by Ed McBain
The room, he now saw, was beautifully furnished in old American antiques, the likes of which could hardly be found for sale anywhere these days, except at exorbitant prices. There were several hurricane lamps around the room, and he lighted these now, and the richly burnished wood of the paneling and the furniture came to flickering life everywhere around him. If there were ghosts in this house, they could not have found a more hospitable place to inhabit. In a brass bucket by the fireplace he found several faded copies of the Hampstead News. The dates went back two years, the last time the house had been rented for the summer. He tore the newspapers to shreds, laid a bed of kindling over them, and stacked three hefty logs on top of that. The fire dispelled the lingering chill in the room and, with it, any possible notion that poltergeists might pop out of the woodwork at any moment. Outside, the wind howled in over the ocean and the shutters rattled, but the fire was crackling now, and the lamps and candles were lighted, and the only ghosts visible were the fire devils dancing on the grate. Carella went out into the kitchen, lighted the candles and lamps there, and then started another fire in the second fireplace. Neither he nor Hillary had yet gone up to the second story of the house.
In one of the kitchen cupboards he found an almost full bottle of scotch. The ice-cube trays in the refrigerator were empty, and the tap water had been turned off. He was starting out of the room with the bottle and two glasses when he noticed the kitchen door was ajar. He put down the glasses and the bottle, went to the door, and opened it all the way. The storm door outside was closed, but the simple slip bolt was unlatched. He threw the bolt and then studied the lock on the inner door. It was a Mickey Mouse lock with a spring latch that any burglar could open in seconds with a strip of celluloid, a knife blade, or a credit card. He locked it nonetheless, yanked on the knob to make certain the door was secure, and then went back into the living room, carrying the bottle of scotch and the two glasses. Hillary was standing at the fireplace. She had taken off the raccoon coat and also the green cardigan sweater. She stood with her legs slightly spread, her booted feet on the stone hearth, her hands extended toward the fire.
“Want some of this?” he said.
“Yes, please.”
“Only spirits in the place,” he said, intending a joke and surprised when she didn’t even smile in response. “We’ll have to drink it neat,” he said.
He poured generously into both glasses, put the bottle down on the mantel, raised his own glass, said, “Cheers,” and took a swallow of whiskey that burned its way clear down to his toes.
“See any ghosts yet?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“Would you know one if you saw one?”
“I’d know one.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
“No. But I understand the phenomenon.”
“How about explaining it to me?”
“You’re a skeptic,” she said. “I’d be wasting my time.”
“Try me.”
“No. I’d rather not.”
“Okay,” he said, and shrugged. “Want to tell me about Craig’s working habits instead?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did he work? There was a sheet of paper in his typewriter on the day he was killed. Did he normally type his stuff?”
“Yes.”
“Always? Did he ever write in longhand, for example?”
“Never.”
“Did he ever dictate?”
“To a secretary, do you mean? No.”
“Or into a machine?”
“A recorder?”
“Yes. Did he ever put anything on tape?”
The word seemed to resonate in the room. He had not yet told her that Maude Jenkins had typed a portion of Craig’s book from a two-hour cassette he’d delivered near the end of the summer three years ago. Hillary did not immediately answer. A log shifted on the grate; the fire crackled and spit.
“Did he?” Carella said.
“Not that I know of.”
“What was his voice like?”
“Greg’s voice?”
“Yes. I understand he was a heavy smoker. Was his voice hoarse or…?” He searched for another word and finally used the one Maude Jenkins had used in describing the voice on the tape. “Rasping? Would you call it rasping?”
“No.”
“At least a portion of Deadly Shades was on tape,” he said. “About a hundred pages of it. Were there—?”
“How do you know that?”
“I spoke to the woman who typed it. Were there any other tapes? The published book ran something like three hundred pages, didn’t it?”
“Close to four hundred.”
“So where are the tapes? If the first part of it was on tape…”
“I never saw any tapes,” Hillary said.
“Who typed the final manuscript?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know Greg while he was working on Shades.”
“Who normally types his stuff? In the city, I mean.”
“He hasn’t had anything typed recently. He was still working on the new book, he had no reason to have it typed clean till he finished it.”
“Would Daniel Corbett have known anything about the existence of any tapes?”
“I have no idea,” Hillary said, and the candles on the mantel-piece went out.
Carella felt a sudden draft in the room and turned abruptly toward the front door, thinking it might have been blown open by the raging wind. He could see past the edge of the boxed stairwell to the small entryway. The door was closed. He went to it anyway and studied the lock—the same as the one on the kitchen door but securely latched nonetheless. He went out into the kitchen. The hurricane lamps were still burning on the fireplace mantel and the drainboard, but the candles he had lighted on the kitchen table were out—and the kitchen door was open.
He stood looking at the door. He was alone in the room. The extinguished candles sent wisps of trailing smoke up toward the ceiling beams. He put his glass down on the kitchen table, went to the door, and looked at the lock. The thumb bolt has been turned; the spring latch was recessed into the locking mechanism. As earlier, the storm door was closed—but the slip bolt had been thrown back. He heard a sound behind him and whirled instantly. Hillary was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“They’re here,” she whispered.
