He twisted the barrel and the nib-end rotated away from the pen, and after a few more turns it came loose in his hand, exposing a duplicate of the ink cartridge he had in his pocket.
“Pull the cartridge off,” she said suddenly, “and lick the end of it. Didn’t she tell you about my ink?”
“No,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Tell me about your ink.”
“Well, it’s got a little bit of my blood in it, though it’s mostly ink.” She was flipping through the pages of the book. “But some blood. Lick it, the punctured end of the cartridge.” She looked up at him and grinned. “As a chaser for the rum I smell on your breath.”
For ten seconds he stared into her deep green eyes, then he raised the cartridge and ran his tongue across the end of it. He didn’t taste anything.
“That’s my dear man,” she said, taking his hand and stepping onto the living room carpet. “Let’s sit in that chair you were napping in.”
As they crossed the living room, Sydney slid his free hand into his pocket and clasped the rum-and-ink cartridge next to the blood-and-ink one. The one he had prepared this afternoon was up by his knuckles, the other at the base of his palm.
She let go of his hand to reach out and switch on the lamp, and Sydney pulled a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and shook one free.
“Sit down,” she said, “I’ll sit in your lap. I hardly weigh anything. Are there limits to what you’d do for someone you love?”
Sydney hooked a cigarette onto his lip and tossed the pack aside. “Limits?” he said as he sat down and clicked a lighter at the end of the cigarette. “I don’t know,” he said around a puff of smoke.
“I think you’re not one of those normal people,” she said.
“I hate ’em.” He laid his cigarette in the smoking stand beside the chair.
“Me too,” she said, and she slid onto his lap and curled her left arm around his shoulders. Her skirt and sleeve were damp, but not cold.
With her right hand she opened the book to the sonnet “To My Sister.”
“Lots of margin space for us to write in,” she said.
Her hot cheek was touching his, and when he turned to look at her he found that he was kissing her, gently at first and then passionately, for this moment not caring that her scent was the smell of crushed ants.
“Put the cartridge,” she whispered into his mouth, “back into the pen and screw it closed.”
He carefully fitted one of the cartridges into the pen and whirled the base until it was tight.
George Sydney stood up from crouching beside the shelf of cookbooks, holding a copy of James Beard’s On Food. It was his favorite of Beard’s books, and if he couldn’t sell it at a profit he’d happily keep it.
He hadn’t found any other likely books here today, and now it was nearly noon and time to walk across the boulevard to Boardner’s for a couple of quick drinks.
“There he is,” said the man behind the counter and the cash register. “George, this lady has been coming in every day for the last week, looking for you.”
Sydney blinked toward the brightly sunlit store windows, and in front of the counter he saw the silhouette of a short elderly woman with a halo of back-lit white hair.
He smiled and shuffled forward. “Well, hi,” he said.
“Hello, George,” she said in a husky voice, holding out her hand.
He stepped across the remaining distance and shook her hand. “What—” he began.
“I was just on my way to the Chinese Theater,” she said. She was smiling up at him almost sadly, and though her face was deeply etched with wrinkles, her green eyes were lively and young. “I’m going to lay three pennies in the indentations in Gregory Peck’s square.”
He laughed in surprise. “I do that with Jean Harlow!”
“That’s where I got the idea.” She leaned forward and tipped her face up and kissed him briefly on the lips, and he dropped the James Beard book.
He crouched to retrieve the book, and when he straightened up she had already stepped out the door. He saw her walking away west down Hollywood Boulevard, her white hair fluttering around her head in the wind.
The man behind the counter was middle-aged, with a graying moustache. “Do you know who your admirer is, George?” he asked with a kinked smile.
Sydney had taken a step toward the door, but some misgiving made him stop. He exhaled to clear his head of a sharp sweet, musty scent.
“Uh,” he said distractedly, “no. Who is she?”
“That was Cheyenne Fleming. I got her to sign some copies of her books the other day, so I can double the prices.”
