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

by Noel Hynd

  “God in heaven!” O'Hara exclaimed abruptly. And the priest's eyes were mildly downcast from the profanity. “Six six six,” O'Hara said. Several ribbons of goose bumps crept across his flesh.

  “Revelation 13:18,” the priest affirmed. “Six six six. 'The Devil's number.' But I suppose that would just be coincidence. Wouldn't it?”

  In the late afternoon, O'Hara visited the Florida State Correctional Facility at Tallahassee. The assistant warden to whom he had spoken by telephone allowed him access to prison records. From the log of visitors, dating back to 1988 and 1989, O'Hara answered one question, but found himself posed with several more.

  Gary had had a female visitor. She had signed in as Heidi White of Marshall, Texas. The name rang no bell for O'Hara. Nor was Heidi White the same name as Carolyn Hart.

  O'Hara stared at the records. He searched through them further looking for Carolyn's name. He didn't find it.

  Was Carolyn the same person as Heidi White? If so, why was she using a pseudonym? O'Hara found that she had used a Social Security number and a Texas driver's license as identification. O'Hara recorded both numbers.

  Another question posed itself. The visits from Heidi White stopped short in 1990.Why? There were any number of explanations, depending on who the elusive Ms. White had been.

  O'Hara went to a telephone and called his office in New Hampshire. A computer check was run on Heidi White, Texas license and Social Security number. An hour later, a phone call for O'Hara came back to the prison. O'Hara was summoned from the archives to the phone room. Here was the answer to his inquiry.

  Not only had Heidi White disappeared from the prison visitor's log three years ago, but she had also disappeared from the map of America. Her license and credit cards had lapsed. No income had been reported. No address. No employment.

  No nothing. Just missing.

  Ominous suspicions, the handiwork of a paranoid mind: Dead? O'Hara wondered. Murdered? A suicide?

  He thought of Carolyn Hart in Philadelphia. He was glad he had taken her pulse to see if she was alive. But even then, he wasn't so sure.

  He returned to the archives and sat down at the reading table where the visitors' logs remained open. But O'Hara was finished reading. Now he was thinking.

  Nutty thoughts again.

  He drew a breath. He felt like going off for some booze but decided to lay off. He shook his head. There he went again with these crazy notions of dead people interacting with the living. Utter nonsense, he kept trying to convince himself. The problem was, if it were utter nonsense, why did it seem like the only explanation that made any sense?

  A half-baked thought gripped him: Where was Gary right now? Kicking around O'Hara's home in New Hampshire? O'Hara could picture it. Did that make O'Hara crazy? Did it become a reality because O'Hara could picture it? Or, flipping the idea inside out, was the only reason that O'Hara could picture it was because the thought already was reality?

  Sometimes O'Hara envisioned himself in a room in which all the walls, plus the ceiling and floor, were mirrors, and he was stuck trying to figure out where reality began and ended.

  Then, as he chased away that image, he was beset with another one. Back home in New Hampshire. He could hear the musty off-key tinkling of the aged piano in the living room of his home.

  He never touched the piano, himself. But he heard an old New Orleans hymn being played. In O'Hara's mind's eye, the player turned around and the music became louder.

  More poignant. More vibrant.

  It was Gary Ledbetter playing, of course, invading O'Hara's home, O'Hara's life. Another image emerged of Gary lying in bed with Barbara, O'Hara's ex-wife. Gary had his clothes on, but he had completely undressed Barbara, who was white-hot with passion, sweating with desire.

  Just waiting for Gary. . . .

  Where did these goddamned images come from? They were metaphors for what? Subconscious wishes for what? Julie Steinberg would have a field day if O'Hara were ever uninhibited enough to reveal them.

  O'Hara closed his eyes to dismiss them but the most recent one only intensified. Now Gary was naked on top of Barbara. He was between her legs, bringing her to a fast, successful, and noisily enthusiastic orgasm.

  Your woman left you. Now I claim her, Gary said to him. You wreck my life and I'll wreck yours!

  He wondered if that's what was going on somewhere. Gary was out there bedding O'Hara's ex-wife.

  Finally giving her what she wants, man!

  O'Hara sprang to his feet quickly, growling and chasing away all these images. “Fuck it!” he snapped aloud. “Go away.”

  Gary laughed and faded.

  Simultaneously, the prison librarian looked up sharply. O'Hara was reduced to returning the logbooks with an apologetic shit-eating smile.

  O'Hara went back to his hotel in Tallahassee and stared at the wall. He turned on the television and watched, but nothing made any sense. His mind was deeply inside another dimension: that of Gary Ledbetter. A killer who killed even after death. A serial killer who wasn't.

  Within his mind, a damn burst, and with it came a torrent of profanities.

  Something inside him shut down his common sense. Some voice inside him-not Gary's!-told him that he could operate now on instinct and instinct alone.

