by Noel Hynd
It was that simple, wasn’t it? Things didn’t fly across the room by themselves.
Did they?
Then there was the mahogany chest upstairs, a big old one that dominated the bedroom and which she used to store clothes.
Getting ready for sleep on Thursday night, Annette banged her bare right foot against the leg of the dresser. She whacked the smallest two toes on her foot very hard, raising a dreadful bruise and even drawing a few drops of blood.
In examining the dresser and trying to figure out why she had tripped where she had never had trouble passing before, Annette made a strange discovery. The impression that the dresser’s legs had made upon the carpet beneath it showed that the chest had been moved at least three inches to the left. That was what had caused her to miscalculate her step and bang her foot.
Annette stared at the impressions on the carpet. She knew she hadn’t moved the dresser. Nor could she have. It was a big, heavy hunk of furniture, much too heavy for her, something of a companion piece to the china cabinet in the living room. Like the china cabinet downstairs, Annette disliked its bulky gracelessness. But the dresser had come with the house. It was too big and difficult to remove. And it did serve a purpose.
Yet when it was filled with clothing, as it was now, the dresser probably weighed four hundred pounds. She wondered how it could possibly have shifted even that short distance. Or was she just plain wrong about where the legs of the bureau had once stood?
Had the other impressions on the carpet been there since she moved in and she had never noticed?
Or—and this she found to be absolutely unbelievable—had someone been in the house while she was out? And had that person moved the dresser?
If so, who?
If so, why?
She went to bed wondering about this on Thursday night, though her wonder didn’t last long. She left the room light on and slept soundly. The night passed peaceably and mercifully without interruption.
The next morning was sunny and bright. Annette awoke refreshed, feeling terrific. Only later in the day did she happen to run into Emmet Hughes, the lock repairman, in town. She asked him if he had for any reason been upstairs in her house. Might he have moved the dresser?
“Never went above the first floor, Miss Carlson,” Hughes answered with a bashful but respectful smile. “Didn’t need to go upstairs to change locks.”
“Of course not,” she agreed.
He shrugged. “You were there the whole time I was,” he reminded her. “You remember? I just done the outside doors.”
“Of course, Emmet,” she said, recalling. “Silly of me to ask.”
Hughes concluded the conversation by inquiring if Annette would sign an autograph. “For my niece,” he explained. Annette smiled graciously and obliged by signing Hughes’ grocery bag, obtained a few minutes earlier from the A & P adjacent to the boat basin.
Yet Annette’s spirits were in better shape than those of several other people. There was the emotional agony suffered by Eddie Lloyd and his family, for example.
Detectives Gelman and Rodzienko had done a thorough job on the young man and, in their opinion, had built a sound criminal case.
It was their thesis that Eddie had killed his girlfriend. Stuff like that happened all the time, they felt, and finally it had happened here. They didn’t have a confession yet, but figured they soon would. Accordingly, the Lloyd family had been advised that a grand jury in Hyannis would soon bring an indictment for the murder of Mary Elizabeth DiMarco.
Nor was it a time of tranquility for Detective Timothy Brooks. Much troubled him. First, the case being built against Eddie Lloyd appeared grossly circumstantial at best. Gelman and Rodzienko had tailored their investigation to suit the preemptive conclusions they had reached minutes after arriving on the murder scene.
People either had homicide in their soul or they didn’t, Brooks had long felt. One look at the Lloyd kid told him—very unscientifically—that Eddie didn’t.
And there had been the expression on the dead girl’s face. That stricken look of pure unearthly horror that still caused Brooks to shudder and which was beginning to cause him to have difficulty sleeping.
What on Nantucket Island could have caused that? What, in particular, out there in the darkness in an open field fifty yards from the old cemetery?
What on earth?
“An emissary from hell,” said a voice inside him suddenly one evening. He shuddered again and the voice disappeared.
Brooks craved an explanation. Sometimes his head pounded with some sort of super migraine unlike anything he had ever suffered before.
And then the 17 Cort Street situation bothered Brooks, too. Two reported intrusions. Annette Carlson’s flaky account of it, suggesting the supernatural. There was a disturbing aura about this episode, as well, though Brooks was at a loss to pinpoint it. Maybe it was the sense of the unsettled, even though with the changes to the locks and to Mrs. Ritter’s accommodations, no new occurrences had reached Brooks’ ears.
It bothered Tim Brooks enough so that the following Saturday he stopped by the house. Just to say hello. Just to inquire if everything remained all right. But Annette happened to be out at the time and Brooks pursued the matter no further, other than to slowly walk around the house.
He was looking for karma again, he supposed.
He found none. He left his business card on the rear doorstep and went on his way. And that concluded a full week in which some matters had ostensibly settled and others had progressed to their next stage.
That also guided Brooks to the following Sunday morning, July nineteenth, and a rare visit to church. The latter would present him with the opportunity to pose several more questions that had perplexed him recently—questions which, had all of the previous events not transpired upon the heels of each other, he would never have thought to ask.
Chapter Sixteen
In more ways than not, Rev. George Osaro did not fit in at the rambling white church where he was pastor. His name sounded like Boston Italian, but he was the offspring of a Japanese mother, who was a librarian, and a Canadian father, who had been a seaman.
