“I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly don’t know. But I’ll tell you what I tried to do.”
7
BETH WATCHED FROM THE DOORWAY AS PETER ONCE again rearranged the odds and ends on top of the old bookcases along the wall. She felt restless and out of place, almost intrusive, and as he worked, making what must have been minute adjustments in the positions of things, he’d grown silent and preoccupied, and the atmosphere in the room was leaden and close. What the room needed—what Peter needed—was a dose of Bobby’s Whoopee Cushion. Or maybe just a dose of Bobby himself, although by now she was glad she hadn’t brought him along. This was too morbid, too unsetting.
“What was the name of the Jetsons’ dog?” she asked suddenly, trying to distract him. “It wasn’t Conroy, was it?” Her voice sounded utterly out of place in the room, and the question fell flat. It even sounded to her like lunacy. She’d meant to force him to sing the theme song to the old television program, but something in the atmosphere made that kind of clowning around almost physically impossible.
And anyway, he didn’t answer. After several seconds of silence he looked up at her with a puzzled frown, then went straight back to work, polishing the glass panes in the bookcase doors now. Many of them were cracked, and the glass was so dusty and filmy that the few books within were visible only as a dark blur. As he wiped them clean, the glass reflected the candlelight, and the books behind the glass gained dimension, their outlines and age-dimmed colors growing distinct. Outside, the wind seemed to heighten, as if it drew energy from the darkness.
Peter moved a glass decanter on the bookcase a half inch to the right of where it had been sitting, then leaned over to examine the wood, shifting the decanter slightly again. There were four cut-crystal glasses next to it. Two of them were broken, but he arranged the broken glasses as carefully as the others, examining the wood closely before drawing a book out of the case and laying it next to the glasses. After peering at all four edges of the book, he picked it up, put it back into the case, and drew out another one, blowing the dust off the top before laying it down.
“It’s strange how you can tell just where things ought to go,” he said suddenly, the sound of his voice breaking the tension in the room. He struck a match, stepping to one of the tarnished old candleabras and relighting two candles that had gone out.
“Ought to go? According to whom?”
“According to all the marks on things, the traces and shadows. You can see the rings where the glasses and the decanter sat. Must have been years in the same place. The finish is discolored underneath. It’s the same under the book. It’s lighter than the wood that was exposed around it. Out of all the books in the crates, I think I’ve found the one that must have been left sitting there.”
“Good,” she said. “It probably wants to be there, after all that time.”
“That’s it exactly.” He stood back and looked at the wall, gesturing at one of the chairs in front of the hearth. “Go ahead and sit down,” he said. But abruptly he leaned down and looked at the chair legs, then shifted the chair minutely on the rug.
“Just right,” she said, testing out the chair cushion. “We’ll be living easy when the porridge cools down.”
“I want to reproduce a scene,” he said, oblivious to the tone of her voice.
“Why does that give me the creeps?” she asked.
He busied himself with the fire, carefully feeding it broken eucalyptus branches.
“Why don’t we trade chairs for a while, just to break the spell? You sit in mine and I’ll sit in yours. Maybe I’ll get a chance to see the ghosts then, and you’ll have a chance to see it all from my perspective. And while we’re at it, I don’t mean to complain, but those paintings on the wall are just downright ghastly, aren’t they? Whoever painted them never paid any attention to sunlight.”
He looked distant, lost in thought, as if he couldn’t or wouldn’t listen to that kind of talk, and for a moment he sat there in silence, tilting his head slightly as if he were listening.
“Did you know that a few minutes ago you called me …” she started to say.
He held his hand up, and she stopped, waiting for him. Then she heard something. From somewhere far away, and yet from no real direction, there came a scattering of sounds—nothing she could identify absolutely, what with the wind and the crackling of the fire. Taken altogether it sounded vaguely like the rustle and shuffle and clink of an occupied room. There was a sound like a cat meowing, and then, unmistakably, a door shutting. Peter narrowed his eyes, waiting, but the sounds diminished and were gone. “I guess it’s nothing,” he said finally.
