The rest I spent in the restaurant and bar. I came to know the girls quite well, mostly from customers—they didn’t talk much about themselves. My favorite story was about how they had organized protests to keep the mayor from awarding the snowplowing contract to his brother-in-law and then, two weeks later when they learned the mayor’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, hosted a fund-raiser to help pay her medical bills.
It was about eleven thirty on the evening of the sixth day when they called me out. The bar was empty—there wasn’t much nightlife in Alma during the middle of the week. I was sitting at the bar nursing a draft. Meg stood on the other side, a bar towel in her hand. Josie was still my favorite, but Meg had risen considerably in my estimation since the evening before. Josie sat on my right, Karla on my left.
“Who are you?” Karla asked.
“Kent Kramer,” I said
“We know that,” Josie said. “Why are you here?”
I didn’t answer.
“You know who we are, don’t you?” Meg said.
“I know who you are. I just don’t know what names to call you.”
“Darn it,” Karla said.
“Does Johnny Scalise know?” Meg said.
“Yes.”
“I knew it,” Josie said. “I knew this day would come.”
“Darn it,” Karla said again.
Josie rested her head on the top of the bar.
“Now what?” she said.
As if on cue a man wearing a black suit, black shirt and black tie entered the bar. He paused at the entrance, found a table near the door and sat down facing us. All of us watched him intently. Karla gasped. Josie reached out and grabbed my arm. Meg had the presence of mind to circle the bar and walk up to his table.
“Good evening,” she said. “May I get you something?”
“Seven and seven,” the man answered.
Meg returned to the bar, mixed the drink and served it to the man.
“Thank you,” he said.
We all watched him sipping the drink. He pretended not to notice. ESPN was on the monitor above the bar and he fixed his gaze on it and did not look away.
“What should we do?” Karla asked.
“Wait,” I said.
I took a long pull of the beer. Josie became agitated.
“I’m not waiting,” she said.
I took her hand.
“Please,” I said. “Wait.”
ESPN went through two commercial cycles while we waited. Finally, we all heard the ring of a cell phone. The man reached into his pocket, took it out and answered it.
“Yeah,” he said. He paused. “All right.”
He returned the phone to his pocket even as he rose from the chair. He walked across the bar. As he approached, he slid his hand under his suit jacket. Karla gasped again. The man smiled at her reaction. He produced an envelope from his inside pocket.
“You Kramer?” he asked.
I nodded. He set the envelope on the bar in front of me.
“Compliments of Jimmy Legs,” he said.
I took the envelope and put it in my own pocket. I didn’t open it; I didn’t count the money that I knew was inside.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“All right for us, not so much for Johnny the Boy,” he answered.
“What took so long?”
“Johnny got it into his head that it was unsafe to leave his place in Chicago. Took a lot to lure him out. If he hadn’t known about the ladies here, if he hadn’t been so obsessed…”
The man nodded his head at the girls and left the bar.
It took a few moments before the four of us started breathing again.
“What just happened?” Josie asked.
I got up from the bar and turned toward the three girls.
“You can probably go home now if you want to. Questions will be asked, but…” I raised the palms of my hands upward and shrugged. Afterward I gave the place a parting glance. “I really like it here.”
I moved to the door. Josie intercepted me. Her dark eyes cut off a chunk of my heart; I could feel her tucking it away in her pocket. She hugged me and kissed my cheek and said thank you.
I left and I never went back, although I’ve thought about it often.
“Obsessive Behavior” Copyright ©2012 by David Housewright. First published in Writes of Spring, Nodin Press.
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Author’s Note: My pal, thriller-writer Anne Frasier (aka romance-novelist Theresa Weir), asked me to contribute a story to a Halloween anthology she was editing. I’m not entirely sure I believe in ghosts, but plenty of people do. Who knows, though? Maybe, maybe… ah ha ha ha ha ha…
Time of Death
A small brick building, one story high and less than thirty feet across crouched in the middle of the block. It was the police station, although there was no sign that said so. A uniformed sergeant sat behind an old, battered desk. As far as Logan could tell, he was the only man in the station house.
“He’p ya?” the sergeant said.
Logan flashed his ID.
“Yeah, the chief said you’d be around,” the sergeant said. “Come to look at our killer, did you?”
“That’s right.”
“Pretty little thing. Hard to believe she slashed her boyfriend’s throat. ’Course, she denies it.”
“I bet she does,” Logan said.
“I gotta tell ya…” The sergeant grunted as he lifted his enormous frame from the chair and circled the desk. “I ’spect you see this sorta thing all the time, but a small town like this one, I gotta tell ya, it’s the biggest thing ever happened here. Well, second biggest thing. I can understand why the chief would call in you big-city boys.”
The sergeant led Logan to the back of the building. There was a heavy metal door with a small window. The window was made of thick glass crisscrossed with iron threads. Logan looked through the glass. The girl was sitting on the edge of a narrow cot attached to the wall, her head in her hands.
