A Room For The Dead (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 3)

by Noel Hynd

  “You could say that.”

  “With the law?”

  “No. Not with the law.”

  He looked for something positive. “Current employment?”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “I'm looking.” Then she added, as if to serve as her own advocate, “I'm trying real hard. Trouble is-”

  “You need an address.”

  “A good address,” she corrected. He glanced again at the application.

  “Can you tell me where you've been for the last few years?” Kaininski asked.

  “No one single place. I've been moving around.”

  “From where to where?”

  “A whole bunch of places,” she said. Again the smile. Again the charm.

  “Personal references?” he asked.

  “I can give you some. But they'd be friends who haven't seen me for several years.”

  “What did you do?” Kaminski blurted out. “Vanish from the face of the Earth?”

  “Sort of,” she laughed.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I just did.”

  Kaminski let this sink in. Why, he wondered, did she have to put him on the spot?

  “I guess that might be okay in terms of references,” he said. “It's a little unusual. But if they check out. . . .”

  “The references will check out.” She paused and sighed. “I just. . . .Well, I don't want anyone to know where I am.”

  He blinked. “May I ask why not?”

  “You may ask, but. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. She grinned and hunched her shoulders as if she couldn't explain, even if she had wanted to.

  “Well, what about those last couple of years?”

  “What about them?”

  “Where did you work? Where have you been?”

  She gave him another plaintive gesture.

  “You can't tell me at all?” he pressed.

  “I'd only be lying.”

  “Then tell me the truth.”

  “You wouldn't believe the truth.”

  “Test me.”

  “Sorry.” She shook her head.

  He shifted uncomfortably and lowered his eyes. Then he raised his eyes again when a nasty thought was upon him.

  “You haven't been in jail, have you?” he asked.

  “No. Never jail.”

  “Under arrest?”

  “No.”

  “Declared bankruptcy?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well,” he said, trying hard. “I can't think of anything much worse than jail or bankruptcy.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  A kept woman, Kaminski thought next. Some wealthy old goat had her as his mistress. By God, that's what she was! But there was an air of innocence, even purity, to Carolyn Hart that made him dismiss this last notion as quickly as he had seized it.

  “Look, I can pay the rent,” Carolyn explained. “I hate to say, 'Just trust me.' But that's what I have to say.”

  Kaminski scratched his head arid shuffled his feet. “You're asking me to extend an awful lot on instinct,” he said.

  “You just said you were very good at that,” she said. “I'll stand by your judgment. If you don't want to do this, I'll disappear and you won't see me again.”

  “You don't have to disappear.”

  “Well, then . . .?”

  Kaminski seemed to be trapped. She nudged him forward.

  “I'll take good care of your house,” she said. “You'll never know I was even in it. And I'll be forever grateful.”

  Kaminski sighed. Here was something new: Someone who was almost begging to be rejected. But other instincts kicked into gear. It was always the applicants who seemed really straight, he reminded himself, who turned into trouble. Like that bitch Mrs. Ryan. And that pricky Strauss kid. And, of course, here was also another female to fall in love with. Someone to replace Paula. Someone who just might be the Right Woman. So. .. .

  Kaminski sighed. “I shouldn't do this. But what's life without taking a few chances?” he concluded philosophically.

  They sat down together on the back step of the house. He read through the lease with her. A standard one-year agreement.

  Kaminski signed for the landlord. Carolyn etched her signature on the appropriate space. She smiled. Her eyes danced.

  Adam would remember the moment. Once both signatures were affixed to the document, Carolyn leaned forward gently and kissed him on the cheek. Her touch was very soft, almost like a gust of wind rushing past. He was surprised. And smitten.

  The next day, Carolyn stopped by Kaminski's office. She paid her deposit and first month's rent. Kaminski gave her a key and said she could move in. She admitted that. she didn't have much.

  “I travel light,” she said. “Remember?”

  “I remember.” He paused. “Well, you must at least have a few suitcases or something.”

  She smiled sweetly and shook her head. “Just a few small things,” she answered.

  “Carolyn, sometimes you make me nervous.”

  “There's nothing for you to worry about,” she said.

  Whenever he received such reassurance was when Adam Kaminski did start to worry. But she was so pretty, and he felt that he was off to a good start with her. So later the same day Kaminski smuggled the paperwork-including the unchecked references-past his parents.

  Two afternoons later, he walked by 565 South Oswell Street to deliver an executed copy of the lease personally to Carolyn. It was a perfect excuse to come calling.

  But she wasn't there, and none of the neighbors recalled seeing her. Kaminski, disappointed, slipped the lease through the mail slot and went on his way.

  He remembered later on thinking as he was leaving, that Carolyn Hart was sometimes so ephemeral and fleeting that it was as if she wasn't even there at all.

  But of course she was there, he told himself. Or she had been. She had left money in his office, and she had signed the lease. He wasn't imagining her. He had seen her twice.

