“Just for the sake of argument, who wrote these plays if Speke didn’t?”
She was quiet for a while. So much truth all at once amazed her. Her confessions should change the color of the light, or the color of the walls, but the morning continued to dawn slowly, gradually.
“So who wrote them?” He was gentle, but he put out his hand to touch her arm. “Sarah, who was the playwright?”
“I gradually became convinced that somewhere in the past he had a ghostwriter.” There it was: that word that she had kept secret so long. “But I didn’t know who.” She waited for a moment, until she was certain that he was beginning to believe her. “But I have records that go back fifteen years, and a name that came up just a couple of days ago stopped me short.”
She was reluctant to leave his presence, even for a moment. Her bedroom, when she reached it, was dark and quiet. The bed had that look of neat neglect, unslept in, witness to no passion. She tugged a drawer, and slipped the piece of paper, Speke’s recent effort, back into the darkness.
She hurried back into Bell’s presence, as she had when, as a girl, she had been afraid of the dark.
Don’t stop now, she told herself. Keep going. “There’s someone here. Someone on the estate—someone secret.”
He was plainly a man used to absorbing news. “Hiding?”
She could not even nod. Her voice was hoarse. “I think so. I’m not sure—but I think he’s still here.”
Bell was leaning forward, his eyes searching hers. He looked shocked, fascinated, even more mystified than before.
“There’s a name from Ham’s past, but I’d completely forgotten it. I never thought of this man as anything but a character in a few wild tales of Ham’s early days. This man—Timothy Asquith.” She paused, as though his name might be an evil incantation. “This man called, and Ham agreed to see him in the morning, just before you got here. Asquith arrived, but he didn’t leave.”
His expression said: are you sure?
“He rode a motorcycle in,” she continued, “and he didn’t ride it out. I’ve searched, and there is no sign of it anywhere. It was red, like flashy lipstick, and easy to spot. It’s hidden well. In fact, I think it’s buried.”
“Buried?”
“I saw Ham in the woods, putting the finishing touches on what looks like a grave. That’s what it is, in a manner of speaking. A motorcycle’s grave.”
Bell shook his head, amazed or incredulous.
“It all made sense to me: Speke needs his ghostwriter back again, but he has to keep him secret, because he’s so proud. And, after all, he does have a reputation to protect. Asquith is still here, somewhere on the estate.”
Bell gazed into his coffee cup, and then met her eyes. “Is that possible? Could a person hide here, out among the ticks?”
“Speke is dry. He has no ideas. He’s desperate.”
Bell shook his head. “He wouldn’t be keeping Asquith against his will—”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Bell sighed, a sound of masculine uncertainty.
“You don’t believe me,” said Sarah when she could make a sound. Her hope was a curl of smoke.
“The problem is worse than that.” He put his hand over hers. “I am beginning—just beginning—to believe you may be right.”
She leaned forward, as though she might be overheard. “I think Asquith is out there.”
He bit his lip against a question he seemed unable to ask.
“Hiding. Asquith is out in the woods somewhere,” she said. “Watching us. And he has some sort of power over Ham. Some dangerous power.”
“Maybe he’s back to renew the old partnership.”
“I don’t think it’s that innocent.”
“I still need some convincing.” He was struggling to put it politely. “You have to admit that there’s a good deal of supposition here.”
“My father was a cop. I know about trouble. Granted, I don’t have any proof. But I think Asquith is here to do harm. To Ham, and just possibly to all of us.”
20
Speke could not take a single step, could only stay where he was, unable to make a sound.
Asquith stood beyond the window, and did not move, did not waver or flicker.
The flesh of the face was the color of the electric light that fell upon it, and the surface of the skin was blistered, broken, with the first eruptions of decay.
Or was it? The vision held itself back, at the very limit of the light. Shouldn’t a ghost seem, somehow, transparent? Speke forced himself to breathe, listening, watching, aching for an owl’s keenness, or a cat’s. This was a bad time to make a mistake. Listen, he commanded himself. What sort of being is that out there? Out there, in the dim light from the cottage.