“There she is,” the sergeant said. He fitted a key into the lock and gave it a turn. The door swung open. “Want I should stay?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Logan said. “But I’m expecting a report from the medical examiner. Let me know when it arrives.”
“You got it.”
Logan stepped into the cell. The sergeant closed the door and locked him in.
“Laurel Clark,” he said.
The girl looked up. Her eyes were swollen and her cheeks were puffy from crying. She wore her hair in a ponytail tied with a red ribbon but the ribbon had become loose and Logan figured a firm head shake would send it flying. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands and looked up again. Logan decided that there was something extraordinarily touching about her, but quickly shook the thought from his head. You know better than that, he told himself.
He let her look at his badge and identification.
“My name is Logan. I’m with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
“It’s all my fault,” she said.
“Ms. Clark, have you been informed of your rights?”
She said she had, but he read them to her again anyway. He asked how old she was.
“Nineteen,” she said. Which made her a legal adult. Which meant he did not have to inform her parents before questioning her. If she had said she was sixteen, Logan would have believed her.
“Will you answer some questions for me?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“You don’t have to. If you want an attorney—”
“It’s okay.”
“I read the report. It’s an amazing story.”
“You don’t believe me either.”
“The report says you had a motive for killing your boyfriend.”
“Ex-boyfriend.”
“Witnesses say that you were the one who coerced him into the house where he was killed.”
“Yes.”
“You admitted to the police tha
t you were responsible for your boyfriend’s death.”
“Ex-boyfriend. Tommy was my ex-boyfriend. And I said I was responsible. I didn’t say I actually killed him.”
“Where were you when he was killed?”
“I was at home in bed.”
“Any witnesses?”
“At two fifteen AM?” Laurel smiled slightly. “No, there weren’t any witnesses.”
“In what way were you responsible for your boy—excuse me—ex-boyfriend’s death?”
“You said you read the report.”
“I like to hear the story in your own words.”
Laurel sighed deeply and rubbed her eyes again. “Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Logan?”
“No”
“I do. I believe in ghosts. I didn’t believe until last night. I believe now.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There’s a farmhouse out on the county road about ten miles from town. The old Utley place.”
“The place where Tommy’s body was found?” Logan said.
Laurel nodded.
She was ten when Delores Utley died and even now it was hard to take. Delores had been the girl Laurel had most looked up to, had most wanted to be like. She was smart and she was lovely and she could dance—Delores was the best dancer in Mrs. Cummings Dance School. Laurel had gone to all of her recitals and because Delores danced, Laurel wanted to dance. But more important, Delores always treated Laurel like an equal, like a friend. She never said, “This is the kid I sometimes baby-sit.” Instead, Delores would give her a hug or slap her hand in greeting and tell her high school classmates, “Meet my friend, Laurel.”
And then she died. The day after Halloween they found her in the Utley home hanging from a rope she had tied herself. At her feet was her boyfriend, his throat slashed so deeply that his head hung backward like the hood of a sweatshirt. According to local gossip, the boyfriend had convinced Delores that he loved her, had taken her virginity and then discarded her. She begged him to come back. He not only refused, he flaunted his new girlfriend in front of her. The police called it murder-suicide, although they never did find the weapon that killed the boy.
The Utley’s moved away from the house and it had remained vacant all those years. Rumors circulated that it was haunted. Laurel never believed the rumors. Yet she could not pass the abandoned house without feeling unbearably sad.
Her childhood friend Tommy, however, did believe the rumors. He even claimed to have seen a young woman dressed in white passing before the windows late at night on a number of occasions. Once, when he mustered enough courage to investigate, he said that he came close enough to the house to hear Delores weeping over her lost love. But then he laughed and one never knew if he was serious or not.
By the time they were seniors in high school, Laurel and Tommy had stopped being friends and had become something so much more. Laurel still didn’t know how it happened, how they had evolved from boy and girl playing in the backyard to man and woman playing in the bedroom. But she remembered one incident in particular that occurred early in their new relationship.
“Remember Delores Utley?” Tommy had asked her. They were naked in Tommy’s bedroom, the house empty except for them.
“Of course.”
“She was always looking out for you when we were kids. It was understood, if you mess with Laurel, you answer to Delores.”
“I remember.”
“After we started dating, she came to me in a dream. She said I should be good to you or else.”
“Or else what?”
“She didn’t say, but I remember what happened to her boyfriend.”
Laurel thought it was a wonderful lie and poked Tommy in the ribs.
“Don’t do that,” Tommy said. He rolled out of bed and stared down at her. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his body seemed to tremble. “I’m not kidding. She came to me in a dream. More than one dream. She was serious.”
It was then that Laurel knew. Tommy really was afraid of ghosts, especially the ghost of Delores Utley.
“Better be nice to me then,” she said.
