The Girl in the Attic

by Ed Gorman

  2

  Ron Evars said, "Maybe we should call one of the doctors at the hospital."

  Carlotta said, "He isn't crazy."

  "I know he's not but. . ." Evars didn't sound convinced.

  "He's just distraught is all. The same way any of us would be."

  "Still. . ."

  Evars, the handyman who had worked around the hotel for decades, shook his head. "He still doesn't know you're in cahoots with that reporter fellow."

  She stared at him with a menacing smile. "And he's not going to know, now, is he?"

  Evars knew better than to argue— or to flat out disobey—the likes of Carlotta. "No. At least I won't tell him."

  "Good. Have another cookie."

  They were in the kitchen of the hotel. Carlotta had put Carleton Edmonds to bed after Edmonds had doused the room with gasoline.

  Ron Evars had a big, sandy-colored sugar cookie. He dunked it in his coffee first so it was good and soggy, the way real cookie eaters like them. He started to gesture with his cookie, but an edge of it fell into his coffee. "Shoot!" Ron never swore. He put a part of his cookie in his mouth. This time he gestured with his hand. He pointed in the general direction of the room where they'd taken Carleton from. "He's got the idea she's back again."

  "She is."

  He looked at her and frowned. "I never have been able to figure out how a woman as intelligent and sensible as you could believe in stuff like that."

  Carlotta dunked her own cookie. "How else would you explain the knocking we hear sometimes."

  "Wind."

  "Then how would you explain the phone ringing?"

  "Same way. Wind." He touched his gray temples. "You put a little wind with the power of human imagination and you can end up with practically anything." He helped himself to another cookie. This time he dunked a full half of it in a single dunk. "You ever actually heard that phone ring?"

  "Sure I have."

  "I mean, have you ever been up in the attic and standing right next to it and heard the phone ring?"

  "Well. . ."

  "See? Could just as well be the wind as a phone ringing."

  "Oh, Ron," she said with just a trace of disgust. She took another cookie, dunked it.

  "I just hate to see him this upset," Evars said.

  "Well, he thinks she's back. And that's what's bothering him."

  Evars glanced around. Once the kitchen had been alive with white-jacketed men, and gleaming pots and pans, and the opening-night tension, every night, of a restaurant that prides itself on its cuisine.

  Now it was an empty and gloomy place, long of shadow, smelling slightly of dead meat.

  "I don't expect it's easy."

  "What?" Carlotta asked.

  "Knowing that your own flesh and blood daughter had picked up an ax and killed four people."

  "She didn't do it."

  "Of course she did it."

  "Well, if she did, she was possessed by that woman who killed people here a long time back."

  He looked at her seriously. "Anne was deranged. Only we didn't know it. Deranged. That's why she killed those four people."

  "How about the little girl last night?"

  "What about her?"

  "You think she's deranged, too?"

  "Absolutely."

  Carlotta dunked her cookie. "You don't think it's a pretty big coincidence?"

  "What's that?"

  "Two little girls killing folks with an ax?"

  "Happens."

  "Happens," she mocked. "Happens about one time in ten billion. That's about how often it happens."

  He reached across to the cookie plate. It was empty. He frowned and raised his eyes to her, then grinned. "I sure hope you got some more cookies stashed someplace, because otherwise I'll have to tell Carleton how you're in cahoots with that reporter."

  "The only reason I asked Mr. Hanratty out here was so that he could help prove Annie was innocent. If he did, that would sure unburden Carleton, too."

  "He ain’t going to prove it, Carlotta."

  "And just why not?"

  He shrugged. "Because she was guilty. Just like that little girl last night. Both guilty, Carlotta. Both of them." He put out his hand. "Now, how about some more cookies?"

  Grimacing, she got up from the table and went to the cupboards and found—miraculously—another plate filled with sand-colored sugar cookies.

  "Here," she said, setting them on the table. "I hope you choke on them."

