Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy

by Dana Stabenow

  Victoria had said there was no way to make Martin happy, so I didn’t bother trying to figure out what I might do for him. The rest of us passed a very enjoyable evening, and I could feel the contentment radiating throughout the entire house. Indeed, when I finally turned out the light and went to bed, I fell asleep almost instantly and I didn’t wake till dawn.

  My first night in the haunted house was far more peaceful than my last hundred nights in the apartment I’d shared with my husband. Had my life held so many terrors lately that I had actually upgraded it by moving in with restless spirits? Had the world of the living proved so perilous that I was more at ease among the dead?

  The following weeks quickly settled into a pattern. During the day, I worked on my novel, occasionally taking breaks to walk around the neighborhood, explore the town, or replenish supplies. In the evenings, I hung out with my new room-mates. Now and then I was able to find a movie or program that everyone in the household could agree on—Buffy was a universal favorite, for instance, and even Edison enjoyed Pixar movies—but most of the time I activated the distinct entertainment zones that everyone preferred. Edison developed the habit of heading down to the kitchen to watch PBS with Bradley once the CD of the day had finished playing. I knew that, because he also developed the annoying habit of telling the rest of us the next day what he’d learned the night before about Mayan ruins or asteroid belts or creatures of the deep sea. It was preferable to his other favorite topic of conversation, however, which was to claim that Martin had murdered him by pushing him down the stairs.

  I didn’t know what Bradley thought about sharing his TV viewing time with Edison. During those first two weeks, neither Bradley nor Martin made an appearance. I couldn’t decide if I should be sorry or glad.

  I did meet a few of my neighbors, though. The young couple on the right usually just waved as they left for work in the mornings, and the older woman on my left never wanted to talk about anything but how late the paperboy was, but the woman who lived behind me was gregarious and cheerful. A low tangle of honeysuckle separated our yards and perfumed our conversations as we stood on either side to talk.

  That first day, she introduced herself as Janet and waved at me with a trowel. She was a fiftyish brown-haired woman dressed in shapeless gardening clothes and a big straw hat that partially obscured her face. “You’re the new renter?” she asked. “How are you getting along with the ghosts?”

  She said it in a playful way that made me think she was joking. So I gave a noncommittal answer and a big smile. “Very well, thank you. They don’t trouble me at all.”

  She laughed. “Excellent! So perhaps you’ll stay longer than the last few tenants. I think one of them decamped within a week.”

  “I’d like to stay,” I admitted. “I’m falling in love with the house.” I fanned myself with the magazine I’d been reading on the back porch before I spotted Janet. “How long have you lived here?”

  “Oh, let’s see—goodness, I think I moved in twenty years ago.”

  “So you must have been living here when the murders happened,” I said.

  She nodded. “It was terrible. I was very close to Suzanne. I kept telling her to leave Martin. He was so unstable, it was so obvious he would turn violent if he ever found out about Bradley. I’d had an abusive husband of my own, and so I knew—” Janet paused and shook her head. “But she wouldn’t listen to me. And when that sweet girl was murdered, I wept for days.”

  “Were you here when it happened?”

  She nodded. “I saw the police cars, and I ran over to see if I could help. I’m a nurse at the ER and—but they were all long dead.”

  I thought she might be weeping, all these years later, and I hastily changed the subject. “My other neighbors seem very nice,” I said. “I haven’t had very long conversations with them, though.”

  “Oh, I like them all,” she said. “But I think Joan and Bruce might be moving soon. She wants a dog.”

  “And? She can’t have a dog here?”

  Janet shook her head. “It’s your house. Animals don’t like it. Last three or four times one of the near neighbors has tried to get a dog—any dog—the animal would just refuse to calm down. Would stand right there in the yard, facing your house, and bark its head off. Cats won’t stay either. They run off the first time they can get out the door.”

  I was disappointed. I’d been thinking about getting a cat. “Maybe the house really is haunted,” I said softly.

  Janet smiled sadly. “Oh, I’m convinced it is.”

  I was working on my book one afternoon when a ghost I hadn’t seen before stalked in and settled in the chair across from my desk. “I suppose you’re not going to leave,” he said in a dark voice.