  Instinct.

  Nothing else made much sense.

  He picked up the telephone and dialed Philadelphia. On the other end of the line, after several rings, Carolyn Hart came on the phone. I “I talked to the priest,” he said.

  “And?”

  “And I want to talk to you again,” he said.

  “Here I am,” she offered. “Talk.”

  “No,” he said. “What I mean is this: I'm stopping in Philadelphia on my way back to New Hampshire. I'd like to talk in person. I'll take you out to dinner.”

  There was a long pause on the phone, one that strongly suggested that he had overstepped. That the invitation was somehow inappropriate.

  So he was about to alter it. Or amend it. Or even start speaking there on the phone.

  “That would be wonderful,” she finally said. “I'll tell you the perfect place.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  O’Hara met Carolyn Hart at a small restaurant on Locust Street, a neighborhood place not far from where Carolyn lived. Carolyn had given him the address over the telephone, and O'Hara, with twenty years as a backwoods gumshoe, had found the location easily.

  She was already seated at a corner table when he entered. She smiled sweetly when she saw him. She looked slightly different from the last time he had spoken with her, and O'Hara attributed the change to that of the light.

  She looked different at night than in the day. This thought occurred to him, and it seemed quite natural. Quite sensible.

  “So?” she asked as he sat. “You had a good trip? A successful one?” she asked.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “What did you learn?” she asked.

  “Not an awful lot that makes much sense,” he said. “Father Trintino has seen Gary, too. What do you make of that?”

  “I'm not surprised,” she said. “He's there to be seen. If you know how to look.”

  They ordered food as she elaborated on the concept.

  “It occurred to me,” O'Hara said, “that Trintino had some reservations about Gary's guilt, too. That's what unifies all of us who believe to have seen him. We all had a sense that an injustice of some sort may have been done.”

  She leaned forward. Increasingly, in her blue eyes, he found something that simultaneously drew him toward her and terrified him.

  “You told me you loved Gary,” he said to her. “How?”

  She opened her hands. “I loved him as an individual,” she said. “As a human being. Not as a man to woman. It wasn't a physical thing between me and Gary.”

  “Some woman visited him in prison,” he said. “Then stopped suddenly.”

  “Me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Why would
n't I? I loved him. I told you.”

  Again, the conversation was elliptical, if not circular.

  “What are you?” he asked. “Friend? Family? Your accent is Southern. Same as Gary.”

  “Am I on trial?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then spare me the interrogation. I'm keeping you on track, aren't I? I'm sending you in the right direction, aren't I?”

  “So far. Maybe.”

  “Believe it,” she said, “I am. Then don't break what's working for you.”

  From here he sensed a delicacy and fragility of feeling that he had never noticed in any other woman he had ever met. She had shades and colors that he couldn't explain, and guessed he didn't know how to explore. Being with her was always like being before an unopened door, like being on the edge of some unworldly experience.

  Another strange image came before him: There was a warm sunlit path before him that would lead him out of a perpetual winter. All he had to do was take the right steps at the right time.

  In the right direction.

  Instinct again, he told himself. He needed to go with it rather than fight it. His confidence was growing that it would lead him in that proper direction.

  “Do you know anything about Gary's lover?” he asked.

  “Wish I did,” she answered.

  “And it wasn't you? His lover.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Was his lover a man or a woman?”

  “It depends what you mean by 'lover,’” she answered.

  “Carolyn, please. No games, okay?”

  Sweetly, almost teasingly, she raised an eyebrow. In the soft, flattering light of the restaurant, she seemed ageless, almost timeless. And yet now, at the same time, O'Hara sensed something sinister about her. But then he blinked and that latter impulse was gone, replaced by the more positive impressions.

  He drew out a breath. A waiter arrived with their order. They ate in near silence. Then, after the meal, over coffee, he ,began to question her again.

  “Let me ask you something, Carolyn,” he said. “Let me ask you something and tell you something. If you visited Gary in prison, you used the name Heidi White. If you didn't use that name,” he said, “then you didn't visit him.”

  This one she thought about long and hard.

  “I visited him in prison,” she said.

  “As Heidi White?”

  “It's as you say,” she said.

  “Sheesh,” he said. “At last an answer. At last a small piece of something that makes a little sense. You were Heidi White.”

  She nodded.

  “Why the pseudonym?”

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked. “With the tabloids all over. With the media? You think any sane person would visit Gary and use her real name?”

  “Why did you visit him?”

  “I cared about him.”

  “Why did you stop going?”

  “I didn't have a choice.”

  “Why?”

  She wouldn't answer.

  “Better yet,” he continued, “three years ago you chose to disappear. You shed your old identity and presumably slipped into a new one. Why?”

  “Why not?” she asked. “It's the type of thing I do. Okay? Why not?”

  “Are you sure you're alive?” he asked. “Are you sure you're real?”

