Hanging by a Thread

by Monica Ferris

  “At a wedding?” said Martha, scandalized.

  “No, no,” said Bershada, laughing. “At the Guthrie!”

  “Oh, him!” said Godwin. “You saw Richard Miller!”

  “Yes, that’s the name. Have you seen him, too?”

  “No, but I’ve heard about him. When did you see him?”

  “Oh, this was years ago. My husband’s parents took Mac and me to see Amadeus, and this usher kept walking up and down the aisle, blocking our view. The ushers are supposed to go out to the lobby during a performance, so it was annoying. He didn’t seem to be looking for someone in particular, like you’d expect if it was an emergency or something. And he didn’t seem interested in the play, either. He was just kind of observing the audience. I could see he was young, maybe only in his late teens, and he had a big mole on one cheek, very noticeable. I knew he was an usher because he had the sports coat they wear, with the insignia on the pocket?” She made a gesture over her left breast. “So during the intermission we complained to one of the other ushers, and he laughed and said we’d seen Richard Miller, who was an usher back in the sixties who committed suicide.”

  “How did this usher kill himself?” asked Betsy. “Hang himself from a balcony rail?”

  “Betsy!” said Emily.

  “He didn’t kill himself in the theater at all,” said Godwin. “He did it in the Sears parking lot on Lake Street.”

  “That old place?” said Bershada. She explained to Betsy, “It’s closed now, has been for a long, long time, but the building is still there, and the parking lot. It’s a big building, very nice-looking in that art-deco way. They keep talking about doing something with it, but haven’t so far. Anyway, you’d think he’d haunt that building.”

  “Maybe he does,” said Martha. “Only there’s nobody around to see him.”

  “Or he haunts the parking lot,” said Comfort. “I can just hear the warnings: ‘Don’t park in row three, slot nineteen, or you’ll come back to find a see-through stranger in your backseat.’ ”

  Emily giggled uncomfortably, but Alice cleared her throat in a disparaging way.

  Godwin said, “Instead, for some reason, he came back to the Guthrie and he gets in the way of customers.” He frowned and said, “Maybe that’s what Paul Schmitt was doing, not haunting the house he died in, but a place where something sad happened.”

  “Or a place where he did something wicked,” said Carol.

  “What do you mean?” asked Martha.

  “Well, suppose he found out about Angela and Foster and murdered Angela. True love can turn to hate in a wink of an eye, you know. I remember wondering right after Angela was murdered if maybe Paul hadn’t done it.”

  Godwin objected, “Well, if that’s a cause for haunting, you’d think Paul would haunt Foster Johns’s office. After all, Foster murdered Paul.”

  Alice said, “Nobody knows that for sure. Everyone’s been saying how nice Paul was. Well, suppose he wasn’t nice, despite his smiles. Suppose someone were to get serious about looking into his and Angela’s deaths.” She raised an eyebrow at Betsy. “I think it’s possible there might be other suspects.”

  “You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” said Bershada with a frown.

  “You shouldn’t make saints of people who don’t deserve it!” said Alice. “If Martha is right and Paul was a jealous man, and it is not at all uncommon for that emotion to accompany obsession—or ‘true love,’ as you will have it—then he would have been upset about any man who talked with his wife. So you can imagine how painful it was for him to think of her in that bookstore, where men came in every day. I think he was a brother to those dreadful Taliban people who made their women cover themselves with—what was it called? That sack thing. He would have loved it if America adopted Taliban customs for women, and made Angela wear that sack thing and never go anywhere without him along.”

  Emily said, “I’d like to see them try to put the women of America into burkas!”

  Martha snickered. “And how could they get American men back to the twelfth century? Make them all ride donkeys to work?”

  The mental picture of a big herd of donkeys laden with men in business suits trekking down 35W and 394 into Minneapolis, talking on their cell phones and batting their unfortunate mounts on the rumps with their briefcases, caused everyone to stop and smile for a few moments.

