Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  But not New Yorkers. It was such a pity, then, since The Sewing Kit was a mere 100 miles straight north of Manhattan, into the most scenic countryside, that New Yorkers were so much more important to her operation than all the Osakians and Ionians and Urbinos and Uyunis put together. Mrs. Krutchfield just bit her lip and kept her own counsel and tried not to look at the “wives’” ring fingers, and did her level best to treat the New Yorkers just like everybody else.

  Including this Briscoe snip. Handing over the large iron key dangling from an even larger wooden representation of the sort of drum that goes with a fife, Mrs. Krutchfield smiled maternally and said, “You’ll be in General Burgoyne.”

  The snip frowned, hefting the heavy key and drum. “Is that usual?”

  That was the other thing about New Yorkers: they kept saying things that made no sense. Ignoring that remark, Mrs. Krutchfield said, “We’ve named all our rooms after Revolutionary War figures, so much nicer than numbers, I think. General Burgoyne, and Betsy Ross, and Thomas Jefferson—”

  “The usual suspects.”

  Mrs. Krutchfield got that one. “Yes,” she said, miffed. But she couldn’t help going on with her patter. “All except the colonel, of course, we wouldn’t name a room after him.”

  So it is possible to attract the attention of a New York snip. The girl said, “The colonel?”

  “Colonel Hesketh Pardigrass,” Mrs. Krutchfield explained, and looked over her shoulder before lowering her voice to add, “the one who was slain in this very house in 1778. It was because of a woman. He’s the ghost.”

  “Ah,” the young woman said. “Haunted house equals ghost equals your colonel.”

  “Well, yes.” It was so hard to be civil to New Yorkers, but Mrs. Krutchfield would not give up. “You can read all about him in your room,” she confided. “I wrote up his history and made copies, so there’s one in every room. You’re welcome to take it with you if you like.” She didn’t add, but might have, most of the decent people do. Particularly the Japanese.

  “Thank you,” the girl said, noncommittal; she wouldn’t take the colonel’s history with her, you could tell. And now she hefted the drum-and-key once more, and said, “Are they alphabetical?”

  Mrs. Krutchfield went blank. “Are what alphabetical?”

  “The rooms. I was wondering how to find General Burgoyne.”

  “Oh, well, I’ll give you directions,” Mrs. Krutchfield offered. Alphabetical? she wondered. What did the girl mean, alphabetical? “You just drive your vehicle around to the back,” she said, “and park anywhere. You’ll see the outside staircase, just go up and in the door there, and it’s the first door on the right. You’ll have lovely views of the Catskills.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “And you’ll be staying just the one night?” This customer was a bit unusual, at that; a lone young woman on a Wednesday in June, arriving at almost six in the evening, for one night only.

  Which the girl confirmed. “Yes. We’re up looking for a house to rent for the summer, but we didn’t find anything today.”

  Mrs. Krutchfield frowned past the girl toward her van parked on the circular drive. “We? I thought you were alone.”

  “Oh, I am. My, uh, my friends had to drive back to the city tonight, because of their cats.”

  Oh, yes, New Yorkers also have cats. Some had even been known to ask if they could keep their smelly cats in the actual rooms at The Sewing Kit, to which the invariable response was a gentle but firm no.

  The girl said, “You wouldn’t know any houses for rent, would you?”

  “I’m afraid not, no.”

  “Well, we’ll look some more tomorrow. Thank you.”

  Mrs. Krutchfield was at heart a good woman, which is why she said, “There’s a television set in the parlor, some guests like to watch in the evening,” even though New Yorkers never want to watch the same programs as everybody else.

  “Thanks.” The girl turned away, paused, seemed to think about something, and turned back with her brow all furrowed. “Your ghost,” she said. “You say there’s a write-up about him in the room?”

  “Yes, every room. You’re welcome to take it with you, if you like.”

