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

by Noel Hynd

  An hour passed almost invisibly. As the afternoon died a man in a polo shirt and shorts sat down on the other end of the bench from her. He stared ahead of himself for several moments, and Carolyn was convinced that he was going to try to pick her up.

  She would have welcomed it. But he didn't speak. He took out a paperback book instead and began to read. Another half hour passed this way until the man placed a bookmark at the end of a chapter, packed up his book again, and walked away. A wave of disappointment overtook Carolyn. Had he even known she was there?

  Minutes later, she rose and walked back to the house on Oswell Street.

  She was in the second floor of the house when a sensation hit her. It was sort of a vibration or a feeling, the type of thing that had been coming to her for a half-dozen years now but which she didn't completely understand.

  She knew what was about to happen. Or what was happening.

  Someone was looking for her. Someone had her on his mind.

  It was a man, she realized. There was a man looking for her.

  She held very still in the house, as if to listen. The sensation, the intuition became even stronger.

  She wondered. Gary?

  Carolyn drifted to the window before her, the one that looked down onto Oswell Street. She stood behind a curtain and looked downward.

  Nothing. For several seconds, nothing.

  But the feeling was unbanishable. She hoped so much: Gary? Would it be Gary?

  Then a man came into view, stopping before her house. Who was he? What did he want? She could only see the top of his head. But when he started to look upward, Carolyn retreated so that he couldn't see her.

  Then there was a knock on the door.

  Silently, Carolyn went down to the first floor. The man knocked persistently a second time. Hard. Firm. A solid rapping.

  Carolyn moved for a fleeting second to a downstairs window and glanced out.

  But it wasn't Gary. It was Adam Kaminski, the rental agent. What did he want?

  She stood her ground and chose not to answer the door. But she kept him in her sights. What could he possibly want?

  Kaminski leaned forward and slid something through the mail slot. Carolyn waited. She watched the rental agent turn and leave. Then she went to the envelope that lay on the floor.

  It was a note from the rental agent. It said that he had been trying to contact her. If she was encountering any problems, the note continued, she should feel free to contact him.

  She moved the note to a table and left it there. Such little details of living bored her. From the second-story window she watched Kaminski disappear down the block.

  Carolyn took stock of the situation. So it was all innocent enough. It was Kaminski who had been tracking her. He had been trying to make contact.

  That's what logic said.

  She sighed and rose again to her bedroom. But she was unconvinced that it had only been Kaminski, that out there somewhere there wasn't someone else.

  Someone much more important. She was, after all, very intuitive about these things. It was an extra sense that she had and she was rarely wrong.

  Chapter Nine

  Bennington, New Hampshire, lay twenty-five miles up the frozen county road from Nashua. The drive there was a trip O'Hara would have wished upon no one.

  The chains rattled relentlessly on his blue bomber, but the old Pontiac faithfully held the road. The entire state had been frozen like Siberia for four days now, and O'Hara half expected to encounter a woolly mammoth somewhere along the icy two-lane.

  He took one consolation. The detective had finally bailed out on the AM-FM radio in his car and now packed a portable tape deck. So at least Sinatra could accompany him on this pain-in-the-ass drive and fill the rumbling old cop-mobile with a touch of elegance.

  The trip took seventy minutes, through two lingering snow squalls and skies the color of steel. Finally O'Hara turned a bend in the highway and sighted the small town. It had seemed more like seventy hours.

  Bennington was a handful of small stores, one good inn, a white church, and about four hundred residents, none of whom ever seemed to appear. So it took O'Hara only another five minutes to find King Street, an inappropriately named collection of boxy single-family houses of various shades of brown, green, or blue. All were mantled with the cursed snow which actually improved their appearance. On one front lawn there was a retired refrigerator with a rusting washer-drier, also mantled with snow. A Currier and Ives touch on a front lawn junkyard.

