Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  Together they went down the paneled hall. “That ponderous, unthinkable oaf,” Sears rumbled. “As if you could believe Omar Norris on any subject except bourbon and snowplows.”

  Ricky stopped short and put his hand on Sears’s arm. “We have to think about this, Sears. John might actually have killed himself.” It still hadn’t sunk into him, and he could see that Sears was determined not to let it sink into him. “He’d never have any reason to go walking on the bridge, and especially not in this weather.”

  Sears’s face suffused with blood. “If you think that, you’re a ninny too. I don’t care if John was birdwatching, he was doing something.” His eyes avoided Ricky’s. “I don’t know and can’t imagine what, but something. Did he seem suicidal to you last night?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Therefore, let’s not wrangle. Let’s get over to his house.” He sped down the hall ahead of Ricky and banged open the reception room door with his shoulders. Ricky Hawthorne, hurrying after, came out into the reception room and was mildly surprised to see him confronting a tall girl with dark hair, an oval face and small, chiseled features.

  “Sears, we don’t have time now, and I told this young woman to drop in tomorrow.”

  “She says—” Sears took off his hat. He looked as if he’d been hit on the head with a plank. “Tell him what you told me,” he said to the girl.

  She said, “Eva Galli was my aunt, and I’m looking for a job.”

  * * *

  (Mrs. Quast turned away from the girl, who had merely smiled at her, and blushed as she dialed the Hawthorne number. The girl moved away to examine the Kitaj graphics with which Stella, two or three years ago, had replaced Ricky’s old Audubon prints. Incomprehensible and new, was Mrs. Quast’s judgment on both the graphics and the girl. No, Stella Hawthorne exhaled when she had heard the news about Dr. Jaffrey. Oh, poor Milly. Poor everybody, I’m sure, but I’ll have to do something about Milly. When she pulls the jack from the switchboard, Mrs. Quast thinks, my goodness it’s very bright in here and then thinks, no golly it’s dark, dark as sin, the lights must have blazed up and gone out, but the next instant everything is normal, the lamp on her desk looks just as it always does, and she rubs her eyes and shakes her gray head—Milly Sheehan had a soft cushy life right along, about time she went out and did a real job of work—and is astonished to hear Mr. James telling that snip of a girl that if she comes back tomorrow they’ll talk about giving her some secretarial work. I mean, just what the dickens is going on around here?)

  * * *

  And Ricky, looking at Sears, wondered too—secretarial work? They had a half-time secretary, Mavis Hodge, who did most of their typing: to find enough work for another girl they’d have to start answering their junk mail. But of course it wasn’t the need for more hands on deck that made Sears treat the girl the way he did, it was that name, Eva Galli, pronounced in a voice that would taste like port wine if you could drink it . . . Sears suddenly looked very tired, the sleeplessness and the nightmares and the vision of Fenny Bate and Elmer Scales and his damned sheep and how John’s death (he was a leaper) had all gathered to unstring him if only for a moment. Ricky saw his partner’s fear and exhaustion and saw that even Sears could come unglued. “Yes, come back tomorrow,” he said to the girl, noticed that the oval face and regular features were more than just attractive, and knew that if there was one thing Sears didn’t need reminding of at that moment, it was Eva Galli. Mrs. Quast was staring at him, so he told her to deal with all incoming calls during the afternoon, just to be saying something.

  “I gather that a good friend of yours has just died,” the girl said to Ricky. “I’m sorry to be coming at such an awkward time,” and ruefully smiled with what looked like genuine concern. “Please don’t let me delay you.”

  He glanced once more at her foxlike features before turning to Sears and the door—Sears reflectively buttoning up his coat, white faced—and it seemed to him that maybe Sears’s instincts were right, maybe this girl’s coming was a part of the puzzle, nothing seemed accidental anymore: as if there were some kind of plan and if they could only get all the pieces together they’d see what it was.

  “It’s probably not even John,” Sears said in the car. “Hardesty is such an incompetent that I wouldn’t be surprised if he took Omar Norris’s word . . .” His voice died out; both partners knew this was only fancy. “Too cold,” Sears said, his lips puckering out childishly. “Too damn cold,” Ricky agreed, and finally thought of another thing to say. “At least Milly won’t starve.” Sears sighed, almost amused. “Good thing too, she’d never get another job with eavesdropping privileges.” Then there was silence again as they recognized that they were agreeing that John Jaffrey probably had stepped off the Milburn bridge and drowned in the freezing river.