  “Yes, you said that.” The girl seemed obscurely troubled, and even sighed a little. “Well, we can only hope for the best,” she commented, as though to herself, and left Mrs. Krutchfield steaming in a stew of irritation and bewilderment.

  New Yorkers!

   

  * * *

   

  There was only one empty room at The Sewing Kit tonight, Nathan Hale, the one Mrs. Krutchfield always rented last because it was downstairs in back, too near the kitchen and the TV, and with no view at all to speak of, unless you like extreme close-ups of pine trees. But it was a nice group tonight, a nice mix, with some Germans in Betsy Ross, making marks on maps, and a family of Canadians in Ben Franklin washing their clothing in the sink—they’d particularly asked for a room with a sink, since The Sewing Kit did not offer private baths, but only communal bathrooms shared by two or three guest rooms—and in other rooms were several groups of mid-westerners, whom Mrs. Krutchfield had always found to be the very nicest of Americans, if somehow not all that stimulating. And of course the retired couple from Detroit—“Motor City!” they kept calling it, with the exclamation point solidly present in a silvery saliva spray—were still here, and still had more of their postcard collection from all over the “Lower Forty-eight”—as they called America—to show to their innkeeper or the other guests or anyone else who didn’t move fast enough.

  And of course there was the New Yorker in General Burgoyne.

  Somehow, not entirely sure why, Mrs. Krutchfield found herself hoping the Motor City! couple and the girl from Brooklyn never crossed paths.

  The Sewing Kit did not serve lunch or dinner, offering instead a typed-up list of suggestions of fine restaurant experiences to be had in the general Rhinebeck–Red Hook area. Mrs. Krutchfield did serve a breakfast of which she was proud, enough baked and fried food to pin any traveler to the seat of his or her car for hours after departure from The Sewing Kit, but the other meals she prepared only for herself, in her private quarters off in the left front wing of the sprawling structure, from which she could watch the main entrance and the circular drive for late arrivals or unexpected departures.

  Usually, after dinner, Mrs. Krutchfield would join in the side parlor any of her guests who might like to watch TV. She herself was always in bed by ten, but she didn’t mind if the guests continued to enjoy television by themselves, so long as they kept the volume down and turned the box off no later than the end of Jay Leno at 12:30. (New Yorkers always wanted to watch David Letterman.)

  This evening the parlor was comfortably full, mostly with midwesterners, plus the Canadians (who smelled of Ivory Liquid), all spread out on both sofas, the three padded armchairs, and even the two wooden chairs. The girl from Brooklyn came in a little later than everyone else, looked around, smiled, said, “That’s okay,” waved the midwestern gentlemen back into their seats, and settled cross-legged on the floor in front of the sofas more gracefully and athletically than a city girl should be able to do.

  Mrs. Krutchfield was justifiably proud of the big black gridwork dish out behind The Sewing Kit, bringing in television signals from all over outer space, but the truth was, she didn’t make much use of its potential, limiting herself almost exclusively to the three networks, except when it so happened that one of the guests knew of a particular old movie afloat on some obscure brooklet crossing the heavens, and asked if they might tune in: a Martin and Lewis comedy, perhaps, or Johnny Belinda, or Fail-Safe.

  There was nobody like that tonight, though, so they contented themselves with sitcoms. Mrs. Krutchfield sat in her usual place, the comfortable armchair directly opposite the TV. On the maple end table beside her lay the remote control, atop the satellite weekly listings open to tonight’s schedule. (It was better not to let any of the male guests near
the remote control.) And so another evening began at The Sewing Kit.

  At first, everything was normal and serene. Then, at just about four minutes past nine, as everybody was contentedly settling in to watch a program broadcast from some parallel universe in which, apparently, there was a small town where the mayor and the fire chief and the high school football coach spent all their time joshing with one another at a diner run by a woman suffering from, judging by her voice, throat cancer, all at once the TV set sucked that picture into itself, went click, and spread across itself an image of three people moving on a bed, with no covers on. With no clothing on! Good gracious, what are those people doing?