  3

  In the dream, Jamie stood just outside an oval clearing in the front, hidden behind a tree so that she could watch what was going on inside a small cabin perched on a hill overlooking a blue lake. White birds soared and dived above the lake beautifully. Next to her left hand, yellow flowers waved in the slightest breeze, like children yearning for her attention. It was all so peaceful and serene and lovely, and then . . .

  In this part of the dream, things became murky.

  She turned her attention back to the cabin doorway just as she saw a tall, blond woman appear and walk outside.

  The woman was upset; Jamie could feel it even from here.

  Then a man with a fierce red beard appeared from behind the woman. He looked angry. Jamie was afraid the man was going to strike the woman. She wanted to scream, to warn the woman.

  The man came closer . . . closer . . . looking angrier all the time.

  The woman tilted her chin so she could see him just before the man brought his thick fist down on the back of her head . . .

  Jamie could hear the birds crying, and the yellow flowers crying, and herself crying.

  4

  "Cletus Olsen told me something I didn't know before," Hanratty explained to Sally Baines. They sat in the large dining room of a restaurant designed to resemble early-American. It would have looked more authentic if so much of the furniture had not been covered with plastic. The restaurant was ten miles outside of Haversham. Hanratty had suggested this spot so that she wouldn't feel quite such a celebrity. In Haversham everybody would know that she was the mother of Jamie. It was bound to make dining unpleasant.

  Wearily, she said, "I hope this trip has been worth it, Mr. Hanratty."

  "David, please."

  "David, then. I'm very tired. I'd probably do myself and my daughter more good if I went back to my room and laid down for a while."

  "Just let me tell you what Cletus Olsen told me."

  She sipped her coffee and looked out the window. Thunderheads still rolled across the bleak gray sky. Once more she had a feeling of complete isolation. "All right. What did Cletus Olsen tell you?"

  "That he pointed your daughter out to One Eye."

  She sighed. "I'm well aware of that, David." Once more she sighed. "Listen! I don't like taking this tone with anyone, believe me I don't. It's just that I'm tired and frightened and . . ."

  "He said he thinks that One Eye went up there to see if your daughter was the reincarnation of Anne Edmonds."

  "I'm afraid I'm not following you."

  Hanratty leaned closer, excited. Nearby, a waitress stood, dressed in a Revolutionary War costume, poised to spring when she thought their conversation had hit a lull.

  "I'm telling you the tack your daughter's legal defense might take."

  "Legal defense?"

  Somehow the tone of the phrase made everything that had happened in the last eighteen hours overwhelmingly real. A legal defense, indeed.

  "Then you think she murdered that man?"

  "I don't know if she did. But I'm saying that whether she did or didn't, she may need a legal defense, and I think Cletus Olsen has handed us one."

  She noted how he used the word "us"—as if they were partners of some kind—and she didn't know whether she should be offended or not.

  The waitress came a bit closer, hovering. She was a teenage girl with an acnied complexion which made her costume look even phonier than it might otherwise. Oh, well, girls in the thirteen original colonies probably had their skin proble
ms, too.

  "All right," Sally said.

  "All right, what?"

  He was studying her as if there had been some deep and disturbing change in her expression.

  "I suppose I might as well listen. There's something I need to say."

  "Of course."

  "My daughter didn't murder that man."

  He paused for just a moment, just long enough to say that he wasn't sure if he believed her. "I hope you're right."

  The words hung in silence a moment. The waitress chose this point to come over: to refill their cups, to take their orders—a ham salad sandwich for Sally, a club sandwich for Hanratty. When the waitress left, Hanratty said, "The man they called One Eye was a very frightening man. To look at, I mean. The locals promoted him into a kind of boogeyman that he wasn't—but just looking at him, he could be terrifying."

  "I know. Cletus Olsen had him look out a diner window at my daughter. That was our first look at him. He was frightening."

  "That's my point."