According to the stories Osaro told about himself, but which no one ever was able to verify, he had been raised in Montana, read his way through the local library by the time he was twelve and took the better part of his bachelor’s degree in life experience, working alternately as a logger, a supermarket clerk, and a cab driver in Billings.
He finally picked up a real sheepskin, he always told people, at a small liberal arts college in northern California. Then, in his mid-twenties found his Calling. Or, more accurately, his Calling found him.
Someway, he traveled east and landed at Harvard Divinity. It was as if he had just appeared one day full grown and with little background. At first he simply took courses from the extension division of the God School. Then, impressing a few professors, he was admitted for formal study.
He married a local girl from Somerville who was an OR nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her name was Carol Ann and they set up shop during his second summer in Cambridge. A son named Paul—Osaro was an expert in the Pauline Epistles—was born during his second winter.
Then George Osaro amazed everyone by writing the most brilliant thesis the school had seen in fifteen years—something nearly incomprehensible having to do with Shinto influence upon the Christian interpretation of the afterlife among the missions in China in the eleventh century—and was ordained. Mainstream New England Protestantism hadn’t been the same since. He became the assistant pastor at Christ and Holy Trinity in 2005 and assumed the full pastor’s duties upon the sudden retirement of his predecessor—a starchy old Lutheran cleric named Clarence Hapgood in 2008.
It was at this same time that Carol Ann decided she had had enough. She packed three suitcases and headed back to the Boston area with her son. Brother Osaro had been dividing his time between the church and the basketball court ever since.
Osaro had lively
intense eyes, windows to a matching soul. He was equally adept arguing Wittgenstein with graduate students or bickering about a summons with the local traffic enforcement ladies on Nantucket Island or spending hours in deep reflection upon the transcendental qualities of the human consciousness.
He also liked NBA basketball—he was a Lakers fan because of ex-coach Phil Jackson’s approach to Zen—pickup trucks and the novels of the South American writers who wrote in the school of magical realism.
Lo real maravilloso, Osaro liked to call it. He seemed to take it as a literary acknowledgement that windows could open onto other realities, without contradicting Christianity. It was a stretch, but he liked to reach.
George Osaro had probably read everything ever printed surrounding the mysteries of any human afterlife and, as his annual “Spiritual Nantucket” nights indicated, was always seeking to define new theories of the afterlife in mainstream Protestant terms. This did not always rest comfortably upon the church hierarchy. But George Osaro was, all who knew him agreed, a singular piece of work.
“Golfers,” said Osaro to Tim Brooks. “Golfers. Republicans and the aged. That’s my congregation. The latter would be a lot bigger if so many members of our parish didn’t belong to all three groups. But my blessings upon them anyway.”
The two men stood on a grassy patch of earth outside Christ and Holy Trinity. It was eleven-thirty on Sunday morning. Osaro had concluded his two services. He talked to his friend and greeted an occasional parishioner as the three to four dozen worshippers walked home or to their cars.
“It’s not a bad parish and the location is terrific,” Osaro allowed. “As far as challenge goes, however.” He raised his eyebrows and his narrow shoulders. “What’s challenge?” he asked in response to his own question.
Brooks smiled. On down days, he might have asked himself the same question. But within police work the demands of faith were of a different sort.
Osaro greeted two teenagers. Then an older couple. He carried a book bag on one arm with several eight-by-ten manila envelopes clutched against it. He smiled broadly. His personal skills were not insubstantial, though, encumbered by books and papers, even in a clerical collar he looked more like a graduate student than a pastor.
“So what’s going on, Timmy?” Osaro finally asked. “You show up for my infamous spirit night, now you show your face on Sunday morning. By my calendar, it’s neither Christmas nor Easter. Why are you here? Are you trying to give Protestantism a bad name?”
“Oh, I had nothing else to do,” Brooks said in jest. “So I thought I’d see what you’d be bantering about.”
Osaro chuckled softly. “Liar,” he said. “First, you look like you’ve got something on your mind. Second, you left a message on my answering machine. You said you wanted to talk to me.”
“I did indeed leave that message,” said Brooks. “And I do want to talk.”
“Your message was bracketed by two from the bishop in Boston,” Osaro said somberly. “Allow me to say that whatever the nature is our conversation, it will be more pleasant than the one with the bishop.”
“Oh? Is there a problem?”
“I don’t know for sure because I’m not planning to return the call till Monday morning. Or Tuesday. Or never. But I suspect the word of our spiritual evening last month has reached his lofty otherwise-deaf ears.”
“Ah. I see.”
“He doesn’t care for such activities,” Osaro said. “Call our bishop ‘old time,’ rather than ‘New Age.’”
There was a fervency in his voice as he quietly mocked his superior. But everyone else was out of earshot. The sidewalk was quiet as was the stretch of grass by the side of the church.
They walked a few paces and were on the asphalt of the parking lot. The cars present were brightly gleaming with sunlight, though they were crisscrossed by the shadows from the branches of several trees.
“Well,” Osaro said at length. “Here I am. Talk at me.”