  Reaching 5 King Street, a dozen doors from his destination, O'Hara pulled the Pontiac as close to a snowbank as was safe, sat for a moment, and took stock. With the car motor off, the raging cold began to penetrate the vehicle within seconds.

  Across the narrow street, a muffled figure walked a small, shaggy mongrel with a rope leash. Man or woman? O'Hara couldn't tell. The individual with the mutt was tall but shapeless. It wore an orange wool hunter's cap and a bulky coat. The dog wore some tattered makeshift garment around its middle, looking like a sad miniaturized military horse that long ago should have found its way either out to pasture or to a glue factory.

  O'Hara turned his gaze away from the mystery-gender human with the animal. From habit, he studied the street scene before him, trying to read its layout, instinctively trawling for concealed danger. He saw none.

  Then the landscape took shape. The snow along the road had an ugly hue, having turned into a frozen grayish-brown stew of dirt and ice and salt. When he could take the view no longer-and the sense of depression and condemnation that came with it-he stepped out of his car.

  The wind whipped fiercely. O'Hara pulled his leather fedora close to his head. Yet the incredible coldness made him feel like his head was bare and his heavy sheepskin coat would protect him for only a few minutes. The ice particles in the air were like little industrial chain saws; they would eventually cut through anything.

  There were no sidewalks. He walked down the road which had not yet been sanded, hard snow crunching under his boots. In his nostrils was the scent of several dozen fireplaces: burning maple and the odor of creosote.

  O'Hara arrived at 17 King Street, a low one-story house with a roof that sagged. Beside the porch was some ragged shrubbery which stood like bizarre sentries, covered with virgin white.

  O'Hara had been here a few times previously, including one memorable time for a birthday party, so he knew the layout. He followed a makeshift line of boot steps that had tracked a path from the driveway to the front door. He noted that there were no tire tracks leading to the garage door and thus guessed that the occupant's car hadn't been out since the snowfall.

  O'Hara arrived at the front door. The house paint was peeling. He rang the bell. Immediately, a large dog barked from within. A big-time, throaty, menacing, I'll-rip-you-to-shreds-if-you-don't-mind-your-own-business bark. Seconds later, O'Hara could hear some sort of bull mastiff clawing and snarling at the other side of the door. Only wood, steel, and sash separated O'Hara from one hundred pounds of canine menace.

  A stream of thoughts flowed in O'Hara's mind as he listened to the dog: Once, in High Bridge, down by the Massachusetts border, O'Hara had visited a GLA suspect at the chop shop where he reinvented cars. The suspect had set the garage's animal-a big prime-time Rottweiler-at O'Hara with instructions to latch its jaws onto O'Hara's windpipe. It had taken three bullets from a Colt thirty-eight police special to bring the damned mutt down. Then two days later some do-good squarejohn from the ASPCA read the newspaper report, felt that O'Hara had been somehow insensitive, and filed a cruelty-to-animals complaint against the State Police. Ultimately, the complaint had been dismissed by an understanding magistrate in Concord who had himself spent many happy autumn afternoons in a forest, blasting away four-legged critters.

  Always a first time in the line of duty, O'Hara thought as he waited. Always the first time to make an arrest, break a murder case, whack out a mutt with a thirty-eight, or chase a ghost.

  Then there was
the sound of latches falling on the other side. Bolts were being undone. Very methodical. Top to bottom, the locks were coming loose.

  “No, Nixon! Down, boy!” O'Hara heard a husky matronly voice proclaim. “Hush, you bad dog until we know who's here. Then maybe you'll get to bite his balls off and maybe you won't.”

  O'Hara sighed, recognizing both the voice and the attitude. Then the same voice called out, “Yes? Who's there?”

  “Rose?” O'Hara called into the frigid air. “It's Frank O'Hara! From the state police in Nashua!”

  The dog went silent and so did the woman. But the bottom lock came away immediately.

