The Girl in the Attic

by Ed Gorman

  She was just about to enjoy the second of her candy bars when the pounding started.

  She jammed the candy bar in her pocket, sat up with her hands flat on either arm of the chair, almost as if she were strapped into an electric chair, and turned her gray head to the ceiling.

  The pounding; my God, the pounding.

  From the attic. Again.

  Hurriedly, Carlotta tried to remember the precise year of the last time she'd heard the pounding—2001; yes, 2001. She remembered because it had been the same year when the chubby little woman with all the Navajo jewelry and the tan Hush Puppies had interviewed Carlotta for Occult magazine.

  Carlotta had told her all about the pounding and what she suspected the pounding might be. The woman had stayed to hear it for herself. She'd stayed three days, then four days, then a week. She'd eaten pie, cake, cookies; drunk malts, Pepsi, and, Carlotta suspected, at least late at night, Jim Beam from several pint bottles Carlotta had discovered in her room long after the woman had gone.

  But there'd been, of course, no knocking.

  Carlotta had prayed for cooperation—either from the Lord Himself or the thing that was doing the knocking. But her prayers went unheeded—until right now.

  Over a noontime. When her favorite soap was on. While eating her Snickers.

  You'd think the knocker would have waited for a more appropriate moment—late on a foggy night, say—but no, here it was, right now. Right in the middle of everything.

  Carlotta got up, turned the TV off, and then went back to the chair. Her oxfords made her move as if her feet were covered with bunions. Then she sat there for the next hour in the silence, waiting for the knocking.

  But there was to be no more knocking. At least, not this afternoon.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  Sally did something she instantly regretted: ordered a lunch befitting a lumberjack. From girlhood she'd had pleasant memories of mashed potatoes served with slices of beef and beef gravy, with green peas on the side. When she saw a similar meal on the menu, she couldn't resist.

  "That's really weird, Mom," Jamie said, after putting in her own order (no surprise: french fries, a malt and a burger).

  "What?"

  "I've never seen you eat that much before." Jamie was right. Since her husband's death, Sally ate like a bird. "How come?"

  "How come I ordered a big meal?"

  "Yes."

  "Nerves, I guess, honey. I've never traveled well. Even as a little girl traveling unnerved me."

  "What's 'unnerved' mean?"

  "Made me vaguely uneasy."

  Jamie grinned. "Is that like xenophobia?"

  Sally nodded. "You know, I've never thought of that before, but that's just what it is. I do have a fear of strangers and strange places—at least one part of me does. The other part likes to travel."

  "Boy, Mom, you are weird."

  Sally laughed. "Look who's talking."

  Throughout lunch, Sally looked around the cafe, fascinated. Many of the signs on the walls were relics of past eras. It was quaint and kitschy but not in the way that the Appleby’s was. These relics of the past were genuine, not mass-produced; they had a time-worn and memory-faded quality about them. The faded Cavalier cigarette sign, for example; Cavaliers hadn't been made since the fifties. Or the chrome-plated Coke dispenser with its taps for lemon, lime, or cherry Coke. Or the oblong glass display case for pastries that sat right on the counter, 1957-style.

  Even the faces in the cafe were reminiscent of other times. Farmers in sweat-stained caps wore overalls from the twenties and thirties. "Bowl" haircuts, longer on top, almost shaved on the sides, were back in vogue in Haversham. "The Wheel of Fortune" by Kay Starr, popular in the late fifties, played several times on the jukebox.

  The sense of being out of her time relaxed Sally. She sat back, took several deep breaths, and let her anxieties from the car breaking down, from Cletus Olsen staring at Jamie—rise like heat to the revolving ceiling fan.

  Jamie said. "Bathroom, I've got to go to the bathroom." Jamie gave her a quizzical look. "Are you all right?"

  Sally laughed. "Drifting off."

  "It's all that food. It made you sleepy."

  "You know, I think you're right."

  "Well, anyway, I've really got to go."

  "Then go."

  "Be right back."

