The Girl in the Attic

by Ed Gorman

  "Mr. Renfrew!"

  "God, Mom, he really is a dork!"

  But somehow Renfrew managed to aim the taxi around the front of the truck and make it safely to the other side of the intersection. The truck driver gave the flame-painted taxi both the horn and the finger.

  Renfrew pulled up in front of the Royal. He seemed oblivious to the fact that they'd all narrowly escaped death. He was back tapping time to Lady Gaga.

  "How much?" Sally said through gritted teeth.

  Without missing a beat, he pointed a finger to the meter that read $5.85.

  Sally handed him a five and a one.

  "No change," he said.

  "You run a taxi and you don't have any change?"

  "Usually people just tell me to keep it."

  "Because they were so impressed with your driving, no doubt," Sally said, sounding bitchy and not caring.

  He nodded to the Royal.

  "You and the kid staying there?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "Just kind of weird, is all," he said, continuing to pound out rhythm on his dashboard.

  "Why do you say that?"

  He nodded to Jamie.

  "She kind of looks like her."

  "Who are you talking about?"

  "Your kid," Renfrew says. "She kind of looks like Anne Edmonds."

  "And who is Anne Edmonds?"

  Renfrew sort of shrugged. "Oh, this little tween back in the mid-nineties who killed five people." He grinned. "With an ax, yet." He nodded to the hotel. "Right in there, too."

  Sally took her daughter's arm protectively and said, "Come on, Jamie. I've had enough of this man."

  She slammed the door so hard, the flames on the side of the cab jumped up and down.

  Renfrew pulled away in a blare of music and a squeal of tires.

  They stood in the late afternoon sunlight on the baking sidewalk.

  "Boy, I wish we were back home," Jamie said, sounding miserable.

  "Forget about what he said."

  "You mean how I reminded him of that Anne Edmonds?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, that could explain why Cletus Olsen was looking at me so funny, and why the one-eyed man was peeking out from behind the curtains. I'm starting to feel like a freak!"

  "Honey, you're not the freak—they are. Smalltown people are like that, sometimes."

  "I thought you liked small towns."

  "I do—mostly. But they have characteristics that bother me, too."

  "Xenophobia?"

  "Exactly."

  Jamie grinned. "Well, maybe this Anne Edmonds was cute, anyway."

  Sally smiled back. "You are getting older. Vanity."

  Just once—as her left foot touched the threshold—did Jamie draw back from going inside. She looked at her mother, and something like fear shone in her eyes, but she let her mother lead the way inside.

  "I hope they have room service," Jamie said, feeling better once they stood at the registration desk. "Then we can have them bring up sandwiches while we watch 'Entertainment Tonight.' It's on in another twenty minutes."

  Sally laughed and jerked her head toward their luggage. Jamie’s laptop was tucked neatly inside, cushioned by her favorite jeans and a velour hoodie. "Maybe they'll have internet access and you can tell me more about how wealthy people live."

  Then something remarkable happened. Sally turned and saw the striking blond man she'd glimpsed in the restaurant walking toward her. She couldn't help feeling that this was a man she wanted to know. She recognized some part of herself in his melancholy.

  He walked behind the desk and turned a rather fancy registration book to them. "Would you like to register?" he asked.

  Sally felt Jamie's eyes on her.

  "My mom seems to have lost her voice," Jamie said, "so why don't you let me register for us?"

  Which is just exactly what she, in her playful way, proceeded to do.

  2

  It was a graveyard, Carlotta's little apartment. In the front room, on an upright piano too big for the place, and covered with a paisley fringed piano scarf, sat a few dozen photographs of dead people. They came, like grave markers, in a variety of sizes, some small and modest, others large and important. Hanratty looked them over each time he came here, and the sight of the museum-like display never failed to depress him. The farmer in the 1920 wedding suit; the straw-haired kid sitting in the rumble seat of a Ford roadster; the burly gray-haired man in the World War II Army uniform; the old folks at a picnic grinning out some of their final days for a camera. Time . . . the photographs assaulted Hanratty with their majesty. Convinced him, if he needed any more convincing, that the Romantic poets of his college days—old frigging Byron and frigging Keats and frigging Shelley—had been right. That in the end you could erect all the monuments to yourself you wanted, but Time got you anyway. He stared at the photographs and knew what they must mean to Carlotta—probably happy memories in most cases. But he couldn't help feeling sorry for her. She lived in a graveyard and didn't know it.

