The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  Mr Ennis lived a life of solitude and grunt sustenance, appearing magically in his chair around seven with a frozen chicken dinner still in the tin. He set these meals upon a folding TV tray and watched an hour and a half of local news, then Wheel of Fortune, the letter blocks shining bricks of white light across his chest and face and the oily sofa that propped him up like a short, meaty mannequin. After Vanna and Pat said goodnight, it was cop shows, heroic high drama until bedtime at ten sharp.

  Initially there was something comforting in his isolation, a reminder that I was not necessarily the loneliest soul in our corner of the city. But toward the end I watched him with a gnawing hopelessness, too aware that if I continued on my present course his fate would soon be mine.

  That evening, when the one-year anniversary of Stacey’s death was less than two weeks away, I checked in on all the usual suspects, but there was scant entertainment to be had. The air turned cool for March and I smelled rain.

  I ducked back into the house and descended the stairs, on my way to retrieve another beer from the fridge. The wide landing was covered with a floral runner. Above the landing’s center, at eye level, was a porthole window that faced east. There wasn’t much to see out this window, except for the wild tangle of juniper bushes that threatened to overtake Mr Ennis’s shitbox abode and, I suspected, played hell with my allergies every summer.

  As I passed the window, a pale face with a great yawning mouth swam over its surface. I startled and turned quickly, the way you do when someone on the street bumps shoulders with you. The face that confronted me was my own. Just a reflection created by the chandelier hanging in the foyer below me, and the outer darkness pressing itself against the house. I exhaled and rolled my shoulders before moving on.

  Except that I hadn’t been yawning, I realized. The image I glimpsed had been yawning or stretching its jaw in some demonstration of power. Also, there had been a wave of blonde hair above the pale face. I have dark brown hair and it’s messy, but it doesn’t fall in any sort of wave over my face.

  This kind of discrepancy does not usually trouble your average drunkard. We see spots, doorways tilt. But maybe by then I was conditioned to sense a new opportunity for spying, always looking for the parted curtain, the inviting figure walking by a narrow pane. Whatever the reason, I was compelled to press my face against the glass, cupping my hands around my cheeks to block the light behind me while I squinted into the encroaching darkness.

  There were Mr Ennis’s juniper bushes, forming a long scraggly wall along the side of his house. Above them, about halfway back, was a frosted window with rusting metal louvers. That would be his bathroom. But by craning my neck to the left, up the lane of my driveway and toward our front lawns, I could see into his living room and kitchen.

  The old round fluorescent light in the kitchen made the yellow Formica countertop glow like cartoon butter. Next to the brown, latching handle fridge and stainless steel toaster was a rack of wooden pegs with red and white checkered dish towels hanging from them. I couldn’t see the table in the kitchen, but there must have been one, otherwise the vase full of flowers would have been hovering in mid-air. The vase was transparent crystal and contained half a dozen green stems supporting a bright arrangement of violets. I was thinking it rather unusual that tired old Mr Ennis had fresh flowers in his kitchen when a pale hand came into view and clasped the bunch in a knuckle-whitening fist. A long flat blade sliced and the heads of the violets toppled over. I want to say that my eyes shifted, but that’s not right, because they didn’t have to. It merely felt like I was looking down as the woman crouched and looked up, seizing my gaze. Her face was puffy, her features blurred, the whole pie of it waxy, the color of Chèvre. But I knew the platinum hair which hung to her neck, ending in a choppy shelf. I recognized the blurred pools of icy blue where her eyes should have been, and they found me. From the corner of Mr Ennis’s kitchen, across his darkened living room, through his window and up to our little porthole, Stacey looked at me.

  I gasped and, as if hearing me (impossible), Mr Ennis jostled on his couch and looked over his shoulder, staring into the darkness between us. My entire body tingled and the house seemed to quake. I clutched the window frame and, when I looked back to the kitchen, she was gone. I did not see her vanish. One second she was there, the next she wasn’t.

  Mr Ennis heaved himself from the couch, but made it only one step before going immobile, as if deciding he didn’t really need another glass of grape soda, and sank back into his couch. He continued watching his television as if nothing had happened.

  I staggered away from the portal window and tripped down two steps before catching myself on the banister rail. I looked over my shoulder, down into the foyer, my mouth moving in silence as I realized there was no one around to confirm what I had seen. I considered going over and knocking on his door. But what would I say?

  I returned to the couch and sat staring at the walls, a chill seeping into me. I was drunk, I decided. I never felt drunk any more, but I drank all day, steadily, continuously, so I must have been. I must have let my anxieties get the better of me. Your own reflection does strange things to you. I repeated assorted explanations to myself until I dozed off on the couch.

