Midnight Voices

by John Saul

  CHAPTER 14

  Echoes of the voices from the night still lingered as Laurie slowly emerged from the restless sleep that had left her almost as tired as if she hadn’t slept at all. But the morning sun flooding in from the east quickly silenced the fading voices, and when she got out of bed and went to the window to look out over the park, the fears of the night before vanished altogether. Pulling on a robe, she headed downstairs, smelling the scent of frying bacon as soon as she reached the bottom of the stairs. She followed the aroma to the kitchen, expecting to find her mother standing at the stove.

  Instead, she found Tony Fleming.

  Stopping short at the kitchen door, Laurie suddenly felt uncertain. What was she supposed to do?

  Why did she suddenly feel as if she were someplace she didn’t belong?

  On Mustique, it hadn’t been that way at all. Practically every morning Tony had been up earlier than any of the rest of them, and it usually had been Laurie who was the next one up. Usually she found him sitting in the living room, drinking coffee and looking out over the sea. She’d pour herself a glass of orange juice from the pitcher the cook always left sitting on the buffet outside the kitchen, and then she and Tony would figure out what they were all going to do that day.

  But this morning, everything was suddenly different. They weren’t on Mustique anymore, and this wasn’t a house they’d rented for two weeks. This was Tony’s house, and Tony’s kitchen, and suddenly Laurie wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. Should she just go on into the kitchen? She glanced around, looking for a pitcher of orange juice, but saw nothing.

  Should she just go look in the refrigerator, like she would have done at home?

  Or maybe go back upstairs until her mother came down?

  But before she could make any kind of decision, Tony turned around, smiled at her, and tilted his head toward the refrigerator. “No staff,” he said. “Just us. There’s orange juice in the fridge. Not fresh squeezed, now that we have to take care of ourselves.”

  Laurie moved to the refrigerator, pulled it open, and found a carton of orange juice that hadn’t yet been opened.

  “Want me to tell you where the glasses are, or do you just want to poke around until you find them?”

  Laurie glanced around the kitchen, which was bigger than their living room had been up on 76th Street. There was a table with four chairs by one of the windows, and from the sink you could see the park. There were two big ovens, and a range with six burners, and a counter long enough that half a dozen people could have worked atit at once. The kitchen in their old apartment had been barely big enough for the four of them to fit into, and its only window had looked out into a narrow shaft the super called a light well even though it barely let enough light in to tell if it was day or night. Laurie surveyed the long row of cupboards that hung above the entire length of the counter, deciding that the glasses should be close to the sink.

  “Very good,” Tony observed as she opened one of the doors to reveal two shelves filled with glasses of various sizes. “How’d you sleep?”

  Again Laurie wasn’t sure what to do. Should she tell him about the noises she’d heard? How frightened she’d been? But before she could say anything, her mother appeared, looking barely awake, accepted a cup of coffee from Tony, then sank onto one of the chairs. “I’ll fix breakfast in a minute,” she said. “Just let me drink this.”

  Tony winked at Laurie. “In case you haven’t noticed, some of us didn’t sleep all morning. Breakfast’s almost ready.”

  By the time Ryan came in—dressed in the same clothes he’d worn yesterday—Caroline was fully awake. As Laurie put a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of her, she looked up to thank her, but as she got a close look at her daughter’s face, her words died on her lips. Laurie looked more tired this morning than she had last night. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Laurie shrugged uncertainly, still not sure whether she should tell the truth. In fact, with the morning light pouring into the kitchen, the fear she’d felt last night when she’d thought she heard people in the next room suddenly seemed stupid. “I’m fine. I just . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Just what?” Caroline prompted, reaching out to lay a hand on her daughter’s forehead. There was no temperature; if anything, Laurie’s skin felt slightly cool. “Do you feel sick?”

  Laurie shook her head. “I just didn’t sleep very well.”

  Caroline’s brow furrowed, but before she could say anything, her son suddenly spoke.

  “I didn’t sleep at all,” Ryan announced. “I hate this place.”

