by Noel Hynd
“Me?”
“You.”
“What tricks?”
“The ones that scare people. Going out for walks late at night?”
“Good Heavens,” she said. “No! Wouldn’t dare. All these hippies and drug addicts coming to the island in the summer. Not safe at night anymore.”
“So you haven’t been out at night at all?” he pressed. “Not even when you might have been feeling a little lonely sometimes, maybe?”
“I haven’t gone anywhere, Timmy,” she said. “I haven’t been out of—she lowered her voice so that any nursing personnel wouldn’t overhear and take offense… “this lousy place for three weeks.” She leaned back. “And I haven’t been out at night since, you know—”
“The last time I gave you a ride back?”
“Yes,” she said. Her aged eyes looked directly into his. “You know I’d tell you the truth, Timmy,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I know that.” He made a mental note to ask the night nurse if it were at all possible that she may have slipped out.
“Then why are you asking me?” Mrs. Ritter demanded. “You have a funny look on your face.”
“Do I?” He smiled. He turned to Annette. “Here I am a professional detective and Mrs. Ritter can still see right through me.”
“I certainly can!” she said succinctly.
“What am I going to do? My career will be ruined.”
Mrs. Ritter’s eyes twinkled. “I won’t tell anyone, Timmy,” she said, consciously continuing the joke. She eased back in her chair and folded her hands. Her gaze wandered the room for a moment, then settled on Annette.
“I taught school on this island for fifty years,” she boasted, emphasizing the fifty. “I know when a young man is being less than candid.” Now she focused even more intently on Annette. “You’re a very pretty young girl,” she said. “You’d do well to learn some of the danger signs as well.”
“Yes, I should, Mrs. Ritter,” Annette said. The old woman took a deep look at Annette.
“Men can’t be trusted,” Mrs. Ritter continued, citing the wisdom of the ages. “Never at all with a pretty girl.”
“Shame on all of us,” Tim Brooks said.
“Well, maybe Timmy here you can trust. I trust Timmy.” She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. Then Mrs. Ritter considered the presence of Annette Carlson very carefully. “I know you,” she finally said. “You’re a movie star.”
Annette smiled graciously. “I’ve been in a few films,” she answered.
“More than a few,” Mrs. Ritter said. “And you won an award. I saw you in that movie. Oh, I forget the name. With that handsome Italian man. The man with the real black hair and the wonderful voice.”
Annette knew exactly who she meant. Tim Brooks rolled his eyes.
“The film was Passport To Fear,” Annette answered.
“That’s the one,” Mrs. Ritter said, as if they would never have thought of it without her. She was much more animated now. “You were terrific in that.”
“Thank you,” Annette said again. “You’re very kind.”
“You got killed off early,” Mrs. Ritter said, recalling with remarkable clarity. “Such a shame. I liked you better than the other girl who was in the film. I don’t know her name.” Annette supplied it.
“You were much better than she was. Should have kept you around to the end.” She paused. “I don’t know who writes those silly things.” She shook her head. “But who am I to judge? I’m just an old schoolteacher waiting out the time that’s left to me. God willing, Heaven could only be a few hours away for any of us.” She shrugged then smiled ruefully. “You in any more movies?” she asked.
“I’m in a television movie that will be broadcast this fall,” Annette said patiently. “I think it will be shown in October. And I’m choosing another script for after that.”
“For a television show?”
“For a movie. In a movie theater.”
“Well, you choose very carefully, my dear,” she said boldly. “And don’t you trust anyone but yourself. A girl has to be careful of her career. Look what happened to Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate and Natalie Wood.”
“What happened to them?” Annette asked.
“They all got killed,” Mrs. Ritter said. Then, forging onward, she added, “When I was a teacher, I looked out for mine. No one else looks out for you.”
Brooks came slowly to his feet. “We have to be going, Mrs. Ritter,” Brooks said next. “I just stopped in to say hello and make sure you were all right.”