  In the morning a slow warbling siren disturbed me from my fugue. I leapt from the couch and swerved into the foyer. I peered through the front window and Mr Ennis was just a white shape. The medics were wheeling him down the steps of his front walk on a gurney. Even before I yanked the door open and crossed my lawn to confront the police and Lucy Arnold and the firemen who could do nothing except hold back the rest of the gawkers, I understood Mr Ennis would not be coming home.

  3

  ‘How are you holding up?’ Lucy Arnold said.

  ‘Real good.’ The shock was still rippling through my system. ‘You want a beer?’

  I counted the cases stacked beside the fridge. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and most of the thirteenth. A God-blessed ocean of beer. I’d tired of having to leave late at night to buy more, so I went to Ralph’s every Sunday and bought five or six cases. Tecaté, Corona, Dos Equis, whatever was on sale and Mexican. Always cans. No limes.

  ‘It’s not quite ten, James.’

  ‘Don’t mind me, then.’ I loaded twenty warm Tecatés into the produce drawers, removed a cold Modelo. My hands were shaking as I gestured toward the living room. ‘Have a seat.’

  Lucy moved like a statue coming to life. For all her fitness activity-patrolling the boardwalk on her LAPD-issue Trek, jogging in Hancock Park, screwing Match.com buddies to the wall - she had an unnerving ability to come off stiff, always prying herself from counters or leaning tiredly against doorways. She hadn’t had her shower this morning (the hair was mousy, a fleck of sleep still clung to the bridge of her nose) and her yoga pants and black t-shirt showed too much of her frame. I was reminded of Stacey, if for no other reason than Lucy was in matters physical her polar opposite. Whereas Stacey had been just over five feet tall, voluptuous in her compact frame, and - until the last year - vibrant with a contained energy that somehow fit her playful manner, perpetually grinning, Lucy was hips and elbows and clavicles, a heron at the arms and neck, always on the verge of frowning.

  I sat in my Scandinavian recliner. Lucy glanced around to see what I had done with the place since her last visit, saw the answer was nothing and became a geometry problem on the couch.

  ‘So, what’s up?’ she said. ‘You seemed pretty shaken up out there.’

  ‘It’s been a bad week. Though obviously not as bad as Mr E’s.’ I poured a little beer on the floor for him.

  Lucy looked at the puddle, then at me, as though I were a dog who has just lifted his leg in the house.

  ‘It’s a black thing,’ I said. This did not put her at ease.

  ‘Did you know him?’ I once confessed to spying on her and she had been flattered. But that was another time, and I never told her my habits extended to the rest of our block.


  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That what’s sad. He was just this lonely guy.’

  ‘He was old, James. Maybe he wanted to be left alone. Is there something else bothering you?’

  I remembered Stacey’s face. First in the porthole window, then in his kitchen. I wondered where she was now, the question itself causing me to shudder. It was the booze.

  ‘No more than usual,’ I said. Lucy stared at me.

  From the moment the officer in charge greeted me at the dividing line between our properties, I made up my mind that I would not tell anyone what I had witnessed.

  ‘Coronary event is the early read,’ the stone-faced cop had said. ‘If you’re not a relative I need you to stand back there, on your property, sir.’

  Nothing I could have told the police on the scene, or the one now sitting in my living room, would have helped Mr Ennis or his family, if he had any.

  ‘Is it the timing?’ Lucy said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘It will be a year next week, right?’

  Oh, that. ‘A week from Sunday,’ I said. ‘You don’t think it’s going to have any significance. It’s just another day on the calendar.’

  Lucy frowned. ‘Of course it does. You wouldn’t be human if it didn’t. We’re conditioned to recognize anniversaries, dates.’

  I swallowed half my beer.

  ‘Do you have plans?’ she said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Someone to spend the weekend with. I guess if it were me I would want to get out of the house, go do something good for myself.’

  ‘No, I’m not seeing anyone.’

  She sighed. I guessed I was being an asshole.

  ‘Tell me about you. How’s life on the beat?’

  Lucy filled me in on a couple of her recent arrests, including the apprehension of a handsome Korean masher who proved so charming she found herself jotting her number on her notepad and slipping it into his pocket before the cruiser arrived to take him in for booking. She regretted this after further inspection of his record (the previous mashees were young), and eventually had to change her phone number. She received a small promotion for hitting her five-year mark with a clean record. I congratulated her and the conversation veered back to actual relationships, as it tends to between single people who have been knocked out of the major leagues but haven’t given up hope of receiving one more call from the front office.

  ‘There’s a guy,’ she said. ‘He’s fine, but I knew by the second date it wasn’t going anywhere.’

  ‘He’s no good in bed?’

  ‘There’s more to it than sex, James.’ But she was blushing.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I’m a cop. Why does every guy think this is a green light to break out the handcuffs?’