“I thought she was dead by now.” Sydney tried to remember what he’d read about Fleming. “When was it she got paroled?”
“I don’t know. In the ’80s? Some time after the death penalty was repealed in the ’70s, anyway.” He waved at a stack of half a dozen slim dark books on the desk behind him. “You want one of the signed ones? I’ll let you have it for the original price, since she only came in here looking for you.”
Sydney looked at the stack.
“Nah,” he said, pushing the James Beard across the counter. “Just this.”
A few moments later he was outside on the brass-starred sidewalk, squinting after Cheyenne Fleming. He could see her, a hundred feet away to the west now, striding away.
He rubbed his face, trying to get rid of the odd scent. And as he walked away, east, he wondered why that kiss should have left him feeling dirty, as if it had been a mortal sin for which he couldn’t now phrase the need for absolution.
She’d lived with the watcher for over two months, felt it in every room, felt its strength increase from hour to hour as the day waned. Whatever her
rational mind said, she was afraid.
The Watcher in the Corners
Sarah Monette
Lilah Collier was washing the windows the first time the sheriff showed up.
It was April 9, 1930, a beautiful sunny Saturday in Hyperion, Mississippi, and Lilah was taking advantage of the weather. She had been the Starks’ housekeeper for four months, ever since she and her husband Butch came into town, and since Butch drank more of his paycheck than he brought home, she was hanging onto this job like grim death, even if she didn’t much like Cranmer Stark or his pale, nervous wife Sidonia. So she cooked for their fancy dinner parties and kept their house spotless, and if Mrs. Stark didn’t want the help talking to her little boy, then all right the help would keep her goddamned mouth shut. She felt sorry for Jonathan, a pale, silent child who always did as he was told, but not sorry enough to risk her job.
She was in the guest bedroom when the doorbell rang, and came panting down the stairs, only to pull up short when she recognized a lawman’s silhouette against the frosted glass. She wiped the sweat off her face, made a futile attempt at smoothing down her hair, braced herself for whatever disaster Butch had caused this time. Opened the door.
And the sheriff, a stocky, tired man with watchful blue eyes, said, “Mrs. Collier, I hate to trouble you, but is Jonathan in the house?”
“Jonathan? No, sir, he’s out with his mama.”
“You seen him today?”
“No, sir. Mrs. Stark, she left me a note. They was gone when I got here. What’s the matter?”
“Mrs. Collier, may I come in?”
She stood aside, her heart banging against her ribs, and when he hesitated in the front hall, led him back to the kitchen.
He sat down when she did, sighed, and said, “Mrs. Collier, it seems like Jonathan Stark has gone missing.”
“Missing?”
“Straight out of the middle of Humphreys Park, from what his mama says. Now, we got men searching, but we’re also trying to figure out what might make him run off. If he did run off. So, when did you see him last?”
Lilah told the sheriff what she knew. She’d given Jonathan his dinner early the night before, since his parents were having company: tomato soup and a cheese sandwich in h
is room. An hour and a half later, when there was enough of a lull in the dinner preparations, she’d gone up to get the tray. He’d been sitting upright in bed with the lamp on. She’d said good night to him, and he’d said good night back, being a polite child, and she’d gone out, and that had been that. No, she hadn’t seen him at all on Saturday. Saturdays were her half days, and she hadn’t come in until noon, when Mrs. Stark and Jonathan had already left.
“You sure of that, Mrs. Collier?”
“Sure of which?”
“That you didn’t see him today.”
“I done told you twice, they were already gone when I got here.”
“And what were you doing this morning?”
“My own cleaning. Do I need an alibi, sheriff?”
“Not ’cause I suspect you, Mrs. Collier, just so as I don’t have to start.”
“My husband was home. We left the house together—matter of fact, he drove me here.”
“Anybody else see you?”
“I was washing windows, so you might ask the neighbors. And Maddie Hopper can probably tell you I arrived when I said I did.”
“She already has.”
“Said you didn’t suspect me, sheriff.”