  Mystified, Caroline glanced from one of her children to the other. There were no traces of Laurie’s dark circles around Ryan’s eyes, nor did he look as tired as his sister. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What kept you awake?”

  Ryan’s expression clouded. “It was like ghosts, or something, just like Jeff Wheeler said! They were laughing and whispering.”

  “Ghosts?” Caroline echoed. Her eyes shifted to Laurie. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

  Laurie looked uncertain. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she began.

  “There are too!” Ryan flared. “Jeff Wheeler said—”

  Caroline held up a hand to stop the flood of protest. “I just want to know what happened.” She turned back to Laurie. “Did you hear something, too?”

  Laurie nodded reluctantly. “I heard something,” she admitted. “It—well, it was like there were people in the apartment.”

  “There were,” Tony said, finally joining the rest of them at the table. “All afternoon and evening.”

  But Laurie shook her head. “After that. After everybody left, and we went to bed.” Slowly, she told her mother and Tony what had happened.

  “And you heard it too?” Caroline asked, turning to Ryan. Ryan nodded, his eyes belligerent, as if he expected her to tell him he was imagining things. She turned to Tony. “Did you hear anything like that?”

  Tony shook his head. “But I’m not saying the kids didn’t hear anything. I sleep like the dead, and last night you did, too.”

  Just then the doorbell rang, and Tony went to answer it. A moment later they heard Virginia Estherbrook’s voice fill the entry hall. “Scones!” the actress boomed, and a moment later appeared framed in the kitchen door, a spotless and perfectly starched apron covering the top of a dress that Caroline was almost certain was a costume from a revival of ‘Picnic’ the actress had starred in several decades ago. She was carrying a basket covered with a red-and-white checked cloth that could have been a prop from the same play, and looking as if she had, indeed, slept for a month, as she’d threatened to do just yesterday. “I just couldn’t resist bringing some for the children,” she went on, sweeping across the kitchen as if it were a stage and placing the basket exactly between Laurie and Ryan. “Now don’t you touch them,” she admonished, swatting Caroline’s hand away as she started to uncover the delicious-smelling pastries. “Scones are fine for children, but you know what they can do to ladies like us.” Opening the cloth herself, she placed a scone on Ryan’s plate, then another on Laurie’s. “Eat, darling,” she urged, gazing intently at Laurie’s face. “You look a little peaked.”

  “I—I didn’t sleep very—” Laurie began, but her brother didn’t let her finish.

  “We heard ghosts!” he broke in.

  Virginia Estherbrook gave the boy a dramatically exaggerated look of horror. “Ghosts! What did you do? I would have fainted dead away!”

  “Somehow I doubt it was really ghosts, Miss Estherbrook,” Caroline began.

  “Virgie,” the actress corrected. “Miss Estherbrook sounds so old, don’t you think?”

  “It was just voices,” Laurie said. “Like someone was having a party. Only it sounded like they were in the room right next to mine.”

  Virgie Estherbrook held a hand to her forehead. “Oh, my darlings, I’m so sorry,” she said. “It was my fault! I had a few friends in last night, and w
e were having such a good time—you know how actors are—we get so used to projecting that we never stop. And in these old buildings—” She fell silent, her features twisted into an expression so overly tragic that it was all Caroline could do to keep from laughing. “How can I ever apologize? The poor darlings must have been frightened half to death!”

  “It was hardly that bad,” Caroline began, but Virginia Estherbrook shook her head violently.

  “It was terribly thoughtless of me, and I can assure you it will never happen again.” She knelt next to Laurie’s chair, clasping her hands beseechingly. “Can you ever forgive me?”

  “If a critic ever sees this performance, I can guarantee you’ll never work again,” Tony Fleming observed, earning himself a glare from the actress. But despite the glare, she got to her feet, and when she spoke again, her voice had dropped into a normal register.

  “Never mind what Tony says: I am sorry, and I shall try not to let it happen again. All right?”

  “Of course,” Caroline assured her, then turned to Ryan. “See? No ghosts. Just a party.”

  “Be glad she wasn’t rehearsing Lady Macbeth,” Tony put in. “That would really be scary.”