“That’s kind of you, Timmy. But, ‘all right’? Ha!” She snorted and motioned contemptuously to her confines. Then she made a complacent face. “I suppose,” she said with a sigh, “all I can do is make the best of it.”
Brooks leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “You take care of yourself, Mrs. Ritter,” he said. “And stay out of trouble.”
“Humph,” she said. “Not much trouble a woman of my age can get into, is there?”
“I’ll stop by and see you again next week,” he said.
She sighed again. “Bless you, Timmy.”
A few minutes later, Tim Brooks accompanied Annette down the entrance lobby of Mid Island Convalescent. He excused himself for a moment and spoke privately with the facility’s daytime manager. Then he and Annette walked out to his car. “So what was that all about?” she asked.
“Ever seen her before?”
“That old woman?”
“Who else?”
“Of course not.” Annette said. “Why?”
He followed her to the passenger side and opened the car door.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Tell me why.”
“I’ll explain in the car,” he said.
Annette settled into the car. Brooks joined her a moment later, started the ignition and buckled into his seat belt. “This goes back maybe two years,” Brooks said. “Mrs. Ritter had her own home. Not far from here, not far from Cort Street. She used to go out for walks after dark. Just waltz out of her home, go up and down the street, looking for doors that were unlocked. Then she’d walk into people’s homes.” He paused. “I’m talking about two, three, four in the morning.” He paused again. “Same time as your visitor.”
Annette folded her arms and listened.
“There’s still a small-town feel among a lot of people here,” Brooks said, guiding the car out of the driveway and pulling onto a quiet road. “Doors don’t get locked very carefully in a lot of houses.”
“So what did Mrs. Ritter do?” Annette asked. “Once she was in these houses.”
“She’d make herself at home,” Brooks said. “Look for people who hadn’t lived there for thirty years.” He paused as he turned onto Main Street. “That, and scare the hell out of the current residents who heard voices in the house.”
Annette nodded. A sad smile crossed her face as she watched the town float by her window. There was still a bustle in the main shopping district: day trippers from off-island.
“I get it,” she said. “A solitary old lady late at night. Wandering around at loose ends.”
“Poor old dear,” Tim Brooks said. He glanced at his passenger as he drove. “Want to hear more?”
“Sure.”
“More than once, people have reported that she would come upstairs into their bedrooms. She’d sit in a room. She’d sit on the edge of a bed.”
Annette looked away.
Brooks continued.
“She’d check on children. Mrs. Ritter’s nighttime prowling scared the hell out of dozens of people on this island. You wake up, see someone wandering through your room, sitting on your bed. Well, you can imagine.”
“I don’t have to,” Annette said, looking back to him.
“Of course not. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?”
She admitted that it did.
“She never hurt anyone, of course,” Brooks said. “Problem was, she was out in the streets late
at night. In the summer, we get these drunk kids speeding home after the bars close. Then we also get city people. New York and Boston. They think they’re vulnerable in their houses so they bring guns. Everyone got kind of worried that she was going to get herself hurt. Know what I mean?”
Annette knew.
“She doesn’t have family. No children. Husband died a quarter century ago. Arrangements were made to move her into Mid Island for her own good. She’s not happy, but deep down, she knows she’s a whole lot safer.” He paused. “See, I used to work nights a lot on the island, so it was me who brought her home a lot. That’s how I personally landed in the case.”
“And you’re still keeping an eye on her?” Annette asked.
Brooks seemed almost embarrassed by the question.
“People forget: being a policeman is protecting the public,” he said. “Sometimes you protect people from harm they might bring upon themselves.”
He took his eyes off the road long enough to watch a girl in red shorts bicycle past them from the opposite direction. The girl was half Annette’s age.
“Mrs. Ritter is a sweet old lady. Yeah, I know her faculties are slipping. Whose aren’t? But she gave her whole life to teaching school on this island. I think she’s earned a little something from the rest of us. So I help keep an eye on her. A lot of us do.”