  Sally watched her daughter fondly as Jamie wound her way through the tables to the back of the cafe. Jamie was Sally's measure of time. She did not mind getting older as long as Jamie led a happy, healthy life. Even death itself lost some of its horror when she thought of Jamie carrying on after her.

  When she turned her head back to the table, she watched the front door open and a man come in.

  He seemed a special man, at least to Sally. She hadn't responded to anybody like this since meeting her husband years ago. Her pulse quickened, her stomach tightened, and a sense of something like panic came over her. She felt two powerfully conflicting emotions—she wanted him to notice her and she hoped he didn't notice her.

  Whoever he was, he did not belong in this cafe. Even though his clothes were casual—a golf shirt and a pair of tan slacks—he wore them with a grace and ease that might have been construed as arrogance if you hadn't seen his eyes. He was blond and sun-tanned , with a strong nose and an ironic mouth. He could have been a magazine model of the older variety; Sally put his age at forty or so. She noticed the tortured aspect of his blue gaze.

  He went right up to the counter and said something to the chubby waitress in the pink uniform. She took money from the man, leaned down beneath the register, and brought up a package of cigarettes, which she handed over. The man opened it.

  By now a few heads along the counter had looked up. He nodded a few appropriate hellos, seeming almost embarrassed by the attention.

  Then he was gone—out the door, across the street, only his head visible above the curve of a 1988 Chevrolet parked at the curb.

  Jamie said, "Boy, you sure woke up fast."

  "What?"

  "Last time I saw you, you looked like you were going to nod off. Now you look—gah, Mom. You should see your face. You look like you're blushing."

  "Just the heat."

  Jamie looked at her suspiciously. "What have you been up to?" she said.

  "Come on, Sherlock Holmes, let's go see how our car is doing."

  After paying the bill at the cash register, Sally ushered her daughter out the front door.

  2

  "He was over there again last night, Mr. Edmonds."

  "The man with the telescope?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you sure, Ron?"

  "I sat out on the balcony on the second floor and watched him."

  "Thanks for being so concerned."

  "Well, you know, Mr. Edmonds, I kind of consider this my hotel, too, if you don't mind my saying so."

  "I don't mind at all."

  Ron Evars was a man in his late fifties. He'd been handyman at this hotel since returning from Desert Storm. In those days he'd had a pencil mustache, shaggy hair, and a pair of genuine red-tag Levis, worn whenever he went to see the few big bands that ever played near a place like Haversham. Those were the days when he'd been courting his wife, a stick-thin girl of sparkling brown eyes and a fetchingly wise-ass way of talking to him. Now Ron Evars and his wife were overweight. He was balding, she had thick eyeglasses. They rarely went out, preferring instead to watch their separate TV sets. He watched pro wrestling and old Randolph Scott westerns; she watched religious programs, especially those that purported to heal people.

  "What do you think he's up to, Mr. Edmonds?" Ron Evars asked.

  The blond man looked up, his blue eyes mournful as ever. "I'm not sure yet. But I think it's time I found out." He picked up the pack of Dorals he'd just bought and tapped one out for himself.

  "Well, if you need some help, you let me know."

  "I sure will, Ron. Thanks. Say ‘hi’ to your wife for me."

/>   "You bet."

  After he was alone, Carleton Edmonds sat back and worked on his cigarette. Soon it would be National Smokeout Day again and he would try again to give it up. But he had more pressing concerns than his nicotine addiction.

  His solemn gaze rose to the ceiling above him as if he were about to experience some sort of apparition.

  Half an hour ago, Carlotta had come into his office to say she'd heard the pounding again. Edmonds had known damn well what she'd meant by it. Damn well. Images of his daughter Anne filled his vision. Anne at age three, riding her trike; Anne at six, making her First Communion; Anne at nine, with a green baseball cap on backwards, sliding into second base; then Anne at 12, the night it had all happened.

  Anne on the staircase with blood-soaked hands. Anne staring in dull disbelief at the ax Carlotta had found in the little girl's room.

  Anne reaching out for her daddy with the same blood-soaked hands . . .