He did not answer her. He locked both doors again and was turning to relight the candles when the hurricane lamp on the drainboard suddenly leaped into the air and fell to the floor, the chimney shattering, kerosene spilling from the base and bursting into flame. He stamped out the flames, and then felt another draft, and knew without question that something had passed this way.
He would never in his life tell a single soul about what happened next. He would not tell any of the men in the squadroom because he knew they would never again trust a certified lunatic in a shoot-out. He would not tell Teddy because he knew that she, too, would never completely trust him afterward. He was turning toward where Hillary stood in the doorway when he saw the figure behind her. The figure was a woman. She was wearing a long dress with an apron over it. A sort of granny hat was on her head. Her eyes were mournful, her hands were clasped over her breasts. She would have been frightening in any event, appearing as suddenly as she had, but the terrifying thing about her was that Carella could see through her body and into the small entryway of the house. Hillary turned in the same instant, either sensing the figure behind her or judging it to be there from the look on Carella’s face. The woman vanished at once or, rather, seemed swept away by a fierce wind that sucked her shapelessly into the hall and up the stairs to the second floor of the house. A keening moan trailed behind her; the whispered name “John” echoed up the stairwell and then dissipated on the air.
“Let’s follow her,” Hillary said.
“Listen,” Carella said, “I think we should—”
“Come,” she said, and started up the stairwell.
Carella was
in no mood for a confrontation with a restless spirit looking for a John. What did one do when staring down a ghost? He had not held a crucifix in his hands for more years than he cared to remember, and the last time he’d had a clove of garlic around his neck was when he’d had pneumonia as a child and his grandmother had tied one there on a string to ward off the evil eye. Besides, were you supposed to treat ghosts like vampires, driving stakes into their hearts and returning them to their truly dead states? Did they even have hearts? Or livers? Or kidneys? What the hell was a ghost? And besides, who believed in them?
Carella did.
He had never been so frightened since the day he’d walked in on a raving lunatic wielding a hatchet, the man’s eyes wide, his mouth dripping spittle, someone’s severed hand in his own left hand, dripping blood onto the floor as he charged across the room to where Carella stood frozen in his tracks. He had shot the man six times in the chest, finally dropping him an instant before the hatchet would have taken off his nose and part of his face. But how could you shoot a ghost? Carella did not want to go up to the second story of this house. Hillary was already halfway up the stairs, though, and neither did he want to be called chickenshit. Why not? he thought. Call me chickenshit, go ahead. I’m afraid of ghosts. This goddamn house was carried here stick by stick from Salem, where they hanged witches, and I just saw somebody dressed like Rebecca Nurse or Sarah Osborne or Goody Proctor or whoever the hell, and she was wailing for a man named John, and there ain’t nobody here but us chickens, boss. Adios, he thought, and saw Hillary disappear around the corner at the top of the stairs, and suddenly heard her screaming. He pulled his gun and took the steps up two at a time.
Hillary, courageous ghost hunter that she was, had collapsed in a dead faint on the floor. An eerie blue light bathed the second-story hallway. The hallway was icy cold; it raised the hackles at the back of his neck even before he saw the women standing there. There were four of them. They all were dressed in what looked like late-seventeenth-century garments. He could see through them and beyond them to the window at the end of the hallway where snow lashed the ancient leaded panes. They began advancing toward him. They were grinning. One of them had blood on her hands. And then, suddenly, a sound intruded itself from someplace above—the attic, he guessed. He could not make out the sound at first. It was a steady throbbing sound, like the beat of a muffled heart. The women stopped when they heard the sound. Their heads moved in unison, tilting up toward the beamed ceiling. The sound grew louder, but he still could not identify it. The women shrank from the sound, huddling closer together in the corridor, seeming to melt one into the other, their bodies overlapping and then disappearing entirely, sucked away by the same strong wind that had banished the specter below.
He squinted his eyes against the wind. It died as suddenly as it had started. He stood trembling in the corridor, Hillary on the floor behind him, snowlight piercing the window at the farthest end, the steady throbbing sound above him. No, it was more like a thumping, the slow, steady thump of—
He recognized the sound all at once.
Someone was bouncing a ball in the attic.
He stood just outside the door to the story above, debating whether he should go up there, thinking maybe somebody was working tricks with lights and wind machines, causing apparitions to appear, a theater of the supernatural, designed to cause a psychic to faint dead away and an experienced detective to stand shaking in his sodden loafers. He told himself there couldn’t be anything like ghosts—but he had already seen five of them. He told himself there was nothing to fear, but he was terrified. Fanning the air with his pistol, he made his way up the steps to the attic. The stairs creaked under his cautious tread. The ball kept bouncing somewhere above him.
