GHOSTS: 2014 edition (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 1)

by Noel Hynd

  She nodded. He mopped the puddle and dried the table. He set aside the broken glass. His gaze rose and settled into her eyes.

  “Tell me candidly. Do you sense anything in the room right now? Any presence other than ours?”

  She took the measure of the room. “No,” she finally said, to her own relief. Brooks realized that it was to his relief as well. “If the situation changes,” he warned, “tell me right away. If we go into another room and you feel something different, tell me straight out.”

  She nodded.

  “Promise?” he asked.

  “I promise,” she said.

  They walked through all the downstairs rooms, entering the kitchen last. He put his hand on the door to the cellar. “Does this unlock?” he asked.

  “It’s been locked,” she said. “No point to go down there.” He paused. He eyed the door. He rapped on it to see how secure it was. He had a funny instinct that he should have a look. A bad vibration, he would have termed it.

  “You’re sure?”

  She shook her head—again. “I’m sure. Don’t bother.”

  He released the knob. “All right,” he said. “Some other time, huh?”

  “Some other time.”

  He retraced his path through the downstairs rooms. She asked him what he was looking for.

  “Some of the very old houses on this island have hidden passageways,” Tim Brooks said. “Secret rooms. Trap doors to basements. Fake walls. Trick doors at the side of fireplaces. These are all little architectural quirks that are left over from the time the first English settlers thought they might have to hide from the Indians or the French or the Portuguese,” he said. “In many cases, these things have remained in the structures of the houses, sometimes out in the open, sometimes hidden. Some have remained hidden for two or three hundred years.”

  Here was an interesting theory, one which would eliminate the supernatural aspect from some of the events at 17 Cort Street. She was almost relieved to hear it, though it then implied that something human was skulking around her home and that thought was just as chilling.

  He continued, moving his hand across walls, rapping gently here and there, looking for a hollow or a previously unknown hinge.

  “If someone’s playing a now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t game,” he said as he searched, “nothing would be more useful than a passageway you don’t know about.”

  Beside the hearth in the living room, where Annette had seen the young woman one night, a few loose bricks caught the detective’s attention.

  For several seconds he stared at them. They were about head high. He removed them. For a moment, he thought they would reveal a lever that would crank open a small passageway between the wall and the brickwork, just narrow enough for a thin adult to squeeze through.

  But he was wrong. Throughout the first floor, he found nothing. There was nothing on the second floor, either. She considered it pointless to search in the attic, but Brooks insisted. They climbed the stairs together. He went first. The floor groaned beneath his footfall. It was a spooky stretch of space, this attic, complete with cobwebs, dusty windows and a pair of bare sixty-watt bulbs that hung from the ceiling. It was also very hot and oppressively sticky.

  Brooks walked around the space. He examined the locations where Annette had stashed her suitcases and the pieces of furniture that she had not wanted downstairs. She had left everything covered with sheets.

  Annette stayed at the top of the steps. For some reason, this room was starting to make her nervous. For an instant she sensed something. She opened her mouth to warn him. Then what she sensed was gone. So she held her silence. Annette didn’t want to appear any more foolish than she already felt. Brooks stopped. His gaze settled upon one of the sheets. He turned to Annette.

  “May I?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  To the policeman’s trained eye, the small reclining form under the sheet was clearly human, perhaps the size of a child. He slowly pulled back the sheet, and as he did something flashed within him and he jumped slightly. He found himself looking at a small human head attached to small immobile shoulders. The eyes were closed. The small face bearing a single eyepiece was lifeless and wooden.

  He started to blurt something out just as recognition came upon him.

  “What’s this?” he asked with a bemused smile.

  “I meant to tell you he was there,” she explained. “That’s Charlie McCarthy,” she said. “A copy of the ventriloquist’s dummy Edgar Bergen used to use.” She paused. “It was my mother’s.”

  “I haven’t seen one of these in years,” Brooks said. Charlie looked like he’d been pleasantly embalmed, pickled maybe, then sealed in acrylic, monocle and all. He remained in perfect condition—for a dummy.

  Intrigued, Brooks reached to the back of the dummy’s jacket where he found the controls. He opened Charlie’s eyes, moved the dummy’s head from side to side and rolled his eyes as if he were possessed. Tim Brooks made Charlie open his silent mouth, but he thought better of putting any words therein.

  “Edgar Bergen. Father of ‘Murphy Brown’,” Brooks said with a thoughtful smile. “You’re in entertainment, Miss Carlson. I might have known.”

  Brooks set the dummy’s head back down. The eyes closed. The policeman pulled the sheet back over the lifeless body. A tiny painless funeral.

  “You know they put Edgar Bergen on a postage stamp a few years ago,” she offered. “It shows you there’s always hope for an actor.”

  “Always. Look at Ronald Reagan,” he said. “He got on some stamps, too.”

  They both laughed.

  “So did Elvis and Malcolm X,” he added. “Who would have ever thought that?”