  Edmonds shook his head to escape those memories.

  He sat in the wood-paneled hotel office with its Renoir and Degas prints, with the big window that looked over the Haversham River flowing downstream, with the hills of pine and fir on the horizon line—sat there shaking, desperately inhaling his cigarette.

  The knocking again, Carlotta had said.

  The same knocking that Anne had testified she'd heard just before the voice had told her to . . .

  Once again, Edmonds raised his eyes to the ceiling, trying to picture the attic—a vast storage room for discarded furniture and ancient dusty records—and what Anne had claimed went on there.

  Nobody believed her in those days, not even her own father.

  But he knew better now.

  3

  "I'm I afraid I just ain't got the part you need right now, lady," said Phil Waldron, who owned the Shell station.

  They were standing in front of one of the bays. The garage was noisy with the clang of hubcaps falling to the concrete floor, the hiss of grease guns firing, and the thrum of hoists raising a car to the cobwebbed ceiling.

  Between explanations of how long it would take to get the alternator—at least tomorrow, at the earliest—he sucked on a bottle of Nehi Orange soda and wiped the back of a greasy hand across his sweaty forehead. His Shell uniform was not enhanced by the gut that stuck out over his belt, nor by the grinning skull on his belt buckle. Just the kind of thing to reassure travelers that they had come to the right place.

  "Wish I had better news for you, lady, but I'm afraid I don't."

  "I'd be willing to pay extra if somebody wanted to drive to the next town and get it."

  He seemed put-upon. "Take a look, lady. Both my mechanics are so busy they won't be gettin' out of here till eight, nine o'clock at the earliest. Which leaves me to work the drive. 'Fraid all I can do is have them put the part on the Greyhound and we'll get it sometime in the morning."

  Sally could see that the man really was hard-pressed. She didn't want to be one of those people who made a bad situation worse by trying to take out her frustrations on the person genuinely trying to help her.

  "Well," she said.

  "I'll have that in there and you out of here soon as I can. I promise."

  "Thank you, Mr. Waldron."

  He nodded to them and then trotted out to the drive, where a Dodge panel truck waited.

  Five minutes later, Sally and Jamie were walking along the street.

  The Royal Hotel loomed in front of them.

  "I guess that's where we're going to stay tonight," Sally said.

  The place was three stories high, with a captain's walk and a balcony on floors two and three. There was a great deal of gingerbread decoration on the newly painted white exterior. Old-fashioned, but seemingly brand-new, pull-down shades gave the windows the appearance of sleepy eyes. The front entrance was wide, with a revolving door. Through it you could see a pair of ornate elevators. More than anything else in Haversham, the Royal Hotel spoke of a different era, when hotels, not motels, dominated the landscape.

  "Well, honey, let's go."

  Sally thought Jamie was joking until she saw how her daughter was hanging back, with real anxiety in her eyes.

  "What's wrong, honey? A stomach ache?"

  "No," Jamie said in a hostile voice. She had the air of a spooked animal.

  Sally reached out a hand to put it on Jamie's shoulder but Jamie jerked away.

  "Jamie, what's the matter?"

  "If you love me you won't make me go in there."

  "In the hotel?"

  "Yes."

  "But why?"

  "I—" Jamie seemed to have an explanation for her behavior but then she paused. "I—I'm not sure."

  "Well then, we'll find someplace else."

  Jamie looked at her mother with real gratitude.

  Sally hugged her close. "Are you all right?"

  "Yeah," Jamie muttered.

  "What happened just then?"

  "This—feeling. I can't explain it."

  "About the hotel?"

  "Yes."

  "It must have been terrible."

  "It—was."

  "Then come on, hon. Let's go look for someplace else."

  Twenty minutes later they walked up to a motel on the southern edge of Haversham, a ten-unit brick place surrounded by a windbreak of fir trees motionless in the still August afternoon.

  Sally was still brooding about Jamie's behavior since they'd walked up to the Royal Hotel. Something had happened, but what? She'd stood right there with Jamie. Nobody had accosted the girl. Nothing untoward had taken place in the hotel windows. What could have made Jamie respond like that?