“No, it wasn’t nothing,” she said. “I heard it, too.”
“Did you smell anything?” His voice was animated, eager.
. “The fire, maybe. It’s pretty smoky in here. Look, I think I really did hear something. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I thought I smelled whiskey, and maybe jasmine, a woman’s perfume.”
“You’re more tuned in,” Beth said. Too tuned in, she thought.
“Did you start to say something a moment ago?”
“I was going to say that you called me Esther again.”
“When?” He stared at her.
“Just a moment ago, when I was standing in the doorway. I guess you were talking to me.”
“I remember saying something, but I don’t remember what.”
“I’m very skeptical of this,” she said seriously.
“Think of it as a scientific test.” He stepped away from the fire and surveyed the room critically.
“Do you want me to write it all down?” she asked. “Maybe by being really scientific about it we can keep it under control.”
“Like having rules in a boxing match,” he said. “Marquis of Queensberry.”
“Exactly. We’ll force it to behave rationally. That’s the thing with ghosts. They’re like spoiled children, always demanding to have their way. Sometimes you’ve got to take a hard line with them.”
He grew silent again, distant, clearly unable to keep up any kind of banter. “What do you think of the room?” he asked finally, gesturing at the newly rearranged furniture, apparently satisfied at last.
“Nice,” she said. “Good thing the light’s dim, I guess.”
“I wanted things to be perfect, the way things used to be. I’ve got this picture in my mind that’s almost photographic—sort of developed while I was working, as if the room was waiting all these years to be restored.”
“Uncanny,” she said flatly.
“There were depressions in the rug from the feet of the chairs and tables, and the wall was shadowed around where the bookcases used to stand. There was even a sort of afterimage of shadow on the bookcase shelves so that I could make out where each of the books had been. Mostly they’re old medical books, but there’s a few novels that must have belonged to her.”
“Esther, you mean?”
He nodded, lost in thought again.
“I’m not sure you should be so anxious to give these things what they want.”
“You sound like Mr. Ackroyd.”
“It’s because I don’t know what we’re doing, and I’m telling you it’s starting to scare me. I’ll admit it. In the daylight it all sounded reasonable. Now it doesn’t.”
He reached across the table and put his hand on her arm. “I still don’t know what happened to Amanda and David,” he said, “but I believe they’re here somewhere. I don’t think they ever left at all.”
“You’ve said that. After all that’s happened to you, I guess I can’t argue with it. But admit it—it’s just a little obsessive, restoring the room so fanatically, putting everything in its place like you were getting ready to perform a spell. It’s like sending the devil an invitation.”
“Listen to that wind!” Peter said, sidetracking.
“I don’t like the wind,” she said. It made a strange humming sound outside, blowing through chinks and cracks in the
old house, which shook ominously with successive gusts.
He left her statement hanging in the air, unanswered. The flames in the fireplace burned with a silvery glow, threads of trailing smoke drawn downward, through the cracks between the stones of the hearth. It was a miracle that the old chimney was standing at all.
Suddenly nervous, she stood up and walked to the window, looking out at the dark woods. She was damned if she was going to be a prisoner of another woman’s chair, no matter how carefully positioned it was. Peter sat in silence, seemingly unaware that she’d gotten up. She glanced back at him. He was gone again, lost in the ozone. It was going to be an evening of long silences despite the very nice afternoon they’d spent together. Actually, the afternoon had contained some long silences, too, but of a different variety.
After their doughnut conversation she had known that they were going to see their various troubles through together. She’d had to convince him of that—to let her stay with him tonight, as a sort of brake. In the end he’d seen reason. And now here she was, trying to talk him out of whatever harebrained thing he was up to.