  He straightened the sheet back across the dummy’s head and scanned the rest of the attic, enduring a tiny descent into boredom. There was nothing wrong with this room. He was convinced. “Let’s go back downstairs,” Brooks said. They both turned. On the way down, he advised her to keep at least one of the windows in the attic open at least an inch—maybe several inches if she put in a screen.

  “It will keep the rest of the house cooler in the summer,” he said. “And it will keep the musty smell from building up there.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ve never owned a house in this area before. “

  “Being a town cop,” he said, “is a full-service job.”

  They walked back down two flights of steps. Annette drew a deep breath and began to relax. No, there didn’t seem to be anything strange in the house right now. She felt more assured just having the detective there. When they arrived on the first floor, she found that she did not like the idea that he would soon leave.

  “Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Based on the evidence that’s been placed in front of me,” he said, “it looks like someone spilled a glass of wine, then mixed it with some water. Then you called me.”

  Annette stared at him with disappointment. “Is that all you can say?”

  “I’m sorry,” Tim Brooks said. “That sounded flip. Let me rephrase. “

  “You don’t have to.”

  “No, I should,” he said. He glanced around the living room.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  “I wish you would,” she said. “And while you’re sitting, I hope a dish flies in the air directly at you.”

  He sat in the rocker across the room from her and considered her remark. “Now, that would be interesting,” he said. “Trouble is, no one would believe me.”

  “Then you know how I feel,” she said.

  He looked at her with growing approval. “A point well taken,” he said.

  She sat on the sofa, where she normally might read scripts or a book. Or watch the television.

  “Look,” he said. “If you’re having a problem in this house, I’m willing to do whatever I can. What’s your gut feeling? Be as frank as you want because that’s how I’m going to be
with you.” He paused, then asked, “What do you think is going on?”

  “I think there’s some sort of—she searched for the right term—force at work in this house. It’s the absolute truth.”

  “I’m just curious,” he said. “Who else might have had access to the house?”

  “No one,” she said. No one human, she meant to say, but didn’t.

  “What about the locks?” Brooks asked. “Were they changed when you bought the place?”

  Annette said Emmet Hughes had done the job. Brooks nodded.

  “What about this afternoon?” Brooks asked next. “Were your doors locked when the wineglass fell over?”

  Annette thought back. She conceded that she had never been in the habit of locking doors outside of a city. So two doors to the house had been open. For a moment, a knowing look crossed Brooks’ face. Then he politely reminded her that someone could have quietly walked in and out. It sounded unlikely, he admitted, but she had to admit that it was not impossible. She nodded again. As he spoke she wished again that an object would fly off the table but nothing did. There was an awkward pause and then he shifted the conversation once again.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll try to be as up-front about this as possible. You’re in films. The public—and this does not mean me—holds a certain bias about film people. Film people and publicity.”

  She looked at him.

  “Are you following what I’m saying?” he asked.

  She thought about it. “That we get too much of it?”

  “In a way, yes,” Brooks answered. “But that wasn’t exactly what I meant.” He exhaled. “Counting tonight when you came out to the street to telephone me, we’ve had three reported ‘incidents’ out of this house. Three circumstances under which you might strongly be suggesting a ‘supernatural’ occurrence. That’s if I’m using the right word.”

  “So?”

  “Miss Carlson,” he said. “None of this has gone beyond the police force yet. In fact, nothing has gone beyond me. But when it does, if it does…”

  Annette folded her arms and Brooks knew that she finally had figured his point.

  “If it does,” she said, “people are going to say we’re engineering a publicity stunt.”

  “That could happen,” Tim Brooks said.

  “And what do you think?”

  “In all candor?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never in my life believed in ghost stories,” he said. “But the other night in my own home, I had a terrifying dream. I turned the light on and the room was empty. But I could have sworn…”

  He shrugged.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Annette asked.

  “To let you know that I’m more sympathetic than you might suspect. That I might be more willing to believe than I was a week ago.”

  Her eyes found his and embraced them.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “I have an instinct for witnesses: which ones are lying, which ones are holding back, which ones are telling the truth.”

  “And?”

  He chose his words with a precision that would have done justice to a trial lawyer.

  “You look to me like you’re awfully upset about what might be transpiring in this building,” Brooks said. “I don’t know what’s going on. But I have the sense that you don’t know, either.”

  She leaned back in the rocker. It creaked on the wooden floorboards, much as it had the night she had watched the apparition of a young woman in that same spot.

  “What I’m saying is,” he concluded, “that I take you at your word.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “But now if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you a story,” he offered. “You can take from it what you want. This is something I know about firsthand. It’s also a reason why I sometimes have trouble believing what I’ve seen with my own eyes. May I?” he asked.

  “Be my guest,” she said.

  “Several years ago there was a ghost reported at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A friend of mine was a tennis instructor there and knew the old story. Seemed like there was a phantom in a blue-and-white uniform that had been seen in one of the buildings. It was early in the month of November when it first appeared.”

  It was Annette’s turn to listen and wait.