  After they had picked up Hardesty and driven to the tiny jail where the body was being kept until the arrival of the morgue truck, they found that Omar Norris had not been mistaken. The dead man was John—he looked even more wasted than he had in life. His sparse hair adhered to his scalp, his lips drew back over blue gums—his whole being was vacant, as in Ricky Hawthorne’s nightmare. “Jesus,” Ricky said. Walt Hardesty grinned and said, “That ain’t the name we got, Mr. Lawyer.” “Give us the forms, Hardesty,” Sears said quietly, and then, being Sears, added, “We’ll take his effects too, unless you managed to lose them along with his dentures.”

  They thought they might find a clue to Jaffrey’s death in the few things contained in the manila envelope Hardesty gave them. But in the collection taken from John Jaffrey’s pockets they could read nothing at all. A comb, six studs and matching cufflinks, a copy of The Making of a Surgeon, a ballpoint pen, a bundle of keys in a worn leather pouch, three quarters and a dime—Sears spread it over his lap in the front seat of Ricky’s old Buick. “A note was too much to hope for,” Sears said, and then leaned gigantically back and rubbed his eyes. “I’m beginning to feel like a member of an endangered species.” He straightened up again and looked at the mute assortment of objects. “Do you want to keep any of this yourself, or should we just give it to Milly?”

  “Maybe Lewis would like the studs and cufflinks.”

  “Let’s give them to him. Oh. Lewis. We’ll have to tell him. Do you want to go back to the office?”

  They sat numbly on the warm cushions of Ricky’s old car. Sears removed a long cigar from his case, snipped off the tip, and without bothering to go through the usual rituals of sniffing and looking, applied his cigar lighter to it. Ricky wound his window down uncomplaining: complaining: He knew that Sears was smoking out of reflex, that he was unconscious of the cigar.

  “Do you know, Ricky,” he said around it, “John is dead and we’ve been talking about his cufflinks?”

  Ricky started his car. “Let’s get back to Melrose Avenue and have a drink.”

  Sears put the pathetic collection back into the manila envelope, folded it in half and slid it into one of the pockets of his coat. “Watch where you’re driving. Has it escaped your attention that it’s snowing again?”

  “No, it has not,” Ricky said. “If it starts this early and if it gets much worse, we could find ourselves snowed in before the end of winter. Maybe we should lay in some canned food, just to be on the safe side.” Ricky flicked on his headlights, knowing that Sears would soon begin to issue commands about this. The gray sky which had hung over the town for weeks had darkened nearly to black, broken by clouds like combers.

  “Humph,” Sears snorted. “The last time that happened—”

  “I was back from Europe. Nineteen-forty-seven. Terrible winter.”

  “And the time before that was in the twenties.”

  “Nineteen-twenty-six. The snow almost covered the houses.”

  “People died. A neighbor of mine died in that snow.”

  “Who was that?” Ricky asked.

  “Her name was Viola Fre
derickson. She was caught in her buggy. She just froze to death. The Fredericksons had John’s house, in fact.” Sears sighed again, wearily, as Ricky turned into the square and went past the hotel. Snowflakes like balls of cotton streaked past the dark windows of the hotel. “For God’s sake, Ricky, your window’s open. Do you want to freeze us both?” He raised his hands to lift the fur collar nearer his chin, and saw the cigar protruding from between his fingers. “Oh. Sorry. Habit.” He lowered his own window and dropped the cigar through it. “What a waste.”

  Ricky thought of John Jaffrey’s body lying on a stretcher in a cell; of breaking the news to Lewis; of the bluish skin stretched over John’s skull.

  Sears coughed. “I can’t understand why we haven’t heard from Edward’s nephew.”

