The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke)

by Rickards, John

  Charlie was almost identical to Ed, except that his beard was much shorter and he was completely bald. Otherwise they could be brothers.

  “Alex Rourke,” I said.

  “Mr Rourke's looking for whoever killed his lady friend, the doctor.”

  Charlie nodded. “That sort of thing shouldn't happen, not to decent people.”

  “I talked to Sylvia Ehrlich, one of the sheriff's deputies, after it happened,” Ed said. “She didn't say much, just that there was a woman they found dead in her car, and that when the doc checked her, they saw she'd been shot. Then it was a murder case, so they had to turn everything over to the State Police.”

  “Bad business,” Charlie said.

  Then it was Ed's turn to nod. “We all only found out who it was a couple of days ago. You talked to the police?”

  “Yes and no. The State Police took a statement from me. I haven’t seen anyone from the local sheriff’s department. I guess it’s not their case now anyway.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I’m just sorting out Gemma’s things. Getting them in order.”

  “Sure,” Ed said, and I guessed he knew damn well that if I really thought that then I was kidding myself.

  The conversation died away after that, although I stayed sitting there while Ed and Charlie chatted about people I’d never heard of. I gave it some time, then said goodnight to the pair of them and made for the door.

  Outside, snow was falling again. Tiny specks of ice caught in the breeze spiraled into vortices where they passed trees and buildings, pricking my skin like frozen grains of salt and collecting in my hair. I pulled up my collar and walked back to Gemma's house as fast as the slippery footing allowed. The old building creaked faintly, stiff beams flexing and groaning. The breeze whistled and piped through a stray knothole or gap somewhere in one of the corners of the roof. It sounded like a warped lament playing far away. I turned the key in the lock, briefly checked behind me, then stepped inside.

  The house had warmed up a little while I was out, so I assumed the heating system was still working. I wiped cold water out of my eyes, dropped my jacket over the back of the couch and made a cup of coffee.

  There was something about the building that made it hard to settle for any length of time. I tried watching TV, but every few minutes I caught myself looking over my shoulder at the rest of the room, scanning the corners, the space behind the door. I got a glass of water. Took a piss. Thought I heard the window rattling in the hall and went to check — it wasn’t, and in fact the snow was stopping and the sky looked to be clearing a little. Smoked a cigarette. Got a fresh pack from my jacket. Changed chairs. Changed back again. I didn’t know whether it was the unaccustomed emptiness of the place, something about the journey up here, or the funeral that morning, but I was jumpy. My eyes picked up every shifting shadow, every little noise.

  After an hour or so of this, I decided I might as well unpack my things and try to sleep. I went upstairs and along the landing to the bedroom door, then paused. The room beyond was dark. The bed was a vague silhouette against the far wall. The only illumination was the faint glow from downstairs and the even fainter silver sheen coming through the windows. The room still carried Gemma's scent, and in the gloom it was possible to believe she was asleep in the bed, breathing just too softly to hear. It was like stepping into a memory of one of those nights when I’d stayed up late to watch a movie and had to creep into the bedroom in the dark, trying not to wake her. If I crossed the threshold, passed into this dreamlike bubble of the past, could I stay there? Could I slip under the covers, warmed by her body, and feel her skin gently brush mine?

  The answer to both questions was no and I knew it. Still, just imagining the possibility was comforting in a strange way, as though Gemma was still alive in another world, another time, and maybe I’d be able to look through and see her now and then. I'd have liked that.

  I sighed heavily, then broke the bubble by walking into the room. As I bent to pick up my bag, I caught a glimmer of movement outside the window. Peering through the frost-speckled pane, I saw that the snow had stopped entirely. The moon was up, although strips of cloud torn by the wind repeatedly scudded across it, making the light rise and fall like the sky was breathing. Past the remaining houses on West Road, over the trees at the base of the ridge, the frozen surface of Silverdale Lake glittered like the few stars visible up above, twinkling through the screen of twigs and branches that surrounded it. As I gazed at the almost hypnotic sheen on the ice, the moon briefly emerged fully from the clouds and I could see a handful of jumbled shapes in the woods on the far side of the lake.

