Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

  “Benny Goodman?” Hardesty snorted. “Myself, I like country. Real country, Hank Williams, not the junk these kids play. That’s not country. Take your Jim Reeves. That’s what I like.” Lewis could smell the sheriff’s breath—half beer and half some terrible foulness, as if he’d been eating garbage.

  “Well, you’re younger than I am,” he said, pulling back.

  “I just wanted to say how sorry I was,” Ned interjected, and Lewis looked at him sharply, trying to figure out just how much trouble he was in. Hardesty was signaling to Annie, the Viking, for another pitcher. It came within minutes, slopping over when Annie set it on the table. When she walked away she winked at Lewis.

  Sometime during the morning, Lewis remembered, and sometime during his drive . . . bare maples . . . he had been aware of an odd, dreamy clarity, a sharpness of vision that was like looking at an etching—a haunted wood, a castle surrounded by spiky trees—

  wrong way out baby, you’re on the wrong

  —but now he felt muzzy and confused, everything was strange and Annie’s wink was like something in a surreal movie—

  you’re on the wrong

  Hardesty bent forward again and opened his mouth. Lewis saw a spot of blood in Hardesty’s left eye, hovering below the blue iris like a fertilized egg. “I’ll tell you something,” Hardesty shouted at him. “We got these four dead sheep, see? Throats cut. No blood and no footprints either. What do you make of that?”

  “You’re the law, what do you make of it?” Lewis said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the band.

  “I say it’s a damn funny world—gettin’ to be a damn funny world,” Hardesty shouted at him, and gave Lewis one of his Texas hard-guy looks. “Real damn funny. I’d say that your two old lawyer buddies know something about it, too.”

  “That’s unlikely,” Ned understated. “But I ought to see if one of them wants to write something about Dr. John Jaffrey for the paper. Unless you’d like to, Lewis.”

  “Write about John for The Urbanite?” Lewis asked.

  “Well, you know, about a hundred words, maybe two hundred, anything you can think of to say about him.”

  “But why?”

  “Jesus wept, because you don’t want Omar Norris to be the only one—” Hardesty stopped, mouth open. He looked stupefied. Lewis craned his neck to see Omar Norris across the crowded room, still waving his arms and babbling. On the bar before him sat a row of drinks. The feeling of something bad nearby which had dogged him all day intensified. An out-of-tune fiddle chord went through him like an arrow: this is it, this is it—

  Ned Rowles reached across the table and touched Lewis’s hand. “Ah, Lewis,” he said. “I was sure you knew.”

  “I was out all day,” he said. “I was—what happened?” A day after Edward’s anniversary, he thought, and knew that John Jaffrey was dead. Then he realized that Edward’s heart attack had come after midnight, and that this was the anniversary of his death.

  “He was a leaper,” Hardesty said, and Lewis saw that he’d read the word somewhere and thought it was the kind of word he should use. The sheriff took a swallow of beer and grimaced at Lewis, full of self-conscious menace. “He went off the bridge before noon today. Probably dead as a mackerel before he hit the water. Omar Norris there saw the whole thing.”

  “He went off the bridge,” Lewis repeated softly. For some reason, he wished that he had hit a girl with his car—it was only a moment’s wish, but it would have meant that John was safe. “My God,” he said.

  “We thought Sears or Ricky would have told you,” Ned Rowles informed him. “They agreed to take care of the funeral arrangements.”

  “Jesus, John is going to be buried,” Lewis said, and surprised tears came up in his eyes. He stood up and clumsily began to edge out of the booth.

  “Don’t suppose you could tell me anything useful,” Hardesty said.

  “No. No. I have to get over there. I don’t know anything. I’ve got to see the others.”

  “Tell me if I can help at all,” Ned shouted over the noise.

  Not really looking where he was going, Lewis brushed into Jim Hardie, who had stationed himself unseen just outside the booth. “Sorry, Jim,” Lewis said and would have gone by Jim and the girl, but Hardie closed his fist around Lewis’s arm.

  “This lady wanted to meet you,” Hardie said, grinning unpleasantly. “So I’m making the introductions. She’s stopping at our hotel.”