  “What about you, Detective? I could ask you the same. If I'm dead and Gary's dead, what about you? Are you dead, too? Is that why you see us? Or are you caught somewhere in between, waiting to go one way or the other? Give it some thought.”

  What she said disturbed him. Again, he chose not to press her, particularly when she shifted the tone of the evening by taking the conversation in an unexpected direction.

  “Now, let me ask you something,” Carolyn said. “Would you like to see where I live?”

  “Why do you ask me that?”

  “Because I know what you're thinking,” she said. “And I know what you'd like.”

  “I'm not sure what you mean,” O'Hara insisted. “What am I thinking? What do I want?”

  “Come over and you'll find out,” she said. “Even if you don't consciously know, you'll find out when you get there.”

  Within him, danger signals chimed. In spite of them, or maybe because of them, he plunged straight ahead.

  Her house was a short walk from the restaurant. They walked through the square and past a busy area of shops and restaurants on a block of Twentieth Street. Then they turned to a darker block of large town houses, some of which had once been very grand indeed. To O'Hara's trained eyes, these former mansions featured many nameplates and many doorbells, signifying their breakup-noble old buildings buzz-sawed into small one-bedroom apartments.

  Oswell Street was even darker. One of the street lamps at the foot of the block had burned out. O'Hara saw the block as any trained policeman might: a shadowy stretch of cityscape that might harbor heaven knew what in the shadows. But he perceived the neighborhood as not being particuarly dangerous, and proceeded, intrigued and beguiled by his hostess. All this time, she kept him amused, taking him into her confidence about little things in her past-her girlhood, art school, a secretarial job she had once held. Yet each detail she gave seemed to stand independently, and served not at all to illuminate any larger portrait.

  Finally he asked again, very gently this time, about the last three years.

  “The last couple of years I don't much want to speak of,” she said to Him. “Not since 1990. June. I don't talk about anything after June of 1990.”

  “Something bad happen then?”

  “Something very bad.”

  “Life has to go on,” he said.

  “If you say life has to go on, then it has to go on. You're a very convincing man.” There was amusement in her voice, and a quick sense of glancing relief.

  “Thank you,” he answered.

  “I've been in places I don't want to be,” she said. “Unpleasant places that I don't wish to go back to. All right? May we let it go at that?”

  “For now,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  They reached her building. He followed her through the front door.

  She lived alone, he discovered, but he had guessed that already. There was a streak of loneliness to her, something that seemed very lost. Or maybe something very feminine that he sensed needed protection. Again, he didn't know.

  The living room was long and sparse, and she quickly explained away the furnishings as having belonged to a previous tenant who never returned for them. The landlord had let her use them, which to O'Hara sounded unusual yet plausible. It also barely mattered.

  She went to the kitchen and poured some brandy, accomplishing it very quickly and returning with it in a pair of mismatching snifters, also holdovers from the previous tenancy. Nor had she asked if he wanted alcohol. She had just assumed that he might. She had assumed correctly, though he accepted it with a moment's hesitation.

  “I don't entertain that much,” she said. “If I start entertaining maybe I'll get some new glassware. I don't know.”

  “Maybe you'll find a husband and he'll come equipped with a complete bar,” O’Hara jested. It wasn't a serious suggestion. It was an attempt to flush her out more, to get her to talk more on a personal level. It partially succeeded.

  “I'll never marry,” she said.

  “Why's that?”

  'Just won't,” she said.

  “On account of something that happened?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Let me guess. Something that happened in 1990. June of that year.”

  “You catch on quickly.”

  “I've paid my dues. Twenty years as a backwoods cop.”

  “You don't strike me as a backwoods cop.”

  “You don't strike me as a woman who would never marry.”

  “Then we're even,” she said. “Cheers.” She raised her brandy and sipped. Then she set aside the glass.

  She sat on the sofa right next to hi
m, her knees drawn up. She was strongly sexual and thoroughly innocent all at once, as if there were something fresh and unspoiled about her. There was also something unnatural, a quality that kept throwing O'Hara off, an essence that he did not recognize from any other woman he had known. It was at this moment, as she sipped brandy and sat beside him, and as he watched her when she took her eyes off him, that the desire to sleep with her intensified profoundly.

  And he wondered, or thought he knew, where this evening was leading. Not so much in the short term, but in the long term, too.

  They spent another half hour talking, all the while O'Hara's sense of fascination and mystery was growing. Finally, finishing the brandy, she set aside the snifter.

  “You don't want to go back to your hotel, do you?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered.

  “Then you can stay with me. Would you like that?”

  “Of course I'd like that,” he said.

  “Well, then we'll do it,” she said with a half smile. “Tell me, if I do things you like for you, will you do things I want for me?”

  “I'm not sure what that means,” he answered.

  “You will,” she said. “You will. Come along.”