  "What is?"

  He spread his hand like a defense attorney making a particularly salient point. "One Eye goes to the hotel because he believes Jamie is the reincarnation of Anne Edmonds. Somehow he lures her out of the room while you're asleep. When she sees him she becomes petrified and grabs the ax in self-defense."

  She just sat there, stunned.

  "I want to ask you a question."

  "What?"

  "Why are you so interested in all this—and what are you doing in Haversham?"

  So he told her all of it, simply, truthfully. The cocaine . . . getting fired . . . drifting through self-pity. Then getting the letter from Carlotta and seeing the possibility of a very good book in it; the nights of video recording the hotel window, the days of frustration.

  "So you're really convinced that some kind of supernatural events are taking place over there?"

  "Yes."

  "The phone that rings and a voice speaking from the graveyard. The voice of a woman who murdered a man back in the thirties."

  He flushed just a little. "I still have some trouble admitting it—but yes, I do think that's what's going on over there."

  "And the glow."

  "I believe that's Anne."

  The sandwiches came. Hers was quite good. After a few bites, and a daub of a napkin on the corner of her mouth, she said, "So two spirits haunt the hotel attic."

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because they have some business left undone."

  "What kind of business?"

  "Well, Carlotta feels that Anne is innocent and that's why Anne is contacting people."

  "How about the other woman?"

  "Janine Barnes? She was insane. In and out of asylums. That much we know. Perhaps she killed the people in the hotel that night—and saw to it that Anne was thought to be guilty."

  Sally could not believe the words coming out of her mouth. "Then maybe this Janine did the same thing with Jaime—Janine actually killed the man but saw to it that Jamie would take the blame."

  He looked at her and said soberly, "That's a very good possibility."

  She let her gaze drift out the window again at the roiling clouds. There was so much people didn't understand, even with all the new technology that was a part of everyday life.

  She thought of the attic, the phone calls, the curious glow.

  Then she sort of shook her head no. For all romances she read and the notions of the spirit world—it was a comforting notion, after all—there just had to be a less fanciful explanation for what had happened to Jamie last night. One that would hold up, it had to, in a court of law.

  She put down her sandwich; suddenly she was no longer hungry.

  "What's wrong?" he said, watching her.

  "You're a very nice man, David. You really are. But I'm afraid you're wasting my time."

  "So you don't believe me?"

  "I can't afford to believe you. I'm going to tell the chief of police about One Eye going to the hotel to see Jamie. That part of your theory may help my daughter—that he was trying to accost or molest her in some way—and she was only trying to save herself. For that information, I thank you. For the rest. . ."

  She stood up.

  "You want to go back, I assume?"

  "Yes," she said, sounding exhausted again. "Yes, I do want to go back."

  The first time Bobby had heard the voice was the night he'd seen the blue firefly.

  Not yellow.

  Not amber.

  Blue.

  It had been summer, maybe four years ago, and he'd been walking along the river the way he sometimes did at night, watching the moon and trying to imagine what it would be like to go up there and walk around in all the craters, to jump up and not come down because of the difference in gravity.

  An astronaut, that's what he wanted to be; but Bobby knew better because of the car accident when he was ten.

  His head had struck the pavement very hard and they'd told him that he had been unconscious for days afterward; and then, when he woke up, he wasn't the same anymore.

  Not that he was crazy, the way some said he was. Or not that he was really stupid, the way others insisted.

  He was just—slow.

  That was the word his mother always used, sometimes with tears in her voice—"slow."

  You had to repeat things to Bobby sometimes. Otherwise he just didn't seem to understand them.

  And that's why he knew better than to tell people he'd seen the blue firefly that night (a blue keen as gas flame).

  And that's why, especially, he knew better than to tell anybody about the voice that night at the cabin, the girl's voice: Anne.

  The one who'd taken the ax to all the people.