  But even after Virginia Estherbrook had left, Ryan still didn’t look convinced. “I don’t like this place,” he insisted. “I want to go home.”

  “You are home,” Tony told him. “Try one of the scones—that’ll make you forget all about last night.”

  The boy only glowered at his stepfather. “I don’t have to eat anything I don’t want to eat.”

  “Ryan!” Caroline said a little more angrily than she’d intended. The boy’s eyes widened and he started to speak, but then seemed to change his mind. “It was just the first night,” Caroline told him. “It’s going to be fine.”

  Ryan’s face set stubbornly. “I hate this place, and I hate my room. I want to go home!”

  Before Caroline could speak, Tony held up a hand to silence her. “Maybe you’d like your room better if you made it really yours,” he suggested. Ryan looked at him suspiciously. “Tell you what,” Tony went on. “You’re going shopping for school clothes today, so why not shop for your room, too? Do it up any way you want, and in a couple of weeks you’ll feel like you’ve always lived here.” He shifted his attention to Caroline. “Might as well start with the kids’ rooms, right? Then you can just keep on going, right though the whole place.” He laughed out loud at the look of surprise on her face. “You think I couldn’t figure out what you and your friends were talking about yesterday? I may not be able to read lips, but I can see when a woman thinks a place needs redecorating. So do anything you want, but just don’t touch my study. That’s the one room I like just the way it is.”

  Though Laurie’s excitement at the prospect of redecorating her room was instant, Ryan said nothing at all, and the look on his face told Caroline that he was going to be as uncooperative about this as he had been about everything else. He hadn’t wanted her to marry Tony, and he hadn’t wanted to move to this apartment.

  Now he seemed determined to be unhappy about everything else, too.

  And Caroline wasn’t sure she knew how to stop it.

  Ryan gazed darkly at the elevator cage hanging in the stairwell. “What if the cable breaks?”

  “It’s not going to break,” Caroline assured him, unable to keep her annoyance out of her voice. They were on their way out to start shopping for the redecoration of his and Laurie’s rooms, and for the last three hours he had barely spoken at all, sullenly watching as Tony tried to interest him in measuring his room. “You have to know exactly how big the room is,” Tony had explained when he began the project. “If you find a rug you like, you have to know if it’s going to fit, don’t you? And you have to know how much wallpaper you’re going to need, and where furniture will fit and where it won’t. I’ll show you.” He’d found some graph paper, a scale rule, and a tape measure, then set to work, showing the boy how to convert the measurements he took with the tape by using the scale rule.

  Ryan had watched, but his hostility toward his stepfather far outweighed whatever interest he might have had in the process, refusing to try taking over the project himself. Mostly, he’d just lain on his bed, punching his fist into the mitt Mr. Albion had given him. Or at least he had until suddenly Tony Fleming’s fingers had closed on his wrist so hard it hurt.

  “Pay attention when I’m talking to you, Ryan,” he said, and though his voice was quiet there was a hardness in it that made Ryan shrink away. But Tony’s eyes locked on to his own in a grip as strong as that of the fingers that were crushing his wrist. “You and I are going to finish this project, and you are going to at least pretend you are interested. Understand?”

  Ryan nodded, too shocked by the coldness of his stepfather’s voice, the hardness in his eyes, and the strength of his grip to say anything at all.

  Caroline and Laurie had concentrated on Laurie’s room, and by the time they were done, so was Tony, who had armed Ryan with a manila envelope containing detailed diagrams not only of the floor plan, but of the walls as well. The closet had been included, the locations of the electrical outlets marked, and how much room the doors would take up when they were swung open. When Caroline had insisted he thank Tony for all the work he’d done, Ryan had mumbled something that didn’t sound like a “thank you” to her, but which Tony seemed willing to accept. And now, as Caroline pulled the door to the old-fashioned elevator open so they could head out to begin their shopping, her son had found yet something else to complain about.

  The elevator itself!

  “I’m gonna go down the stairs,” he finally decided, ignoring the scornful look his sister gave him.