The moon hadn’t risen yet, and the night outside the windows was a mass of moving shadows that were only barely discernible as trees. The candles cast a flickering glow that seemed almost to reflect off the wall of darkness beyond the glass. Dimly, from somewhere out in the night, came the sound of weeping. She tensed, listening. It trailed away into silence. She heard only the wind and the clicking of leaves and twigs against the wooden siding like tapping fingers. The crackling of the fire sounded unnaturally loud behind her, and seemed to contain within it the noises she’d heard earlier—the clink of glasses, the groaning of springs in a seat cushion, the swish of book pages turning.
She glanced at Peter. He seemed almost to be scowling, his face dark and unhappy.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said, walking to his chair.
He was silent. She could see the fire reflected in his unblinking eyes.
“What’s six times six?” She looked straight into his face, waving her hand in front of his eyes, snapping her fingers.
“What?” His voice was flat, trancelike.
“Quick,” she said, “what’s the capital of Ohio? Say something. Speak.”
He stared into the fire.
“Where did King Henry keep his armies?” she asked, right into his face. “Come on, tell me. Don’t make me hurt you.”
He blinked at her, shook his head, maybe grappling with the ridiculous question.
“In his sleevies,” she said, then waited.
He looked at her in utter bewilderment, as if she’d gone crazy.
“It’s a joke. Get it? Armies, sleevies, handsies … Heh, heh.” She laughed woodenly.
Then, in a voice like an incantation, Peter said, “Moses supposes his noses are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously.”
“Thank God,” she said, collapsing backward into her chair. A cloud of dust rose around her, and she waved her hand through it, turning her face. “I thought you wigged out on me. Are you okay? You keep zoning out. It’s better if you talk.”
“What’s better if I talk?” He yawned and stretched. “I nearly fell asleep there.”
“With your eyes open? What were you staring at?”
He started to say something, then stopped abruptly. His head swiveled toward the window, and a noise escaped his throat—the sound of raw fear. Beth twisted around to look, half standing up out of the chair, her heart accelerating.
A boy stood just outside, staring in, his face the color of gray clay in the dim light. The wind blew through his hair, and one of his hands was pressed against a pane of glass. His dull eyes searched the room for a moment before he turned away, gliding into the darkness beyond the edge of the window frame.
8
KLEIN TOLD HER ALL OF IT—ABOUT WINTERS AND SLOANE, about Pomeroy and their dealings with the local cabin owners, the fraud, the collusion. Getting out from under it would cost them. If they were lucky they could resell the cabins at some kind of profit, pay off the fronts, pay off Winters and Sloane, put it all behind them. The words rushed out until he had played it all through, even his finding out about Pomeroy’s obsession with Beth and his confrontation with Pomeroy in Beth’s house yesterday.
She looked at him and shrugged, shaking her head again. “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “Except that I knew. I knew there was something, and I knew that it was getting to you. That’s what I was talking about yesterday afternoon.”
He realized suddenly that he’d come to the end of it. He couldn’t tell her anything more. He had driven out here determined to unburden himself of the whole story—the blackmail, revelations about his past. But he saw that there was no reason for that now. Pomeroy was dead. And he knew that he couldn’t tell her about the blackmail anyway. If holding that back was the same as lying, then he’d have to learn to live with being a liar. Telling her anything about Pomeroy’s death, about moving the body, ditching the car and identification papers, would make her an accessory. What could she do, turn him in? Or would she live with the day-to-day, month-to-month fear of his being arrested?
Once again Pomeroy would have insinuated himself into their lives, his ghost muttering threats, making his nasty phone calls from the grave. Bury him, Klein told himself. For Lorna’s own protection he had to stop talking now. Confession was over. It was true that a day might come when there was a knock on the door, and men in gray suits stood outside wanting to ask a few questions about a body found in the hills. But if that day did come, then at least he could tell Lorna truthfully that he had kept it from her out of love and hope….
She was staring at him, waiting for him to say something.