  Some horrible corner of the satellite village, some swamp beside the information highway, had suddenly thrust itself—oh, what an awful choice of words!—onto their TV screen. Gasping and shaking and little cries of horror ran through the room as Mrs. Krutchfield grabbed frantically for the remote control, only to find it had somehow fallen to the floor under her chair.

  The people on-screen were also gasping and shaking and emitting little cries, though not of horror. “Mrs. Krutchfield!” cried a midwesterner, a stout lady from Loose Falls, whose chubby hands were now a bas relief on the front of her face. “Mrs. Krutchfield, help!”

  “I’m, I’m—”

  Scrabble, scramble—there! A different channel. On this channel, in a bare room, garishly lit, several men in ski masks and gray robes waved machine guns over their heads and yelled at the camera in some foreign tongue, urging who knew what depredations to be directed against the decent people of the planet, but at least they were clothed, and none of them were women, so they afforded Mrs. Krutchfield that calm moment of leisure she needed to figure out how to get back to Kitty’s Diner, where the coach was saying: “—and that’s when you throw the long bomb.”

  The sound track laughed, God knows why, and most of the people in the parlor dutifully laughed along with it, and life got back to normal.

  For eight minutes. Im-plode, click, and now it was two people on what looked like a hockey rink in a large empty arena. These two weren’t entirely naked, since they were both wearing ice skates, but what they were doing together was certainly not an Olympic routine.

  Cries and shrieks from the sofas. Great wafts of Ivory Liquid essence from the Canadians. Mrs. Krutchfield lunged for the remote, and it was gone again!

  Under her chair again—how could she keep knocking the blame thing off the end table like that, without noticing?—but this time she was more sure-fingered in fighting her way back to Kitty’s Diner, where Kitty was rasping: “—and that’s why you can’t get today’s special today.”

  The sound track laughed, the people in Mrs. Krutchfield’s parlor laughed, and the world returned to its accustomed orbit.

  For four minutes this time, before the implodeclickpicture, during which half the guests either squeezed their eyes shut or protectively slapped their palms to their faces. But this time it was something entirely different. The picture on the screen was in black-and-white, to begin with, instead of those all-too-real flesh tones. Also, the woman walking along the cliff-edge above the stormy sea was fully clothed. Not only that, she was . . .

  “Gene Tierney!” cried a midwestern gentleman who had not shut his eyes.

  “She wouldn’t do things like that!” cried a midwestern lady, whose eyes were still firmly sealed.

  “It’s a movie!” cried another midwestern gentleman.

  Eyes opened. On-screen, the action had moved indoors, into an extremely cute cottage not unlike The Sewing Kit itself, though perhaps a bit more cramped. In this setting, a recognizable Rex Harrison marched and harrumphed, dressed like a pirate captain or something, and behaving in a rough-and-ready way that didn’t at all suit him. Also, you could see through him, which was odd.

  A midwestern gentleman said, “It’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.”

  A midwestern lady said, “I remember that series. But it wasn’t Rex Harrison.”

  “No, no, no,” said the gentleman. “This is the original movie.”

  “There was a movie?”

  A Canadian, somewhat younger, said, “There was a television series?”

  A midwestern lady gave out a sudden shriek. “It’s the ghost!” she cried.

  “And Mrs. Muir,” said her companion on the sofa.

  “No! The ghost! Colonel Pardigrass!”

  That shut them up. For a minute or two everyone in the room just sat and gazed at Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney, finding love—or something—across the centuries. So much pleasanter to contemplate than those other people.

  Timidly, a midwestern lady said, “Mrs. Krutchfield, does this happen often?”

  “My goodness, no,” Mrs. Krutchfield said. “I couldn’t bear it.”

  “What does the ghost usually do?” asked a gentleman.

  “Well, uh,” Mrs. Krutchfield stammered, all undone by events. “Just, oh, rapping and, and creaking, and that sort of thing. The usual sort of thing.”

