Marianne turned and gave her a weak smile. “I’ve got it, Janet. Again, thanks for everything.”
“You bet.” She turned back to Baby Charlie and made a sudden sour face as an odor wafted upward from him. “Whew, little man, we need to make a stop at the changing station on the way out.”
SIX
She felt like a visitor in her own house.
She remembered a similar feeling when she came home to her parents’ house from college the first time. Janet was already married by then, right out of high school the year before, and the bedroom they had shared, which was still essentially unchanged, looked almost strange, as if someone else lived there. Everything was where it had always been—her bed piled high with stuffed animals, the shelf over the headboard lined with books, the rolltop desk open, a row of knickknacks, figures from the Wizard of Oz across the top, the bed tables with the funny-shaded lamps, little gold pom-poms hanging from the shade rims, two of them missing on her lamp, victims of their cat Marvel’s hunting ardor. She knew every inch of this space, the messy closet, the red-and-white curtains, the floral wallpaper. She had lived in this room since she was a little girl—and yet, today, it all looked new to her, as if she was visiting herself.
That was how Marianne felt in her house today.
But there was a difference, because she was not coming home to the same house.
Jack’s half was . . . gone.
It hit her immediately, when she looked at the hat rack in the front hallway and saw his baseball caps gone. There was only her own gardening cap, on its single peg. Normally it would have been hidden behind one of Jack’s hats, which had always annoyed her. There were certain places—the living room closet, stuffed with his golf clubs, baseball glove, bowling ball—where he tended to crowd her out. The garage had been his, the basement his, even though he had been promising her for years to set up her sewing machine down there.
All of him was gone, now. The living room closet was nearly empty, three of her coats hanging forlornly. His side of the bedroom closet was bare. Even his muddy shoes and ratty sneakers had disappeared.
Marianne sat on the made bed, folded her hands in her lap, and stared at the open closet door.
Gone.
A movement caught her eye in the corner of the room to her left. The room was dark, the window open a crack, October twilight descending outside. Light washed in from the hallway closet.
“Jack?” she said, tentatively.
The shadow thickened, seemed to take shape, then drew into itself and was gone.
“Jack? Are you there?” She rose, walked to the corner of the room and put her hand out.
Something trailed along the top of her hand like a bare caress, and melted away.
“Marianne . . .” the faintest of faraway voices called.
She stood staring at her hand, at the blank corner of the room, listening to the wash of distant traffic outside.
SEVEN
“He was there.”
Janet was getting tired of rolling her eyes. Chuck Larson had been truly interested in the beginning, but now that the dessert and coffee was gone he just wanted to escape to his TV room and a baseball playoff game.
“Honey—” he began, trying to rise.
“Shut up and sit down, Chuck. Unless you want to put Baby Charlie to bed.”
Chuck sighed, settled back into his dining room chair.
Marianne looked from her sister to her brother-in-law. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be going on like this.”
“What we’ve got here,” Janet said, “is you still trying to deal with your husband’s death. My own feeling is that it’s time to kick your own ass and move on. But you were never me, Marianne. So in the short run I’d say go with it. If it doesn’t stop, we’ll get you a shrink.”
“I think it was really him.”
Chuck, trapped in the sisters’ conversation, tried to revive his own interest. “But all you saw was a shadow, and felt something on your hand, and heard someone whisper your name?”
“It sounded like Jack.”
“Sounded like? Or was? Is there any of it that could have been something else? The shadow maybe from a passing car in the street? The touch on your hand a breeze from the open window?”
Marianne said, “And the voice?”
Chuck hesitated, shrugged. “In your head? A noise in the house, misinterpreted?”
“It was the same kind of touch as when I took the pills, when the bottle rolled under the bed and I reached for it.”
Janet snorted. “That was a dust bunny, kiddo. I cleared them out myself. By the way, don’t you ever clean that place of yours?”
Chuck smiled, hoping the evening was over. His grin didn’t carry the room, however.
“Honey—” he began again.
“Yes! Please! Leave!” Janet said, exasperated. “Watch your damn game!”
Relieved, her husband raised his bulk out of his chair and headed for the door.
“But put the baby to bed first!” Janet commanded after him.
He physically flinched, but kept walking.
Janet turned back to her sister. “How did you sleep last night?”
“Fine.”
“Marianne, what the hell is it you aren’t telling me?”
“What do you mean?”
Janet gave a grim smile. “You’ve never been able to hide anything from me. You know that. And you’re trying now.”
Marianne tried a blank look, then gave up. “I’m glad you let Chuck go. I didn’t want to talk with him around.”
“So he’s not around. Talk.”
Marianne took a deep breath. “I think . . . I’m pregnant.”
“What!”
“I started throwing up this morning, and, well . . . I just know.”
Her sister’s face grew florid. “I’ll kill Bud Ganley. So help me God, I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”
Janet suddenly pushed herself away from the table and got up. Somewhere in the depths of the house, Baby Charlie was crying, Chuck’s voice trying to soothe him.
“I’m calling Detective Grant right now,” Janet said. “He may be weird, but he’ll take care of Bud Ganley.” She stomped off toward the kitchen, and the wall phone.
