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

by Noel Hynd

“Your office tried to call you. No answer on your phone. They called me. Asked me to come over and take a look.”

  O'Hara nodded. The events of the previous night resonated in his head. In a nanosecond, all the events replayed themselves.

  “Is there a problem?” O'Hara asked.

  “If you're the acting head of homicide in this state, Frank, yeah. There's a big problem.”

  “I might have known.”

  “We got a telephone tip. Found a man dead. I'll take you,” said Reynolds.

  They climbed into Reynolds's four-wheel, and while Reynolds drove, O'Hara saw the route of the previous night repeat itself. They took the state highway westward until they neared Devil's Glen, then cut down that familiar side road that had already figured into too much death.

  O'Hara felt his heart beating harder as they neared the area where he must have been just the previous night. And then he had a sense of déjà-vu when he saw the assemblage of police vehicles at the side of the road, and an obvious path leading far into the woods. He knew exactly where he was being taken. But this time there was a snowmobile to take him.

  Minutes later, he stood before Sandor Clay's cabin. He looked upward to see why the cabin had never been visible from the air via Sgt. Hamburger's helicopter. One of these weird little quirks in the universe, he wondered. He had no explanation, other than that the trees shielded it perfectly.

  Then two harness bulls in parkas showed him into the cabin.

  “Nothing's been touched, sir,” one of the men said to him. “We waited for you.”

  “The murder looks like it's pretty fresh, sir,” the other one said.

  O'Hara gazed at the body of Sandor Clay, lying facedown exactly where O'Hara remembered him falling.

  “One bullet to the head, sir. Someone just walked in here and popped him.”

  “I can see that,” O'Hara answered.

  “Looks real fresh,” the first cop repeated.

  “Can't tell that, kid,” O'Hara growled. “In the damn cold. Everything gets preserved. No heat in this place. Who knows how long he's been lying here.”

  A team from forensic arrived, stumbling through the snow, ready to obliterate as much evidence as their usual carelessness would allow.

  After making his own inspection, he told them, “Go to it.”

  “Yes, sir. Right away,” one of them answered. It was a young team. Inexperienced. O'Hara was confident they would make a mess out of this.

  With a booted foot, O'Hara found some play in the floorboards. As he toyed with the planks, there was a terrible creak in the wood. The creak reminded him of his own place and the events that had transpired there.

  “Officer?” O'Hara said to one of the forensic men.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I'm going to take personal charge of this case. I want you to submit every bit of evidence directly to me.”

  “Yes, sir.” The uniformed man gazed at O'Hara. “We have some shovels and axes in the truck outside, sir. Do you want us to pull up these floorboards? We might find something down there.”

  The younger man looked at the suspicious spot.

  “No. Leave the floor alone,” O'Hara said. “I'll take care of that part.”

  The younger man nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Then O'Hara stepped back and let the investigation begin around him. He thought again of the previous night, or at least his memory of it. He drew a breath and tried to relax. Two words came into his mind pertaining to his own involvement. Two words that would always remain with him.

  Innocent, man!

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Several hundred miles to the south, Adam Kaminski still lived a life that was filled with perplexity. Sure, over the years he thought he had developed a keen sense of tenants and which ones would be trouble, but nothing had ever prepared him for the intrigue that had involved Carolyn Hart.

  Young women. Psychiatrists. Apartment leases. Police. A combination of any of those two always meant trouble in his business. Why couldn't anything just fall neatly in place? Why was his life such a continuing series of contradictions and inexplicable events? Particularly this last series, which continued to bedevil him.

  February came and went. March arrived, and Kaminski fell into a sharp depression, despite the fact that the weather in the mid-Atlantic broke very mildly. An early spring was in everyone's forecast, which somehow only made Adam more depressed.

  He had taken to not eating on his lunch hour. Rather, he took long walks around the city, wallowing in his loneliness, trying to sort out his lack of understanding of any of the events surrounding the Carolyn Hart intrigue.

  That was how he thought of it: Carolyn Hart intrigue. What else could he call it? He had no way to otherwise define it.

  Continually, he replayed the final events leading to her ultimate disappearance that past December. How else could he explain what those psychiatrists had told him?

  Here he had wanted to lead a young woman who had been in their charge back to them. So Kaminski had gone to Oswell Street and had confronted her on the doorstep. In response, Carolyn had frozen on the spot and stared at him without speaking. Several seconds passed. Then Carolyn had fled into the house and slammed the door.

  Reluctantly, Kaminski produced a key, hoping that he could talk to Carolyn and convince her to return to Northeastern Pennsylvania State Psychiatric. He entered the residence. He searched every nook of the house, every closet, and every part of the basement.

  And no Carolyn.

  She had just plain disappeared. How she had slipped out of the house was something that Kaminski would never understand. And the funny thing was, all of her small possessions were gone, too. As if she had anticipated her departure.

