House Haunted

by Al Sarrantonio

  Minkowski, seriously lecturing now, answered without humor, “It's a power thing. I would imagine that we're dealing with someone from a classic broken home, most probably with an overbearing mother, one who may have compromised his love for her with other men. He has a rage in him that can only be assuaged by beating, in proxy, his mother. In effect, each of those he kills is his mother; he's beating his mother, dominating her the way she dominated him.” The sly grin returned. “All speculative, of course.”

  Falconi threw up his hands in exasperation. “Great.”

  Minkowski slapped Falconi's knee and got up. “Don't look so glum,” he said, stretching. “Even if I'm wrong, you'll be catching him soon.”

  Falconi's interest immediately piqued. “What do you mean?”

  “He's getting bolder, more confident of his invincibility, cockier. That bloody turtleneck shirt he left at the cribbage woman's apartment, what's her name—”

  “Meg Greely.”

  “Right, Greely. That shirt was left deliberately. He probably nicked his finger while he was cutting her up. It's a sign that he's ready to up the odds in your favor. The fact that his blood type is O positive is irrelevant. He knew he'd be giving you relatively little to track him down with there. He's teasing you; wants to see how good you are. I wouldn't be surprised if he gives you a call soon, or one of the papers.”

  “You're sure about this?”

  Minkowski winked. “All speculative, of course.”

  “Mark—”

  Minkowski laughed. “Look, Rich, don't be so tentative around me. I know my business, but I'm not God. And neither are Borgen or Robbins. I can tell you for a fact that Robbins published a paper a few years ago that's complete bullshit. He pulled in theorists that were discredited forty years ago to try to bolster his thesis, and he got away with it. I'm sure he believed what he was doing; probably still does. But the paper is still bullshit.”

  He leaned down toward Falconi. “Don't be so intimidated by it, Rich,” he smiled. “Most of it is bullshit. The mind's a mystery, like Plato's Cave, only most of the time we can't even catch the goddamn shadows.”

  “Now I really feel great.”

  “Oh, most of what I've told you is good enough to use.” He walked toward the door, pausing to stretch again. On the way out he said, “Purely speculative, of course.”

  Falconi threw a wadded piece of paper at him, but it fell short of the doorway.

  Shit. There were some things that weren't purely speculative. Like the fact that his head was being fitted for the scapegoat platter if they didn't get a break soon.

  His eyes wandered to the double-hinged picture frame resting on the corner of his desk.

  Still, some things are worse than being a scapegoat.

  The picture on the right was of Grace and Amelia—his wife smiling, his daughter with a glum, little girl's look on her face. Falconi remembered it had been their last day at Disney World, and Amelia hadn't wanted to go home. It had been taken three years ago, the last time she had looked like a little girl. Before Bruce Springsteen.

  The picture on the left was of a blank, anonymous-looking woman in her mid-thirties. Her hair was cropped sloppily close to her head. She had on a nondescript spring jacket and stood on a slush-covered March city street, staring into the camera as if uncaring if it was there or not.

  Minkowski had asked him why he kept that picture, had even hinted there was something unhealthy about it. But Falconi knew why it was on his desk. There were some things worse than being a scapegoat—

  Fuck that. Let's just get this creep.

  He stared hard at the chart; annoyingly, he could just see the outline of Bruce Springsteen's tight fanny and upraised arm through the back of the poster. Springsteen's ghostly hand, holding a wired microphone, was pointing to the category marked Games. Falconi was mildly satisfied to see that the Psychological Profile category was right over Springsteen's fanny; he would have to tell Minkowski that one. Under the Games heading was listed, in Falconi's tight scribble, Monopoly, Cribbage, Chess, Trivial Pursuit, Bridge; under that was the word Next followed by a question mark and then: Pictionary, Pinochle (the word Ha was scribbled next to it in red ink, in Minkowski's hand), Life (again the word Ha, this time the irony crossed out, again, in red ink), Clue (Falconi's own Ha), Parcheesi, Video Games (a double question mark after this; so far, the killer had had nothing to do with electronics), Poker, and a dozen others.