  He startled me. I believe an undignified “eek!” actually passed my lips, but I wasn’t exactly afraid. I hit SAVE and closed my laptop so I could study him. A handsome man, I decided. I guessed Suzanne to be about thirty, and this man was maybe a year or two older. He had rumpled brown hair and an intense gaze that gave him a brooding air. Altogether, he cultivated a somewhat Byronic manner that suited my notions of ghosthood as much as Suzanne’s die-away despair. “Which one are you?” I inquired.

  He sneered. “You mean, am I the wronged husband or the doomed lover? The murderer or the fool?”

  “Yes,” I said calmly. “That’s what I meant.”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. I made sure to take in details of his face and clothing so that I could ask Victoria later whom I had had the pleasure of meeting, in case he never told me. But he shrugged, and said, “I’m the fool.”

  I propped my chin on my hand. “For loving a married woman?” I said. “Lot of people make that mistake.”

  He snorted. “For believing she was worth loving.”

  My eyebrows rose. This was a new twist. “You and Suzanne had a falling-out? Was this the night you were—were discovered?”

  He looked away. “No. That night I loved her as much as I ever had. It was just—later—when I found out—” He shook his head. “How could I ever have loved someone like her?” he burst out.

  My eyes went wide. “You discovered something—after you died? A secret about Suzanne?”

  He watched me a moment with those dark eyes. Sexy. Just a little more corporeal mass, I found myself thinking, and I’d want to sleep with you, too. “Doesn’t everyone have secrets?” he asked at last. “Don’t you?”

  I reviewed my own life. “Things I don’t like to talk about, maybe,” I allowed. “Not necessarily secrets.”

  “I have to wonder about someone who seems to be perfectly happy when she’s living in a house that harbors seven ghosts and the memories of three murders.”

  “Three? Oh, you mean Edison?” I said, a little amused. “I haven’t encountered Martin yet, but did he really push Edison down the steps?”

  Bradley was sneering. Still attractive. “He talked about wanting to do it almost from the day the man moved in.”

  I almost laughed. “I’m sure the rest of you tried to dissuade him. To be stuck with Edison forever!”

  Bradley didn’t smile. Indeed, his gaze became even more intense as he hitched himself forward on the chair. “You must help me,” he said. “Help all of us. We’re trapped in this house together—for time everlasting—hating each other, unable to get away. For so long I wanted Martin dead, but once he died—he’s the one who keeps us all here. Put him at rest, and all of us will be at peace.”

  “But how do I do that?” I asked, bewildered.

  Bradley stood up. “Uncover the lie,” he said. “Once a living person knows the truth, we will all be free.” And, before my eyes, he vanished.

  “I don’t know what truth he means,” Victoria said. She was helping me make dinner that night. I wasn’t much of a cook, and of course Victoria couldn’t eat, but apparently she’d been something of a chef in her day. We had gotten in the habit of meeting in the kitchen a couple of nights a week so she could walk me through one of her fa
vorite recipes. “The truth is that Martin killed Bradley and Suzanne, then killed himself. No, dear, not that much garlic.”

  “But maybe that’s not the truth,” I said. “Maybe Suzanne is really the one who shot Bradley and herself. Maybe that’s what Bradley meant. And Martin’s been blamed all this time. Maybe that’s why he’s so mad. I’d be mad, too.”

  “She was shot in the back, so I don’t think so,” Victoria said. “But, you know, ever since I’ve been here, there’s been some trouble between Bradley and Suzanne. You would think that lovers who had been murdered together would cling to each other in the afterlife, but that’s never been the case. They’re almost never in the same room, and if Suzanne comes in the kitchen while Brad is here, he simply walks out. You can tell that she’s devastated, after all this time. She doesn’t know why he no longer loves her. Because she loves him still.”

  I tasted the sauce I was creating for my pasta del mar. Victoria was right. Not that much garlic. “Is that why she seems so sad? I mean, even for a ghost, she seems—miserable. Inconsolable.” I smiled at Victoria. “You seem quite happy.”