Only Tommy hadn’t been nice to her. He professed his undying love for Laurel the night they first made love and then again the night before she left for college in September. Only by the time she returned home for Halloween, he was sleeping with Tiffany Brent who was still in high school. Laurel was stunned by this development and reminded him that he was the only man she had known. He responded by asking how long he was supposed to wait for her.
“More than eight weeks,” she told him
The day after Halloween there was a party—beer and a bonfire at the lake. All the kids home from college and those who had stayed in the little town were there. Tommy told stories, as he always did, while Tiffany stared adoringly at him.
“Tommy’s afraid of ghosts,” Laurel said. That caused several heads to turn. “I mean it. He’s terrified of Delores Utley. He claims she comes to him in his dreams. Isn’t that right, Tommy?”
“You’re crazy,” Tommy said.
“How ’bout it, Tiff?” Laurel said. “Has Tommy ever mentioned his fear of ghosts to you?”
Tiffany did the worst thing she could have done to her man. She looked him in the eye and said, “Is it true?”
After that, Laurel didn’t have to add much to the conversation to keep it going in the direction she wanted. Eventually, Tommy agreed to spend an entire night in the Utley house if that was what it would take to prove his manhood. He was quite surprised when Laurel jumped up and announced, “No time like the present.”
“Now?” he said. As someone correctly noted, it was ten years to the day that Delores had killed her boyfriend and hung herself.
“Right now.”
Tommy’s fear of being ridiculed was far greater than his fear of the grisly anniversary. He allowed Laurel and a dozen friends to escort him to the house where he bravely kissed Tiffany goodbye, said, “See you in hell,” to the cheering crowd and entered the house. Most of the kids lingered to see if he tried to escape; a few tossed rocks on the roof and raked tree branches along the walls. They could hear Tommy shouting from inside, “Real funny, guys.” After an hour or so, everyone left.
Early the next morning, Tiffany went to the house to see if Tommy was still there or if he had gone home after the crowd dissipated. She found him, dead, his throat slashed, under the beam where Delores Utley had hung herself a decade earlier. Shortly after, the police questioned Laurel.
“I wanted Delores to kill him,” she said. “I was desperate for her to kill him but I never really believed that she would.” Laurel covered her face with her hands. “What have I done?”
Logan watched her intently as he leaned against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. He didn’t believe her story. His gut and twenty years of experience convinced him that Laurel killed Tommy and set it up so the more gullible would blame Delores Utley. Only he couldn’t prove it. The preliminary report he had read earlier said the crime scene investigators were unable to find the murder weapon just as they had been unable to locate it in the first killing. Nor could they uncover a shred of evidence to suggest that anyone had been in the Utley house except Tommy. The case was so weak, Logan was sure if Laurel had asked for an attorney when one had been offered, he would have screamed for her release long before now and he would have gotten it.
Laurel looked up at Logan, studied his expression.
“What will they do to me?” she said.
Logan had no answer. Even if the county attorney believed that the girl had deliberately manipulated Tommy into the house so that Delores would kill him—God, now even he was considering the possibility—what could he do about it? Charge Laurel with conspiracy to commit murder? Call Delores to the stand as a corroborating witness?
The sergeant rapped on the cell door.
“The medical examiner’s report just arrived,” he said.
Logan excused himself and left the cell. He returned to the front des
k and started reading the findings of the Office of the County Coroner. The sergeant glanced at the report over his shoulder.
“So,” he said. “Did you hear the girl’s story?”
“I heard it.”
“What do you think? Do you believe a ghost did it?”
“Do you?”
“You gotta admit, it certainly would make for a novel defense should the matter ever go to trial. Think we’d get on Court TV?”
Logan smiled. He held the report up for the sergeant to see and pointed at the line that read Date and Time of Death.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said. “Do you want to know what I believe in? I believe in forensic pathology.”
A minute later Logan was back in the cell standing before the girl.
“Ms. Clark, I would like to clarify something you said earlier,” he said.
“Certainly.”
“I asked where you were when Tommy was killed.”
“I said I was in bed.”
“I asked if there were witnesses.”
“I said there weren’t any.”
“No, you said at two fifteen AM there weren’t any witnesses.”
“So?”
Logan held up the coroner’s report. He was smiling broadly. “How did you know that’s when Tommy was killed?”
Laurel didn’t hesitate for a moment.
“Because, Mr. Logan,” she said, “two fifteen—that’s the exact same time when Delores Utley killed her boyfriend ten years ago.”
“Time of Death” Copyright ©2011 by David Housewright. First published in Deadly Treats, Nodin Press.
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Author’s Note: Another contribution for a Minnesota Crime Wave anthology—Fifteen Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Malice from the Land of Minnesota Nice—this time with no strings attached. All they wanted was a story that takes place in Minnesota. So I gave them one inspired by a chance encounter I had with a pretty college girl who was giving readings of Tarot cards in a small tent at the Stone Arch Bridge Art Festival along the river in Minneapolis. I asked her if she ever told her customers if the cards said something awful was going to happen. She said, “No one pays ten dollars to hear bad news.”
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