A Room For The Dead (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 3)

by Noel Hynd

  “So I see,” said O'Hara, who now understood why there had been no advance warning of the intrusion. Reynolds lived two houses away. He had walked, and the snow had fallen so resolutely that his bootprints had already been obliterated.

  “Well, it's snowing like hell, man. I wasn't about to pitch camp on your doorstep.”

  “But I'm not sure I know why you've come calling at all, Philip,” O'Hara said. “Am I missing something?”

  “You're not going to miss anything. Particularly in a snowstorm.”

  “What does that mean?” O'Hara asked, starting to remove his outer clothing.

  “It means that you're the state's numero uno homicide detective. So I'd leave on the hat and parka if I were you,” Reynolds answered.

  “Oh, sure thing,” O'Hara cursed. “The maniacs of this state can't even control themselves in a blizzard?”

  “Guess not. And we've got about an hour to drive, and I don't know if the heat is working in my four-wheel.”

  “An hour to where?”

  “Let's just say Captain Mallinson wants to see you.”

  “Mallinson? Now?”

  “Frank, would I be here today if 'the Cap' had meant tomorrow morning?”

  “What's going on?”

  “Does the name Gary Ledbetter bring back any memories?”

  A sinking, uneasy pause. The key name in the state's most celebrated murder case of the last fifty years tended to stay with those who had been intimately involved, as O'Hara had.

  “Of course it does,” O'Hara answered.

  “Thought it might.”

  “So? What of it? Ledbetter went to the electric chair in Florida last summer.”

  “That's all I'm allowed to tell you,” Reynolds said. “And you're to come right away. Hope you don't mind a little spin toward Mount Monadnock. Mallinson wants you to see a crime scene before the press gets wind of it.”

  “Even in this weather?”

  “I told you: Captain's orders.”

  Quietly, O'Hara cursed again.

  It had been a day just like this one, O'Hara found himself thinking next, a day when there had been a heavy snowfall. How long ago had it been? Five years? Six? Time tended to blur past the initial impact of a case. And further, this was not O'Hara's moment for understanding the murkier points of time.

  And then he found himself thinking, My God, yes. Fifteen minutes earlier he had been taking refuge in the fact that a lifetime of police work was coming peaceably to a close. And now he was thinking that, yes again, with the advent of the snow anything horrible was possible.

  Absolutely anything horrible.

  *

  Just past five o'clock, dressed in a fresh and heavier parka, a gift five years earlier from a woman who was no longer his wife, Frank O'Hara was sitting angrily in the drafty cabin of Reynolds's red Ford pickup. And they were bombing along a two-lane rural route at a speed that tempted fate every second.

  Actually, there was no speed that actually was safe in such conditions, but Reynolds gravitated toward particularly perilous ones. He owned a concrete foot which, when combined with a truck on a snowy day, made the experience of climbing a mountain road more akin to the experience of flying low through fog in a small aircraft. It was not a question of if they would hit something; it was a matter of when.

  O'Hara glanced at his driver. Reynolds wasn't even wearing a seat belt. So much for the billboards across the state picturing an almighty Aryan-looking state trooper and bearing the words, “Seat Belts Save Lives-We Use 'em.”

  The road was already covered with five inches of snow and, with the new state austerity-meaning the precipice of bankruptcy-it had no chance of seeing salt, ash, or sand for another day. By then there would be a killer sheet of ice under the white stuff. '

  They were travelling east, navigating a road that led into the mountains. The cold was so irresistible that it penetrated the cabin of the truck, and the vehicle's heating system, much as Reynolds had warned, was a free spirit unto itself. One moment it worked, the next moment it didn't, and the moment after that it came back with a vengeance and threatened to blow them out of the car. Then it would fail again, only to repeat the cycle.

  “You really should get that thing fixed,” O'Hara said, indicating the heater. It moaned during the intervals when it worked.

  “Got to replace the whole blower motor on the truck,” Reynolds answered. “I'd be looking at six hundred dollars, easy.”

  “Funerals are two thousand bucks,” O'Hara said sourly. “And that's with imitation pine.”

  Reynolds only grinned. He was a man in his late twenties who had not yet grasped the concept of his own potential mortality.

  “What I'm trying to tell you,” O'Hara tried tactfully, “is that you're driving like an asshole.”

  “Yeah. I know. That's how I like to drive.”

  “The hell with it,” O'Hara grumbled. Then his spirits sagged a little further as daylight completely disappeared. Now they were at the mercy of the headlights on Reynolds's truck. And the snow was pouring forth so relentlessly that it seemed like a shroud coming down from a malevolent Heaven to obliterate everything living.

  They drove on a road that was pristine with the damned stuff, with the snow howling out of the sky and against them. The truck's windshield seemed midway between some movie screen or a kaleidoscope. And Reynolds was a terrible driver, taking turns too quickly, hitting the brake and accelerator too often. For the preservation of his life and his truck, he relied on the bulky chains on his tires. The chains clanked rhythmically and loudly and somehow-idly, as O'Hara stared past the falling snow into the white countryside-O'Hara thought of old ghost stories with clanking chains being dragged through attics. Yet somehow-fate? the chains? good luck?-the pickup stayed on the road.