“Janet, don’t!”
Janet stopped and turned around. Her face was flushed with anger. “Why the hell not! You were raped, and now you’re pregnant! And I want to watch that son of a bitch Ganley swing by his balls in jail!”
EIGHT
Bud Ganley stretched out and crossed his long legs and wanted more than anything to put his boots up on the desk. But he instinctively knew that wouldn’t be a good idea. He had the feeling Grant would kick them off, and there were a half dozen other cops of various ranks in the room who would like to take a poke at him. He’d already gotten rid of his tobacco chaw at Grant’s insistence, and knew from the murderous look on the detective’s face that if he gave the old man reason enough to pound him, Grant just might do it. And every other cop in the place would surely look the other way.
“Smells like paint in here,” Ganley said, stretching his arms over his head and yawning.
“You know something?” Grant asked, tapping his pencil on the desk and staring at Ganley.
“No,” Ganley said, looking at the ceiling.
“Well, I’ll tell you anyway. The older I get, the more tired I get of guys like you. I’ve known you since you were, what, seventeen? And you’re still the same punk at thirty-four.”
Ganley smiled, showing white teeth through his thick handlebar moustache. “Thirty-five next week, Detective. You gonna throw me a party?”
Ganley looked down from the ceiling. For a moment their eyes locked, and Ganley’s smile went away.
Man, this guy has weird eyes, Ganley thought. The rest of him is a complete wreck, but those eyes have seen way too much.
For a brief moment, a pang of something almost like pity went through the young man. Then that, too, went away.
Ganley grinned. “Can we get to it, please? I’ve gotta be back at work.”
“As long as it takes, Bud,” Grant said, lost in his notebook now.
Suddenly Ganley sat up straight and put his hands on the desk. “Look,” he said, trying to make his voice sound reasonable, “you know I didn’t lay a hand on Marianne—”
“I’m not sure of that, Bud.”
The way Grant’s voice sounded sent a chill through Ganley. “You’re not gonna try to tell me that DNA test—”
Grant was regarding him with a level stare now, then gave a nearly imperceptible nod.
“That’s impossible! I didn’t do anything to her! I swear I didn’t! Petee swore up and down I was with him the whole time! The nurses at the hospital—”
“You had time after you left the hospital,” Grant said evenly. “And you certainly had motive.”
Ganley exploded, standing up. His face grew red. “That was fifteen years ago! And those charges were dropped!”
Grant tapped his pencil against his head. “Not in here they weren’t. You tried to rape Marianne when she was in high school.”
“I was in love with her! And I got drunk and a little bit out of hand!” Ganley abruptly sat down and put his head in his hands. “Oh, man . . .”
Grant waited patiently. Ganley looked at the floor for a few breaths, then looked up at the detective. “Look,” he said earnestly, “straight talk, okay?”
“Fine with me.”
“What I did back then . . .” He took a deep breath. “What I did back then was way wrong. I even knew it at the time. I guess they call it date rape now. Or at least attempted date rape. But I was nuts about her, absolutely out of my head. And I knew we were going to break up, and my head was just full of snakes and I was drunk—”
“No excuse. Not now, not back then.”
Ganley took another deep breath. “Okay, you’re right. And thank God I didn’t really do it.”
“But you would have, if Jack Carlin hadn’t knocked you on your ass.”
Ganley nodded. “Yeah.”
“I always found it puzzling how you and Jack became such good friends, especially after he and Marianne hooked up after that night.”
“It just happened, man! Jack’s a great guy—was a great guy . . .” He put his head in his hands again and looked at the floor.
“You can leave, Bud,” Grant said.
Ganley looked up, puzzled. “But you said about the DNA—”
“I didn’t say anything. And like they say in the movies: don’t leave town.”
Ganley bounced out of his chair, suddenly grinning, his trademark bopping gait evident as he wove his way through the maze of desks in the bull pen. At the front desk he stopped and smiled at the sergeant. “Chip! How’s it hangin’!”
Chip Prohman tried to put a dispassionate look on his fat face. “Hope you didn’t get yourself in big trouble this time, Bud.”
“Nev-ah, my man! Nev-ah!”
He was out the door, all eyes on him, except for Grant’s, which were set like lasers on his notebook, while he frowned.
NINE
Something in the corner again.
Marianne came awake at a sound like two pieces of soft fabric being drawn one over the other. Reflexively, she looked over at the bedside table, but the clock, set back in place, was blank, broken. It was deep night, the window open a crack, cold breath of breeze barely bothering the curtains, no hint of moonlight in the darkness behind the curtains.
The sound came again, from the corner.
Marianne pulled herself up in the bed and stared into the gloom.
“Jack . . . ?”
The sound increased in volume. Now she heard a louder, more distinct sound, like a cape flapping. The shadow in the corner grew deeper in the soft darkness surrounding it, and a hint of blank white, like an oval, peeked out at her and then was gone.
“Jack, is that you?”
“No.”
The sound of the voice, suddenly loud and deep and distinct, sent a bolt of ice through her. She clutched the sheets to her like a life jacket.
“Who—” she began, her voice trembling.
