“I certainly don’t feel sorry for you.”
“You think you’ll beat me up.”
“It just seems silly.” Bell shocked himself, confronting Hamilton Speke so bluntly. “I’ve boxed enough to realize I don’t like jabbing people in the nose, and I don’t like being hit.”
“You’re afraid of pain?”
“I’m rarely afraid of anything.”
Speke jabbed at the air. His hands were quick, and he was light on his feet, too, as he boxed the image of himself in the mirror.
He turned toward Bell and snapped a fast jab, nowhere near his jaw, a half humorous non-punch.
But Bell had the very clear insight, as certain as a punch itself: Speke would knock me out cold with no trouble at all.
A thump.
Not a big noise at all. A thud, metallic, softened by earth, with no resonance. A flat, deep sound that both of them turned over and over again in their minds. The silence that followed it was thick and dull, as though sound no longer traveled through the air.
Was that it? Bell wondered.
They didn’t move. Speke’s head was cocked, and he looked like a sparring partner stunned by an uppercut in the very recent past. He met Bell’s eyes.
He whispered: “That was it.”
Bell found himself breathing again. He had been, without knowing it, holding his breath.
“That,” Speke whispered, “that stupid little pop was it.”
They laughed. As soon as one stopped, the other started up again, and they both laughed all the harder.
It was wonderful to laugh so hard, and afterward they strolled back through the heat, to the office. Speke vanished, to reappear unscrewing the cap from a bottle of scotch.
Bell’s pocket tape recorder had run all the way to the end, and he turned it over. He didn’t know—maybe somewhere between waiting for the explosion and staggering with laughter there would be a phrase, a quote that illuminated Speke’s soul.
Speke savored his first sip. “The best thing ever invented.”
Bell sipped. Scotch was not his drink, but this was an important moment. They were getting somewhere.
“Some day, before we finish the book, maybe we can go a few rounds?”
“Sure.”
“I’d like that. I sure as hell can’t box with Mr. Brothers.”
Bell felt a surge of compassion. Speke was lonely. He had no real friends. He needed a playmate, someone to wrestle, to race, to climb trees and go swimming with.
He was more like a boy than a man, it seemed just then.
And then he said something that shook Bell, in a low voice. “You don’t think a place can be haunted, do you, Bell?”
Bell couldn’t answer.
“By a ghost, I mean.”
“No.”
“You aren’t superstitious at all, are you?”
“I don’t waste my time.” The statement, Bell realized, was more self-revealing than he had intended, and Speke seemed to acknowledge this with a steady gaze.
You are not, Bell thought, going to escape me, Speke. You can dance and move, but I’m going to find out what sort of man you are.
Speke was thoughtful. “I don’t, either. I absolutely do not believe in ghosts.” He stared as though Bell had disagreed with him and added, “I just don’t believe in them. And yet, this place. This house, this land …”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Speke added, “Maybe we don’t know anything at all, Bell. Maybe the few things we do think we know are completely wrong.”
And maybe we wax philosophical, Bell thought, when there are subjects we would rather avoid.
He learned several things that day. He learned that “Speke” was not pronounced “speak,” as most people did, but to rhyme with “spake,” as in “thus spake.” Half the people Bell knew pronounced Speke’s name incorrectly.
He learned that Speke was not the high-strung, uneasy man he sometimes appeared. At the same time, he was not the hearty, self-assured individual he so plainly wanted to be. He was complicated, shot through with contradictions. Bell found comfort in this. He, too, had a hidden nature.
Soft splinters of wood were everywhere, and at the heart of a great broadcast of black and red shards of tree was a crater, an inverted cone of space. Dark, wood-rich earth was flung in all directions, a nova of wreckage.
Speke put his hands to his face. “No!” he breathed.
He crept to the edge of the blasted humus. He gazed, as though unable to believe what he saw. Then he shook himself, and attempted to laugh. “I knew it would be gone, Bell, but—to see it gone like this, so suddenly …”
Bell was about to say something about the power of dynamite. After all, what had the man expected? But when he was about to speak he decided to say nothing.
There were tears in Speke’s eyes. “I didn’t realize,” he said, “that I would feel this way.”
17
The stars were so crowded they seemed to make a sound, and even a smell, a dry, sterile whiff. Bell sat on the porch of his cottage, feet on the front steps, playing back today’s interview.
There was one ability people had that impressed him almost more than any other, the ability to tell by looking at a fragment of a person, a figure dashing around a corner, the torn scrap of a snapshot, the identity of the person observed. We know who we have seen, and at the same time we know which people are strangers. Even sheep can recognize their companions from slides flashed on a screen.
So, Bell reasoned, I should be well on my way to understanding Hamilton Speke. And yet—I’m not. He sat listening. On one side of the tape, Speke worried about the explosion that had not yet occurred. “I’m hopeless.” He did not respond to Bell’s comment about his blister. “I hate people who only read dead playwrights,” his voice said.
With a little hard work—what one of his editors had called “old-fashioned hammer and tongs application”—Bell believed that he could understand anything. Give him an hour with a dossier, a half hour with a court transcript, and he would know the man he was after.