  “I just don’t have the time, I have to leave,” Lewis said, Hardie’s hand still clamping forcefully on his forearm.

  “Hang on. I’m doing what she asked me to do. Mr. Benedikt, this is Anna Mostyn.” For the first time since he’d met her glance at the bar, Lewis looked at the girl. She was not a girl, he discovered; she was about thirty, perhaps a year or two on either side. She was anything but a typical Jim Hardie date. “Anna, this is Mr. Lewis Benedikt. I guess he’s about the handsomest old coot in five or six counties, maybe the whole damn state, and he knows it too.” The girl grew more startling the more you looked at her. She reminded him of someone, and he supposed it must have been Stella Hawthorne. It crossed his mind that he’d forgotten what Stella Hawthorne had looked like when she was thirty.

  A ravaged figure from a low-life painting, Omar Norris was pointing at him from the bar. Still grinning ferociously, Jim Hardie let go of his arm. The boy with the fiddle swung his hair back girlishly and counted off another number.

  “I know you have to leave,” the woman said. Her voice was low, but it slid through the noise. “I heard about your friend from Jim, and I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was.”

  “I just heard myself,” Lewis said, sick with the need to leave the bar. “Nice to meet you, Miss—”

  “Mostyn,” she said in her effortlessly audible voice. “I hope we’ll be seeing each other again. I’m going to work for your lawyer friends.”

  “Oh? Well . . .” The meaning of what she had said reached him. “Sears and Ricky gave you a job?”

  “Yes. I gather they knew my aunt. Perhaps you did too? Her name was Eva Galli.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Lewis said, and startled Jim Hardie into dropping his arm. Lewis plunged off into the interior of the bar before changing direction and rushing toward the door.

  “Glamour boy musta got the shits or something,” Jim said. “Oh. Sorry, lady. I mean, Miss Mostyn.”

  The Chowder Society Accused

  6

  The Morgan’s canvas top creaking, cold billowing in, Lewis drove to John’s house as fast as he could. He did not know what he expected to find there: maybe some ultimate Chowder Society Meeting, Ricky and Sears speaking with eerie rationality over an open coffin. Or maybe Ricky and Sears themselves magically dead and wrapped in the black robes of his dream, three bodies lying in an upper bedroom . . .

  Not yet, his mind said.

  He pulled up beside the house on Montgomery Street and got out of the car. The wind pulled the blazer away from his body, yanked at his necktie: he realized that like Ned Rowles he was coatless. Lewis looked despairingly at the unlighted windows, and thought that at least Milly Sheehan would be in. He trotted up the path and pushed the bell. Far away and dim, it rang. Immediately below it was the office bell for John’s patients, and he pushed that one too and heard an impatient clamor go off just on the other side of the door. Lewis, standing as if naked in the cold, began to shake. Cold water lay on his face. At first he thought it was snow, then realized that he was crying again.

  Lewis pounded on the door futilely, turned away, the tears like ice on his face, and looked across the street and saw Eva Galli’s old house.

  His breath froze. He almost thought he saw her again, the enchantress of their youth, moving across a downstairs window.

  For a moment everything had the hard clarity of the morning and his stomach froze too, and then the door opened and he saw
that the figure coming out was a man. Lewis wiped his brow with his hands. The man obviously wanted to speak with him. As he approached, Lewis recognized him as Freddy Robinson, the insurance salesman. He too was a regular at Humphrey’s Place.

  “Lewis?” he called. “Lewis Benedikt? Hey, good to see you, man!”

  Lewis began to feel as he had in the bar—he wanted to get away. “Yes, it’s me,” he said.

  “Gee, what a pity about old Dr. Jaffrey, hey? I heard about it this afternoon. He was a real buddy of yours, wasn’t he?” Robinson was by now close enough to shake hands, and Lewis was unable to avoid grasping the salesman’s cold fingers. “Hell of a note, hey? Goddamned tragedy, I call it. Boy.” He was shaking his head sagely. “I’ll tell you something. Old Dr. Jaffrey pretty much kept to himself, but I loved that old guy. Honest. When he invited me over to that party he had for the actress, you could have knocked me down with a feather. And man, what a party! Really, I had the time of my life. Great party.” He must have seen Lewis stiffen, for he added, “Until the end, of course.”