  Falconi stared at the list, felt nothing. So much for Bruce Springsteen. He rubbed at his eyes and yawned; the sourness in his stomach was gone, which meant it was time for another cup of coffee. He reached behind him to his desk, felt his finger down into his coffee cup, and found it still half full. Cold. Good, he could have another cup and not feel like he had lied to Grace. “Two cups of coffee a day, tops,” he'd promised her. He had it down to seven.

  Once again he stared at the poster; Springsteen's phantom hand holding the mike sprouted something curling beneath it. He leaned closer. Part of the mike—the cord. It started at the end of the word Games and snaked down and over to the category Physical Characteristics. It went through the heading and stopped somewhere in the middle of the list. Coffee, he thought. Instead he leaned closer, playing out his own game, emptying his mind, peering close to see the end of that cord. Down through Height, Weight, Clothes (Black Shirt scrawled next to this; question marks with Jeans? and Windbreaker? Coat? next to it), Eyes, Name—the microphone cord ended there.

  Name. Falconi stared at the word, let his eyes drift back up through the curls of cord, settle back on the word Games.

  Games? It was a stupid idea, but all of his ideas were stupid to him in the beginning. He began to think about it. Could the killer's name have something to do with games? Minkowski had said it was odd that there had been no communication by this time between the Games Killer and the media or the police; they had of course made sure Falconi was prominent in the news stories, was the focus of the investigation, just to make sure the killer had a name, a nemesis, to concentrate on. It had worked before. Minkowski had said it might be because he was getting everything he wanted already.

  Games? Gaymes? Hastily, Falconi pulled his pen from his shirt pocket and clicked the ballpoint out. He wrote, hand cramped against the wall, under a dash next to the word Games, making a subheading: Games, Gaymes, Gaimes, Gaemes, then, after a pause, Gaames, putting a few dash marks down a line after it to leave spaces for other possibilities.

  He leaned back in his chair, contemplated the new entry, absently clicking the pen closed and slipping it into his pocket. He felt a tiny thrill run through him, the kind he had had many times before and which sometimes—just sometimes—led to a break.

  His eye caught the opaque trace of the microphone cable and he traced it leisurely up from one link to the other.

  Why not.

  He swiveled around, away from the poster, turning to his phone. As he put his hand on it he felt the familiar doubt, the relic of hesitation, the fear of looking foolish that always assaulted him when he needed to ask anyone else's opinions on his hunches. He ignored it, knowing that second thoughts were part of his nature and that they should be ignored. They were nonproductive and vain. If he needed further incentive, he need only think of his head resting on that platter on the front page of the Post, surrounded by cut vegetables, an apple stuck in his unemployed mouth.

  If he didn't keep working, his daughter wouldn't be able to buy a poster of the next teen idol.

  His hesitation had been instantaneous; even as he had these thoughts he was dialing Minkowski's number and waiting for the pickup on the other end.

  11. SOUTH

  When Ricky was not happy, it was never a secret.

  He couldn't help it. He was normally so open, so outgoing, that when anything really bothered him the change in his nature was instantly apparent.

  For two weeks he had tried to keep to himself what had happened at Chambers House. Arriving home that afternoon, soaked and shivering,
his mother had thought he was sick and had made him take a hot shower, get into dry clothes and get into bed. But by the time he was under the covers she had known that he was not sick and that something was bothering him.

  “What is it? What's wrong?” she had said, scolding him gently, which was all it had ever taken to get him to open up.

  But this time he had only shivered and said, “Nothing, Mum. Just a shiver from the rain,” and turned his face to the wall.

  Shiver from the rain it wasn't, and she'd known that immediately; and over the next few days, when he'd stayed in bed through glorious sunshine, claiming illness that wasn't there, she'd known that something had happened to him. She had even asked Mr. Harvey—whose patience at Ricky's absence from work, as well as his forgiveness for the items that had been broken at the landmark, was beginning to disappear—if anything had happened to him at Chambers House that day, but Mr. Harvey had only answered that he hadn't been there himself, and Ricky had better come back soon, because there were special groups coming through soon, and the work had to get done by Ricky or someone else. Mr. Harvey's regret at saying “Someone else,” was evident, but so was his resolve.