  “Well, I always was,” she said comfortably. “No need to change now.”

  Edison wandered through and made a great show of holding his nose. “I hate the smell of fish. Makes me want to vomit.”

  “Shut up, Edison,” Victoria said, and he humphed and stalked out.

  Edison had also complained a couple nights ago when I ate some takeout crab rangoon. “I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t eat seafood while I’m living here,” I said with a sigh. “I hate for him to be offended.”

  Victoria was unimpressed. “If you’re going to worry about all of our food preferences, you won’t be able to eat a thing,” she said. “Suzanne is a vegetarian, Lizzie hates broccoli, Bradley is allergic to tomatoes and blueberries, red wine gives Charlotte a migraine, and Martin is lactose intolerant.”

  “What about you?”

  Victoria smiled. “I eat everything.” She looked suddenly wistful. “Or I used to. Now, of course, I can’t taste a thing.”

  “I still wonder what Bradley meant,” I said. “I did a Google search about the murder—”

  “A what?” Victoria repeated.

  “Google. It’s—it helps you find information on the Inter-net.” She still looked mystified, so I shook my head. “Never mind. I think I’ll have to go to the library and see if they have microfiche with newspaper coverage. Maybe that will give me some ideas.”

  “Oh, I have a scrapbook,” Victoria said. “After we moved in, I looked up the stories about Brad and Suzanne and Martin. There wasn’t much,” she added. “It was such a very common and obvious crime.”

  After my meal (which was pretty good, if heavy on seasoning), Victoria led me to the living room, where a jumble of books and old magazines filled two built-in bookcases.

  “All your stuff is still here?” I asked. “That’s convenient.”

  Victoria nodded and settled on the floor to scan the bottom shelf. It was completely filled with scrapbooks and photo albums. A treasure trove for me to look through on some future date, I decided. She said, “We were only renting the house from Suzanne’s sister, but we planned to live here a good long time. She let us decorate however we wished—and then she just kept everything in the house so she could rent it out furnished. I think she knew right then she would never have boarders who stayed very long. There, I think that’s the book you want.”

  I pulled out the volume she indicated and began leafing through the pages. It wasn’t a modern scrapbook with decorative papers and fancy borders. No, it was just a couple of sturdy covers wrapped around thick black pages. In it, Victoria had collected all sorts of news clippings related to events in this decade of her life—her husband’s death, her son’s Army heroics, her granddaughter’s baptism.

  Articles about the murder/suicide appeared late in the book, and I sat right there on the floor and read them. The first thing I found out was that Martin hadn’t killed himself with a gun, as I’d always believed.

  “He took morphine?” I said, looking up from the page to stare at Victoria. “He shot two people, but he couldn’t stand to shoot himself?”

  “It’s harder to bear pain than it is to inflict it,” Victoria said.

  The second thing I learned was that Martin really was cold-blooded. Police theorized that Martin had come home unexpectedly, heard voices, retrieved his gun from the living room case where he always kept it, crept upstairs, and shot his wife and her lover. Then he’d come back downstairs, laid the gun on the kitchen table, opened a beer, eaten a bowl of leftover chili, and turned on the football game. (The television was still playing the next day when police came to investigate why his wife wasn’t at work.) He appeared to have chased his second beer with a handful of morphine tablets, which took effect when he was back in the kitchen (looking for his third beer, they believed).

  “Where’d he get the morphine?” I asked Victoria. “It doesn’t say.”

  She pointed at the book. “Next article.”

  I turned the page and read another story that gave more detail about the troubled couple. A friend was speculating that their marriage had started to show signs of strain the year before, when his mother moved into their house as she was dying of cancer. “Probably some leftover morphine in the medicine cabinet,” Victoria said. “Surely his mother had a prescription.”

  I nodded. “Makes sense. Still. This is even creepier than before.”

  “Now you know why the rest of us are just as happy when Martin keeps to himself.”

  But Martin made an unexpected, and not particularly welcome, appearance just the next day. I had gone to the third bedroom—the place I was most likely to find ghosts—and had been lucky enough to discover Suzanne alone. As usual, she stood at the single window, looking insubstantial enough to evaporate, but weighted in place by the heaviness of grief.