Speke baffled him. But there was something else, something he was ashamed to admit to himself.
Speke was, in a subtle way, a way impossible to define, frightening.
He heard her first, before he saw her, and he did not for a moment mistake her for Maria. She stepped through the wet grass carefully, as though creeping her way across a narrow walkway over an abyss. She was so exactly the vision Bell needed that he could not speak.
Her eyes were cool in the porch light, and as before seemed to see into him, and to understand him better than he understood himself. She studied him, and yet did not approach any farther, as though there were a circle of magic surrounding his cottage.
“I think we should talk,” Sarah said at last.
She joined him on the steps, and when she spoke, her words and the sound of her voice cured something in him.
He was not surprised. He had known from the very beginning that she knew the answers. But it was more than that. Where Speke had been fragmented, Sarah was coherent. Her peace challenged him. Speke had been unable to tell the story of his life as anything but disconnected, lively anecdote. Sarah sat next to him on the cottage steps, and told Bell that she had sacrificed her life to this man and his career.
She summarized her life so succinctly that it was nearly an act of violence. “I did not pursue anything but the publication of these plays, and these musicals, because I believed in them. And while I traveled a little, and had the occasional lover, the work of Hamilton Speke was everything to me.”
Why was it, Bell wondered, that she seemed to be speaking of a time long past?
“There’s an owl that flies over the cottage sometimes,” said Sarah after a silence Bell was reluctant to break. “He makes a wonderful sound, like a manuscript falling through the dark.”
How austere her life had become, Bell thought, how many years she had spent on the campaign of building up the reputation of Hamilton Spek
e.
“He’s not what you expected,” she said after a long silence.
“I don’t know what I expected, really.”
“You’re disappointed.”
“No, I can honestly say I’m not disappointed. Although it’s weird how often the word ‘honest’ seems to crop up the last couple of days. I’m confused.”
“Life is all confusion. That’s dumb. I don’t mean to be philosophical. But, Christopher.” She stopped. It was the first time she had used his first name, and she seemed to want to test it carefully.
She did not speak for a long time, and Bell supposed that she was about to suggest that he leave and come back in a few weeks, or, perhaps, give up on the book altogether.
The bitter voice in him, the voice of insight, whispered: everyone wants to get rid of you.
When she spoke again, she said, “You know, I hope, how you can believe in someone even when you see their shortcomings.”
Bell was surprised. He had expected to eventually discuss the bad side effects of genius, the stories he already knew and cared little about. Drinking, temper, wild nights, chasing nubiles through the woods. That sort of detail fleshed out the portrait of a human being. But he had expected Sarah to be reluctant to share such tales, and yet here she was, hinting at something she could hardly bring herself to discuss.
He did not want to push her. Perhaps she was testing him, to see if he would make a capable ally. Perhaps she was probing him, to see how overeager he might become.
“The police were here this morning,” she said.
“I know.” Go slow, he cautioned himself. He listened to the night sounds: wind, and the passing overhead of a pair of wings. “Do you know why?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But you can guess?”
“I don’t like guessing.”
Sarah loved the hush of night here at Live Oak. She was thankful for his silence. She was about to make a decision that would change her life.
“My father was a cop,” she said. “A detective. He worked on counterfeiters. It amounted to endless stakeouts, and my mother and I were alone constantly, and yet thinking of my father. Even his absence had a weight.” Was it fair to use this man who was, after all, such a recent friend, as a confessor?
She continued, having gone so far. “It became a life of being two places at once. Where I really was, sitting while my mother sewed, helping with the ironing, while my soul, and my mother’s, were really out there somewhere with my father.”
She sensed him listening, and felt that his silence encouraged her, tugged her forward. “I grew accustomed to being alone, working by myself, taking care of my own life. I was too proud to settle for the life of a cop’s daughter. Even a smart cop, which he was. A smart, gentle, kind man. He was killed in a bar.” Even after all these years, this was a hard statement. “He went in looking for a suspect. His partner staked out the back, out by the dumpster. They expected the suspect to bolt and run out the back. Instead he hit my father with an ax handle.” Again, the words were too hard.
Bell put his hand over hers.
She made herself continue. “He was hit once, in the side of the head. His pension saw me through college, but wasn’t enough to get me into graduate school. I wanted to make something of myself, and I did. An English major can teach or take up computer programming. I ran a typing service. Stop me if I bore you. I sound tough, but I’m not. I’m tired of having a story to tell, and nobody to listen. Not much of a story, but it’s my life. Boring, right?”
“It’s fascinating.”
“But you have to say that, don’t you? It’s your fault. You must bring it out in people, like a priest or a psychiatrist.”
“And he brought you manuscripts to type, and you typed them, and a career began for both of you.”
“He wouldn’t like this, you know—the two of us talking. The old Ham wouldn’t mind. But the Hamilton Speke of the last day or two would find it very unsettling.” She gazed up at the stars, and then continued. “But I am, really, a cop’s daughter. He used to show me counterfeit bills that he’d confiscated, packets that were going to be used as evidence. ‘Look at this misery,’ he’d say. ‘Look at this misery and deceit.’ Have you ever seen a counterfeit bill?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“There is something eerie about counterfeit currency. It looks just fine, usually, when you first glance at it. But then you look again, and there is always something wrong. The color is off, or the lines on Franklin’s face are thick, and it’s spooky. This isn’t real, you think. This isn’t the real thing at all. And you have a chill inside.”