  “Suit yourself,” Caroline sighed, deciding that this wasn’t a battle worth fighting. “See you in the lobby.” She and Laurie stepped into the cage, and as Ryan started down the stairs, she pressed the button marked lobby. There was a whirring sound, and a couple of clanks, then the cage jerked, and for a moment Caroline was afraid Ryan might have been right. A second later it seemed to make up its mind to do what it had been told, and began grinding slowly downward. When it finally came to a stop, she fully expected to find Ryan standing at the door, grinning at her.

  Instead, he was standing stock-still on the next-to-the-bottom stair, staring not at her, but into the lobby, his eyes wide, looking as if he might turn and bolt back up the stairs at any second. Her own gaze followed his, and for just a moment she had a feeling of utter disorientation, as if the elevator had taken her into the lobby of the wrong building.

  Every chair and sofa in the lobby seemed to be occupied, and half-a-dozen or so more people were standing. At first Caroline recognized no one, but then she spotted Irene Delamond. Next to Irene was her sister Lavinia, seated in a wheelchair, with a shawl wrapped around her stooped shoulders.

  There were two other people in wheelchairs, and as Caroline stepped out of the elevator cage, one of them haltingly propelled himself forward. The man in the chair looked as if he must be in his nineties, and as he rolled to a stop in front of Ryan he spoke in a voice that trembled almost as badly as the hand he held out to the boy, a candy bar clutched in his twisted and swollen fingers. “So here you are! And just as sturdy as Irene said you were, too!” His rheumy eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, fixed on Ryan. “You like chocolate, boy?”

  Ryan shrank away from the strange apparition.

  “For heaven’s sake, George, you’re frightening him,” Irene Delamond said, quickly moving forward and inserting herself between the old man and the boy. She clucked disapprovingly as she surveyed the collection of people in the lobby, then smiled ruefully at Caroline. “I told them all to just stay at home and leave you alone, but in this building, you can’t tell anyone anything.”

  Caroline, still not sure what was happening, glanced uncertainly at the group of people who were now all moving closer, smiling, and reaching out with their hands.

  “They just want to meet you and the children,
that’s all,” Irene said.

  “If we left it up to Irene, she wouldn’t have let us meet you at all,” an old woman clad in several layers of woolens interjected. “Just because she met you first, she thinks she owns you.”

  “Owns us?” Caroline repeated. What was the woman talking about? What on earth was happening?

  “Now just calm down, Tildie,” Irene retorted. “No one owns anyone.” She turned back to Caroline. “It’s just that they’ve all been worried about Anthony, and ever since they heard he’d gotten married again, it’s all they’ve been able to talk about.” She shook her head. “So many of them can hardly get out any more, and to have more young people in the building—well, you can’t really blame them, can you?” One by one, Irene began introducing her neighbors to Caroline, Laurie, and Ryan, and every one of them seemed to have brought some kind of treat for the children.

  Treats, Caroline noted unhappily, that would not only make them sick to their stomachs if they consumed them all, but rot their teeth on the way through their mouths. “It will only happen this once, I promise,” a tall man with piercing blue eyes and thick gray hair said. “I’m a doctor, so I know these things.”

  “Dr. Humphries,” Irene Delamond supplied. “I don’t know what we’d do without him.”

  “You’d all get by just fine,” the doctor replied, then turned his attention back to Caroline. “Children are resilient,” he said. “Far more so than the rest of us. So let them enjoy their candy.” His gaze shifted from Caroline to Laurie and Ryan. “Strong, healthy children, both of them. They’ll be good for us all—we get old, we need some new energy around us, you know what I mean?” His hand dropped to Ryan’s upper arm, squeezing it not quite hard enough to make the boy wince. “Good strong muscles—a boy who doesn’t spend all his time in front of the TV.” He gave Caroline a slight bow. “I approve. And now I shall leave you to the mercies of our neighbors.”

  Besides the doctor, Tildie Parnova, and George Burton, there was Helena Kensington, who was carrying a white cane, wore dark glasses, and asked if she could touch the children’s faces.