  ‘We’re always looking for the new play.’

  She laughed. Okay, there was still a little something there and neither of us flinched. Despite mucking up everything I touched, there still existed in this woman some goodwill toward me. With feeble effort I could parlay it into something comforting, maybe even something real. On any other morning, but not this one.

  ‘You look good, Lucy,’ I said. ‘Happy.’

  She tilted her head. ‘Thank you.’

  A moment stretched between us.

  I said, ‘Now you’re supposed to say how good I look.’

  She cupped a hand over her grin. ‘Oh, James. You look like shit.’

  ‘See, that wasn’t so hard.’

  ‘What’s going on with your hair? And the beard’s getting a little unruly.’

  ‘I’m going for a kind of nineties grunge thing.’

  Neither of us could tell if I was joking.

  ‘So, are you looking?’ she asked. ‘For the new play?’

  ‘I’m a fucking mess. It never ends.’

  ‘Do you want it to end? Because I think that’s part of it. Wanting to move on.’

  I finished my beer. ‘What else do you know about him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Ennis.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed I had returned to the subject of our deceased neighbor. ‘Not much. I remember him mentioning a son in Barstow or Reno, I think.’

  ‘You talked to him?’

  ‘A few times. I invited him to that pot-luck Thanksgiving I threw two years ago. He was polite but declined. I didn’t press him.’

  ‘Could you confirm the cause of death?’

  Lucy frowned. ‘He had a heart attack. Didn’t Troy tell you?’

  ‘Troy?’

  Lucy spun her finger in a circle. ‘The officer who spoke to you before I led you home.’

  ‘Oh, right. Did he seem, you know, at peace?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Did he look terrified out of his fucking mind? I wanted to scream at her, but of course did not. ‘Can they tell if he went quickly or if he suffered?’

  ‘Like more than a heart attack suffered?’

  ‘Never mind - oh, shit, wait.’ I sat forward. ‘The flowers. Did they find a vase full of flowers in the kitchen?’

  ‘Flowers?’

  ‘Yes, purple ones, with the heads cut off.’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Will you check?’

  Lucy’s patience was nearing its end. ‘If it’s important. Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me? Because if you saw something—’

  ‘No, no. I’m just . . . I had a bad dream, maybe. It’s cool. I haven’t slept well for a few days.’ I looked at the couch. ‘Thanks for coming by, though.’

  She stood, not meeting my gaze. I followed her to the front door. Why did I feel like I was disappointing her again?

  ‘Hey.’ I touched her shoulder. She flinched, then regarded me with her mistrusting deer eyes. ‘This weekend. Maybe we can go drink some bad Chianti and have a sing-along at Cheese & Olive’s.’

  She smiled. ‘I’d like that.’

  I nodded. ‘Cool.’

  ‘Yeah, cool.’ She tensed up, debated it, then awkwardly kissed me on the corner of my mouth.

  I watched her scuttle across the lawn. She glanced back as she met up with the sidewalk and waved.

  I waved back. ‘What do you make of that one, Stace?’

  In the silence that followed, I regretted addressing my wife aloud.

  Four days after Mr Ennis was wheeled out of his home, two men dressed in gray work pants and shirts emptied his belongings into a moving truck. The commercial cleaning crew - six Hispanic women and an Asian guy with a clipboard - swept through after the movers. A forty-something white man who may have been Mr Ennis’s son appeared, pounding a For Rent sign into the lawn with a rubber mallet. As he was doing this, his cellphone went off. He removed it from his pocket and spoke to someone for fifteen minutes. He clamped his phone shut and slipped it into his pocket, shaking his head and smiling ever so slightly. He then removed the For Rent sign and hucked it into his truck bed, not bothering to wipe the dirt clods from its legs.

  I slept in late the next morning and missed a phone call from Lucy. Her message said, ‘Hey, James, I know you’re sleeping but I just wanted to let you know I spoke to the ME. Our friend died of a heart attack. He had a history of heart disease, so . . . yeah. No flowers, either, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring me some. Just kidding. I don’t need flowers.’ Snorts and snickers of embarrassment. ‘Okay, looking forward to Saturday, so I hope you’re warming up your vocal chords. Call me.’

  I meant to. I really did. But other developments averted my attention, and I did not call Lucy Arnold back.

  This turned out to be another mistake, one of the bigger ones.

  4

  The era of the balcony was over. I began to wonder how much I could get for the house. I guessed I had about seventy thousand in home equity, and half as much in my checking account, where it was earning all of one point in annual interest and shrinking by five thousand a month. Three thousand went to the mortgage, the
other two to bills and beer. I had enough to start over somewhere decent, and I decided I would call our realtor, David, the next morning.