A creature somewhere in the dark made a sound, a cry of warning or even pleasure. She continued, “Ham doesn’t make sense to you, does he?”
“Not really.”
She did not speak for a while. “In a few years they’ll probably make a TV movie about Ham and me. But the truth is a little flat. We were never lovers. I knew right away he was a big talent. I had tears in my eyes as I typed Stripsearch. It was even better, really, before he revised it. The work was the product of someone who knew the truth about people. Maybe knew them too well to function as a normal person. Anyone with insights like that would have to do something violent, or self-destructive, from time to time. Life itself might be a crisis to someone who felt things so deeply.”
“Speke—Ham—doesn’t strike me as self-destructive. He has a temper, I imagine.”
“It used to be worse.” She gave a short, soft laugh. “It used to be terrible.”
“But something is left unsaid here.”
“What’s unsaid is this: it would have been better if you had never come here. But you’re here now. It’s too late. The process has begun.”
“I can leave. No, I mean it. I can delay the book indefinitely—”
She touched his lips with her fingers. To silence, but also to tell him something.
When she spoke again, there was a timbre in her voice she had never heard before. “Ham is a man like no one else you will ever meet. Something happened very recently. Something very bad.”
“And you aren’t sure what it is?”
“I used to think this was a place of refuge, a haven, an enchanted forest.”
“I think it is.”
“You have faith in yourself. I didn’t know if I could trust you,” she said softly. “I still don’t know. But I’ve reached a point in my life when I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know if you’re a kind man, or a weak one, or what you believe in, or what you hate. I’m going to take a risk. It’s time.”
He touched her face in the light that rose, strangely, from the hills of the estate, and fell from the stars, and seemed to play in the air about them.
Inside, in the special silence of the cottage, his hands were steady, and gentle and knowing as he undressed her, as though they had both known each other for a long time, for centuries, since light first fell. What are clothes, she thought, but clumsy pictures of human beings, maps of our lives, that we snap and button around our lives, our true selves, living beings hiding within fictions?
They both slept, but it was not like a sleep she had ever experienced before. She felt a third presence in the room, someone she had always known, a friend.
Survivors of shipwrecks, bobbing alone in lifeboats, are sometimes convinced that there is someone with them, and after they are rescued call out that their companion, too, be taken aboard. She had heard that lovers sometimes sense a third presence in the room, but she had never had this experience before.
Bell was awake, too. She reached for his hand, and his hand met hers in the darkness.
“I have so much to tell you,” she said.
18
Even as he dreamed that he was killing someone he knew the truth. This time it was not merely a nightmare. It was the truth. It was the knowledge, beating in him like a new, ugly heart, a diseased, pumping organ. The truth pulsed through his body, his blood turning to cold iron.
Maria was asleep beside him. Her breath rose and fell, evenly, slowly. She was strong, and untroubled by what they had done. “They.” Speke gave a dry laugh, a silent croak. What he, Hamilton Speke, Lord of Live Oak, favorite of audiences around the world, had done by his own hand.
But strength did not communicate itself to him. Her faith did not help him now. She slept.
What sort of person is this woman? he asked himself. How can she go on so calmly? She seemed to have resigned herself to reality completely, like a well-adjusted prisoner, a woman who thoroughly understood the limitations she faced.
He climbed out of the bed. He needed a pill, but something had happened to all the sleeping pills in the house. They were all gone, completely. He had been certain of a few old valium, so ancient they were damp-crumbled, but this afternoon he had fumbled through every medicine cabinet in the house, and found only Alka Seltzer and antihistamines.
Sleep was nothing more than a habit. He would learn to do without it. The bathrobe captured him, confining him, and when at last he fought into it, something ripped. Forget it, he told himself. Put on clothes.
Before coming to bed he had read the fax in the manila envelope left by Holub. It had been, to his relief, nothing remarkable. Grisly, but not remarkable, especially if you did not believe what you read. The fax was a mistyped hodgepodge, a report evidently from a detective’s files, of a series of murders. Speke didn’t like reading about violence, so he had scanned it, hastily. Mutilation, blood. This was the sort of subject he hated. It was awful the terrible things that could happen. Wounds so many centimeters deep, sharp instruments. He didn’t like gore, and besides, he did not believe Asquith could do anything like that. Some murderer chopped up a few very unfortunate women over a period of several years. One woman had been killed by a slender instrument thrust through the top of her skull. That was ghastly, and terrible to even think about. It had nothing to do with Asquith, Speke was convinced, and he had not finished reading every page.
When he had tugged on a shirt and a pair of pants, he made his way from the bedroom. He was going to forget all about medical advice. This was a time for scotch. Scotch and television. The two stalwarts of his life, his two favorite drugs. They would see him through the night.
Ghostwright Page 12