  “This is a completely different manifestation from anything that ever happened before?”

  “Lord, yes!”

  The snip from Brooklyn, seated on the floor in their midst, turned toward them an excessively innocent face as she said, “Looks like, after all these years, the colonel’s getting a little randy.”

  “The ghost wasn’t like that with Mrs. Muir,” a lady objected.

  “Frankly,” a gentleman said, “I don’t see how it’s possible to suffer the pangs of the flesh if you don’t have any flesh.”

  “It doesn’t bear thinking about,” a lady announced, in an effort to forestall speculation.

  Another lady said, “Mrs. Krutchfield, what should we do?”

  Mrs. Krutchfield had been pondering this problem herself. The ghost of Colonel Hesketh Pardigrass had never been any trouble before, had been, in fact, merely another charming part of the decor, like the Laura Ashley curtains and the Shaker reproduction furniture and the print in the entranceway of George Washington crossing the Delaware. An insubstantial insubstantiality, in other words, which was exactly the way Mrs. Krutchfield preferred it.

  It wasn’t that Mrs. Krutchfield had made up the ghost, or not exactly. The real estate agent, years ago when she’d bought this wreck of a place to fix up for its present use, had told her about the old tales of ghostly goings-on here, though without any specific history or even anecdotes attached. (Privately, Mrs. Krutchfield had always believed that much of what the real estate agent had told her was malarkey, meant to intrigue her, but that was all right. She’d been spending her school-administration retirement funds plus her dead husband’s insurance money, and had been in a mood for a bit of malarkey, anyway.)

  Then, shortly after buying the place, when Mrs. Krutchfield had been ripping out some horrible old linoleum in the kitchen, with newspapers lining the floor beneath, one ancient newspaper had contained a feature story about ghosts in the Hudson River valley, in which Mrs. Krutchfield had read about this Colonel Hesketh Pardigrass, who had been having some sort of liaison with the wife of a farmer in the area and had been murdered in the farmhouse, presumably by the farmer, though possibly by the wife. In any event, it had been claimed for a while that Colonel Pardigrass roamed the site of his demise on windy nights, still vainly trying to get back to his old regiment, though no one, even at the time this old newspaper had been printed, claimed to have had personal experience of the wayward colonel. As to the farmhouse, the description of the place and its whereabouts had been vague, but this house here could just as well have been the one where it all happened, so why not say so? What was the harm?

  And how much cosier for a nice B-and-B like Mrs. Krutchfield’s to come equipped with a ghost. A nice gentlemanly ghost, like Rex Harrison over there, though less intrusive. And that was how it had been.

  Until tonight, that is.

  After a few minutes of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, when nothing further of an untoward nature happened—and now, more than ever bef
ore, Mrs. Krutchfield understood the concept of happenings of an untoward nature—one of the Canadians timidly asked if it might be possible to return to Kitty’s Diner, but one of the midwestern gentlemen said, “Seems to me, this is what the colonel wants to watch. I don’t know that we oughta cross him.”

  Which ended that discussion, and everybody settled down to make some sense out of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, if possible. However, without color to soothe their eyes and a laugh track to let them know when things were supposed to be funny, they soon became restless and uneasy. There were murmurings among the guests, who were clearly suggesting to one another it was time to give up television for this evening and go to sleep instead—what else was there?—until Mrs. Krutchfield, who was not a timid woman, suddenly said, “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m just not in the mood for this particular movie this evening. I want to go back to Kitty’s Diner.”

  “So do I,” said several other people.

  “Good,” Mrs. Krutchfield said, and reached to the end table, and found nothing. She looked—the remote wasn’t there. On the floor again? Grunting, she leaned forward to look under her chair, and it wasn’t there either. “Now where’s that remote doodad?” she asked, and implodeclickpicture it was those people on the bed again!

  Indefatigable, inexhaustible, and now there were four of them! A second naked woman had joined the other depraved souls, and this one had something strapped around her mid-section. What is that?