  The truck began to climb a low mountain. They were on a winding road with no guardrails, just a deep ditch on each side. O'Hara consoled himself with the notion that Reynolds's truck had a two-way police radio, so as soon as they were in the ditch they could call for help. This notion reassured O'Hara until Reynolds informed him that only the receiving end of the setup was working. But Reynolds had made a note to have the phone fixed before the first big storm of the year.

  “This is the first big storm, you dickhead,” O'Hara said.

  “So I didn't get it done,” Reynolds said with a shrug. “It's expensive.” The shrug caused Reynolds's hands to leave the wheel for a moment. The car lost its direction momentarily and gave a quiver in the direction of a row of sturdy snowy pines.

  O'Hara lunged for the wheel, but Reynolds's hand was there first, correcting the tires.

  “We don't have a radio? Is that what you're telling me?” O'Hara asked.

  “Cops worked these woods for a hundred and fifty years without radios,” Reynolds answered.

  “This isn't eighteen eighty,” O'Hara said.

  “Might just as well be. No radio. Plus when we get where we're going there'll be plenty of radios.”

  “If we get there,” O'Hara grumbled.

  “What a grouch you're turning into.”

  “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  “I wish to hell you'd just go out and get laid for a change. It would make life more pleasant for all of us.”

  O'Hara controlled his temper, then suffered silently for a moment. Eventually, he calmed a little.

  “I just spent three months seeing the department psychologist,” O'Hara said. “Dr. Julie Steinberg. Nice woman. Pretty, smart, thirty-something years old. I should be married to someone like that. Saw her for tension, nightmares, and an urge to start hitting the Jack Daniel's at two each afternoon.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I know you were going to a shrink, and I know you got your head all straightened out now.” Reynolds paused as the tires danced on a curve in the road. “So?”

  “So she got me past all that. And you're now undoing it all in one drive through the lousy white countryside.”

  Reynolds managed a grin. “Frank, this
drive ain't nothing compared to what's waiting halfway up this mountain.”

  O'Hara turned to ask more, but somehow thought better of it. So his eyes found the road again, and he fell silent.

  The path grew steeper as they climbed the mountain, and the snow gave no indication of relenting. The yellow headlights from the truck cut a swath through the storm and, incredibly, as they turned into one narrow area, a logging truck with a full load careened recklessly toward them, encroaching on their lane.

  O'Hara closed his eyes, waited and braced. He opened his eyes a moment later and was surprised to find himself still alive and intact. Noisily, the truck rumbled past.

  O'Hara opened his eyes. Reynolds was looking at him, grinning like a gargoyle.

  “You're a pile of nerves,” Reynolds said.

  “Just drive,” O'Hara answered. A mild profanity formed a further punctuation mark at the end of his sentence.

  From the side window, O'Hara studied the snowfall in the woods beside the road. There was an optical illusion sometimes present during winter storms. By staring long enough into the snow and shadows among the trees, one could often see figures moving.

  Human figures in the forests.

  “Snow ghosts,” the Monadnock Indians used to call them. The spirits of the deceased returned to Earth along with the downfall from the heavens, according to native legend. The spirits remained among the living until the snow melted, which in New Hampshire meant all winter.

  If O'Hara looked for the snow ghosts, and unchained his better judgment, he could find them: the dark human figures ducking out from behind one tree and darting to the next. But of course it was nothing more than an illusion, the product of an overactive imagination and a willingness to believe. The D.T.'s without even the thrill of the alcohol. Wasn’t it?

  O'Hara watched them silently for several minutes and was amazed, as he let his imagination go, at how real they looked. He understood how, following the legend, Monadnock warriors had taken these illusions to be enemies stalking them. Sometimes the warriors had pursued the illusions far into the wooded mountains during blizzards, only to be found frozen to death days later.

  O'Hara shuddered and returned his attention to within the truck. The heater failed again, this time for a quarter hour.

  Yet, after an additional twenty minutes, half frozen, O'Hara and Reynolds arrived at their destination. The latter was a two room cabin in the middle of nowhere, an unheated wooden structure that was used by campers in the summer. Usually in the winter it was untouched by human hands.

  Today it was touched by several human hands. It was ringed by a pair of police cars, plus a jeep which belonged to a local auxiliary. The jeep had oversized tires and a red beacon flashing on its roof.

  O'Hara stepped out of the car, felt his foot slide through the fresh snow, then felt his other foot follow. He had been tramping through this white stuff for two decades; yet today he felt as if he were stepping onto the surface of the moon, and the crap underfoot was just about to give way.

  O'Hara faced the cabin. A familiar figure hulked into the doorway.

  “Talk to me,” the figure growled. His usual greeting.

  “Hello, Captain,” O'Hara said.

  “What took you so long?” answered Captain William Mallinson, head of the homicide division of the New Hampshire State Police.

  “There was a little matter of seven inches of snow,” O'Hara answered. “I know you didn't notice, but-”

  “You're right. I don't see no frigging snow,” Captain Mallinson answered. He puffed something that was small, brown, smelled bad, and gave off smoke, indicating that it was on fire. It was some subspecies of tobacco, halfway between a cigar and a cigarette. When Mallinson wasn't puffing it, he held the stinking, burning, brown object in a gloved hand.