  He went out to the refrigerator and helped himself to a Diet Pepsi. On his last visit, he'd brought the sixer along and stashed it in the fridge so he'd have something to drink when he came here. Carlotta wouldn't buy it. Said the chemicals were harmful. All he could do was smile when she said things like that. Given her penchant for candy, she probably ate a pound a day of red dye no. 2. And here she was afraid of a little Diet Pepsi.

  While he waited for her, Hanratty finished looking around the apartment. The furniture reminded him of the stuff in his own sleeping room. The TV set was the only nice thing. A brand new 32-inch, Sanyo LCD flat screen that took up one entire corner of the living room.

  During the rest of the wait, he occupied himself with watching the window air conditioner freeze up and drip, all the while trying to figure out what had caused Carlotta to be so excited. When she'd called his rooming house, she'd sounded as if a close relative had just died.

  She came out in a worn light-blue corduroy robe too hot for the scorching twilight heat, and fat pink hair curlers that gave her the appearance of a parody housewife Carol Burnett might have played in a skit. He knew she was disturbed because wrapped in her mannish fist was a can of Hamm's Beer.

  "Didn't hear you come in," she said.

  "You should lock up. Anybody could walk in."

  "This is Haversham. We don't have problems like that."

  He stared at her. She was a stolid woman, slow to smile, virtually impossible to know. She was the high school girl who never quite outgrew her tomboy days—not even forty years later. "Anne Edmonds killed four people in Haversham."

  She stared back at him, seeming to be irritated by his flip comment. "That's the only serious trouble we've ever had."

  She sat down across from him at the table. The room smelled of past meals—meat, especially. She sipped at her beer and stared dully out the window. In the street below, a hot rod blasted away with the backfire from dual exhausts. Rock-and-roll blared briefly. She said, "They get more disrespectful every year."

  "The kids?"

  She nodded.

  "I was just like them," Hanratty said, not wanting to say something adult and hypocritical.

  She shot him a look as hot as the weather. "Are you proud of it?"

  "Not especially."

  "Good."

  Then she took another sip. When she put the beer down, she said, "He used to drink Hamm's."

  "Your husband?"

  "Uh-huh."

  She was going into one of her reveries. Sometimes it was okay, hearing about him, how he'd lived and died a railroad man (he'd tumbled off an icy box car to his death one night, cut in half beneath steel wheels), his habits, quirks, fears. But tonight Hanratty was faced with running out of money, and he needed some help fast.

  "You looked bored," she said. Her tone caught him. She sounded like a lover bent on picking a fight, the way two people get when they need a few hours away from each other.

  "No," he said.

&
nbsp; "You don't like hearing about Alan, do you?"

  "Most of the time it's fine."

  "But not now."

  "Carlotta, Jesus, look. . ."

  She held up her hand. "What did I tell you about cursing around me?"

  "Sorry."

  "There's no excuse for it!"

  He flared. "I said I was sorry."

  She took another sip, stared out the window some more, looked old and lonely and wretched, except for the comic touch of the pink hair curlers.

  For his part, Hanratty just sat there and waited her out. His shirt was stuck to his back from the heat. The meat smell on the air had started to nauseate him. He looked over at the photographs of the dead people again. How the fuck had his life ever gotten this screwed-up? He wanted to be back in suburbia, happy with wife and kids.

  "I heard her today," Carlotta said.

  That got his attention. "The knocking?"

  Carlotta nodded.

  "You're sure?"

  "I'm sure."

  He couldn't help smiling. He sat there in his sweat and poverty and oblivion and grinned his ass off.

  "What are you so happy about?"