  Now Bobby, finished for the day at the hotel, walked along the banks, smashing kamikaze mosquitoes against his arms and neck and cheeks, drinking from the plastic 2-liter bottle of Hires root beer, thinking how great it would be to play the 1953 movie "Invaders from Mars" on the DVD again tonight.

  His whole family was sick of watching the movie. But not Bobby. He liked the part where the sand whirled into quicksand and where the little boy fell through and where the big green guys came after the kid.

  Now that he was within a hundred feet of the cabin, he stopped and looked out across the river. It was choppy and brown in the chill afternoon. The trees waved on the other side of the shore like mops being dusted out. Bobby could sense a frantic quality in the way the robins and jays and sparrows tumbled slightly in the downdrafts. Bobby hated storms; they terrified him.

  That's why he was thinking of going into the cabin.

  Most people thought it was locked, but there was a way you could kind of sway the back door this way and then sway it that way, and then the door would open if you'd put your shoulder to it.

  He spent the next few minutes watching the motorboats all head in on the distant shore. Even the red ones didn't look bright and happy in this gloom.

  Then he turned to the cabin.

  He'd always wished it was more like a log cabin of the sort Abe Lincoln had been born in or pioneers had lived in.

  Bobby liked western movies, too, and they had neat log cabins in those movies. But this was more like a house, with white aluminum siding and a screened-in front porch and a TV antenna up on top.

  A wind came up then, whipping fat drops of rain against Bobby hard enough that they stung.

  He headed for the back door of the cabin, walked up on the little stoop, and started the process of swaying this way and swaying that way and getting the door to open.

  The rains came: lashing, cold rains.

  They were not like July rains at all; they were so hard you could hear the rain on the glass windows like bullets, so hard it looked to be shredding the beautiful yellow flowers that ringed the back yard, so hard it soaked him even though he was standing under the overhang.

  He swayed and swayed and swayed and even started to cry a bit out of exasperation because he just coul
dn't seem to get the door open. But then it popped free and Bobby stood looking at the kitchen of the cabin. He smelled paprika and pepper, lemony dish soap and floor wax. He went inside and closed the door.

  Lightning flashed in the mid-afternoon sky. Like an animal, he skittered through the small kitchen with its neat cupboards and wide, white sink and big Frigidaire, to the living room, where one wall was a built-in bookcase, the second a fireplace and the third held paintings of mountain men in coonskin caps. The fourth held a window through which you could see out over the hump of the hill to the shore, lost now in rain and fog.

  He turned and looked above him to the loft.

  That was where he slept sometimes when he didn't want to be near anybody or when, as now, he was out in the woods and it started to storm. Then he always headed for the loft so he could read comic books (because he kept a stash up there) and sleep.

  He loved to sleep.

  Twenty minutes later he lay on the bed, watching how the shadows played on the ceiling.

  Outside the wind whipped the trees ever harder and the rain against the roof came in waves.

  He had the reading light on and next to him was a stack of "Daredevils" and "Supermans" and "Ms. Trees", his favorite comic books, even though getting them meant he had to go down to the comic book shop where these guys who always had a sneer for anybody who wasn't one of them hung out and talked in the special code language of anybody who collected anything—in this case, all about how much a Volume 1, Number 1 "Batman" cost, or a "Phantom" from 1942. He didn't care about that—he didn't even especially care for old comic books. He liked the new ones with their vivid colors and the smell of the fresh ink and the feel of the paper.

  He was reading "Ms. Tree," which was a detective comic, when he started up from the bed as if somebody had shot him.

  The voice.

  He threw down the comic books, stood up next to the bed, and tried to open his ears wide. He listened.

  And he seemed to hear everything—the soughing wind beneath the waves of rain, the way the cold furnace banged internally, the way the edge of an eastward shutter slammed against the window frame, and most especially his own breathing.

  It came in ragged heaves, the way it did sometimes when he ran for two miles around the high school track as hard as he could.