The girl on the bike was gone from his rearview mirror. Annette was quiet as the car eased to a stop in front of her house on Cort Street.
“The night staff was supposed to be watchful, make sure she didn’t wander off again,” Brooks said. “My guess is… Well, you see what I’m saying?” he said.
“I see.”
“They’re not always so alert, the night staff,” Brooks said.
Annette nodded. They sat together in the parked car. Brooks waited. “So what do you think?” he asked. “Is our mystery solved or not?”
“What I saw in my house didn’t look like her at all.”
He thought about it for a moment and sighed. “Ms. Carlson?” he asked.
“What?” She waited.
“Tell me again what you think you saw. I have a hunch that you left something out.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she spoke.
“Neither woman had any contrasting color. They were all white. Like beams from stage lights. Yet they had form. And faces. And they conveyed thoughts to me. Two different times.” She fell silent again. Then, with an arch to her eyebrow, as if to discount even her own version of the events, “They looked like ghosts,” she added. “Or what I imagine ghosts would look like.”
Her words elicited half a smile from him. Polite but noncommittal.
Indulgent and supportive, but skeptical.
“But that’s silly, isn’t it?” she asked. “Ghosts, I mean.”
“I’ve never been much of a believer,” he allowed.
She nodded.
“The first night, when I reached out to chase it away,” she continued, “my arm flowed right through it, just like reaching through a beam of light.”
His right forefinger was gently massaging the steering wheel of the Jeep.
“No low moaning?” he asked. “No dragging chains? No skeletal hands or red beady eyes glaring out of the darkness?”
“No,” she said. “And I wasn’t drunk and I don’t do drugs.”
Expecting a curt dismissal, Annette was surprised when Brooks began to nod gently. Then he surprised her again. “You were there,” he said. “You know what you remember. And that’s the real reason you didn’t phone the police at the time it happened,” he concluded.
She nodded.
“Well, it makes more sense now,” Brooks said. “In one way, at least.”
“So what do you make of it?” Annette asked. “You think I’m a crazy lady from the West Coast, don’t you? Movie actress, right? Must have a few screws loose?”
“Well, not yet, anyway,” he assured her. “But there’s still time.”
“What you’re saying is you do think I’m crazy. And you don’t believe in ghosts. Let me tell you something. That’s how I felt up until two nights ago, too.”
“I have a friend on this island,” Brooks answered thoughtfully. “Mrs. Ritter mentioned him. George Osaro. He’s the pastor of one of the local churches as well as one of my best friends. We play basketball. He’s always been into this stuff. Spirits. Spooks. Ghosts. Whatever he calls them.”
There was a brightness as the sun almost broke through the clouds. Then from somewhere a shadow crossed Brooks’ face. “Every summer George has a symposium on this island about encounters with the supernatural,” Brooks said. “He holds it in the church hall and always brings out a crowd.”
“Are you suggesting that I go?” she asked, accusation in her tone. She had no intention of attending such an event.
“Nope,” he said quickly. “Fact is, you just missed it. It was held about three weeks ago.”
“I’m sure it was interesting.”
Brooks shrugged. “What did your ghost say to you?” he asked.
Annette had almost forgotten. But the words came back. “She said, ‘I came to warn you. Everyone on the island is in danger.’”
For some reason that he couldn’t readily understand, her response gave him pause. It hung in the air and disturbed him.
“George never seems to lack for new material or new ‘sightings’ on this island,” he continued. “But then again, we’re overlooking the obvious.”
“What’s that?”
“Just because Mrs. Ritter wasn’t in your house doesn’t mean you didn’t have a different prowler. A real flesh-and-blood one, I mean.”
“I know what I saw,” she repeated.
“Of course,” he said.
Brooks fished through his shirt pocket until he found one of his business cards. He found a pencil almost as easily. On the back of the card, he began to write.