  “What's that?” I asked, pointing through the open window. “Another town?”

  Gemma came to stand next to me and followed my outstretched arm, peering at the buildings peeking out from beneath the distant leafy canopy. She shook her head. “North Bleakwater, according to the realtor. He said it's been abandoned for years, something about a flood in the Twenties. The woman who lives next door called it Echo Springs.”

  “Real-life ghost town, huh? Have you been to take a look yet?”

  “I went for a walk around the lake on Wednesday evening. There's a dirt track that runs there from the highway, but it's muddy and overgrown, like the buildings. There's only a few that still have more than a couple of walls. Give it another twenty years and it'll probably be nothing but trees and a handful of stones. Interesting, though.”

  “So I should have brought a spare pair of shoes if I wanted a romantic walk in the woods? That'll teach me.”

  “We'll just have to see what we can do here to make up for that.”

  I turned away from the window. Grabbed a blanket from the closet and left the room, careful to shut the door behind me. I couldn’t spend the night in there, not any more. It just didn’t feel right.

  I lay on the couch, still half-dressed, and tried to sleep with the blanket wrapped as tightly around me as possible. It wasn’t easy. With my eyes closed, stray noises sounded louder and harder to place. A floorboard that shrieked as the house swayed and settled, a drip, drip of water trickling down somewhere outside the room. Every new interruption tripped a spike of adrenaline and I couldn’t relax long enough to fall asleep. Every time I got close, something else shifted in the dark and bang I was wide awake again.

  I’d suffered from insomnia, on and off, for years. It was frequent and serious enough that I had an emergency supply of sleeping pills on prescription. They usually worked, but I’d had some bad experiences with them in the past and was less inclined to rely on them than in the early days.

  I opened my eyes. The clock on the mantel read 02:47. I clambered out of my nest and stumbled to the stereo. Switched the radio on and hunted for a station still transmitting at this late — early — hour.

  “... SEEN THE SHADOW ON THE MOON...”

  Volume too high. I cranked it down hurriedly and retreated. Didn’t know the song or the singer, but it was loud enough to drown out the sounds of the house, and quiet enough, maybe, to sleep too.

  I dropped back on to the couch and prayed for the music to carry me away.

  8.

  I woke, leaden-eyed, to the smell of stale wool clogging my nostrils, dim grayness swimming past the edges of the drapes, and the clock telling me it wasn’t even seven o’clock. Everything ached. I thought about trying to go back to sleep but it didn’t seem worth it, so I made coffee instead.

  Through the kitchen window, the back yard was a featureless mass of white sloping sharply down away from the deck. The sun had yet to break over the horizon to the left, though the sky was turning a kind of inky blue like deep ocean water. Patchy cloud, dark in the half-light, lurked in clumps, the remains of yesterday's snow flurries.

  Thirty minutes later, I was out. The street was deserted this early on a frozen Sunday morning, and the icy crust was broken only by animal tracks and a couple of slushy tire marks in the road. Even the church still looked unoccupied.

 
; I followed Main north, downhill. This side of town was the mirror image of the other. Towards the bottom of the slope, though, things were different. Past a certain point the houses went from post-Reconstruction clapboard to rust-brown weathered brick; newer, but I guessed still well over fifty years old. The dark band of homes was centered around the quick, shallow flow of the Bleakwater River and the bridge that carried Route 100 across it. The smooth charcoal-colored stones that formed the bed of this glorified creek made the water seem black and poisoned, which I assumed was what had given the river its name. From the bridge I could see up to the forest covering the lower slopes of Windover Mountain where the sombre, shadowy river had its headwaters, then down to where it vanished between the mist-shrouded trees that surrounded the lake. Standing on the bridge, watching the stream pouring down the hill, I felt a chill pass through me as though last night's breeze had returned. My clothes suddenly seemed unable to hold any heat and I started shivering. With the cold came the feeling — the absolute certainty — that someone was close by, maybe in the bushes by the river or in one of the houses nearest the bridge, and they were staring at me. An unseen pair of eyes burning through me, baleful and laced with hatred. I remembered the corpse of the dog I’d seen — half-seen — the night before and shuddered.