  He cheered himself. It was absolutely inevitable that their paths would cross again. After all, he had her signature and her personal check. Best of all, she was now his tenant.

  And so when he thought about it, Adam Kaminski felt pretty good. There was a lot to love about Carolyn Hart and, the more he thought about it, the more he felt that he was just the type of down-to-earth, stable guy who might appeal to her vagabond spirit.

  Chapter Three

  Like much in the stark, frozen New Hampshire countryside, the details of Detective Frank O'Hara's life lay beneath the surface, carefully concealed from the world.

  Today in Nashua, in the dying hours of an afternoon in late November, even the physical details of O'Hara were hidden, cloaked first by a heavy early season snowfall and then by the clumsy garments of savage New England winters. As O'Hara walked from the state police headquarters to the department's rear parking lot, he wore his own version of civilian attire: a floppy leather fedora, a parka, jeans, work boots, and a pair of leather gloves.

  Had anyone been able to discern the actual appearance of O'Hara, they would have seen a rugged, well muscled man in his late forties, amazingly sturdy and agile for his journey into middle age. He had a handsome but craggy face and a shaggy brown-blond mustache that matched the hair on his head. Had anyone probed the spirit beneath the exterior, the examiner would have found something every bit as rugged-and perhaps with as many scars-as the surrounding landscape.

  O'Hara paused and did what he frequently did at this time of the year. He looked angrily at the sky. All that was above him was white with snow.

  “This is the last time I will ever experience this,” O'Hara told himself. He grimaced as the year's first snow settled upon the hood of his car, the brim of his hat, and the tip of his nose. “And for that, thank God.”

  The snow, of which he had seen countless tons over nearly twenty years, might have conveyed a benign appearance to the rest
of the world, a fitting motif for a cozy New England winter landscape. It was immortalized on postcards, tourist brochures, and maple syrup bottles.

  Sure. Kids played in the snow. The Labradors and golden retrievers of his neighborhood in Hancock ran through it, tucked their noses in it and tossed it aloft, spinning it sometimes almost like cotton candy or wet confetti. Tourists skied on it, and more than a few of O'Hara's friends made money plowing it.

  Ah, snow. O'Hara hated it.

  Snow-particularly heavy snow like this, that fell early in the season-had become a harbinger of glacial winters to come, of ice and sleet storms, of freezing winds, cars skidding into ditches, stray livestock turned into rigid corpses, and pipes busted and hemorrhaging water in basements. And every winter, some poor senior citizen was found frozen in a cabin or a house heated only by a fireplace that had long since died down.

  Snow was white death to O'Hara. He had come to associate it with his own resolute march toward the grave. Snow depressed him endlessly. Both his parents had passed away in January. His marriage had ended in February. The two close friends on the police force who had died in the line of duty had been killed in winter, one in February, the other five days before Christmas.

  O'Hara pulled his parka closer to him and hurried to a battered old Pontiac with oversized tires arid a heart the size of a mountain. “My dinosaur of the highways,” he called this clunky old monster. “The thing is, it never stops working,” he confided to friends.

  He stepped into the Pontiac, fumbled for the key, and found the ignition. His breath appeared in misty intermittent cones before him. The temperature was somewhere in the twenties, with a windchill in the teens. Inside the car, it was every bit as hot.

  O'Hara turned the car key. The engine growled stubbornly, like a bear disturbed during midwinter hibernation. The battery, engine, and electrical system were no more enamored of the cold than O'Hara. But after a moment, the dependable old wreck-124,000 miles since he had first purchased it in 1978, but still clanking along-turned over with a snarl. O'Hara gunned the accelerator, then stepped out, leaving the motor running.

  O'Hara knocked the accumulated whiteness off his windshield. With a brush and scraper he freed the side and rear windows from snow and ice. Then he slid back into the car.

  As he waited a final minute for the engine to warm, he punched the dial of the car radio. No Sinatra anywhere. And surely no Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington in these godforsaken sticks. So by default, he found a rock station in Boston. Here he was-well within shouting distance of his fiftieth birthday-and he still occasionally listened to the music of his youth, the music of social revolution. It would have to do when Mr. Sinatra was unavailable.

  Well, nothing too revolutionary about the golden oldie the DJ in Boston was playing. The station played The Beach Boys. “Good Vibrations.” Like hell, good vibrations on such a day. O'Hara caught the nasty irony and smiled with it.

  It was just such little details of life that O'Hara focused upon, the cruel little twists and ironies. He shifted the vehicle into gear. The car obediently surged forward.

  He watched the special “arctic” wipers methodically throw the snow from his windshield. Already this looked like a blizzard. He was certain that he would quickly be called back to work, probably by six in the evening, for emergency duty.

  O'Hara pulled onto Route 3 which snaked out of Nashua. And suddenly-because he made an effort to put it out of his mind-the snow didn't bother him quite as much. It didn't bother him because a wave of satisfaction came over him.