He put his pencil down and rubbed his eyes. He looked like a man who didn’t get enough sleep. “So far, Mrs. Collier, there ain’t nothing to suspect nobody of. But little boys don’t just vanish into thin air, and they don’t have that generous variety of enemies that adults might do. We’re asking these questions of any adult that knows Jonathan Stark, for the pure and simple reason that we ain’t got nowhere else to start.”
“His daddy’s a powerful man,” Lilah observed.
“Don’t I know it. And, yes, I think it’s a kidnapping, and, yes, I think we’re gonna be hearing from somebody here in another hour or so saying what it is they want. But it bugs the shit out of me, begging your pardon, that they could grab him in broad daylight in the middle of Humphreys Park and not have nobody the wiser. So I’m covering all my bases.” He looked her squarely in the eyes then. “Do you know anything that might help us?”
“Like what?”
“Damned if I know. Like anything that might explain where he went or why somebody took him or anything.”
“I don’t know nothing to explain that, sheriff. I’d tell you if I did.”
“I hope you would, Mrs. Collier. I sincerely do. Thank you for your time.”
He left her sitting there in her clean kitchen, gooseflesh crawling up and down her back.
No communications from kidnappers were received, not in the next hour, not in the next two weeks. No one was found who seemed to have any motive for harming Jonathan Stark; even his father’s enemies were equipped one and all with unassailable alibis. No one was found who had seen him after his mother’s last sighting of him at 12:30 p.m. in Humphreys Park. The park, which was not large, was searched with a fine-toothed comb, and the pond was dragged. No evidence of Jonathan Stark was discovered, although a remarkable assortment of other things came to light. As far as anybody could tell, Jonathan Stark had vanished into thin air.
Sidonia Stark took to her bed; Cranmer Stark took to drink. Lilah Collier took to cleaning the Stark house with a passion that surprised her. She had instructions to do nothing to Jonathan Stark’s room—not even to dust—and she obeyed, but the rest of the house became antiseptically spotless.
She began to have the feeling, alone on the first floor of the Stark house, that she was being watched. She told herself she was being stupid and high-strung (her father’s phrase for such airs was “being missish,” and it was a good way to get a casual clout across the back of the head), but every day she talked herself out of it, and the next day by noon the feeling would be back again. Something watching, something small and white. She’d find herself glancing around, as if she could catch it in a corner, but she never saw anything, never anything that wasn’t the curtains or a lace doily or her own dust rag left on a side-table. She sometimes got a feeling, towards dark, that there was something cloudy in her peripheral vision—sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right—but it was never something she was sure of. “Missish,” she grumbled to herself, and was glad to leave the house for the dubious security of Butch’s car.
And then, in the middle of June, the sheriff showed up again. Cranmer Stark had driven Sidonia to Memphis to consult a nerve-specialist; taking advantage of their absence—and desperate for something to keep herself occupied against the watchfulness filling the house—Lilah was washing the curtains, and she had to rinse soap suds off her hands before she could answer the door.
“Mrs. Collier,” the sheriff said.
Lilah only realized after she’d done it that she’d glanced at the height of the sun in the sky, only realized it as she was thinking, We got another two hours before it really gets bad. “Sheriff Patterson,” she said, controlling the impulse to weep with gratitude at the sight of another human face, the sound of another human voice. “They ai—Mr. and Mrs. Stark aren’t home.”
“I know that. I don’t want to talk to them. May I come in?”
Oh, thank God, Lilah thought. Even being arrested for murder would be better than being alone in the Stark house any longer. “Come on back to the kitchen. You want some coffee?”
“You’re a good woman, Mrs. Collier. I’d love some.”
So Lilah made coffee, and the sheriff sat at the kitchen table, looking at the clean counters and the sultanas on the windowsill.
“What can I do for you, sheriff?” Lilah said when she’d given him the coffee and sat down herself.
“I ain’t suspecting you, Mrs. Collier,” he said, “but I want to ask you again about April eighth.”