  I hurried off the lonely bridge and up the road. The cold and the sense of evil fell away as I passed the last two rows of houses, the only ones built on the north bank of the river, and left Bleakwater Ridge behind. The hike up the highway took me almost an hour. Traffic was sparse; only a few vehicles passed me as I hugged the shoulder, trying not to get caught in the dirty ice-water slop kicked up by their tires. A couple of the cars slowed as they passed, maybe wondering if I was a motorist who’d broken down or a stray hitchhiker, because I sure as hell didn’t look like a tourist. None of them stopped.

  A couple of miles outside town the road took a sharp right before plunging down into a particularly long and deep furrow between ridges. The trees on either side were tough, ragged evergreens. Just before I reached the bottom I came across a gap torn in the wiry undergrowth to the right, running away downhill. The shredded ends of twigs, branches, and old, dead bushes looked fresh and the gap itself was vehicle-width. It could have been the site of nothing more than an accident caused by the ice, but it wasn't.

  This was where Gemma had died.

  Before I followed the trail carved by her car as it rolled off the road, I photographed the gap left in the trees and the roadside around it. Then I walked out into the middle of the highway and took pictures of the view up, down and around the spot where she’d been shot. Barring the long-distance hunting-accident theory, the bullet had to have traveled in a more or less flat arc from the shooter’s position, so I knew the place he’d fired from was visible from the road. I was almost done when a horn blared behind me and I had to scurry out of the road to avoid a close encounter with a red pickup. The driver took a moment to hurl insults at me, then sped up and got on with his day while I headed down into the trees and got on with mine.

  The air under the canopy seemed colder than that outside. The ice-coated needles shielded the space beneath from the weak heat of the January sun. The shallow ruts left by Gemma’s car ran for maybe thirty feet down the slope, a drop of eight or nine from road level, before coming to an end in front of a solid-looking pine. They were hard to follow with the other markings left by the cops and medics, not to mention those made when the car was winched back out of the woods. The bark of the tree was mashed and battered a couple of feet off the ground, though not too seriously, so I guessed the car wasn't traveling very fast by this point. There were chips of dark blue paint in the mangled bark, the same color as Gemma’s Malibu.

  I was examining the ground around the base of the tree, digging into the frost and figuring out what space, exactly, the car had occupied, when I heard a woman's voice behind me, up the hill.

  “Are you OK down there, sir?” she called out. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  I knew without looking that the voice belonged to a cop. And she didn't sound particularly pleased to see me. I guess she had me pegged as either a souvenir hunter with a taste for death or a journalist running a story behind the police's back. I turned around. Framed in the gap at the top of the slope was a woman somewhere in her mid to late twenties wearing the dark uniform and puffy winter jacket of the Lamoille County Sheriff's Department.

  Up to the highway, to where the she stood by her cruiser. Her face was flushed pink by the cold now she was out of the heated interior of the red-and-white Impala by the roadside. “I’m fine, thanks,” I said when I reached her. “Can I help you?”

  “We had a report that there was someone wandering the highway in this area,” she said. Her tone suggested she wasn’t sure how to phrase the ‘what the hell are you doing here?’ question occupying her mind. “Are you out here hiking, sir? Are you living or staying somewhere local?”

  I wondered who’d reported me to the LCSD. “Was the guy who gave you the call driving a red pickup?”

  “I couldn't say.”

  “I was taking a photo from the road over there and was late seeing him coming. That's all. I'm not hiking and I am staying somewhere local.”