  Then over the telephone, the shrinks had given him that bizarre story-completely unbelievable, though they did have records to back it up-that Carolyn had been in their care, yes. But one story had reached them that she had died under suspicious circumstances in New Hampshire in June of 1990.

  Three years ago.

  Kaminski had heard that shrinks underwent psychoanalysis themselves. And that many of them were crazy. This episode did nothing to dissuade him. And yet, wherever Carolyn had been, she was now somewhere else.

  Kaminski sighed as he looked back on these events. Life was becoming tenfold too complicated for him. His father, a millionaire who could easily have retired, stewed daily about increased municipal taxes. His mother worried about her only son. Adam couldn't wait to get out of the place every noon for his walk. So what that he had lost ten pounds due to his new non-lunch lunch hours?

  Hell. He felt rotten.

  The walk usually took him in the direction of Oswell Street where a certain house of note (one of the best in their portfolio) was up again for rent. It had sat empty since Carolyn had last disappeared into it.

  Or disappeared from it, as the case may have been.

  Some days he entered it for no reason, other than trying to catch the vibrations within. The strange thing was that walking around in that building, he still had a vague feeling of her. There was a scent to the place, and he associated it with Carolyn. Foolishly perhaps. It was probably nothing more than an old house smell and he dismissed the notion that he could still pick up a piece of her spirit therein. Kaminski was, after all, the sort of guy who could fully believe in only what he could see.

  And he couldn't see Carolyn. Though one day he thought he did.

  It was a day in early March as he took his noon walk. Kaminski turned the corner onto Oswell, looked down the narrow street and stopped short. Here it was on an afternoon much like the one several months ago. And there, standing in front of the very house, looking for all the world like she had a few months earlier, was a woman in a light navy raincoat. She had brown hair and beautiful legs and Kaminski's heart leaped upon the sight of her.

  She was standing right outside his property, gazing up at the FOR RENT shingle that had blossomed on the house over the winter.

&n
bsp; By all that was holy, it was Carolyn Hart! Her. Again. In the flesh. Or what again appeared to be in the flesh.

  Kaminski looked at her as a flood of conflicting emotions overtook him: fear, attraction, excitement, terror.

  Lack of understanding. Then he moved steadily forward. No flirtation this time. No nonsense. Just bold confrontation. Just what type of games were going on here?

  He was tired of his head being scrambled over those impossible tall tales being told by the psychiatric center in Bryn Mawr. Some of the accounts suggested that Kaminski himself was dealing with a few cards short of a full deck. Adam was owed some answers and, by God, this time he would have them!

  The woman turned toward him and smiled as he approached. It was only when Kaminski drew within a few feet of her that he realized that he had been badly mistaken.

  From a distance, this woman looked like Carolyn. But up close, the physical similarity was so barely fleeting that he was convinced that he had caught this new woman in a strange light. Or that his eyes were playing tricks upon him. This girl was very plain. More studious than sensual, more a homebody than a home wrecker.

  “Hello,” she said, looking at him. Her demeanor was warm. She continued to smile.

  “Hello,” he answered. He remained near her.

  “I don't think I know you. Do I?” she asked.

  Nonplussed, Kaminski answered the only way he could. With indecision. “I'm not sure,” he said.

  She glanced up again at the FOR RENT sign.

  “I've always liked this house,” she said. “I see it's available.”

  “Apparently,” he said.

  “Do you know anything about it?” she asked. “Is anyone living in it now?”

  “It's empty.”

  “Do you know anything about the ownership?” she asked. “I might be interested in renting. Or even buying.”

  He stared at her for several seconds.

  “I own it.” He grew a little on the spot.

  She turned with greater surprise. “Do you?” she asked. “I'm afraid I didn't introduce myself properly. I'm Bernice Lang.”

  He felt a tingle at the base of his spine. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. He looked at her left hand. No ring.

  “And you are . . .?” she asked.

  “Adam Kaminski. I own several buildings in the city. And a few in the suburbs.” He grew even more, at least in his own estimation.

  “Ah. I see,” she said.

  “I can show you the house if you like,” he said.

  “Could you? Now?”

  “I have a key,” he offered.

  The door opened. The house accepted them easily. Kaminski gave her the tour, downstairs first, then the middle room, then the upstairs. The house was a little musty again. Disuse during the late winter. And he really did have to get rid of Paula Burns's furniture, he reminded himself. There was almost something incestuous about all these women living on top of each other.

  But the house gave him a very receptive feeling on this visit, one he liked. He wasn't picking up the somber vibrations of his other more recent visits. But just the same, Kaminski was relieved that this visit had gone well and without incident. He was glad to lead Bernice back downstairs and out to the street, after a pleasant moment admiring the rear garden.

  “Well?” he finally asked.

  “I loved it,” she said.

  “Are you looking for a place to live right now?” he asked.

  She explained that she was getting a business degree at Temple University. Her roommate was getting married, and she could use a new place as soon as she found one. “A business degree, huh?” he asked. “Any specific area of concentration?”

  “Real estate.”