  Then Godwin said, “I’ve never seen a ghost, but my grandmother heard one. She was baking Thanksgiving pies one morning when she heard, plain as day, her sister Frankie saying, ‘Milly, call an ambulance! I fell and broke my ankle! Help, Milly!’ What was weird is that Great-aunt Frances was in Columbus, Ohio, at the time, and Grandmama lived in St. Paul. Grandmama was so sure she’d heard her sister asking for help that she called the police in Columbus and insisted they go to Frankie’s house. Sure enough, she’d fallen on a patch of ice in the backyard and would have laid there until her husband came home from work, and as it wasn’t even noon yet, likely he’d have found her frozen to death.”

  Martha said, “That’s not a ghost story. Your great-aunt wasn’t dead.”

  “Well, okay, I guess it isn’t. But it’s a paranormal story.” He looked at Alice. “Explain that, if you can.”

  Alice obediently tried. “I suppose she was thinking about her sister and imagined she heard her voice. Or perhaps ... perhaps Frankie prayed very hard for rescue and a miracle happened. God allowed her cry for help to reach Milly’s ears.”

  “He works in mysterious ways,” agreed Bershada. “Or perhaps Godwin had just made that up, another way to pick on Alice. Shame on you, Goddy!”

  “This is a true story,” said Godwin, hurt. “It was written up in the Columbus Dispatch. You have to believe it, Bershada, I believed you about Richard Miller. I’ve been there lots of times, and I know all about him, but I’ve never seen him. Now they’re tearing down the old theater, I probably never will. Unless—do you think he’ll go haunt the new building?”

  Bershada said, “Can they do that sort of thing?”

  Carol said, “There is supposed to be a family in the United States who are direct descendants of a duke, and they had a family ghost from the twelfth century follow them over here. One of those kind that when she appears, there’s a death in the family.”

  Emily said, “I know a story like that.”

  “What, about someone who saw Richard Miller’s ghost and died?” asked Godwin.

  “No, mine is about the Wendigo.”

  Everyone at the table smiled but Betsy. “What’s the Wendigo?” she asked.

  “He’s a really old spirit, the Indians told the white settlers about him,” said Godwin.

  “Oh, no, it isn’t a spirit,” said Carol, surprised at him. “The Wendigo is a big, hairy creature, sort of like Bigfoot, who finds Indians alone in the forest and eats them.”

  “Ish!” said Bershada.

  Godwin said, “Eats them? Like a cannibal? I didn’t know that.”

  Betsy said, “It’s not cannibalism to eat something other than your own kind.”

  “Anyway,” said Emily, to regather their attention. “The Wendigo is like nine or ten feet tall, and covered with gray fur. And it has a bright light shining in its forehead. Early settlers saw it, and pretty soon they realized there was a death in the family of whoever saw it, that’s why what Carol said about the duke’s ghost reminded me. It’s still around, people still see the Wendigo, only now mostly just up north. And when they do, someone dies.”

  Godwin said, “That’s your scary story?”

  Emily said, “No, that’s just the explaining part. My great-grandmother saw it. She and her second husband were up on the Iron Range, on the road between Eveleth and Virginia—he was a surveyor, and she was his assistant—and she told my mother, who told me, that they were walking back from a job. It was getting dark, and there were trees along one side of the road, and she saw this light-colored thing back in there, and first she thought it was the trunk of a birch growing alone amo
ng the pines, and then that it was a light-colored bear standing on its hind legs. Only it was too tall to be a bear. It turned toward them, and she saw it had a light shining out of its forehead, and she knew what it was. She screamed ‘Wendigo!’ and they both ran all the way back into Eveleth. Almost two miles it was, and they never stopped once. And Ralph—that was her second husband—he died two days later of a heart attack.”

  “And we mustn’t think that perhaps running scared in near-darkness for two miles might have been the cause of that,” said Alice very dryly.

  “Did her husband know about the legend of the Wendigo, that it means a death?” asked Betsy.

  “Oh, yes, they both did, and they wondered who it was going to be. Great-grandmother called all her children the next day to see if they were all right, and they were, so she was starting to think it was a mistake when Ralph collapsed at the supper table and died. Great-grandmother had thought it might be she herself who was doomed, but it never occurred to her it would be her husband, because he was five years younger than her, and he didn’t have any medical problems.”