  "I needed something to tell my editors. This is going to help."

  "What if they don't believe you?"

  "Oh, they're going to believe me, all right."

  She eyed him skeptically. "What makes you so sure?"

  "Because I'm going to record it."

  "The knocking."

  "Yes."

  "When?"

  "Tonight."

  She shook her head. "Maybe she won't knock."

  "I've just got a feeling my luck has changed."

  "How would you record it, anyway, from across the street?"

  "That's the point, Carlotta. I'm not going to be across the street. I'm going to be in the hotel itself. In the attic."

  She put her beer down again. "Mr. Edmonds, he'll never let you up there."

  "I'm not going to ask his permission, I'm just going to go up there."

  She shook her head. "Sometimes I wonder if I ever should have gotten ahold of you."

  He smiled. "Like it or not, we're sort of business partners. Remember the contract we signed?"

  A year ago Carlotta had contacted the CBS reporter who'd done all the stories on the occult.

  David Hanratty was his name. She'd started sending him letters, telling him about the incredible events that had taken place in Haversham and how a young girl had been possessed by the spirit of a woman who had murdered a man in the hotel in 1932. Hanratty was gone from CBS, but a friendly secretary there forwarded him all his mail. Carlotta sent him so many letters that he didn't have any choice but to respond. And then gradually he started seeing a book in it. . . He wrote a twelve-page outline, sent it to a half-dozen agents—but none bought. Then he used a few of the publishing contacts he'd had from his New York days—but again, no sale. In a supermarket line one day, reading the ratty headlines about Jennifer's latest diet and the possibility of aliens having taken over the White House, he recognized the sleazy tabloids for what they were—his last, best hope. Within a week, the editor of the International Tattler was intrigued by having a former CBS Evening News man doing a story for him and Hanratty was drawing $2000 a month and living in Haversham.

  But now that same editor was no longer so intrigued. He wanted results. Fast.

  "Mr. Edmonds might have you arrested," Carlotta said.

  "He won't even know I'm there."

  Carlotta finished her beer. "Sometimes I forget why I started writing you all those letters."

  "You mean Anne?"

  "Yes. She'd never have done anything like that if she hadn't been possessed."

  "I believe you."

  "She was a very good little girl." She teared up. Carlotta had been Anne's babysitter for years.

  She thought of the girl as her own daughter. She didn't care about any money the book might bring, or about getting famous, or even about proving the existence of the supernatural. She just wanted to clear the girl's name, exonerate her from charges of insanity or evil. She'd been possessed, otherwise she could never have done such a terrible thing.

  "I need a favor," he said. "I want you to give me the key to the back door."

  She frowned. "He'd fire me if he ever found out."

  He used a cheap device, ashamed of himself as he did so. "You want to help Anne, don't you?"

  Tears came back to her eyes. "Wait here."

  In a few moments she came back with a silver key which she gave to him. "You'd better wait till after ten."

  "All right."

  "The stairs in the back lead all the way up to the attic."

  "I'll probably need a key for that."

  "You'll find one under a trunk that sits to the right of the door. The trunk's empty. It's easy to move."

  "Thanks, Carlotta." He stood up. He hated to leave her alone with her graveyard of photos, but he wondered what, at her age, he'd have for companionship. Probably nothing more than photos himself—pictures of the daughter he'd never spent enough time with, pictures of all the newsy friends who were going to be the next Dan Rather, but who now presided over "happy news" in South Dakota, pictures of lovers who had since gone on to bear the children of other men and know something like real love.

  He did something he'd never done before put out a hand to touch her meaty shoulder. Different as they were from each other, he felt a kinship with her. She might have been his older sister. "One of these nights I'm going to take you out and buy you a fancy dinner."

  She raised her head. She looked awful. "You just prove that my little Anne was in the power of that crazy woman. That's all you need to do for me."

  In the slow, lazy dusk, her words had the crack of shots being fired.