  From within, first the interior door opened while the storm door on the outside remained locked and closed. A large, graying woman with a pinkish porcine face swelled into view, using a meaty left forearm to hold a German Shepherd at bay. The woman wore a deep green sweater and was shaped like the refrigerator on the lawn down the block.

  For a moment, she suspiciously appraised him, her two shrewd eyes glassy and wet like an infant's. Then there was recognition.

  “Hoo! Well, I declare!” the woman said happily. “It is Frank O'Hara! “

  “Hello, Rose,” he said softly. “Got a hot cup of coffee for an old friend?”

  Rose Horvath's eyes flicked quickly past his shoulder to see who might have accompanied him. Then, finding no one, the fat face of the former doyenne at Central Records illuminated with a smile. And they could hear each other quite well through the storm door because the top pane was cracked. A shard of glass one-by-six inches was missing, though a covering of clear plastic had been taped upon it.

  “You beast, you!” Rose exclaimed. “Dropping in unannounced on an old girlfriend! Not letting me get myself all tarted up! How are you? You, the most unrequited of all my loves.”

  “I'm well,” he said. “Are you going to invite me in or are you going to let me freeze out here?”

  “You monster,” she said. “I should let you freeze, then thaw you out for the time and use that suit me.”

  She unlocked the storm door and pushed it open before him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “If I were in my right mind I wouldn't entertain any state employees. Not after what they did to poor old Rose. But you're the exception, Franklin. You, I think, I still like.” She paused. “Right, Nixon?”

  Nixon, the dog, sniffed inquisitively as O'Hara stepped into the house. As for the “Franklin,” Rose had always called O'Hara that. The reason had always escaped him, although he guessed it had something to do with either Roosevelt or Benjamin.

  “I'm grateful, Rose,” he said.

  She stood before him, like a teacher with a star pupil several years after graduation. He was a head taller than she, but she was a decade older. She grinned foolishly. She let him remove his hat and coat, then gripped him by the shoulders.

  It was kissy-kissy time. O'Hara inclined gently and received two such moist proclamations of her affection, one on the left cheek, the other on the right.

  “Please sit down,” she said. “And I'll make you some coffee. I have hazel nut-peach cappuccino. Got it at Peterborough mall. It's instant. Only a moment in the microwave.”

  He was in no mood to protest, fruit coffee or not. And Rose had a fire going, though it was burning down. So he sunk into an old armchair by the side of the hearth. As he sat, he felt that the chair was warm and knew that this was where Rose had been sitting when he had arrived. So quietly, as she rattled with spoons, cups, and the microwave oven in the kitchen, he moved to a less comfortable chair that was also beside the fire.

  He spent a moment studying the room.

  The chamber was dim with no piece of furniture less than a decade old. Like the exterior of the house, paint would have helped. Yet the room's very dreariness accounted for much of its charm. And he also spotted a couple of absurd touches.

  The first one: Over the mantel was an eight-by-ten-inch frame containing a picture of her animal, Nixon, and a photo of the world figure of the same name. O'Hara wasn't sure what Rose was suggesting, and he also knew he wasn't going to ask.

  Then the second touch: On a table near O'Hara's chair was an assortment of books. Something flashed inside O'Hara when their titles fell into a pattern: Fifty Famous Hauntings, Unsolved Ghost Stories of New England, Vampirism in Rhode Island. The latter volume was astonishingly thick. And so on. Spiritualism. Exercises and studies in the paranormal. Someone had been doing some reading recently. O'Hara assumed it was Rose. The books reminded him of what had brought him there in the first place.

  O'Hara's toes were just starting to thaw when Rose reappeared with some coffee. Sure enough, she had nuked it, and it had only taken half a minute.

  Rose had aged badly since the last time he had seen her. She had gained probably five years' worth of gray in the twelve months of her retirement. Plus maybe twenty pounds. He accepted the coffee and sipped. Rose had put milk in it, plus what tasted like half a cup of sugar. It was sweet enough to blow out his triglyceride count for a week. Rose meanwhile went to the front window and peered out, fussing with a curtain, which was drawn.