Wasn’t adulthood a surprise, its contradictions, the lingering childishness of one’s own nature, the paradoxical nonsense of success? Why, then, shouldn’t a ghost baffle expectations, too?
“Asquith,” he whispered.
The silence was a response.
“What do you want?”
The figure was a stain in the air, a smudge on the otherwise perfect darkness. The apparition was almost like someone who wasn’t there at all.
But he was there, and more—there had been a sound, the breathy hush of grass depressed by a foot, the snap of a stem. Don’t lose control of yourself, Speke commanded his quaking arms and legs. Stay calm. Stare back.
It was certainly exactly like the living Asquith, a human presence barely illuminated by the light from the cottage. There was a chiaroscuro effect, a gilded line of head and shoulder, eyes glittering in shadows. The spectral figure stepped back, shifting away on its legs just like a living man. He was fading to black again.
And Asquith was gone.
“Come back,” Speke said in a low voice.
That made it worse. It was bad enough to have a hallucination. It was madness to actually talk to it, and he was not only speaking, he was shouting. “I can’t help what happened. I didn’t mean to kill you.”
Then he stopped himself. He was sweating, but the strangest feeling powered him forward.
He stumbled, flung himself to the windows and threw them open, but by the time he gazed at the patch of light they cast upon the earth, he saw only his own shadow and a few vague branches.
It was hopeless. The ground here was the same obdurate stone as always. He knelt, searching in the bad light, aware that any moment a dead hand could fall upon his shoulder. The hand would be cold, he knew. Perhaps even cold and wet.
This was the grave, its stones impossible to make out in the darkness, its presence a vague scatter of rock in the night. This was the light from the window. This—he put out his hand—was the jagged stone of the earth here, fragments that reminded him that earth was created by an explosion, a series of explosions, fire and storm.
But at least the stone was real. He was reassuring himself that the world was real, and that he was awake, but he was also realizing something else.
Asquith, he whispered. And he laughed.
Because it was funny—he had just been looking for footprints. He had just been imagining a hand, corporeal, with flesh and bones. This was because he did not believe that the apparition was a ghost.
He didn’t believe it. He never had believed it, he told himself. Not really.
He wasn’t a child any more. He still had nightmares from time to time. A waking, struggling corpse could disturb him, scare him, do everything but convince him. It wasn’t real. Everything was going to be just fine. He still had his native intelligence. He wasn’t going to let fear turn him into a cowering animal. He had pride. Don’t worry. Everything will be just terrific.
“I know you, Asquith!” he hissed.
No sound answered him. Of course not. What did he expect, an echo? A long-range conversation? I feel, he told himself, strangely lucid. Strangely peaceful. Perhaps a human being can only feel so much terror before something snaps. You are being watched. Act calm. H
e closed the windows, and turned off the light, telling himself to take his time. The dark alone won’t hurt you, he reassured himself, although he took a deep breath when the door was shut at last, and he could follow the trail up the hill.
It really wasn’t much of an act. He did feel calm. It was a peculiar, stunned sort of calm. But it allowed him to feel certain of one or two things. Hamilton Speke was not such a fool, after all. It was time for the truth.
Why was night so slow to fade? The stars were still vivid, the black perfect, except around the edge, where the east had gone gray. The gray of dirty dishwater, the gray of granite. How weak light is when it first dawns, he thought.
He would use his wits. He laughed, a rusty grunt like the sound of the garage door. The darkness held the stale, leftover heat of the previous day. He fumbled in the garage, groping for a light switch and finding cobwebs.
He grasped the familiar shaft, then turned and groped back into the dawn. The shovel was like an old friend. Good old spade, thought Speke fervently. My favorite weapon.
He understood why Beowulf’s men had names for their swords. It was only right: you could talk to the steel that would save your life. You could talk, as a driver might speak to a stalling automobile, willing life into iron.