  Lewis was looking at the ground, not bothering to reply to these horrible remarks, and Freddy Robinson rushed into the silence to add, “Hey, you look kind of crapped out. You don’t want to stand here in the cold. Why don’t you come over to my place, have a good stiff drink? I’d like to hear about your experiences, chew the fat a little bit, check out your insurance situation, just for the record—there’s nobody at home here anyhow—” Like Jim Hardie, he grabbed Lewis’s arm, and Lewis, harassed and miserable as he was, sensed desperation and hunger in the man. If Robinson could have handcuffed Lewis and dragged him across the street, he would have. Lewis knew that Robinson, for whatever private reasons, would fasten on him like a barnacle if he allowed him to.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” he said, more polite than if he had not felt the enormity of Robinson’s need. “I have to see some people.”

  “You mean Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, I guess,” Robinson said, defeated already. He released Lewis’s arm. “Gosh, what you guys do is so great, I mean I really admire you, with that club you have and everything.”

  “Christ, don’t admire us,” Lewis said, already moving toward his car. “Someone’s picking us off like flies.”

  It was uttered almost casually, a merely dismissive remark, and within five minutes Lewis had forgotten he’d said it.

  * * *

  He drove the eight blocks to Ricky’s house because it was unthinkable that Sears would have taken Milly Sheehan to his place, and when he got there he saw that he’d been correct. Ricky’s old Buick was still in the drive.

  “Oh, so you’ve heard,” Ricky said when he opened the door. “I’m glad you came.” His nose was red, with crying Lewis thought, and then saw that he had a bad cold.

  “Yes, I saw Hardesty and Ned Rowles and they told me. How did you hear?”

  “Hardesty called us at the office.” The two men entered the living room, and Lewis saw Sears James, seated in an easy chair, scowl when the sheriff was named.

  Stella came in from the dining room, gasped, and ran across the room to embrace him. “I’m so sorry, Lewis,” she said. “It’s such a damn shame.”

  “It’s impossible,” said Lewis.

  “That may be so, but it certainly was John who was taken to the county morgue this noon,” Sears said in a thick voice. “Who’s to say what is impossible? We’ve all been under a strain. I may go off the bridge tomorrow.” Stella gave Lewis an extra squeeze and went to sit beside Ricky on the Hawthorne’s couch. The Italian coffee table in front of them looked the size of an ice rink.

  “You need coffee,” Stella said, scrutinizing Lewis more carefully, and got up again to go into the kitchen.

  “You’d think it impossible,” Sears went on, unruffled by the interruption, “that three adult men like ourselves would have to huddle together for warmth, but here we are.”

  Stella returned with coffee for all of them, and the desultory conversation ceased for a moment.

  “We tried to reach you,” Ricky said.

  “I was out for a drive.”

  “It was John who wanted us to write to young Wanderley,” Ricky said after a moment.

  “Write to whom?” Stella asked, not understanding. Sears and Ricky explained. “Well, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” she finally said. “It’s just like the three of you, to get all worked up and then ask someone else to solve your problems. I wouldn’t have expected it from John.”

  “He’s supposed to be an expert, Stella,” Sears said in exasperation. “As far as I’m concerned, John’s suicide proves that we need him more than ever.”

  “Well, when’s he coming?”

  “Don’t know,” Sears admitted. He looked rumpled, a fat old turkey at the end of winter.

  “If you ask me, what you ought to do is stop those Chowder Society meetings,” Stella told him. “They’re destructive. Ricky woke up screaming this morning—all three of you look like you’ve seen ghosts.”

  Sears remained cool. “Two of us saw John’s body. That should be reason enough for looking a little out of sorts.”

  “How did—” Lewis began, and then stopped. How did he look? was a singularly stupid question.

  “How did what?” demanded Sears.

  “How did you happen to hire Eva Galli’s niece as a secretary?”

  “She asked for a job,” Sears said. “We had some extra work.”