  Finally, on the eve of the third day of his bed-taking, after a day of seventy-five degree temperatures and beautiful breezes, and high layered clouds like sheets of heavenly gauze breaking the deep blue, after yet again turning his friends Spook and Reesa and Charlie away, without even seeing them, she went into his room in the light of dropping evening and pulled the hard-back desk chair close to his bed and made him look at her.

  “This has got to stop, Ricky,” she said, fighting to keep her voice firm. He had rustled away from her when she came in, and lay staring at the white plaster of his wall.

  After a silence she said, “You hear me?”

  “Yes, Mum,” he replied.

  “Roll over, boy. Look at me.”

  He did as he was told, finding her large face filled with concern and love. She laid the back of her hand gently on his cheek and withdrew it. “This isn't my Ricky. You're looking at me from some dark place.” She brushed his cheek again, feeling the tremor in his flesh. “Tell me.”

  He almost told her. Instead, he decided what he must do. Down inside, in a dark place he was not accustomed to being, he fought the little demon that wanted to tell her everything, make her wash the pain off him, making it her own, as if he were her little boy again. But he was not a little boy and could not do that.

  In the dark place, he controlled the tremor in his skin, turned his face into part of a smile.

  “It's a girl, Mum,” he lied, but even in his lie a relief flooded through him because he was able even to pretend to unburden himself to her.

  “Oh?” She lifted her face up, and the only dim surprise she registered told Ricky that he had hit something along the lines of what she had expected. “And who would this girl be?”

  “I . . . can't tell you that.” He was filled with panic, not knowing where to go next.

  “I see.” She was silent, turning her face away from him, hands in her lap, thinking. Ricky knew for certain now that he had said the right thing.

  She turned her face back to him, patting her hand on his knee below the sheet and leaving it there. “I had a feeling we might be having this talk someday,” she said. “Thinking about this day coming made me wish—and that was the only time I ever wished such a thing—that you had been born a girl. For I don't really know how to go about it.” She looked away uncomfortably, then back at him with a level gaze. “Did you get her pregnant?”

  “What?” Ricky almost laughed. “Why, no, Mum, of course not!”

  He saw her task immediately made easier. “Then what is this trouble? Do you feel love for her and she doesn't love you?”

  Ricky reached quickly, thinking of Reesa. “She loves me, Mum. But she already has a boyfriend.”

  “I see.” His mother now seemed to be relishing her role, playing out daytime soap opera plots in her mind. He imagined she knew whom he was talking about. “And would this boyfriend be one of your best friends?”

  So caught in his own lie that he half-believed it now, Ricky blushed.

  “Ah,” his mother said. She squeezed his leg and stood up leisurely, reaching around to rub at her back. Ricky saw that there was a smile, a sad, perhaps memory-drenched, smile on her face.

  “Ricky,” she said tenderly, looking down at him with all the love a mother could contain (down in the dark place he trembled, seeing her, briefly, flat on a table with three screw-drivers in her chest and the look of “Why?” on her frozen features), “Ricky boy, there's nothing anyone can do for you. You're filled with love like a puppy, and you have to let things work their way out. It's something we all do.” She gave a relieved sigh. “You had me so worried! Ricky,” she said, putting her hand to his face, “this will pass. Believe me it will. What I say may sound foolish to you now, and may be foolish, but we all must be our own fools in our own way. One thing I know,” she said, slapping his cheek playfully, “is that you cannot stay in bed forever. You have to drink up sunshine. And rain, too. You have to live in the world. Now get up out of your bed and let your problems live in the world, not in your poor head.”

  She smacked him again, and he found himself almost laughing—and then actually laughing, sliding on the bed away from her playful smacks, finally yelling, “All right! All right, Mum!” He hopped out of bed. “I'm up! See me? I'm up!”