  “He’ll probably just turn up.” The snow slackened off. “That’s better.” Then thought, well, maybe not: the air had a peculiar midday darkness which seemed unaffected by his headlights. These were no more than a glow nearly invisible at the front of the car. It was the objects and oddments of the town which instead seemed to glow, not with the yellow glow of headlights but whitely, with the white of the clouds still boiling and foaming overhead—here a picket fence, there a door and molding shone. Here a scattering of stones in a wall, there naked poplars on a lawn. Their bloodless color reminded Ricky eerily of John Jaffrey’s face. Above these random shining things the sky beyond the boiling clouds was even blacker.

  “Well, what do you think happened?” Sears demanded.

  Ricky turned into Melrose Avenue. “Do you want to stop off at your house for anything first?”

  “No. Do you have an opinion or don’t you?”

  “I wish I knew what happened to Elmer Scales’s sheep.”

  Now they were pulling up in front of Ricky’s house and Sears was showing obvious signs of impatience. “I don’t give a gold-plated damn for Our Vergil’s sheep,” he said; he wanted to get out of the car, he wanted to end the discussion, he would have growled like a bear if Ricky had mentioned the apparition of barefooted, boneheaded Fenny Bate on his staircase—Ricky saw all this, but after he and Sears had left the car and were walking up the path to the door he said, “About that girl this morning.”

  “What about her?”

  Ricky put his key in the slot. “If you want to pretend that we need a secretary, fine, but . . .”

  Stella opened the door from within, already talking. “I’m so glad both of you are here. I was so afraid you’ d go back to stuffy Wheat Row and pretend that nothing had happened. Pretend to work and keep me in the dark! Sears, please, come in out of the cold, we don’t want to heat all outdoors. Come in!” They shuffled into the hall and moving like two tired cart-horses, took off their coats. “You both look just awful. There’s no question of mistaken identity then, it was John?”

  “It was John,” Ricky said. “We can’t really tell you any more, Stella. It looks like he jumped from the bridge.”

  “Dear me,” Stella said, all her momentary brightness gone. “The poor Chowder Society.”

  “Amen,” Sears said.

  After late lunch Stella said that she’d make up a tray for Milly. “Maybe she’ll want to nibble something.”

  “Milly?” Ricky asked, startled.

  “Milly Sheehan, need I remind you? I couldn’t just let her rattle around in that big house of John’s. I picked her up and drove her back here. She’s absolutely wrecked, the poor darling, so I put her to bed. She woke up this morning and couldn’t find John, and she fretted in that house for hours until horrible Walter Hardesty came by.”

  “Fine,” Ricky said.

  “Fine, he says. If you and Sears hadn’t been so wrapped up in yourselves, you might have spared a thought for her.”

  Attacked, Sears raised his head and blinked. “Milly has no worries. She’s been left John’s house and a disproportionate amount of money.”

  “Disproportionate, Sears? Why don’t you take her tray up and tell her how grateful she should be. Do you think that would cheer her up? That John Jaffrey left her a few thousand dollars?”

  “Scarcely a few thousand, Stella,” said Ricky. “John willed almost everything he owned to Milly.”

  “Well, that’s as it should be,” Stella declared, and stamped off to the kitchen, leaving them both mystified.

  Sears asked, “You ever have any trouble deciphering what she’s talking about?”

  “Now and then,” Ricky answered. “There used to be a code book, but I think she threw it out shortly after our wedding. Shall we call Lewis and tell him? We’ve put it off too long already.”

  “Give me the phone,” Sears said.

  Lewis Benedikt

  5

  Not hungry, Lewis made lunch for himself from habit: cottage cheese, Croghan baloney with horseradish and a thick chunk of Otto Gruebe’s cheddar, made by old Otto himself in his little cheese factory a couple of miles outside Afton. Feeling a little upset by his experiences of the morning, Lewis enjoyed thinking of old Otto now. Otto Gruebe was an uncomplicated person, built a little like Sears James, but stooped from a lifetime of bending over vats; he had a rubbery clown’s face and enormous shoulders and hands. Otto had made this comment on his wife’s death: “You hat a liddle trouble over there in Spain, yeah? They told me in town. It’s such a pidy, Lewis.” After everyone else’s tact, this had moved Lewis immeasurably. Otto with his curd-white complexion from spending ten hours a day in his factory, Otto with his pack of coon dogs—he’d never been spooked a day in his life. Chewing his way through lunch, Lewis thought he would drive up to see Otto someday soon; he’d take his gun and go out looking for coon with Otto and his dogs, if the snow held off. Otto’s Germanic hardheadedness would do him good.