“Someone . . .” the voice said, and now the form took on more edges, moved out of the corner toward her. The pale oval appeared and disappeared again, cut with a slash of red at the bottom: a mouth.
The figure stopped at the foot of the bed. Now the face became wholly visible: a pale oval the color of dead fish, two empty eyes like cutouts of darkness, that bright red slash of mouth like a wound. He was enfolded in a black cape that swirled and snapped as if it were in a stiff breeze.
The temperature in the room dropped; dropped again.
Marianne shivered.
“Where’s . . . Jack?” she managed to whisper hoarsely.
The figure tilted its head slightly to one side, but said nothing. Marianne noticed now that there were arms of a sort, also dead fish colored, and hands with unnaturally long fingers, enfolded in the cape.
“I wanted to see you,” the thing said. It’s voice was deeply neutral, without inflection.
Marianne shivered, hid her eyes as the thing drew up over the bed toward her.
“No!” she gasped.
She clutched the sheet and blanket to her face, felt a wash of cold unlike anything she had ever felt before. It was like being dropped into a vat of ice water. No, it was worse than that—like being instantly locked in a block of ice.
There was a wash of breath over her, colder still—
She opened her eyes, gasped to see that face inches from her own, the empty black cutout eyes regarding her, unblinking.
The mouth opened, showing more blackness still—“No!”
She covered her face again, and, instantly, she knew the figure was gone.
She lowered the blanket and sheet.
The room was as it had been, the corner a stand of gloom, empty, the cold gone.
A breeze from the open window rustled the curtains, and she drew in her breath.
Something beyond them, in the night, moved past the window, a flat retreating shadow.
TEN
Bill Grant hated his empty house.
It was full of memories, all of them bad the past few years. Even when his wife Rose had been alive the house had not been a happy place, her depression regulating their lives like a broken wristwatch. When they had bought the place on his lousy beat cop’s salary twenty years before it had been filled with nothing but good memories. But when the dark moods began to overtake her, the parties stopped, and then the socializing altogether, and eventually even the amenities with family.
And then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving Grant with only his job, and all that other business—what Grant liked to call weird shit—that seemed to happen in Orangefield every Halloween.
And weird shit left nothing but more bad memories, which made his empty house feel even emptier.
So he did what he often did now, especially as Halloween approached, which was to sit in his chair in his finished basement with an open bottle of Dewar’s scotch, get drunk, watch old movies, and hope to God that weird shit wouldn’t happen.
Grant poured two fresh fingers of scotch into his favorite glass—what had once been a jelly jar from the sixties encircled with pictures of the cartoon character Yogi Bear (outlined in yellow), his friend Boo Boo (outlined in blue) and Jellystone Park (drawn, originally in a garish green). Over the years and thousands of dish washings, all but the faintest outline of Yogi’s fat head was still visible, none of Boo Boo but one of his feet, and some bizarre section of Jellystone Park that may or may not have been a picnic table, Grant no longer remembered.
Grant used the jelly jar because it reminded him of himself: slowly fading away with each new washing of weird shit . . .
He downed the two fingers in two neat swallows, and refilled the glass with two more fingers of scotch.
He hit the remote change button hard, angry that AMC had started to show commercials with their movi
es—he liked his westerns as neat and unblemished as his whiskey.
But Turner Classic Movies was showing a period piece, something along the lines of a 1930s version of Dangerous Liaisons without sex, so, grumbling, Grant hit the button hard again and put up with the few commercials breaking up the old John Wayne western Stagecoach on AMC.
“That’s more like it!” Grant toasted the TV as the movie came back on. What a great John Ford flick. The only one he liked better was The Searchers. He’d have to buy it on tape someday to avoid all the breaks.
He was refilling his glass yet again when a tap came on the casement window to his left.
He nearly spit his whiskey back into the glass, remembering the last time that had happened (weird shit), but then he went smoothly into cop mode, rose, and drew his 9mm out of the drawer in the side table next to his lounge chair.
The tap came again as he reached the window. Reaching up, he pushed the dirty white curtain abruptly aside.
There was a face there. A young girl . . .
She made a motion, and he recognized her. He nodded and pointed up.
The face retreated and Grant dropped the curtain back into place.
He grabbed the scotch and his glass on the way, thought better of it and put it back.
Leaving the TV on, he went upstairs, hearing his own heavy tread on the creaking stairs.
She was not at the back door, which was closest to the basement window, so Grant went to the front door and snapped on the porch light as he opened it.
“Come in, Marianne,” he said, holding the screen door open for her.
“I’m s-s-so sorry—” she began, but he cut her off.
“Nonsense. Come in and sit down. Can I make you some tea or coffee?”
She looked like a scared rabbit. “C-c-coffee would be great.”
“Are you all right?”
She nodded, but was shivering like a leaf.
Grant moved past her into the kitchen, and she followed, sitting at the kitchen chair he pulled out for her. He fiddled with the coffeemaker, which had already been preprogrammed for tomorrow morning. After a few minutes of trying to fool the computer chip in it, he was able to get it to work. In a few seconds the comforting blurp and drip sounds commenced.
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