  Betsy asked, “Do all of you believe in the Wendigo?”

  “I don’t, of course,” said Alice.

  Godwin said, “I understand you don’t have to believe in the Wendigo for him to appear to you.” There was a blank silence, then everyone laughed, even Alice.

  7

  When Betsy climbed the stairs to her apartment that night, she was exhausted. Sophie, anxious and whining, trotted ahead and led the way into the kitchen. Betsy opened the cabinet under the sink and gave her cat the little scoop of Iams Less Active that was dinner. It was not possible the vastly overweight animal was hungry—Sophie snacked all day long: potato chips, fragments of cookies and the occasional mayonnaise-soaked comer of lettuce, all cadged from customers down in the shop.

  Betsy had tried to institute a policy of no food or drink in the shop, and failing that, of not feeding samples of it to the cat. When that also failed, she pretended it wasn’t happening. Sophie held up her end by pretending to be famished in the evenings. So not just in the morning but also in the evening the cat was served a small low-calorie, high-protein meal that at least filled in the vitamin gaps her otherwise poor diet offered.

  Betsy was too tired to even think of cooking for herself. She was searching her larder for a can of tuna when the phone rang. She thought about letting her machine catch it, but the receiver was in easy reach, so she picked it up.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Oh, my dear, are you as tired as you sound?” drawled a friendly voice.

  “Gosh, yes, totally bushed. Hi, Morrie, I’m glad to hear your voice, but I hope you aren’t thinking to take me somewhere tonight.”

  “When you check your machine, you’ll find I’ve been calling you all evening. But it’s too late now to go trick-or-treating, we’ve missed the start of the special showing of Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman, and the costume party has reached the stage where only people with at least three drinks under their belts are having any fun. Where have you been?”

  “Down in the shop. We did our Christmas window tonight.”

  “Ah, you’re one of those merchants who starts in right after Halloween.”

  “That’s right, I’m very conservative, unlike those who begin in September. Still, by the time Christmas Eve rolls around, I’m going to be totally sick of Christmas patterns, Christmas wrap, yarn in Christmas colors, and angels with wings done in Wisper and gold metallic. But by gum, the shop is going to be in the black.”

  Morrie laughed. He had a good laugh, frequently used, and she could picture him, head thrown back and mouth wide open. He was a tall, thin man in his early sixties, with not quite enough silver hair, a lantern jaw, and ears that stuck out. But he had the kindest eyes and sweetest demeanor Betsy had encountered in a long, long while. He was wonderful to have around, because with quiet ardor he had taken charge of making her life enjoyable. “Have you had supper yet?” he asked.

  “I was about to open a can of tuna. I can make it into a salad if you want a share.”

  “Put that can opener away right now. I’ll be there in half an hour with—what shall I bring, a pizza?”

  “Bless you. Thanks.”

  Ninety minutes later, over the last slices of now-cold pizza, they were talking about—what else?—ghost stories.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

  “Well, I saw a ghost once, so I guess I have to.”

  He was amused. “Where did you see a ghost?”

  “In that most traditional of places: a cemetery. I was standing in one of those little country ones, the kind a family would put up for itself back in the pioneer days. I was reading epitaphs—don’t you just love old epitaphs?”

  “ ‘A coffin, sheet, and grave’s my earthly store; ’tis all I want, and kings can have no more,’” he recited in an oratorical voice.

  “Oh, that’s a nice one! Did you read that on a tombstone?”

  “No, in a book I got as a Christmas present a long time ago. It’s called Over Their Dead Bodies, which has to be one of the cleverest titles ever dreamed up. But you were in this cemetery at midnight and a ghost swirled up out of a grave and said to you ...” he prompted.

  “No, it wasn’t anything like that. I was in this little cemetery, but it was a sunny afternoon, and my sister Margot said, ‘Hey, look at this one!’ and I turned to look, and as my eyes went past the woodlot that was the border of the cemetery, suddenly it wasn’t a woodlot, but an open field of grass and a woman in a long white dress was standing there with a child in a shorter white dress and one or the other of them had a parasol. I was just so surprised, I looked again and it was the woodlot again.”