  “I want to ask you some questions,” I said, speaking fast. Suzanne never hung around for long, so it was best to skip any amenities and get straight to the point. “When you were married—why didn’t you leave Martin?”

  She didn’t turn around to look at me. “I was afraid of him. I thought he’d kill me.” She gave a small laugh. “And he did.”

  “Did Brad want you to run away with him?”

  “Yes. Said we could change our names. Move to a different state. Move to a different country. Said he would always love me.” She sniffed, as if holding back tears.

  “But Brad is angry at you now. Why?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. “He won’t tell me,” she said at last. “He just says I’m not worth loving anymore.”

  Well, that was unhelpful. “Do you have a guess?”

  Even if she’d planned to answer, she didn’t get a chance. “Don’t ask a lying bitch for information!” a voice roared, and I jumped nearly a foot in the air. The room was suddenly ice-cold and dark with shadows. I could just make out a lumbering shape—big body, small head, fisted hands—an even-more-insubstantial spirit than Suzanne. “Goddamn whore would say anything she thought you would believe!”

  Suzanne choked down a cry and hurried past him, out of the room. I didn’t know if I should be glad for her or worried for myself that Martin didn’t follow. Instead, he stayed facing me, panting heavily, swinging his little head from side to side. I wrapped my arms around myself and wished I had a sweater.

  “I suppose you’re Martin,” I said.

  “Get the hell out of my house!” he bellowed.

  I stood my ground. “I’m just trying to help,” I said calmly. “I want to understand what happened that night.”

  “What happened? What happened? I found my wife screwing another man, that’s what happened! Should have strangled both of them with my bare hands. Bitch deserved to die staring me right in the face.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot yourself?” I asked.

  He took three quick steps closer, and I felt myself enveloped in menace and
chill. Suddenly I believed Edison when he said Martin had deliberately forced him down the stairs. I was pretty sure Martin would have liked to shove me out the window. “Because I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction,” he spat. “Why don’t you shoot yourself?”

  Shooting, no; running, yes. I was shivering, and frightened, and trying to edge past him toward the door, when suddenly I felt a flurry in the air behind him. “Martin!” came Charlotte’s stern voice. “You leave her alone right this minute. Such behavior! Out of the room—out, I say!”

  He turned on her with a curse, but Bradley and Edison flanked her on either side. I wondered wildly whether ghosts could touch each other even if they couldn’t touch living people and if that meant the other three could manhandle Martin out the door. But they didn’t need to. He snarled something unintelligible at the three of them and stomped into the hall. Instantly, the room warmed by fifteen degrees.

  “My heroes,” I said faintly. “Thanks, guys.”

  That night I rented season two of Buffy, and all of us, minus Martin, gathered in the living room to watch. I worried that the story line might be a little violent at times for Lizzie, but she just curled up on Charlotte’s lap and covered her eyes anytime there was too much blood. Suzanne and Bradley were both in the room, though in opposite corners, and her eyes were on him more often than they were on the screen. For the most part, he ignored her, but if ghosts could be said to have body language, I was sure he was highly aware of her.

  What had gone wrong between the lovers?

  After the first DVD, I was too tired to stay awake any longer. “Want me to set up the next disc or just turn the channel to TCM?” I asked through a yawn.

  “TCM,” Victoria and Charlotte said in unison. Victoria added, “There’s a Barbara Stanwyck retrospective. I just love her movies.”

  “Then movies you shall have,” I said, and flipped the necessary switches. Double Indemnity had already started before I was halfway up the stairs.

  I woke at noon the next day and sat straight up in bed. Maybe if I’d stayed up to watch the movie, the revelation would have hit me the night before. It was certainly the stuff of cinema: Woman schemes to kill her husband, ensnaring an innocent man in her plan. Except Bradley hadn’t had any idea what Suzanne planned to do. Easy enough for her to crush a few morphine tablets and slip them into a container of leftover chili, then wait for Martin to come home and eat it. All she had to do was not taste the doctored food.