“It’s funny that the bishop should phone you,” Brooks began. “I wanted to ask you something about ‘Spiritual Nantucket’ as well.”
Osaro moaned slightly. “Well, out with it. What’s on your mind?”
“Tell me a little more about Doctor Friedman,” Brooks asked.
“Who?”
“He was the final speaker that evening,” Brooks reminded him. “He had some nasty spirit in his house.”
Osaro smiled. “Oh. Yes. That Doctor Friedman,” he said, as if there were two of them. “What about him?”
“Doctor Friedman’s story,” Brooks asked. “How much of it can we believe?”
Osaro thought for a moment. He drew a breath, and when he finally answered, his eyes were shadowed from overhead by a low branch of an elm tree.
“I believe every word of it,” Osaro said.
Brooks looked his friend in the eye.
“Tim, the man’s a doctor,” Osaro said. “Think he gets off on making up hobgoblin stories? Think that brings extra tonsillectomies into his office?”
“It takes a leap of faith to accept a story like that,” said Brooks, thinking as much about Cort Street as the Friedmans’ residence on Milk. “Evil spirits and all. I don’t know if I can make that leap just yet.”
Osaro arrived at his van, an old Plymouth Voyager that was white and rusting. The vehicle’s most distinguishing feature was a large dent on the right front end where it had once lost a right-of-way challenge with a driver from New Jersey. Osaro had left the van unlocked. He opened a rear door and tossed in his book bag and manila envelopes.
“Well, I’m able to take him at his word,” Osaro said. “And, if it helps you sleep tonight, Timmy, I’ve also talked to the rest of the Friedman family. They all saw the same things. His poor kids were scared out of their little Hebrew minds.”
Osaro looked disapprovingly at the interior of his van. “Why on earth does someone move out of a three-hundred-thousand dollar house, Tim?” he asked without looking back. “Why, if there’s not a problem? The Friedmans felt that they had a malevolently haunted house. So they got out. Wise move on their part. You don’t dick around with the forces from the dark side.”
Osaro folded down a rear seat in his van. The floor of the vehicle was littered with stray papers, maps, empty bags, windshield cleaning solvent and, that most essential of summer equipment, a spray can of de-icer, left over from the previous February. Osaro leaned into the Voyager and made an effort to lend some order to it.
“Tell me something else,” Brooks finally said, leaning against the right front door of the van. “I’ve never asked you, so tell me honestly. How did you get started with this spiritualism stuff?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you get into this in college? Were your parents into it? Read some book that changed your life? See a light flash one day?” He paused for emphasis. “I’ve always wanted to know where your interest came from.”
“It was either something I read or something I ate. I really don’t remember.”
“It was a serious question,” Brooks pressed.
“Tim,” Osaro said, pulling his head out of the car and grimacing slightly, “you didn’t ‘always wonder’ about this. What are you fishing for?”
“Nothing in particular,” Brooks said.
“Sure,” Osaro said gently as he pushed some old food wrappers into a small trash bag. “You always belittled this subject. Now you’re suddenly interested. Before I recite for you my autobiography, you have to tell me: what gives? Qué pasa?”
Osaro looked at his friend and waited for an answer. A speckled shadow crossed his face. Branches of a long-diseased elm tree above them rustled in a breeze.
“Let’s say it’s work related.”
“Police business?”
“Maybe.”
A pause. Then, “Oh, I see,” Osaro said.
The minister put the van’s rear seat back up and closed the door.
Brooks expected another airily contentious response from his
friend, one tinged with flippancy and the inevitable needle. Thus Brooks was surprised when he drew something more serious.
“Let me tell you something, Tim,” George Osaro said. “And it’s just between us, okay? I already have enough funny stories circulating about me without every cop on this island looking at me as if I’m extra whack-o.”
“This is strictly between us,” Brooks promised.
“For a long time, maybe since I was about ten years old,” Osaro began, “I’ve had this funny gift. I didn’t set out to become interested in spiritualism and the afterlife. They landed upon me.”
Osaro stopped speaking as a well-dressed young couple strolled to a nearby car. Osaro nodded to them. Then he lowered his voice and continued.
“I can walk into a disturbed place and pick up the vibrations,” he said. “I can tell you immediately if something’s there.”
Brooks stared at his friend for several seconds.
“What do you mean by ‘disturbed place’?” Brooks finally asked. “And what do you mean by ‘something’?”
“A disturbed place is a location such as Doctor Friedman’s house. A place where events, that might be viewed as paranormal, have been reported. And by ‘something,’ I’m talking about a spiritual presence. A migratory soul, maybe. Or something else, some force we don’t completely understand, trying to make itself known.”
Brooks waited for Reverend Osaro to break into a wide There!-I-had-you-fooled grin, but quickly realized no such sign would be forthcoming.
“Oh, come on,” Brooks finally said.
“Okay. Don’t believe me!” the minister snapped petulantly. “I’d make up something like that, right? You ask me to confide in you, I say I will, and then you accuse me of slinging bull. Thanks a lot, pal.”
Osaro’s left hand plunged into his pocket for car keys. The keys came out with a jingle. Brooks was startled by the vehemence of Osaro’s response.