  “Know what I used to do at this window, Franklin?” she asked. “I used to stand and watch in the first year of my retirement,” she said. “I'd stand here and wait, hoping my former coworkers would come see me. None did. You came by a few times, though, didn't you, you noble man. Like the time when I threw my own birthday party. Remember that?”

  “I remember,” he said. And he remembered that she had thrown it to bring some life into her home in the middle of her first winter alone.

  Then her hand, out of long years of habit, went to the curtain and parted it. “What time is it, Franklin?” she asked. “I'd guess it's a little after two.”

  “It's two fifteen,” he answered. “Afternoons can be so long,” she said. “And this is such a dark day. Dark outside, I mean. Overcast.”

  “It's very gray,” he answered.

  He wanted to offer the sickening cliché that spring was just around the corner, but it wasn't even winter yet on the calendar, so this lie-convenient though it might have been wouldn’t even form on his lips.

  “Would you care to put on a lamp?” she asked.

  “Thank you.”

  He found an old fixture, short and ugly with a single bulb under a deep beige shade. It was a thrift shop special, its style dating from the 1950s, if not the 1940s. The bulb was sixty watts and dim. It cast a depressing yellow glow to all corners of the chamber.

  “Maybe you could check my fire for me before we get down to business,” she said. “There's supposed to be a high-school boy who comes over and minds my fire for me. Name of Mark; named after the saint, I'm sure,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “Comes in around four thirty but half the time he doesn't show. Other half of the time he helps himself to small change around my kitchen. Thinks I don't notice, but I do.”

  She pondered the further point of petty criminality.

  “Probably uses my money to buy drugs over in Hillsboro,” she added. “But who knows these days? None of these kids seem to be any good, but their parents weren't, either.”

  O'Hara addressed her fireplace for her. Two logs were down to their last embers. He found some wood stocked at the corner of the hearth. He kindled the wood, arranged it in a grate, and lit crumpled newspaper beneath it. He excused himself for a moment and went outside to her woodpile and brought in a fresh supply. Returning, he knelt by the fireplace and put on a few larger logs. He would have the hearth blazing in a few minutes.

  “Bless you, Franklin,” she said, watching approvingly. “And make it a good fire. One which could burn a witch.” Rose sat down in her frayed armchair and relished the warmth as it built.

  “What on earth makes you use a term like that?” O'Hara asked.

  “It's just a figure of speech,” she said. “But a good figure of speech at that, isn't it? Wouldn't you like to meet a real witch someday?”

  “I notice that you
've done some reading on the subject,” he said, still toying with the logs in the fireplace. He motioned toward her books on the occult.

  “Go ahead. Make fun of it. I've done a lot of reading on the subject,” she nodded. “There's a lot that the human mind just doesn't understand yet. But I suppose you now think that Rose is going a little soft in the head during retirement.”

  “I keep an open mind about everything,” O'Hara answered. “Particularly matters of life and death.”

  “Good for you,” she said softly. She had brewed tea for herself. She sipped it. “An open mind. How refreshing. Most people in this neck of the woods just have a hole in the head.”

  The fire cast a warm glow into the room. The dog even rose from his corner and found himself a more suitable position, at Rose's foot and not far from the fire.

  O'Hara, for his part, wiped the wood bits from his hands and returned to his chair. The dog sighed and tried to sleep.

  “I thought you had cats,” he said. “Six of them.”

  “I got rid of the kitties,” she said.

  “Why did you do that, Rose?”

  “Gave them to my sister, who lives in Hillsboro.”

  “To make way for the puppy?” he asked. Nixon, the “puppy,” was three quarters the size of a Harley-Davidson.

  Rose caught the joke and smiled. “The kitties weren't doing me any good,” she said. “A bunch of brat high-school kids used to yell obscenities and throw rocks at my roof. Mark's friends, no doubt. Put a few stones through my bedroom window.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “They decided they didn't like me.”