GHOSTS: 2014 edition (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 1) Page 9

  Still unresolved, of course, was the question that only he could ask himself and only he could ultimately answer: Had he walked away from San Jose in disgust? Or had he left the department because he wasn’t up to the challenges of being a policeman in a big city? Did he really have the inner courage to carry a badge and protect the public? Or had he now settled into a comfortable small-town department where few cases which required true street-style courage would ever come his way?

  He didn’t have answers yet. And he didn’t know if he ever would.

  But that, resolutely, was how Tim Brooks might have told the story of his own life. Or at least that’s how he would have told it up until a July morning when a college girl from Cape Cod was found dead in an open field.

  Chapter Eleven

  From a deep sleep in the middle of the night, Annette came alert. Her eyes opened. She lay in bed for several seconds, thinking. She wondered why she was awake in the darkness in the first hours of Sunday. Then Annette knew, though she didn’t see her. The visitor was back. The specter. The woman in white. Two nights in a row.

  Call it what it was. The ghost.

  Annette felt her flesh creep. She looked around the room. There was no movement. There were no shadows, no enigmatic configurations of light and darkness. Just quiet. Just stillness. And yet, Annette knew the ghost was somewhere.

  Annette rose from bed. She went to the top of the stairs. Then slowly, she descended. The house was cool, chilly for a summer night. Almost abnormally so.

  Annette arrived at the landing at the base of the steps. She moved into the living room and saw her. The woman in white—the ghost—was standing near the fireplace. She turned, the spirit did, when Annette entered the room. The ghost acknowledged the living owner’s presence, but she went about her tasks. She stood by the hearth for many minutes, staring, as if she were considering a matter of great sorrow.

  It was a whitish transparent presence that Annette saw again, clearly visible through the darkness, as if illuminated by some soft low hidden spotlight. It was definitely a woman. This time, however, Annette had a sense that the woman was much younger. This was perhaps a woman of less than Annette’s own age.

  Then, with a flash, Annette made a realization. This was a different woman. Younger. Prettier. A second woman in white. Annette then had another sense, much like an idea coming to her from somewhere unknown: the sorrow this woman felt was very fresh and very painful.

  Annette’s fear vanished. She watched this new specter with fascination. She backed away from the room and slowly seated herself on the bottom step of the staircase and gazed into the living room. It was as if she were too riveted to flee, yet too fascinated not to watch. The ghost turned and sat down in a rocker near the hearth. Annette would later remember feeling that the woman was finally content about something—maybe just pleased to have been seen and smiled, though later Annette wouldn’t remember seeing her smile. Again, it was just a smell.

  Then Annette felt an idea forming inside her, a thought that she couldn’t immediately unravel. Nor could she give words to it. It was a feeling, not a pleasant one. It was one of caution, almost one of foreboding or dread. It was much like the feeling one has when one knows something is bothering one but cannot quite place it.

  Annette looked downward for a moment, then back up. She stared at the ghost. The woman seemed to still be in her chair, gently rocking. Annette felt the woman was facing her, but she couldn’t see clearly enough to determine the woman’s expression.

  Then the feelings within Annette started to fade. And with them faded the vision in the living room. Seconds later, the ghost was gone.

  Annette stared at the place for what seemed like many minutes but which was probably a much shorter time. She had the urge to step forward and turn the room lights on but, in a funny sort of reaction, hesitated. She didn’t know whether light would antagonize the specter.

  So she waited for several more minutes. Then she stood. Her hand found the old light switch near the door of the living room. Annette turned on the room lights. The room was suddenly bright.

  Annette squinted. The room was empty. Not a soul there. The only thing moving was the rocking chair, which, right before Annette’s eyes, was moving very slightly, as if someone had left it a moment earlier. Then it eased to a gentle halt, as if guided by an unseen hand.

  Annette felt a deep shiver. She held one of her hands in the other. The room was very still now, very empty and very comfortable. Then Annette suddenly knew that the presence was gone, driven away perhaps by the light. It was a very palpable feeling, as if she had felt the woman brush invisibly past her and leave the room.

  “Gone,” Annette thought to herself. “Sure. Gone. Gone to where?”

  An unsettling thought started to form again within her. And then that vanished as well. Yet for some reason she wasn’t frightened. And she congratulated herself on her courage.

  “You should be scared,” she mumbled to herself. “You saw a ghost again! You should be scared, but you’re not. Brave girl. Very good!”

  She blew out a long breath to reassure herself.

  She recalled that it was not unlike her conquest of professional fear several years ago. Fear of audiences while upon a stage. Fear of auditions. Fear of a live television camera.

  Fear of death? Fear of life? Fear of the afterlife? Fear of no afterlife?

  Tired, she looked for a place to sit. She avoided the rocker and chose the sofa. It was half-past three in the morning. She studied the furniture. The rocker. The side tables. Some antique chairs. The huge old china cabinet that no one could budge.

  A few moments later, remaining in the living room, Annette closed her eyes. Just for a minute, she told herself. She would just close her fatigued eyes for a minute. Then she would climb the stairs again and go back to bed.

  Her mind worked overtime.

  “Ghosts,” she whispered in the quiet room. “Oh, yeah. Sure. All the time. I believe that, don’t I?”

  Her eyes opened a crack. The room was quiet and cozy.

  “There really has to be a rational explanation for this,” she thought. “I mean, what’s going on here? I have to find the rational explanation tomorrow.”

  In her sleepiness, she considered it further.