“You can ask, sheriff, but I can’t give you no new answers.”
“I just want to hear it again.” He sipped the coffee. His eyebrows went up appreciatively, and he said, “I do wish you’d give lessons to my wife. Now. April eighth.”
“There was a dinner party.”
“Who?”
“High society folks,” Lilah said and shrugged. “Three married couples, and a couple men on their own, and Mrs. Stark’s cousin Renee from Oxford, and the lady who owns the gravel pit.”
“Miss Baldwin, then. So what happened?”
“I did dinner. Or-derves and soup and salad and beef burgundy and a chocolate mousse. The party seemed pretty happy. Nobody fighting or nothing.”
“When’d you leave?”
Lilah thought back. “Everybody was gone by ten, and I was doing the washing up—I can’t abide to leave it overnight—when Mr. Stark comes in and says, ‘You had a long day, Lilah. Why don’t I run you home?’ ”
“Did he? Had he ever done that before?”
“No, sir.”
“Done it since?”
“No, sir.”
“Could you tell me about what time that was?”
“ ’Levenish, I’d guess. I’d got all the big stuff done, and I was just as happy not to have to walk. So I said, ‘Them plates’ll keep,’ and he drove me home. Sheriff, what is it you’re after?”
“Now, just bear with me. Tell me again when the last time you saw Jonathan Stark was?”
“I took up his dinner at five, I guess. His mama was in with him, showing him her pretty dress and letting him smell her perfume. So I put the tray on that big deal table they got in his room and went back down. Then, I guess it was six-thirty or so, I’d got the soup simmering and the beef in the oven, and the mousse to chill in the ice-box, and there wasn’t nothing more I could do for another fifteen minutes at least, so I went back up for the tray.”
“And he was there.”
“Yes, sir. And alive. He was sitting up in bed and hanging on to that ratty toy bunny that drove Mr. Stark so wild.”
“Did he say anything?”
“His mama was on him pretty sharp about not talking to me or Mr. Wilmot who comes about the lawns and such. He did say good night, but I think that was it.”
“Why? I mean . . . ”
“Excepting his mama, you seem to be the last person who saw or spoke to Jonathan Stark. And, forgive me for saying it—and please don’t repeat it—we ain’t getting no manner of help out of his mama at all.”
“She’s a pretty nervous lady.”
“She says she can’t remember nothing about that Saturday morning. Not what he was wearing, not what they said to each other—and I can’t believe that a boy and his mama could walk to Humphreys Park without a single word being passed between them.”
“D’you think she’s lying?”
“I don’t know. Like you say, she’s a nervous lady. But she ain’t helping. And, Mrs. Collier, I got to say, I don’t think this is a kidnapping.”
“You think he’s dead.” Lilah’s hands were ice-cold, and she was thinking of that feeling in the house, that feeling of being watched that got worse as the day darkened.
“I’m afraid he’s dead. Did he say anything to you? Anything at all, even if it don’t seem important.” He held a hand up. “I know if it’d seemed important, you would’ve told me at the time. But anything.”
“God, sheriff, let me think.” Lilah forced her mind off the emptiness of the house and back to that Friday night. “I was in a hurry, and I wasn’t paying much heed to Mr. Jonathan. Sometimes kids say things, you know, and you answer ’em, but you ain’t rightly listening?”
“Yeah,” the sheriff said heavily. “I know.”
“I could smack myself for it now. But we both knew he wasn’t supposed to talk to me, and he was a quiet little boy anyways. Never said much at all.”
“Mrs. Collier—”
“I’m trying. Lemme think. I came in and said, ‘You done, Mr. Jonathan?’ And he said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Collier.’ The tray was on the table where I’d left it. He was in bed, with his rabbit.”
“What was he wearing?”
“His pajamas, I think. Blue striped.” She shut her eyes, to remember better. “I went over to pick up the tray . . . and he did say something. Christ Jesus, I can hear his voice in my mind, but I can’t remember the words.”
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 8