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

by Noel Hynd

  Mallinson's eyes rose to the ambulance crew. “No wheelchair,” the captain said. “I walked into this building, I'll frigging walk out.”

  The captain's hand, shaking and feeling very old, touched O'Hara's shoulder as he stood to walk. Partially to thank O'Hara. Partially to steady himself. But Mallinson's whole arm spasmed, and O'Hara suddenly was very frightened for him. Mallinson had always been a big, belligerent, bear-like man. Today an irregular heart had reduced him to a patty.

  He took two steps and hesitated as if he would fall. Mrs. Mallinson was at his side, as was McConnell. But O'Hara beat them both, caught the big man with both arms and eased him into the chair.

  “Aaah,” Mallinson groaned. “I feel like Raymond Burr in this thing. But why walk when you can ride, anyway? I've waited a long time for a free ride in this state. Might as well take it.”

  “Hang in there, Captain,” O'Hara said. Strangely, it occurred to O'Hara that he had never liked Mallinson more than he did at this moment.

  The orderlies positioned the commander properly in the chair. They pushed him out the door. An audience of his subordinates stood in the hallway. From their grim faces came calls of encouragement as his wheelchair passed. O'Hara watched from the door to the captain's office.

  A few moments later, the state records clerk entered and retrieved the succession agreement that O'Hara had signed. Mallinson had left it neatly-and conveniently-on his desk, right next to an unfinished pack of cheroots.

  Then O'Hara watched the clerk disappear down the hall with it to place it on file. And it occurred to O'Hara that more than the dead could come back to haunt a man.

  *

  What did he know?

  Inventory time. An opportunity to take stock.

  Late that evening, O'Hara sat in the downstairs of his home. A fire burned in the hearth and Sinatra sang softly on the sound system: a bootleg tape of rare, old 78s. The big band era. The 1940s.

  O'Hara had a clipboard on his lap with a single sheet of paper. He wrote upon it. Outside, the wind was active but came up short of howling. Inside, he had to admit that the house was cozy.

  He wasn't drinking. Not since the three beers in the bar earlier in the day. Upon the clipboard he tried to assemble an outline of the case before him.

  The question repeated itself. What did he know?

  He knew he had a murderer loose, one who would continue to kill until stopped. A killer who signaled, through the mutilation of his victims, that he was laughing at the police. A killer who was perhaps insane, as insane as he was trying to drive 0' Hara.

  But who?

  Why did the most logical suspect remain a dead man? Why was the totally irrational-the contention that a killer had returned from the grave-the most logical explanation?

  There was something wrong with the evidence, O'Hara theorized. There was some fault in the original case made against Ledbetter: He wasn't a loner. He wasn't a heterosexual psycho killer of women. The witnesses against him weren't positive with their identifications. Already he had found cracks in the case assembled six years earlier. How many more would he find?

  Who was S. Clay? Was S. Clay anyone? Or was S. Clay a name that Gary had thought up on the spur of the moment when he rented a storage space. S. Clay.

  What was it, O'Hara wondered, that Gary had said to him when the notion of S. Clay first arose? He recalled in Gary's slithery, rasping voice. It's me but it's not me. Well, what the hell did that mean? What the hell did Gary intend with that?

  Then O'Hara caught himself. Be logical, he insisted. Did he believe that Gary actually communicated with him? Did he really believe that? Because if he did, he told himself, then it was rational to believe that Gary could interact with other humans.

  And could return to kill.

  It was only if he didn't believe in Gary that he had to find a worldly killer. And yet paradoxically, a worldly killer was what Gary was asking him to find.

  Not guilty, man.

  “Is that you, Gary?” O'Hara asked aloud. “Or is that my memory recalling you?”

  He waited for a response. None came. There was a distant creak in the house. But there were always distant creaks in the house.

  Carolyn Hart.