“In case your visitor drops by again,” he said, “I’m giving you my home phone number. Call me at the police station or call me at home. Any time, day or night.”
He handed her the card. She accepted it.
“You mean it?” she asked.
“I’d like to meet her, too,” he said.
She thanked him and she stepped out of the Jeep. “I promise,” Annette said. “If it comes back, I’ll phone you.”
“Do something else for me, too,” he said. “Get that lock replaced. I’ll give you the name of a repairman.”
Annette nodded and gave him a grudging smile. “Right away,” she agreed.
Then she turned and walked back to her house, feeling the detective’s eyes—or some pair of eyes—upon her every step she took.
Chapter Fifteen
On Monday morning, Annette hired the home repair contractor to change all the exterior locks on her doors. The man’s name was Emmet Hughes. He was a cheerful, chubby, ruddy faced man who specialized at household repair jobs. By eleven A.M. on a clear sunny morning, the new locks were in place and Annette had paid Hughes in cash and even tipped him generously.
Then on Tuesday afternoon, the nursing staff of Mid Island Convalescent moved Mrs. Ritter to a more secure room on the second floor. There she resided across from the duty nurse’s desk. She immediately complained about the new accommodations. The elevator never came to the second floor when she needed it, she grumbled. Her new room was drafty and she was too far from the steps. Even worse, her residency status had been downgraded and she was not permitted to set foot outside the home without a chaperon.
Timothy Brooks stopped by 17 Cort Street that same afternoon to advise Annette of the change in Mrs. Ritter’s tenancy. Annette thanked him but still professed doubt that the events at Mid Island Convalescent could reflect upon what happened at the Carlson residence.
“I know what I saw,” she told him again.
He nodded indulgently.
And yet, and yet…
Simultaneous to the tighter leash held on the old woman, the spectral
manifestations ceased at 17 Cort Street. There were no unwelcome visitors to Annette’s bedroom over the next days. Or at least none that Annette saw. Thus the mystery, the petty nocturnal dramas of July eleven and twelve, did indeed appear solved through normal phenomenon. Secretly, however, Annette kept her own counsel. If there were supernatural presences in her home, she decided, they hadn’t harmed her. They had only frightened her. So on one hand, she was prepared to live with things she couldn’t readily explain. And on the other hand, she took comfort in the fact that the overt problems had stopped.
She gave a careful reading to Rumor of Guilt by Horace Westerly. While she found much to commend in the script, the role being offered to her wasn’t to her liking. It remained too similar to roles she had already played. With some careful consideration, she returned the script to Joe Fischer with a note praising its quality, but declining the role.
Thereupon she started in on another dozen scripts Joe Fischer had procured for her. What film she would do next was not the only question that remained unanswered. Nor, with Mrs. Ritter under a form of Senior Citizen House arrest, were all of the smaller mysteries at 17 Cort Street resolved.
There was the matter of Annette’s reading glasses, for example. When she returned from Mid Island Convalescent on the previous Sunday afternoon, she had gone immediately back to the script in an attempt to finish it.
But her eyeglasses had not been where she had remembered leaving them. She was certain she had placed them on the end table by the sofa, right next to her soft drink. Instead, she eventually found them on the bottom shelf of the china cabinet. They were right in the open. But again, they were not where she recalled leaving them.
The sight of them in a different place gave her pause for a moment, accompanied by a tingle of goose bumps. Yes, this was a room in which she felt she had seen a restless spirit. And yes, the glasses seemed to have moved. But she also knew that she was frequently unmindful of where she had left things. Where was her driver’s license, for example, which she had apparently misplaced four days earlier? Where had she mislaid a French eyeliner that had vanished since the previous Tuesday?
Why had a gold hoop earring, one of a pair, tuned up on the kitchen floor when she was certain she had left the pair on a dresser upstairs? And so on. So what if she thought she had put the glasses on the end table? When Detective Brooks was distracting her with his bothersome knocking, she might easily have put them down somewhere else.