  The officer nodded. I knew I looked pretty ragged and this probably wasn’t helping my case. “And what exactly are you doing out here, sir?” she said.

  I glanced behind me at the trees, then over at the road. I answered like I was speaking to myself. Couldn’t help it. “This is where she died.”

  “That's a police matter, sir.” Emphasis on the ‘sir’ in that way that meant the next stage in our conversation would be a threat to arrest. “I’d appreciate it if you left it for the authorities to handle and don't go disturbing things. Let us do our jobs and let the victim rest in peace.”

  “My name's Alex Rourke. She was my girlfriend.”

  That threw her. Her expression changed, hard-nosed authority fading to the soft, dead-eyed smile of pity reserved for overwrought relatives. I’d seen it plenty of times already. When she spoke, though, there was real warmth and compassion in her voice. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry for what happened to her, I really am, and I do know what you're going through isn't easy. But you've got to let the professionals work through this.”

  “What makes you think I'm not here just to pay my respects?”

  “People who do that don't normally take photos,” she said. “And I saw you digging around down there. A crime scene team from the State Police already went over the ground where we found her. If there was anything there to find, they'd have got it already. That’s their job.”

  “I used to be an FBI agent. I was trained for that sort of thing as well, and I've done it plenty of times. I know you're giving me the ‘distraught loved ones getting in the way’ speech, and I understand why. But I’m not some stricken accountant who's watched too much CSI. I just want to understand what happened.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Maybe so, but if you start hunting around on your own you're liable to end up being arrested for interfering with an investigation.”

  "I spoke to Detective Flint. The State Police think it was either a hunting accident or that there was some wacko wandering out here with a rifle and she was just the first person he saw. Both of those are a crock. Who hunts at night around here, this time of year? Why has no one noticed there's a lunatic living in town? I’m not interfering because I don’t believe there’s much to interfere with.”

  I looked back at the woods, got my calm back. “Besides,” I said, “the scene's been released. I'm not breaking the law coming out here. You said ‘where we found her’. I spoke to a guy called Ed Markham in the bar last night and he said he knew what had happened to Gemma because he'd talked to Sylvia... Ehrlich in the Sheriff's Department.”

  “That's me.” She looked surprised.

  “You found her?”

  “I was on patrol shift that evening. I saw that someone had
plowed into the trees.”

  “And you went down to check out the car.”

  Ehrlich nodded. “It looked like she'd gone off the road in the ice. You could see where the car rolled into the woods. It looked bad, and... when I checked for a pulse there was nothing. Wayne — Officer Cevik, sorry — arrived a couple of minutes after I called it in. He'd just finished with a breakdown south of Bleakwater. We waited for the ME and the ambulance to show up. We only realized what had actually happened after they came.”

  “And they saw she’d been shot.”

  “Mr Rourke, I don't think I should be going into details with you. I probably said more than I should already.”

  “I’m just trying to get a clear picture of how the woman I loved died, and if you can't help me then I'm going to have to go on guessing and imagining and never knowing for sure. Let me tell you what I know so far, and you can fill in anything you feel happy to.”

  She didn’t look convinced. I carried on anyway. “It had just started snowing again. She was somewhere right about here on the highway, probably not going very fast because of the weather, when she was shot through the windshield. The bullet hit her in the throat. The car swerved off the road and into the trees. If it had gone off the other side, it'd have rolled to a stop straight away. But it went downhill, so it still had a little speed when it hit the tree. Not much, or there'd be more damage to the bark. So I'm guessing the car wasn't too badly smashed when you found it. Maybe you were surprised that the impact seemed to have killed her.”

  Ehrlich frowned, confused. “How do you know it had started snowing?”

  “She was leaving a message on my voicemail when she died. I got it later. She told me.”

  “Oh boy, that must've been so awful,” she said and it sounded like she meant it. “You've got more guts than me to go through this after hearing... well, after hearing it all.”