  “First one cadet saw it. Then another. Then a few more. Then some officers. The phantom was spectral. It had color, but it appeared like a beam of light. Made no noise. No sound. Didn’t say anything. Those who saw it told their friends. Others saw it. There you had it. A full-fledged verified haunting before the level-headed future leaders of the United States Army.”

  Brooks let the moment hang in the air.

  “And so?” Annette finally asked.

  “There must have been twelve to sixteen witnesses eventually,” Brooks said. “Cadets, officers and civilian employees of the academy. They all knew what they had seen. And what they had seen was a ghost.” He paused. “Well, not really, as it turned out. The solution was much more prosaic.”

  Somewhere upstairs in the old house a warm floorboard creaked with discontent.

  “The hoax was revealed the day of the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia,” Brooks explained. “A few Midshipmen from the Naval Academy had stationed themselves within the West Point compound. They had a slide projector. What had looked like a beam of light was a beam of light. They were showing a slide of a soldier from the War of eighteen twelve. They shot the beam through a dormitory window. Those who saw it believed it to be a ghost.”

  Annette considered it.

  “Great story,” she finally said. “But I haven’t seen anyone around here yet with a projector.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t,” he said. “And you probably won’t. But my point is a larger one. I think someone’s doing something to you here. I don’t know who or how. But I still think there’s a natural explanation somewhere.”

  Any disagreement that might have followed was averted by the shrill ring of the telephone. Annette excused herself and went to the kitchen to answer. Then she returned to explain that the caller was Joe Fischer, her agent, phoning from California. She would be a few minutes, she apologized.

  As Annette carried on a conversation in the kitchen, Tim Brooks sat in the living room without moving. He looked around, assessing a comfortable room. It struck him that there was a smattering of pieces in the room that must have been left by the previous inhabitants, not the least of which was the massive china cabinet. The rest must have been shipped in by Annette.

  Well, at least she hadn’t turned the place into Beverly Hills,” he thought to himself. An Academy Award actress. A real beauty in person. And here he was sitting, having a normal talk with her. How many tens of thousands of men would have paid good money to trade places with him at this moment? And yet she seemed so normal. So collected. So together.

  And yet again, she told these stories, experiences not too distant from his own.

  He heard her talking with her agent and wondered how these people lived, these celebrities who flew coast to coast the way another person might go to the shore for a day. Thinking about it triggered a touch of restlessness that remained in Brooks’ spirit, the instincts that had taken him all over the country in his earlier years. A touch of discontent was suddenly upon him as he realized that she could jet out of there tomorrow morning. And he was stuck with a shoe-leather-style job.

  She was talking in subdued tones now and Brooks did his best not to eavesdrop. Police business was one thing. Personal phone calls were another. The call reminded him, in fact, that attractive as she was she was socially out of his reach and would always remain so. He wondered if she had a regular lover—or a half dozen of them, all wealthy, handsome and famous—back in California.

  He picked up the edition of the Inquirer & Mirror that he had carried in from outside. There it was, all over the front page.

  Murder.

  Beth DiMarco. A picture of her in life.


  A story of what had happened.

  A mention of the suspect being questioned. Plenty of self-serving quotes from Detectives Gelman and Rodzienko. And a plea from the police for anyone who knew anything further to come forward.

  For the sake of young Eddie, someone better, Brooks found himself thinking. Here was a problem he hadn’t even approached yet. He was convinced—no, he knew—that Gelman and Rodzienko were barking up the wrong tree. What would he, Brooks, do when the indictment was handed down? He sighed. Forget about seeing a knife or a fork or a plate fly across the room. What he wanted was for Mary Beth DiMarco’s killer to magically appear. That would solve years of problems for lots of people. He sighed again and placed down the newspaper as Annette returned to the room.

  He spoke to her as she sat down. He waited for a response. But he knew that he had suddenly lost her attention. Instead of listening, instead of excusing herself for the time spent on the phone, she was staring at the front page of the newspaper that he had set beside the sofa.

  “What’s wrong?” he finally asked.

  She was staring with wide mystified eyes. Eyes that told more than surprise. Eyes tinged with anxiety.

  “Who’s that?” Annette said urgently.

  “Who’s what?”

  “That girl?” she asked. He followed her gaze to the lead story of the local newspaper. “That picture?”

  He picked up the paper and looked again at Beth DiMarco.

  To make sure that he understood what Annette was asking, he turned the paper toward her and gave her a good look. Then he saw something terrible in Annette’s eyes.

  Somehow he knew what she was going to say.

  Brooks felt a long low tingle, something which ran along the skin from the base of his backbone, up his spine and to the nape of his neck.

  “That’s her!” Annette said, looking past the headline to the photo. “That’s the young woman I saw the second night. Who is she? And why was she in my house?”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  On Saturday morning, Annette sought a temporary retreat from her Nantucket home. She found an isolated strip of beach beyond Dionis on the south shore. She brought with her a pair of novels purchased from Nantucket Bookworks that morning, a stack of scripts, a blanket, a beach chair and an umbrella. She also had some fruit and some bottled mineral water for lunch. She spent a peaceful day, reading, swimming, and sunning herself. She enjoyed the solitude.