“That’s all,” he stammered. “What I want to say is that I know I haven’t been paying any attention to us, to you. It’s obvious now. But I swear it wasn’t obvious a couple of days ago.”
She nodded now, instead of shrugging. And it wasn’t exaggerated; the nod wasn’t meant to be ironic. She understood him. He reached across and squeezed her arm again, and although he had to force himself to do it, he said, “I love you,” and then sat back in his chair, the words sounding rusty from disuse.
She smiled just a little, as if at the idea of him trying so damned hard to do something he wasn’t very good at. “I was thinking of going to the AA meeting at Saddleback Hospital Tuesday night.”
“Why?” he said, suddenly coming to her defense. “There’s no way you’ve got that kind of problem. Just because I might have said a couple of stupid things …”
“They weren’t stupid things. They might have been mean things, but they were true.”
He started to argue with her, but then stopped abruptly. He was doing it again—pretending that nothing mattered, that it was better to keep your head in the sand. “All right,” he said. “There’s no harm in checking it out. Maybe I’ll tag along.”
She set her coffee cup down and stood up, leaning against the porch railing. The moon was just showing above the ridge, and the sky was full of stars. He stood next to her and put his arm around her awkwardly, half expecting her to shrug it off. After a long time she said, “It’s beautiful out here when the wind blows,” and she leaned her head against his shoulder.
9
BETH FOLLOWED PETER THROUGH THE BACK DOOR, DOWN the wooden stairs, grabbing onto the handrail to steady herself against the wind that swept across the road and rushed through the forest trees. The gray trunks of alders bent before it, and the heavy limbs of oaks and sycamores swung ominously in the darkness. Moonlight shone on the bricks of the walkway, illuminating the leaves that skittered past, the moon itself barely risen above the ridge.
Something moved along the edge of the house, in the dark shadow of the rock retaining wall. Peter stopped abruptly, shouting to warn her, and she grabbed his arm to steady him, looking past him, expecting to see the boy. Instead, a man stood staring straight back at them, through them, his dark coattails flapping i
n the wind, his hair wild, eyes livid with rage. He held a piece of broken tree limb in his hand, which he threw angrily into the forest, suddenly striding forward as if he meant to run them down. Peter trod backward, pushing Beth behind him, and just then the man vanished. For an instant he was a mere patch of pale radiance like moonlit dust, and then he was gone.
She was aware of the boy crying now, the sound of it close, impossibly loud on the wind. She stood clutching Peter, who breathed heavily, his face a mask of fear. He shut his eyes and said to her, “Did that look like me?”
“What do you mean?” she half shouted, barely able to hear him above the wind. The night was full of noise, the crying and a deep buzzing like bees in a hive.
“He looked like me.”
She shook her head and shouted, “No, he didn’t.” The man, ghost, whatever it was, hadn’t looked anything like Peter. He was dark, with deep eyes, and heavy browed…. “Let’s go back in,” she shouted, pulling on Peter’s arm. But he cocked his head then, listening, as if just now conscious of the crying.
The latticework gate blocking the open cellar swung slowly open on its hinges, and something darted past, straight into the cellar. A cat? She’d seen only a gray shape. Peter stepped warily toward the gate, shining the beam of a flashlight along the retaining wall. They stopped outside, peering in, Peter playing the light across the stone piers and the broad base of the chimney.
Was the boy under there? She pictured the face at the window, blank and staring, discolored by the yellow light of the candles. It’s just a little boy, she told herself, listening to the crying. It was farther away now, maybe deeper under the house, maybe somewhere off within the fringe of the woods.
“All right!” Peter shouted. “Come on out!”
There was no response, no movement in the darkness. He bent over and shined the flashlight into the recesses of the cellar, but the beam was weak, and the cellar itself was full of rubble and stone piers and wooden supports that threw myriad shadows, making it impossible to see clearly beyond a few feet.
Night Relics Page 33