  Captain Mallinson was a big, irritable, belligerent, militantly disagreeable man with a ruddy, porky face. His shoulders were slumped, and in his thick winter parka-with two silver captain's bars on each lapel-he looked like one of the smaller, nastier floats from an upcoming Thanksgiving parade in one of the distant cities. On his left side, he wore a Smith & Wesson that looked as if it could have dropped a bull elk.

  Mallinson was fifty-seven years old and the head of homicide investigations within the state, a no-nonsense position held by appointment from the commissioner of state police. Fourteen years earlier he had become the youngest captain ever on New Hampshire homicide, a reward for having been a priority case hatchet man for the previous two state police commissioners. Before that, he'd done “gunboat” police work, meeting the state prison bus at the Nashua and Manchester depots and pistol-whipping white trash recidivists into docile parolees. And he had the sour, unforgiving demeanor to underscore all of this: the temperament of an angry warthog. Those who worked for him liked to quip that he was New Hampshire's only living heart donor. Yet all the bare knuckle living had taken its toll. Mallinson had already had one heart attack and was hoping to retire before a second one killed him. Even he knew it would probably be a photo finish.

  “Does anyone here see any frigging snow?” Mallinson eventually asked the men around him.

  Two sergeants standing near their captain didn't see any snow, either. No one else ventured an opinion. To admit seeing snow was an invitation to start shoveling it.

  “See? No snow,” Mallinson said. “God damn it, I'm the most powerful goddam son of a bitch in this state. When I say there's no snow, there's no snow. O'Hara! Am I right?”

  “Right, Cap,” O'Hara said. “Nice sunny day. And these aren't pine trees around us, they're palms.”

  “See?” Mallinson said to the younger men with him. “Here's a veteran detective and he doesn't see any snow. Now do you all get the idea?”

  “Bet it was a great day for someone to get whacked, huh?” O'Hara suggested.

  “You can't imagine,” Captain Mallinson said. “Had anything to eat recently?”

  “No.”

  “You're lucky.”

  Mallinson made a motion of his head to one of his uniformed men, a fresh-faced officer in a blue parka and a fur cap. The young man's name was Samuelson and he looked terrified. Or, as O'Hara read the expression more carefully, horrified.

  Samuelson led O'Hara back into the cabin, a crummy, little building containing motel-reject furniture. Clear plastic sheets were spread across the windows from the inside, but a couple of the windows had been broken, so the plastic had been torn and shredded. No telephone. No power. The only lights-the illumination by which O'Hara now saw-were hand-held battery lanterns maintained by the cops, plus a web of trouble lights strung from the police jeep out front.

  In the big room, off from what passed as a kitchen, was a door that led to an outhouse which in turn was accessible from outside and inside. To work as a cop in New Hampshire was to never be surprised at what one found in such buildings: from a stripped Ferrari to a cannabis hothouse to a corpse.

  Today it was the latter. Everything in sight was frozen, even the odor of death that hung in the air. The stench-a modest pile of decomposing human flesh-had been so bad that it had permeated the cabin before the big winter freeze set in a few days earlier.

  O'Hara recoiled as he and the young cop passed through the first room. He braced himself for what was coming.

  “A couple of hikers made the discovery,” Samuelson explained. “Sometime after the storm began to break on the mountain. Took them an hour to get down the slopes. Called the report in. Then it took us another hour to locate the cabin. Real bad weather by that time,” the young man explained in a low voice.

  “Real bad weather,” O'Hara agreed.

  “Plus this structure is not on any maps,” Samuelson said. “No building permit.”

  O'Hara had already pegged the building as pre-World War Two, with probably a decade to spare. Back in the 1930s the State had built many such cabins as public shelters for hikers and campers, even where there were no trails or campsites. Rural America WPA projects: A make-work wooden
assemblage in the middle of nowhere. No one had bothered with building permits. Currently, no one in any state authority even had an accurate guess as to how many structures still existed on public lands: some occupied by squatters, some abandoned for decades.

  “What the hell have we got?” O'Hara finally asked. “One corpse or more than one?”

  “Just one, sir.”

  O'Hara had already guessed as much. The stench of frozen decomposition would have been much worse with two.

  He and the younger officer stepped into the death chamber. Both gagged. The reek of death was much stronger here, much like a punch in the nose as they entered the room. Both gagged. The young cop studiously avoided looking at the cadaver. O'Hara felt a surge in his stomach. Mallinson had been correct: He was lucky he hadn't eaten.

  “Oh, Lord,” O'Hara said. It was as if he had stepped into his past, a horror film, and an abattoir simultaneously.

  Before him was a scene out of a warped nightmare. The remains of a woman's torso lay on the bare wooden floor. It was in an advanced state of decomposition, a state that had been halted by the plunging temperatures.

  The torso was facedown. Or, more accurately, it would have been facedown had there been a face to have been facing down. And there would have been a face if there had been a head. But there wasn't a head because whatever fiend had done this had decapitated his victim.