She was standing at the top of the stairs. She was no older than his daughter April, wearing a long gray dress and a faded sunbonnet. She was grinning at him. She was bouncing a ball, and grinning, and chanting in tempo with the bouncing ball. The chant echoed down the stairwell. It took him a moment to realize that she was repeating over and over again the words “Hang them.” The ball bounced, and the child grinned, and the words “Hang them, hang them” floated down the stairwell to where he stood with the pistol shaking in his fist. The air around her shimmered, the ball took on an iridescent hue. She took a step down the stairwell, the ball clutched in her fist now. He backed away, and suddenly lost his footing, and went tumbling down the stairs to the floor below. Above him, he heard her laughter. And then, suddenly, the sound of the ball bouncing again.
He got to his feet and turned the pistol up the steps. She was no longer there. On the floor above he could see a blue luminous glow. His elbow hurt where he had landed on it in his fall. He dragged Hillary to her feet, held her limply against him, hefted her painfully into his arms, and went down the steps to the first floor. Above he could still hear the bouncing ball. Outside the house he carried Hillary to where he’d parked the car, the snowflakes covering her clothes till she resembled a shrouded corpse. He heaved her in onto the front seat and then went back to the house—but only to pick up their coats. The ball was still bouncing in the attic.
He heard it when he went outside again, stumbling through the deep snow toward the car. He heard it over the whine of the starter and the sudden roar of the engine. He heard it over the savage wind and the crash of the ocean. And he knew that whenever in the future anything frightened him, whenever any unknown dark terror seized his mind or clutched his heart, he would hear again the sound of that little girl bouncing the ball in the attic—bouncing it, bouncing it, bouncing it.
It was close to 10:00 when they got back to the hotel. The night clerk handed him a message over the desk. It read: Calvin Horse called. Wants you to call him at home. Carella thanked him, accepted the keys to both rooms, and then led Hillary to the elevators. She had been silent from the moment she regained consciousness in the automobile. She did not say a word now on the way up to the second floor. Outside her door, as she unlocked it, she asked, “Are you going straight to bed?”
“Not immediately,” he said.
“Would you like a nightcap?”
“I have to make a call first.”
“I’ll phone room service. What would you like?”
“Irish coffee.”
“Good, I’ll have one, too. Come in when you’re ready,” she said, and opened the door and went into the room. He unlocked his own door, took off his coat, sat on the edge of the bed, and dialed Hawes’s home number. He debated greeting him as Mr. Horse, but he was in no mood for squadroom humor just now. Hawes picked up on the third ring.
“Hawes,” he said.
“Cotton, this is Steve. What’s up?”
“Hi, Steve. Just a second, I want to lower the stereo.” Carella waited. When Hawes came back on the line, he said, “Where’ve you been? I called three times.”
“Out snooping around,” Carella said. He did not mention the ghosts he’d seen; he would never mention the ghosts he’d seen. He shuddered involuntarily now at the mere thought of them. “What’ve you got?”
“For one thing, a lot of wild prints from that pawnshop counter. Some very good ones, according to the lab boys. They’ve already sent them over to the ID Section; we may get a make by morning. I hope.”
“Good. What else?”
“Our man took another shot at it. This time he tried to hock the gold earrings with the pearls. Place on Culver and Eighth. They’re worth close to six hundred bucks, according to Hillary Scott’s list.”
“What happened?”
“He was prepared this time. Wouldn’t show a driver’s license, said he didn’t drive. The broker would’ve accepted his Social Security card, but he said he’d left that at home. He produced a postmarked letter addressed to him at 1624 McGrew. Name on the envelope was James Rader. The broker got suspicious because it looked like the name and address had been erased and then typed over again. He wouldn’t have taken it as identification anyway, but it alerted him, you
know? So he went in the back room to check our flyer. When he came out again, the guy was gone, and the earrings with him.”
“Anything on James Rader?”
“Nothing in the phone directories, I’m running the name through ID now. It’s most likely a phony. I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’ve also sent the envelope to the lab. There may be prints on it they can compare against the others.”
“How about the address?”
“Nonexistent. McGrew runs for six blocks east to west, just this side of the Stem. Highest number on the street is 1411. He pulled it out of thin air, Steve.”
“Check for Jack Rawles,” Carella said. “The J. R. matches, he may be our man. If there’s nothing for him in the city, check the Boston directories for a listing on Commonwealth Avenue. And if there’s nothing in those, call the Boston PD, see if they can come up with a make.”
“How do you spell the Rawles?” Hawes asked.
“R-A-W-L-E-S.”
“Where’d you get the name?”
“He was renting the house Craig described in his book.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Maybe nothing. Check him out. I’ll be up for a while yet, give me a ring if you get anything.”
“What do you make of all this running around trying to hock the jewels?” Hawes asked.
“Amateur night in Dixie,” Carella said. “He needs money, and he doesn’t know any fences. What’d he sound like?”
“Who?”
“The guy who tried to pawn that stuff,” Carella said impatiently. “James Rader or whatever the fuck his name was.”
“Steve?” Hawes said. “Something wrong up there?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Can you reach those pawnbrokers?”
“Well, they’ll be closed now. It’s close to—”