  For the first part of their walk out to this motel, along a narrow two-lane asphalt road baking in the sunlight, Jamie had seemed to forget all about the experience in front of the hotel.

  But the further they got away, the more her brow furrowed, and the more she seemed gripped by some feeling she could not escape.

  When Sally tried to speak to her during the walk, she scarcely got an answer.

  They passed through a screen door that squawked on its rusty hinges like a parrot.

  Sally went up to the desk. A sixtyish man with a great deal of white chest hair sticking out of his T-shirt wiped Kentucky Fried chicken from his lips.

  "Help you?"

  "We'd like a room, please."

  The man eyed Jamie. "You walkin'?"

  "Our car broke down," Sally explained.

  "You want to see Phil Waldron then. Best car man in these parts."

  "We've seen Phil Waldron."

  The man obviously picked up on the note of disappointment in Sally's voice. "He busy?"

  "No, he can't get the part till tomorrow."

  "Well," the man smiled with wide-spaced teeth, "if'n Phil can't get it till then, it can't be got." Sally opened her purse to signal the man that she wanted a room much more than she wanted conversation.

  The man turned the desk register to her. Sally bent over to sign it.

  Jamie said, "Mom."

  Once again Sally was struck by the curious tone of her daughter's voice.

  Sally put the pen down, looked at Jamie. "Mom, I don't want to stay here."

  The man pursed his lips.

  Sally flushed. She hated scenes of any kind. Given the heat, the long walk they'd just finished, the strange reaction Sally had had to the Royal Hotel, Sally let her irritation show.

  "I think it would be best if we took a room here," Sally said.

  The man smiled to himself. Apparently he liked seeing authority exerted.

  "I'm going back, Mom," Jamie said. She had almost whispered.

  "Back to where?"

  "To the other hotel."

  "To the Royal?" Sally's voice was rising. "But I thought. . ."

  "I was wrong. About the Royal, I mean." She looked straight at her mother. A shudder went through Sally. At that moment she didn't feel she knew her daughter at all. Before she could speak, Jamie had turned and gone out the squeaking scre
en door.

  "Seems like a kid oughtn't to be telling a mother where they'll be stayin'," the man said.

  "Is there a cab company in Haversham?"

  "Not really a company. Mike Renfrew has a Ford station wagon he kind of chauffeurs people around in."

  "Good," she said. "Then would you please call him right away?"

  The man did not look at all happy as he lifted the phone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  The cab that took them to the Royal was endearingly scuzzy. Renfrew, the driver, had taken a black 1987 Ford Taurus wagon and proceeded to fancy it up with hand-painted yellow-and-red flames, an antenna that looked as if it could pull in signals from Saturn, a pair of sizeable pink angora dice hanging from the rearview mirror, and a CD player that looked as if it would require a PhD in electronics for operation.

  Renfrew himself was an equally fancy piece of work, one of those young-old men who wore greasy Elvis sideburns in a kind of quasi-religious tribute to the departed King, too much mousse, Tic Tacs for the breath, a yellow sport shirt open to the rise of his belly, and enough tattooing on his arms to qualify him as a work of art. His CD player blared—unlikely as it seemed—the new Lady Gaga album, which Renfrew, in an almost trancelike state, kept time to with fingers, elbows, knees, feet, and head, which rolled left and right, right and left, like a voodoo dancer's. He seemed not the least concerned that he came close several times to hitting parked cars and that he also ran red lights.

  "God, what a dork," Jamie whispered to Sally, who was glad to hear humor and sarcasm back in her daughter's voice.

  "Maybe I'd better say something to him," Sally said.

  "Mom, don't you be a dork, too."

  But when they nearly plowed into the rear end of a laundry truck, Sally couldn't help herself. "Mr. Renfrew."

  He turned completely around, of course, facing her, disregarding the traffic in front of him. "Mr. Renfrew—the intersection!"

  "Oh, yeah," he said, turning back around and narrowly missing a gravel truck that was charging toward them.