  “Eva Galli?” asked Stella. “Wasn’t she that rich woman who came here, oh, a long time ago? I didn’t know her very well; she was much older than I. Wasn’t she going to marry someone? Then she just upped and left town.”

  “She was going to marry Stringer Dedham,” Sears said impatiently.

  “Oh yes, Stringer Dedham,” Stella remembered. “My goodness, he was a handsome man. There was that awful accident—something at a farm.”

  “He lost both arms in a threshing machine,” Ricky said.

  “Ugh. What a conversation. This must be like one of your meetings.”

  All three men had been thinking the same thing.

  “Who told you about Miss Mostyn?” asked Sears. “Mrs. Quast must gossip overtime.”

  “No, I met her. She was at Humphrey’s Place with Jim Hardie. She introduced herself to me.”

  The feeble conversation died again.

  Sears asked Stella if there was any brandy in the house, and Stella said she’d get some for everybody and disappeared again into the kitchen.

  Sears yanked savagely at his jacket, trying to make himself comfortable in the leather and metal chair. “You took John home last night. Did he seem unusual in any way?”

  Lewis shook his head. “We didn’t talk much. He said your story was good.”

  “He didn’t say any more than that?”

  “He said he was cold.”

  “Humph.”

  Stella returned with a bottle of Rémy Martin and three glasses on a tray. “You should see yourselves. You look like three owls.”

  They did not so much as nod.

  “Gentlemen, I’ll leave you with the brandy. I’m sure you have things you want to talk about.” Stella looked them over, autocratic and benign as a primary teacher, and then moved quickly out of the room without saying good-bye. Her disapproval stayed with them.

  “She’s upset,” Ricky said apologetically. “Well, we all are. But Stella’s more affected by this than she wants to show.” As if to make amends for his wife, Ricky leaned forward over the glass ice-rink table and poured a generous amount of cognac into each glass. “I need this too. Lewis, I just don’t understand what would make him do it. Why would John Jaffrey want to kill himself?”

  “I don’t know why,” said Lewis, taking one of the glasses. “Maybe I’m glad I don’t.”

  “Talk sense for a change,” Sears growled. “We’re
men, Lewis, not animals. We’re not supposed to stay cowering in the darkness.” He too accepted a glass and sipped. “As a species, we hunger for knowledge. For enlightenment.” His pale eyes angrily fixed on Lewis. “Or perhaps I misunderstood you, and you did not actually intend to defend ignorance.”

  “Overkill, Sears,” Ricky said.

  “Less jargon, Ricky,” Sears retorted. “‘Overkill,’ indeed. That might impress Elmer Scales and his sheep, but it does not impress me.”

  There was something about sheep—but Lewis had forgotten it. He said, “I don’t mean to defend ignorance, Sears. I just meant that—hell, I don’t know anymore. I guess I meant that it might be too much to take.” What he did not articulate but was half aware of was the notion that he feared to peer too closely into the last moments of any suicide’s life, be it friend or wife.

  “Yes,” breathed Ricky.

  “Twaddle,” said Sears. “I’d be relieved to learn that John was merely despairing. It’s the other explanations that frighten me.”

  Lewis said, “I have the feeling that I’m sort of missing something,” and proved to Ricky for the thousandth time that he was not the dullard of Sears’s imagination.

  “Last night,” Ricky said, holding his glass with both hands and smiling fatalistically, “after the other three of us had gone, Sears saw Fenny Bate on his staircase.”

  “Christ.”

  “That’s enough,” Sears warned. “Ricky, I forbid you to go into this. What our friend means, Lewis, is that I thought I saw him. I was badly frightened. It was an hallucination—a ha’nt, as they used to say in these parts.”

  “Now you’re arguing both ways,” Ricky pointed out. “For my part, I’d be happy to think you’re right. I don’t want to see young Wanderley here. I think we might all be sorry, just about the time it’s too late.”

  “You misread me. I want him to come and say: give it up. My Uncle Edward died of smoking and excitement, John Jaffrey was unstable. That’s the reason I agreed to John’s suggestion. I say, let him come, and the sooner the better.”