  “Can it be a ghost if it’s a whole landscape?” Morrie asked.

  “I don’t know. I only know what I saw, for just an instant.”

  “What were they doing, the woman and child? Did they see you?”

  “No, they were looking down at something in the grass. It wasn’t scary or anything, it was just a glimpse of a long-ago time, that piece of ground reciting a lesson it had learned. Or that’s my theory, anyhow.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”

  “Yes, because I was about twelve and if I ever thought of the parade of fashion, which I didn’t very much, I would have assumed that somehow we jumped from huge skirts, like during the Civil War, to the flapper’s fringed little dress, like during the Roaring Twenties. But this woman was wearing something long and soft with no hoops. Her dress was like gauze, several layers of gauze. I found out later that material is called ‘lawn.’ She had a ruffle somewhere on the bodice, I think. And not leg-o’-mutton sleeves, but long ones.”

  “What was her hairstyle?”

  “I don’t remember. She was holding the child’s hand. They were happy, I think.”

  She took a sip of wine, and let it rest on her tongue a moment before swallowing it. Morrie’s taste in adult beverages was much like hers, not highly sophisticated—the bottle had a picture of a toad in a vest on it—but well beyond soda-sweet stuff.

  “Do you know what the temperature was in Fort Myers today?” he asked.

  “No, what?”

  “Seventy-eight. You’ll love it down there. How much vacation do you get every year?”

  “None. I’m the owner, I don’t get a vacation.”

  “Nonsense. You have to take at least a week off in, say, February or March.”

  Morrie was being forced to retire—well, not entirely forced, he knew it was coming and in fact was ready for it. He had bought a house in a Fort Myers gated community five years ago, furnished it, spent two weeks there every winter and rented it out the rest of the year. He was planning to move down there permanently when he retired early next year.

  Then he’d met Betsy. It was during a course of a homicide investigation—where else?—and there had been an immediate attraction. He’d found her clever and lucky, and she thought him
charming and intelligent. But while in a few months he was ready to commit to a relationship, she was unwilling to relocate to Florida.

  He thought she was crazy to want to stay in the frigid north; she thought he was crazy to abandon a lifetime’s worth of friends. Neither was seeing anyone else, but he couldn’t persuade her to sell the shop and she couldn’t persuade him to stay in Minnesota.

  “Why do you think I should take a vacation in March?” she asked now.

  “Because by then you’ll be really sick of winter—and I’ll really be missing you.” He lifted her pepperoni-scented fingers and kissed them.

  Betsy came down to the shop a little heavy-eyed the next morning. She had let Morrie stay a little later than she should have, and her only satisfaction was that he had to be at work by nine, while her shop didn’t open until ten. She went down around quarter to, Sophie happily trundling ahead of her.

  In the shop, Betsy looked around with satisfaction. There was a little artificial Christmas tree on the checkout desk, waiting for customers to decorate it with stitched ornaments. Her own ornament, a white cat with a wreath around its neck, stitched on maroon Aida cloth from a Bucilla kit, already hung on a branch. The tree would be given to someone in town who otherwise wouldn’t have one. Betsy’s sister, who had founded Crewel World, had begun the custom, and Betsy was pleased to keep it up.

  The Marbek Nativity glowed under the track light, and on the wall behind it were three counted cross stitch stockings, Marilyn Leavitt-Imblum’s Angel of the Morning, Dennis P. Lewan’s scene of snow-covered Victorian houses at sunset, a Christmas sampler from Homespun Elegance, and a cross-stitch pattern of Santa aloft in his sleigh with an American flag flying off the back of it.

  For the less sentimental, there was an amusing model of Linda Connors’s black cat destroying a Christmas tree.

  For the curmudgeons, there was Santa sitting on a chimney, pants down, a satisfied scowl on his face, and under it the legend, “For Those Who Have Been Really Naughty ...”