tried to stick up a bank on Culver and Tenth. Locked themselves inside when the alarm went off, tried to hold off the whole damn Police Department. We finally flushed them out about four o’clock.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “One of the tellers had a heart attack. But that was it. I’m glad you called.
We got something on the jewelry. A pawnbroker called the squadroom while I was out playing cops and robbers. Runs a shop on Ainsley and Third.”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “I called him back the minute I got in. Turns out some guy was in there this afternoon trying to hock the diamond pendant. Just a second, here’s the list.” The line went silent. Carella visualized Hawes running his finger down the list Hillary Scott had provided. “Yeah,” Hawes said, “here it is. ‘One pear-shaped diamond pendant set in platinum with an eighteen-inch chain of eighteen-karat gold.’”

  “What was it valued at?”

  “Thirty-five hundred.”

  “Who pawned it?”

  “Tried to pawn it. The broker offered sixteen hundred, and the guy accepted and then balked when he was asked for identification. They have to get identification, you know, for when they send their list of transactions to us.”