  3

  He was the nearest thing Haversham had to a real mystery, the man with one eye. His real name, long forgotten, was Richard O'Brien. He seemed to walk the streets night and day, and to shave and bathe only occasionally. He took his meals at the little white diner out on the north edge of town and slept in a barn loft not too far from the diner. Sometimes he sat in the library, especially on hot days, when the air conditioning was not unlike a miracle, and read old newspapers, very old ones, way back to '31. These were the only times people saw him smile—something in the newspapers seemed to make him sentimental, and his one dark eye gleamed wetly and his horrible teeth shone through chapped lips and his filthy, matted hair bounced on his skull as he chuckled.

  When he'd first come here back in '79 (it was rumored at the time that he'd been injured in the Viet Nam War and was "not quite right in the head," as the locals of the time always put it), he'd gotten himself a job as a handyman at the Western Auto store, but inexplicably he'd lost it. Then he'd lost jobs at the A&P, the Dairy Queen and the A&W. Then he became the sort of man you hired for 50 cents an hour to mow your lawn, or to do some backbreaking carrying, or to clean out the garage that had sat untouched for the past decade. He always had the hardscrabble dollars necessary for food and shelter, he never touched liquor, he was always polite to women, and once he even pulled the five-year-old McGregor boy from certain death by knocking him out of the way of Mr. Willard Brimley's shiny new Cadillac.

  Then the Overholser girl disappeared.

  She was nineteen and was given to the kind of short-short-skirts worn most prominently by Goldie Hawn in the pictures that played downtown at the Orpheum. The joke was that "more soldiers had visited her than had ever visited Ft. Bragg." It was true enough.

  She was a fleshy girl prone to too much makeup and too many hysterics. She was always mooning over one of the many lovers who'd lain with her in her drab little room above the Dew Drop Inn, where she was a waitress, and her customers kidded her about it mercilessly. This was back in September of 1980, so the way she passed through her pain was to listen to a lot of Olivia Newton John and James Taylor and Billy Joel, to drink a lot of 3.2 Hamm's Beer (sometimes in a very unladylike way, right out
of the quart bottle), and to smoke the hell out of a pack of cigarettes, one after another. This was pretty much her life at the time.

  At closing time one night, O'Brien was in there having a malt. He took a kid's delight in 45 cent malts—the biggest they had—where you mixed strawberry and chocolate together. She had been pulling the shades down the way she did every night, and (according to O'Brien) that was when he'd left.

  But the Overholser girl was never seen again.

  After a few days, Police Chief Crowley started looking for her. People remembered seeing O'Brien in there.

  The following weekend, fifty-three men dressed in hunting clothes began combing a seven-mile radius in every direction looking for her body with dogs as excited as their owners.

  The body was never found.

  There was an ambitious county attorney at the time who talked of prosecuting O'Brien, but then the attorney's wife sued him for divorce, charging physical cruelty, so his ambition was less pleasing to the public eye, and the O'Brien matter just sort of faded away. But the people of Haversham never forgot.

  They started calling O'Brien "One Eye," and children taunted him when he came shambling down the street. Teenagers cruising in sports cars chased him sometimes and called him names.

  Whenever a kid was missing for more than a half-hour, the first place the cops went was to look up One Eye. Whenever a girl was raped, whenever anybody reported a Peeping Tom, it was One Eye who was sought.

  Instead of leaving Haversham, he proved defiant. He not only stayed, he stayed to trouble them. Once, in the town square, a group of kids started calling him names. He picked up a nearby puppy, set its head beneath his heel, and stomped on its face. He stood on corners, ogled pretty girls, and sat across from the Methodist church on Sunday morning drinking something that looked like a urine specimen. You could easily smell him from ten feet away, and you could sense him moving ineluctably and mysteriously like midnight shadows themselves.

  And here he came now.

  There was a chatter of children when he was spotted—giggles and gawking—and then they ran behind the elms, where they'd been playing hide-and-seek and hid as if their lives depended on it.

  One Eye, dressed in his filthy ragged sport coat, baggy pants, and K-Mart plastic sandals, came to the drinking fountain at the head of the town square and stood looking at the empty bandstand.