  He missed her. Who was she? he wondered. He hoped her landlord might be able to tell him more. But who knew whether that little twerp would cooperate at all? Kaminski hadn't seemed very happy to see a cop. Adam probably had had negative experiences with police, O'Hara reasoned. That seemed to be most people's reaction. Maybe Adam got beat up once, O'Hara speculated. He grinned. Maybe Kaminski had deserved it.

  Carolyn Hart.

  The larger question. Was she dead or alive? O'Hara was feeling very rational this evening. So how could he really accept that he had made love with a spirit? A dead woman.

  Something about that idea suddenly repelled him. And yet O'Hara had decided to go with his instincts on this case. And his instincts told him how he felt. Whether Carolyn was a ghost or not, there was something about her that gripped him, that hooked him emotionally unlike any woman he had ever known.

  Oh, man, he told himself. The alarm signals were going off all over the place when it came to Carolyn. He wished she could come to New Hampshire to be with him. He wished he could talk to her whenever he wanted.

  In a way that he couldn't explain, she was exactly what was missing from his life.

  The fire crackled. O'Hara got to his feet. The creaking under the floorboards that he now heard were from his own feet. He took a poker from the side of his hearth and spread the embers around the fireplace so that they would die out. He waited a final minute for the Sinatra tape to end.

  It did, with a tune from the Tommy Dorsey days. The tape clicked off.

  O'Hara had the urge to take a drink to help him sleep, but resisted it. He climbed the stairs, feeling very alone in the house.

  Again, he wished Carolyn could be with him. How much brighter that would make life, no matter what she was. Absently, he wondered about the place she had been in and to which she didn't wish to return.

  Jail? A graveyard? The dentist's office? He smiled. A half dozen absurd notions were upon him. And he didn't like any of them.

  Well, he knew one thing. If she would come and stay with him, he would always have a room for her. For as long as she wanted. It had taken a lifetime for him to feel that he could fall so hard in love with a particular woman. Damned if he was going to let her get away!

  He went to his bedroom, and walked to his dresser. Upon it, in the evidence envelope, was the turtle pendant that had belonged to Abigail Negri.

  O'Hara slid it out into his hand. He hefted it a little, feeling its weight. Its essence. Its vibrations. He wanted it to tell him something.

  But it was mute. It refused to divulge its secrets. He put it away.

  Then he walked to the window. A bright moon on the freshly fallen snow. Christmas weather. And it was indeed getting near Christmas. Tomorrow was the first day of December.

  He whistled a little tune of loneliness. 'Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Murder All the Way. . . .”

  What on earth had steered his mind in that direction?

  He gazed out toward the woods. Then he cursed himself. He had meant to call the hospital to see how the captain was doing. He glanced at his watch. Too late to call now and, he reassured himself, if anything terrible had happened, someone would have called him.

  No news was good news.

  He looked at the woods in the moonlight and shook his head.

  Here he was stone sober and those damned forest ghosts were darting back and forth among the trees again. One of them. Two of them. Three. Four. Five.

  Then ten of them, going from tree trunk to tree trunk. He lost count. There was a whole colony of them, darting in different directions.

  An optical illusion? Yeah, sure. A window on a new, different reality? Why not? He wasn't the first individual to see them. To believe that something could be there.

  All of which ma
de his case.

  If he believed in the forest ghosts, then he believed that Gary's spirit could walk on Earth.

  If Gary's spirit could walk on Earth, then it could kill. That meant Gary, or Gary's ghost at least, was still his numero uno suspect.

  It also meant Carolyn was real, no matter what she was. And if she was real, he could fall in love with her.

  Was that crazy? Not to O'Hara. It made perfect sense.

  Chapter Twenty

  The cat-transvestite party was long since over and Nixon, the dog, had been back home for several days. Even the animal's picture on Rose Horvath's mantel had been turned forward again.

  It was eight o'clock on a frozen Thursday evening. Rose stood at the door and allowed O'Hara into her Bennington home. A kerosene heater hummed in her living room as the temperature outside had plunged to the single digits.

  “I came as soon as I could, Rose,” O'Hara said, unbuttoning a massive sheepskin coat. “What's going on?”