  His knees wobbled slightly. Kaminski puffed up his courage. Somewhere out there was just the right lady for him. There had to be. And maybe, just maybe, this Bernice was she.

  She looked at the facade of 565 Oswell Street. “It's just a beautiful, old place,” she said. “The last two tenants were both single women, too. They loved the place.”

  “Why did they move?”

  “Career changes.”

  “What sort?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “I never understood. And they never told me.”

  She smiled again.

  “The house has a bit of a history, though,” he said. “If you're interested, I'd be happy to tell you all about it.”

  “I'm interested,” she said. There was a new espresso bar around the corner. Adam guided her in that direction.

  “That would be nice,” she said.

  He locked the front door of 565 Oswell. And as he did so, a feeling of relief came over him. And then a funny thought: Wherever Carolyn Hart had gone, she was finally somewhere else. The Oswell Street residence seemed finally back in his possession.

  “Now, this,” Adam Kaminski found himself thinking as he walked with Bernice Lang, “this really could be the girl.”

  *

  Captain William Mallinson died the same day that Adam Kaminski met Bernice Lang. It was March 10, four days after Mallinson's fifty-eighth birthday. The New Hampshire papers were filled with stories. The prevailing motif was that Mallinson had been a good man in a tough job. And that the job had eventually eaten him alive.

  He was buried outside the town of Henneker in a burial plot that he had bought many years ago, back during the early days of his marriage, back when he was a young man, filled with optimism and noble aspirations, unblemished by the job, his psyche not yet bearing the collateral damage of nearly a thousand violent deaths. By a curious coincidence, fifty-eight people stood at his graveside as his casket was lowered. It was a wicked winter day, and the ground had to be broken with jackhammers. He was then returned to the frigid earth of New Hampshire. All of the mourners knew each other.

  Mallinson's death cast a pall across Henneker, where the captain had lived. Friends sat at Leary's Tavern and lifted many glasses to him. It is said that great minds discuss ideas, medium intellects discuss events, and small minds discuss people. At Leary's, the faithful discussed people. An individual person. Bill Mallinson. They discussed him at length, but they did so with reverence.

  When a man dies, there is much summing up to do, an accounting of a man's years on Earth. The locals at Leary's were inclined to see Bill Mallinson in terms that ranged from workmanly to poetic: a stand-up, old-fashioned guy who did honest work every day of his life. The notices in the newspapers followed this same theme, usually accompanied by his name and picture.

  The one discordant reaction, however, came from his successor. Frank O'Hara saw the man's life more in terms of condemnation and claustrophobia. To him, Mallinson had been a man whose worldview had never travelled beyond the towns and counties of New Hampshire. He had aspired to nothing higher than investigating the tags on the toes of corpses. Then, after a lifetime of this, chopped short by political pressure, too many winters, and endless cheroots, Bill Mallinson was returned to the same rocky soil that he had trod throughout his lifetime. He would lie beneath the dark New England winters for eternity.

  Never to escape.

  There but for the grace of God. . . .O'Hara might have remarked. But in his mind, he would never finish the thought. It was too frightening.

  After the funeral, there was a reception at the Henneker firehouse. Mallinson was recalled more cheerfully there. A day or two later, a marker was placed upon his grave. Two days after that more snow covered the marker.

  In keeping with the state law, Frank O'Hara was elevated within the state police hierarchy. He became Captain of Homicide, the job he had never wanted. Inexplicably, he also agreed to stay on for four extra months, or until a proper successor could be found. He agreed for several reasons.

  Two were salient.

  First, he had been absorbed in the Negri and Stacey Dissette slayings, both of which remained officially open. Then there was mopping up to do from the strange discovery of Sandor Clay's body out in the snows
of Devil's Glen.

  Second, O'Hara had made virtually no plans to move out of state. He had never had the opportunity, having been so busy in the days before he would have retired. So, since he was staying, since he felt needed, he might just as well draw a paycheck.

  And who better to fill the job?

  The winter, however, remained relentless. Blizzard followed blizzard. In some cases, the snowbanks by the side of roads reached ten to twelve feet.

  Drifts covered sides of houses, two people died when a roof collapsed in Derry, and-sure enough-an entire family was found frozen in Franconia when their power had failed. In March, there was a little bit of a thaw, right around the time of the big police funeral for Bill Mallinson. Then winter returned with a wallop. Two back-to-back, don't-fuck-with-Mother-Nature ice storms put a nice hard coating on everything.

  To O'Hara, despite the fact that he had agreed to stay on, winter was still akin to death-either a fast one or a slow one-but a death nonetheless. Sometimes, he insisted, even the distinctions between the two were vague.

  Some people thought him a little nutty on this point, but he had his reasons. Even if he didn't explain them.

  He missed his old boss. Missed Mallinson's insight. Missed his inspiration. Missed his foul-spirited crankiness, in fact.

  So on some days when the roads were clear, O'Hara would drive past the cemetery in Henneker where Mallinson lay. O'Hara would stop his car and gaze across the tombstones.