  But it was snowing again now; the dogs would be barking in their kennels and old Otto would be skimming off whey, cursing the early winter.

  A pity. Yes: a pity was what it was, and more than that: a mystery. Like Edward.

  He stood up abruptly and dumped his dishes in the sink; then he looked at his watch and groaned. Eleven-thirty and lunch already over; the rest of the day loomed over him like an Alp. He did not even have an evening of bubbleheaded conversation with a girl to look forward to; nor, because he was trying to wind things down, could he anticipate an evening of deeper pleasure with Christina Barnes.

  Lewis Benedikt had successfully managed what in a town the size of Milburn is generally considered an impossibility: from the first month of his return from Spain, he had constructed a secret life that stayed secret. He pursued college girls, young teachers at the high school, beauticians, the brittle girls who sold cosmetics at Young Brothers department store—any girl pretty enough to be ornamental. He used his good looks, his natural charm and humor and his money to establish himself in the town’s mythology as a dependably comic character: the aging playboy, the Suave Old Bird. Boyish, wonderfully unself-conscious, Lewis took his girls to the best restaurants for forty miles around, ordered them the best food and wine, kept them in stitches. He took to bed, or was taken to bed by, perhaps a fifth of these girls—the ones who showed him by their laughter that they could never take him seriously. When a couple—a couple, say, like Walter and Christina Barnes—walked into The Old Mill near Kirkwood or Christo’s between Belden and Harpursville, they might half expect to see Lewis’s steel-gray head bending toward the amused face of a pretty girl a third his age. “Look at that old rascal,” Walter Barnes might say, “at it again.” His wife would smile, but it would be difficult to tell what the smile meant.

  For Lewis used his comic reputation as a rake to camouflage the seriousness of his heart, and he used his public romances with girls to conceal his deeper, truer relationships with women. He spent evenings or nights with his girls; the women he loved he saw once or twice a week, in the afternoons while their husbands were at work. The first of these had been Stella Hawthorne, and in some ways the
least satisfactory of his loves, she had set the pattern for the rest. Stella had been too offhand and witty, too casual with him. She was enjoying herself, and simple enjoyment was what the young high-school teachers and beauticians gave him. He wanted feeling. He wanted emotion—he needed it. Stella was the only Milburn wife who, tested, had evaded that need. She had given his playboy image back to him—consciously. He loved her briefly and wholly, but their needs were badly mismatched. Stella did not want Sturm und Drang; Lewis, at the center of his demanding heart, knew that he wanted to recapture the emotions Linda had given him. Frivolous Lewis was Lewis only skin deep. Sadly, he had to let Stella go: she had taken up none of his hints, his offered emotion had simply rolled off her. He knew that she thought he’d simply gone on to an empty series of affairs with girls.

  But he had instead gone on, eight years ago, to Leota Mulligan, the wife of Clark Mulligan. And after Leota, to Sonny Venuti, then to Laura Bautz, the wife of the dentist Harlan Bautz, and finally, a year ago, to Christina Barnes. He had cherished each of these women. He loved in them their solidity, their attachments to their husbands, their hungers, their humor. He loved talking to them. They had understood him, and each of them had known exactly what he was offering: more a hidden pseudo-marriage than an affair.

  When the emotion began to go stale and rehearsed, then it was over. Lewis still loved each of them; he still loved Christina Barnes, but—

  The but was that the wall was before him. The wall was what Lewis called the moment when he began to think that his deep relationships were as trivial as his romances. Then it was time to draw in. Often, in times of withdrawal, he found that he was thinking of Stella Hawthorne.

  Well, he certainly could not look forward to an evening with Stella Hawthorne. To fantasize about that would be to confirm his foolishness to himself.

  What was more foolish than that ridiculous scene this morning? Lewis left the sink to look out the window toward the path into the woods, remembering how he had raced down it, panting, his heart leaping with terror—now there was real asininity. The fluffy snow fell, the familiar wood raised white arms, the return path trailed harmlessly, charmingly off at a screwball angle, going nowhere.