We have work to do, he breathed.
It was still too dark. He wanted daylight. He wanted the shovel in his hands under the sun, and what he wanted more than anything was the truth. And he knew exactly how to get it.
He was going to dig up the grave and see what, if anything, lay under those stones.
21
Bell and Sarah shared the growing dawn. From time to time he asked a question regarding Speke’s friendship with this actor or that director, and returned to a subject that increasingly puzzled him: why Speke had so little regard for security. “To be famous these days,” Bell said, “is to court assassination.”
Sarah enjoyed answering his questions, but she savored most that inner silence that ensues after confession. Bell, on the other hand, enjoyed quite another sort of feeling.
He was secretly ecstatic. This was going to be an amazing story, he thought. Talk about scandal—he could expose Hamilton Speke completely.
He sipped his cooling coffee, and tried not to let Sarah see how pleased he was. He tried to look pained, concerned. What sort of herbs did Clara grow in her garden? Did any of the wild animals on the estate ever suffer from rabies? All the while he ached to call his publisher and tell them to get ready for the most astounding biography ever written about a contemporary figure.
If this were all true. That was the catch. This was where his methodical cast of mind, his training, slowed him down to a step-by-step grind. If you are going to write this kind of book, he knew, you have to be completely sure your facts are anchored.
How, Bell wondered, will I broach the subject of a ghostwriter when I talk with Ham? Start by mentioning ghosts? Maybe the bluntest approach was the best. Tell me, Ham, which words did you actually write yourself? Go ahead, underline them. It shouldn’t take long.
Was that wind overhead, on the roof of the cottage? For a silent place, a sanctuary, there were too many hushed movements at Live Oak. This was a place where very little made sense. All paths here twisted, and each silence seemed destined to be eroded by a whisper, a rustling in the dark. This estate was enchanted, but something solid in Bell was uneasy. He liked things to add up. He liked his facts in order, and his shirts ironed. He liked the fresh starch of common sense. It was time to return, for a while, to the world, the real world, the one beyond this estate with its tangled trees.
Clara grew thyme, Sarah said, and basil, and tomatoes which attracted the sphinx moth larva, the big green worms which Clara killed while singing the softest, saddest sounding songs in Spanish. Rabies, Sarah said, was supposedly endemic, and bats and skunks were rumored to suffer from it from time to time, but there had not been a case discovered in San Mateo County, she had heard, for more than a decade.
The cold coffee reflected his face, a dark, quaking caricature. He returned to the subject that flickered inside him. “It’s not as simple as it seems,” he said. “We need proof.” Surely, he meant to say, you can discover evidence for me. He added, “You know Speke better than I do.”
“He needs our help.”
“I need more evidence.” This, he knew, sounded brittle, and betrayed too much of his purely journalistic interest. Bell pushed the cup away. “What do you know about Maria?”
Sarah considered his question. She recounted the bioparagraph many people could have rattled off, but then she was quiet, as dissatisfied as he was. This list of galleries and art institutes was scarcely knowledge.
“I have a bad feeling,” said Bell at last.
Maria was watering the nasturtiums as he and Sarah descended from her cottage. In the morning sunlight white fire sputtered from the watering can, and blisters of water scarred the dust. There was the scent of soil, and spice of wild flowers.
How cute, Sarah remarked to herself. Maria never did such a thing as simple as watering flowers. She either closeted herself with her watercolors, or sat listening to tapes with her earphones, tapes labeled “Surf Sounds” or “Thunderstorm, New Hope, Connecticut.” This display of horticultural enthusiasm, missing only a bonnet to make it something out of Renoir, was for Chris’s benefit, Sarah guessed. In one of those insights which can never be wrong, she thought: Maria is trouble.
It was rare to have any insight at all into what Maria might want. Maria smiled. This was not a kind smile, nor a smile of greeting. It was a smile that said: you see me looking so pretty.