  “Good boy!” she said, taking his face in her hands and kissing his forehead. “Now go outside where you belong.” She shook her head and sighed as she walked from the room. “Oh, for heaven,” she added as she walked from the room, “it's times like these I wish your papa were still alive . . .”

  Twenty minutes later, Ricky was heading to Spook's house on his motorbike. It was the only thing he could do. A false burden had been lifted from him by his mother; perhaps Spook could help to lift the real one.

  Spook was not home; nor was Spook's father. The lawn chair sat empty on the front lawn. Of course, Spook's father would be at work. It was Saturday, and his shifts had begun to run through both Saturday and Sunday, leaving him two days midweek to sit on his lawn and get quietly drunk and think about his rotten wife, Spook's mother, who was a fine woman but never good enough.

  There was only one place that Spook would be. Feeling a twinge of guilt at the story he had just told his mother, and feeling a tiny guilty poke because he really had begun to notice Reesa as more than one of the chums, and maybe if Charlie didn't want her for anything more than a friend there might be a chance for him with her yet, he gunned the motorbike onto James Road and off the long side street down to the ferry dock.

  They were all there. A ferry had just left, tooting its horn merrily, tourists waving lazily at the three of them, and at Charlie especially, who was wet and had obviously just completed one of his trick dives into the water. Sometimes he jumped in and held to the bottom of the boat with his flat palms, letting it take him out until he had to breathe and pushed himself away and up, popping through the surface like a dolphin, then swimming slowly, clownishly, back to the dock.

  “Did I miss much?” Ricky said, trying to put on a convincing smile.

  “Ho! Who's this fellow!” Charlie crowed, still huffing from his swim, dripping water to the concrete. Reesa smiled and Spook held his hand over his heart and stumbled back in mock surprise.

  “Risen from the dead!” Spook said.

  Coldness went into Ricky, but he held his smile.

  “Say, what's been wrong with you?” Charlie said. “Been sick or something?”

  Ricky nodded simply. “Much better now. How's it going?”

  “Same as ever,” Spook said. He came up close to Ricky, peered into his face. He did it in jest, but something he saw there made him start. “Sure you're all better, Ricky?”

  Ricky flashed a smile and hit Spook on the back. “Bad cold, Spook. Just about gone.”

  Charlie was toweling himself off; behind
him, over the water, the ferry boat had dwindled to a paddling churn of water and steel and wood. The late afternoon sky was lowering; the sun had become orange, and there was the slightest of chills in the air.

  Charlie shivered, finished with rubbing his hair, and folded the towel under his arm. “Coming, Reesa?” he said, approaching his bike.

  “Sure,” she said. She came to Ricky and looked at him; his guilt rose again briefly as she smiled. “Missed you, Ricky.”

  He nodded as she turned to retrieve her own bike from against its wall and mounted it to ride off after Charlie. “See you!” she called back.

  “Sure!” Ricky shouted with false brightness.

  When he looked back at Spook, he saw that he hadn't fooled his best friend for a moment.

  “Let's talk about it,” Spook said.

  In the approaching dusk they sat on Spook's front lawn. The rum bottle had found its way out from the bushes. “The old man's on till midnight,” Spook explained. “Mum won't be home till nine.”

  They passed the rum and sat in silence. The clouds were high soft wedges, bottoms tinged with sunset. The breeze brought sea smell to them.

  Spook drank, then said, “So tell me, Ricky boy.”

  Ricky stared at the passed rum bottle for a few moments, then drank from it quickly. “There's a ghost in Chambers House.”

  There was true silence, and then Spook exploded in laughter. “What!”

  “No joking, Spook. There's a ghost and I saw it. It talked to me.”

  Spook fumbled for something in the near-dark. He abruptly turned to Ricky and hissed, widening his eyes, opening his mouth, showing off the glowing plastic vampire teeth he had put on.

  “I said no joking, Spook,” Ricky said quietly.

  Spook continued to stare at him; he reached into his mouth and took the plastic teeth off and put them away.