  “It's Donna,” Rose said. “She's terrified.”

  “What's the problem?”

  “It's that pendant you let her feel,” Rose said, leading the detective into her living room. “Very bad vibrations coming from that. Rose had a dark vision.”

  O'Hara blinked, following. Rose led O'Hara past the kerosene heater and into a small den. Looking ahead, he could see that the room was strewn with knitting and quilt making projects and that Rose's live-in lover Donna was draped on an overstuffed sofa. In the same room, a Christmas tree had materialized. The tree reminded O'Hara of Peter Lavalliere, rather than joy to the world. It occurred to O'Hara that life had taken an evil spin when a Christmas tree called to mind a neo-Nazi with a floating walleye.

  “Did you bring the pendant with you?” Rose asked. “Donna needs a clearer view to help you.”

  Somehow all the psychic stuff seemed wacko out of context.

  “Let me ask you something, Rose,” O'Hara said. “Did I drive on ice all the way over here from Nashua because your girlfriend had a vision?”

  Rose was already in the den with her roommate. She turned, a touch of petulance upon her. “Frank O'Hara!” she snapped, her voice like the clapper of a new bell. “Did you have anything more important to do this evening? We are about to present you with your dark future in this dismaying murder case. And for your trouble, you laugh at us.”

  “Believe me, Rose. I'm not laughing at anything these days.”

  A beat. O'Hara eyed the two women, first one, then the other. Donna raised a faint hand from the sofa and Rose held it. Reassurance.

  O'Hara had long ago learned that in any such situation the wisest course of action was to play along.

  “So what do you have for me?” he asked.

  “Do you have the turtle pendant with you?”

  “What if I didn't?”

  “I'd tell you to take that jalopy you drive around in and skid all the way back to Nashua to fetch it.”

  “As it happens,” O'Hara said, “I carry it.”

  He reached to an inside pocket and pulled out the pendant in its envelope. Donna's hand left Rose's and reached forward. O'Hara carefully handed the envelope to her.

  “Now,” pronounced Rose. “We're in business.”

  Donna stood. She led Rose and their guest to a small sitting room in the rear of the house, a chamber with many windows that served as a solarium in the summer. In the winter, a set of worn sheets served as makeshift curtains to cut the many drafts. They did not serve efficiently.

  O'Hara sat down at a round table that was covered with an antique linen cloth. Donna sat, also. Without asking, Rose produced a bottle of beer for O'Hara. In keeping with elegant winter life-styles so prevalent in their milieu in New Hampshire, she also produced a clean beer stein, one bearing the logo of a nearby bed-and-breakfast.

  O'Hara accepted the drink with thanks.

  Rose knocked the lights low in the room and Donna lay the pendant in the middle of the table. For several seconds Donna stared at it. Then she looked at Rose, her eyes asking a question.

  Rose Horvath looked at O'Hara. “Oh, uh, Frank,” she said. “I know you're still on the job. I know you're always on duty. But can you be a little flexible tonight?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Rose needs something to help her get up a little,” she said. “Know what I mean?”

  O'Hara sighed. He knew what she meant. “It's okay,” he said. “Just get on with it.”

  Donna eagerly produced her beloved hash pipe, stoked it with a sticky little brown cube and lit it. Donna took a puff also to get the cannabis fire going. The women giggled and gave each other a playful push under the watchful eye of the top detective of the New Hampshire State Police. Within a few moments, Donna was sailing.

  She hefted the pendant in her hand again. While it didn't speak to anyone else, it seemed to be shouting to her.

  “I see deep trouble,” she said. “I see a police funeral,” she said.

  “Whose?” O'Hara asked. He thought of Mallinson. “A commander?”

  Donna was looking right at him. “You are going to be drawn out in the snow to a rendezvous with death. I see . . . I see you meeting with the figure of a man. In a heavy snow squall. A man whom you have sought, but whom you do not know.”