Sarah wished her a good morning, and Bell said something cheerful about the watering can. It was a large green metal can, with a spout that sprinkled the nasturtiums prettily, but, Sarah suspected, inefficiently.
“I don’t think it’s an antique,” smiled Maria. “Just something for a person who enjoys solitude.”
“Why not use the hose?” Sarah asked. Indeed, the can was already empty.
Maria ignored the question, and said, “I see you two are getting to know each other.”
“Sarah is very helpful with some background material,” offered Bell, with as much gallantry as seemed required.
“Ham says she knows everything,” said Maria.
“Oh, hardly,” Sarah began.
“Ham is under the impression,” said Maria, “that Sarah is the mastermind behind his career.”
“He may be right,” said Bell.
“Sarah, we must have a talk soon,” said Maria, managing to shake a few last drops from the can. The can made a low, metallic rumble, a hollow grumbling surprising from such a relatively small container. “In fact, I think we should get together for a long talk. Something I think we’ve both been putting off for too long.”
“Actually,” said Bell, glancing at Sarah, “I was just about to suggest that Sarah and I take the day off.”
Sarah started. He had mentioned no such plan. Whatever could he mean?
“Or maybe,” he said, “she’s too busy.”
“I think it would be a marvellous idea,” said Maria. “Poor Sarah spends every day in that fusty little office. It would be so nice for her to spend the day away from here. Her eyes get so red, sometimes, from looking at the computer. It’s so kind for you to suggest that, Mr. Bell.”
The dapples of sunlight were sharp-edged, brilliant razors.
“I haven’t been away in—” Sarah stopped herself. There was no use in elaborating for Chris what a spartan life she had been leading lately. True, there had been the affair with the photographer, and those romantic, if too-brief, interludes at the St. Francis Hotel in the City. And, before then, the trips to Paris, always a five-day jaunt, too short, too rushed, because she had to hurry back to open Speke’s mail.
Maria plainly was delighted to have Sarah take the day off. “Take three or four days off, or even more, Sarah. I think you should take care of yourself.”
“Good heav
ens,” Sarah heard herself say. “I would think you want to get rid of me.”
Maria laughed. “I think it’s a delightful chance for some fun.”
“Fun.” Sarah savored the word. What a puerile, empty word it was, smacking of balloons and cheap plastic toys. Fun indeed.
And yet, the thought of a few hours more with Chris weakened something in her, her resolve softening as under the influence of champagne. “For the sake of my health,” Sarah suggested, in her brightest, sweetest voice.
“You start to make mistakes when you’re tired,” said Maria.
It was unsaid, but as vivid as the beads of water on the circular leaves of the nasturtiums. Maria would get what she wanted. This sudden shift in the emotional climate baffled Sarah, and yet logic was useless.
Don’t go, her inner voice whispered. Stay here. Don’t abandon Ham to this woman. Where had this thought come from? Maria was, as far as Sarah knew, a true and faithful wife. She loved Ham, certainly. And Speke would stand by Sarah, no matter what Maria might say.
Besides, there was that silly word: fun. It might be, after all, fun to spend just a little time with Chris.
He took her hand when they were alone, their shoes squeaking on the dew-rich lawn. The shade of the poplars spilled over both of them. “I think we’ll both think more clearly away from this place.”
That was certainly true. She was pleased that he sensed it, too. But she did not respond.
“You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
She hesitated. “The sky here isn’t like the blue over any other landscape,” she said. It was nearly a confession. She was amazed to hear herself speak like someone under hypnosis, in a truth-serum trance. “It soaks up our thoughts, and even our dreams, and at night I sometimes hear things. I heard the voice of my father, once, laughing, telling a joke I could almost make out. As though there is another world, but so dim that we can never see it.”
He absorbed her words, gazing into her eyes with a measuring look, as if trying to estimate her weight. Then he turned away. “I would enjoy your company,” he said, studying the glittering ferns, realizing he was about to be rebuffed.
Ghostwright Page 14