  Today was November 20. His retirement papers had been processed that morning, sixty days ahead of his retirement date, just as the state police handbook dictated. He had put in nineteen and three quarters years on the state police department, the last fourteen years as a plainclothes detective. Now he was in a position to walk away as a free, healthy man.

  What the hell? Let it snow. He would claim victory even over the elements of the vicious New Hampshire winters. He had survived nineteen of them and saw no reason why he couldn't scratch and claw his way through a twentieth.

  Back in August when those vibrant nightmares scorched every night, he had finally gone to Dr. Julie Steinberg, the department shrink. He had come away with a clearer understanding of himself, an understanding that led him to tender his retirement from the state police. Now he was at ease with that decision.

  He would sell his house and move south while still relatively young. A man like him, honest, strong, with excellent law enforcement credentials, would have no trouble finding a slot as a security specialist of some sort. Not in this crazy world where nothing was secure any more. Snow or no snow, life could have been much worse.

  Traffic crept on the snowy highway that led out of the state capital. The salt and sand trucks were nonexistent. But O'Hara had learned that his best move was to go home, have dinner, perhaps grab a nap, and wait for the inevitable ring of the telephone. Once he was called back to work, he might do twenty hours straight. Thank God it would be reflected in his paycheck.

  He arrived at Cooper Road in the town of Hancock, a dead end of middle class houses, some very old, a few very new. This was the street upon which he lived. To either side were homes of younger families, some busy, some with dogs running through the snow, others with children at play on the lawn. Two to three cars, some of them inoperable, jammed each driveway.

  From long habit, O'Hara passed these cars in review, checking to make sure all were familiar, and that all had local plates, the numbers of which he had committed to memory. Partly he did this to keep his instincts sharp. But equally, he did this as a policeman's extra level of caution, the same motivation that compelled O'Hara to arrange his living room in a way in which he could sit in a comfortable chair, watch television, sip a drink, and keep an eye on the approach to the house, so that he could see anyone arriving before he, himself, could be seen.

  He edged his car as close to his mailbox as possible and picked up the day's bills. Then he turned the Pontiac into his driveway. From a remote unit in his car, he raised his garage door and parked.

  He was proceeding as he ordinarily might on such a day when his gaze fell-and froze-upon a pair of boots just outside his kitchen door.

  The boots were leather and dry. Yet there was a puddle of water, meaning melted snow, beneath them. So it passed through his mind that the boots must have arrived since the snow began-more than an hour ago-and that whoever owned the boots hadn't arrived by car because there was none unaccounted for outside. Or at least, there was no car that had remained.

  And after his first flash of anxiety had subsided, O'Hara knew that the owner of the boots must have been a man in a similar line of work, one who knew him and his signature pretty well, in order to enter his home.

  He also sensed that the intruder was not malevolent. At least not this time. Besides, he thought he had identified the footwear.

  Yet a man could never be too sure. For good measure, O'Hara's hand drifted beneath his parka and found the reassuring presence of his automatic pistol. O'Hara kept his hand there as he stepped from the garage into the kitchen.

  He thought he heard a radio playing very softly somewhere. And, as he quietly stepped through his kitchen, he could see that a light was on in the living room.

  O'Hara continued forward and, with a toe, pushed open the living-room door. The door moved silently.

  “Frank?” called an amiable male voice from the living room. “That you?”

  “Philip?” O'Hara asked.

  O'Hara's hand moved away from his weapon.

  Through the light from the front window, past the dormant piano, the form of a large man took shape. The man was standing in the living room near O'Hara's past-its-prime sound system. Standing, and picking critically through O'Hara's collection of CDs and cassette recordings. O'Hara's musical acquisitions, which ran largely from early Sinatra (Columbia label, big bands) to late Sinatra (Reprise label, 1960s and after), with much middle Sinatra (the
best stuff, the Capitol years) in between, did not meet the visitor's approval. Then again, “The Man and His Music,” while close to sainthood in O'Hara's pantheon, met the approval of virtually no one whom O'Hara knew personally. Another clear sign to O'Hara that he was a pilgrim among philistines.

  “Still listening to all this Mafia music?” the visitor said.

  “You don't know class when you see it. Or hear it,” O'Hara answered.

  “If that dissipated old dago had done a cover of 'Incense, Peppermints,' I do believe you would have bought that, too.”

  “Yeah,” O'Hara answered, “and the song wouldn't have sounded like crap anymore. It would have sounded great with Frank's pipes applied to it. Now leave my 'Old Blue Eyes' collection alone and tell me why I have the pleasure of your company.”

  As it turned out, the electronic sound came from the television, not a radio, not a CD player.

  “I took the liberty of letting myself in,” said Philip Reynolds, a friend, a neighbor, and also the assistant chief of police of the local five-man town squad. O'Hara had worked with Reynolds frequently. The local cops and the Staties often washed each other's hand when it came to special assignments. Reynolds and O'Hara had covered each other's back from time to time. O'Hara had once lent his friend a key to the house, which must have been how he had let himself in now.