  Donna shook her head. If this were an act, it was a good one. She looked as if she believed what she was saying.

  “A big man?” O'Hara tried. “A handsome man? Dark? Light?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Can you visualize a name?” O'Hara pressed. “Can you describe a face?”

  Abruptly, Donna pushed the pendant back to O'Hara. She jumped as if a raw nerve had been buzzed. O'Hara took the pendant in his palm and closed his hand. Donna wrapped her hands around O'Hara's. Her hands were trembling. O'Hara guessed that she hadn't even arrived at the worst part of her vision.

  “You try, too,” Donna said to him.

  He closed his eyes. The only face that would come to him was Gary's. Or a close approximation of it. Then, for some reason, another image flashed into his mind. He saw his own house at night, illuminated with a bluish light from a Devil's moon. The sole light in the house was the one in his upstairs bedroom. There in the bedroom, the vision told him, he held court with a ghost. And at the same time, as O'Hara sat with Rose and Donna at their round table, Gary's face appeared to him in a huge close-up, as big as a winter night, as if O'Hara were looking through Gary's face to see his own home.

  It was as if O'Hara's own home were now part of Gary.

  “Your home is haunted,” Donna said. “Has been for a while. Will be for a long time.”

  O'Hara felt a chill.

  “The pendant's telling you all that?” O'Hara asked.

  “The pendant and your hand,” Donna said. She held a long pause. A puff on the hash pipe, followed by a long smoky exhalation, seemed to help. “The charm came from a woman who was murdered. Very violently. Very horrible murder.”

  “Can you see the killer?”

  “Same man as in the snow,” Donna said. “Same killer.” Donna spoke slowly, adding things, amplifying details. “He's a psychopath. Enjoys killing. Killed men and women. . . .”

  O'Hara's ears perked.

  “He won't stop . . .” Donna continued, “he won't stop until his spirit can rest.”

  O'Hara, with his free hand, took a long draw on his beer. One part of his mind told him that he had to be imagining all of this. The other part knew that he wasn't.

  “And I’ll meet him in the snow?” O'Hara asked.

  “Soon.”

  “Rose,” O'Hara said, “this whole damned state is under a blanket of snow right now.”

  But Donna was on to greater, more disturbing material.

  Donna's gaze had settled on their hands where they formed a union. Now her eyes lifted. They came up with a very frightened cast to them. She stopped short.

  “Detective O'Hara is a big boy,” Rose said to her girlfriend. “Go
ahead. Give him the worst part of it.”

  “I see the funeral as being yours,” Donna said. “I can't be certain, but I do see you prominent in it.” She paused. “I think you're going to die soon,” she said. “I think you're going to be lured out into the snow by forces you can't control. Maybe by a woman. And I don't see you coming back alive.”

  Her hands separated, leaving O'Hara holding the pendant. The silence in the room was so palpable that O'Hara felt as if he could whack it with a hammer. He would have liked to.

  Both women were staring at him. There was little he could say in return. “Thanks,” he finally said. “I can't tell you how you've made my evening.”

  *

  But the evening worsened.

  O'Hara stayed for a final drink. It was nearly ten P.M. when he departed from Rose's house and slid into his car. But even in the deep freeze, the old Pontiac surged to life when O'Hara cranked the ignition. He fastened his seat belt and let the engine idle for a moment. Then he was ready to face the one-hour drive across the state roads to his home in Hancock.

  Snow was rare with single digit temperatures. Meteorologists would explain that it was “too cold” for the atmosphere to produce precipitation. But the early winter was upon the state with a vengeance, and the snow itself didn't know it couldn't happen.

  The snowfall became heavy about fifteen minutes away from Bennington. O'Hara had arctic wiper blades on his car and he watched semi-mesmerized as the blades, on the fastest speed, flung the damnable white stuff off his windshield as fast as it could fall. But as fast as it fell, nature replaced it. O'Hara wasn't sure where this snowfall was coming from, because it hadn't been predicted. But it was there, anyway.