  “Right. First thing tomorrow morning. That’s what I’ll do.”

  Instead of going back upstairs to bed, she fell asleep on the sofa. There she remained. She dozed for several hours. Her eyes opened at half-past eight the next morning, when the light from a gray cloudy morning seeped into Annette’s living room.

  She made herself coffee and breakfast. Then, her resolution firm now, she reached for the telephone.

  “Ghosts,” she reassured herself as she pressed a number into landline pushbutton telephone. “What utter rubbish.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Elsewhere on the island that Sunday morning, the interrogation continued. Tim Brooks was nominally off duty at the time, but was in the police building catching up on paperwork. His office bordered the office used by Rodzienko and Gelman, and was within twenty feet of the Gray Room as well.

  Brooks studied the interrogation, or as much of it as he could see and hear. He watched the greatly shaken Arthur Lloyd bring his son to the precinct. He watched the boy submit to another torturous morning of questioning. From his desk, Brooks could hear much of the conversation in the Gray Room. Then, toward noon, as Brooks worked at his desk, a familiar figure with white hair lurched into Brooks’ doorway.

  Brooks looked up. Captain Agannis’ eyes were fixed upon him. “What are you doing here, today, Tim? Working? Or just eavesdropping on your peers?” Lieutenant Agannis asked.

  “Both.”

  “Figures,” Agannis growled. The lieutenant always sounded as if his head ached.

  “Got time for a nuisance run today?” Agannis asked. Whenever the lieutenant asked, it was strongly suggested that the officer in question make the time.

  “Sure,” Brooks said a
fter a pause.

  “Come down to my office, Timmy, will ya?”

  Brooks followed his superior through a corridor. The walls here were green, just as they were in Brooks’ office. And, like Brooks’ walls, the paint was starting to peel. Agannis led him to the higher rent district of the building, right next to the chief’s office.

  The paint was flaking there, too. Under the rules of the new stimulus-era austerity, all decorating costs had been whacked from the town budget.

  Agannis led Brooks into the assistant chief’s office. Agannis trudged behind his own desk and landed heavily in a leather swivel chair. Boomer, seated on a mat beneath a window, raised his head expectantly and recognized the younger policeman. Boomer gave a halfhearted wag of his tail and then settled back into his afternoon snooze.

  “What have you got?” Brooks finally inquired.

  “The old Ritter woman. The one who walks around at night,” Agannis said, leaping into the subject at hand. “Helen Ritter. You remember her?”

  “How could I not?” Brooks said. He seated himself on a wooden chair across from the lieutenant.

  “Seen her recently?”

  Brooks shrugged. “Maybe a week or ten days ago.”

  “How’d she seem?”

  “About the same as ever.”

  Agannis foraged through the top drawer of his desk as he spoke. He found a battered soft pack of Marlboros that contained a few final smokes. His thick fingers intruded into the pack. Then he remembered the oppressive new NO SMOKING rules and tossed the pack back into the drawer.

  “Harmless old hen. Sweet old woman, actually,” Agannis said, shaking his head slightly and rambling off on a brief tangent. “You know, she was a schoolteacher on this island forever. I had her myself when I was in eleventh grade.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It is.”

  “Must have been a hundred years ago,” Brooks suggested.

  Agannis grinned. For a moment, through a strange cast of light that filtered through the fresh cloud of smoke, Brooks’ commanding officer looked horribly ancient and his skin seemed to take on the hue of granite. From somewhere there was a fragment of sunlight from outside. Through the haze, it illuminated one side of Agannis’ face and made a hollow out of his eye on the opposite side.

  Brooks blinked as if his vision hadn’t focused properly. Then, just as abruptly, the light from outside shifted and Agannis looked normal again.

  “We got a complaint from an address on Cort Street this morning,” Agannis said. “Some single woman lives there. New to the island. I don’t know who the hell she is. Summer resident probably. Wealthy if she’s at that address. I think the house was sold recently. Anyway, she thinks there was a woman wandering about her property the last two nights. Or something.”

  “On her lawn or driveway or what?” Brooks asked.

  “Inside the house,” Agannis said.

  “She saw someone?”

  Agannis nodded. “She says she did.”

  “And she filed an actual complaint?” Brooks inquired.

  “Nah. She just asked us to look into it.” Agannis glanced at a paper on his blotter. “She phoned an hour ago.” Lieutenant Agannis paused. “Check with the dispatcher, will ya? I don’t even know the name. We got a call this morning around ten thirty.”

  Brooks nodded.

  “The woman said that she would like the visits to stop,” Agannis said. “Of course, if she’d lock her doors at night it would help, too, wouldn’t it?”

  Brooks acknowledged that it might.

  The lieutenant wrote down the address. Seventeen Cort Street.

  Brooks took the slip of paper from him as Agannis further enveloped himself in a cloud of his own making. He raised his eyes and locked into those of the younger man.

  “Looks like our Mrs. Ritter is on the prowl again,” he said. “Or at least that’s my guess. See if you can settle things down, will ya, Timmy?”

  “I’ll handle it,” Brooks assured his commander.

  “Today or tomorrow,” Agannis said. “No rush.”

  Brooks nodded and took the address. Then he departed from the lieutenant’s office.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The gray overcast darkened on Sunday morning until it turned into heavy showers. Kept away from the beaches, tennis courts and golf courses by the weather, vacationers and weekenders clustered in the center of Nantucket town, prowling through stores, lining up for breakfast at the inns and guest houses, and waiting near The Hub for the deliveries from the mainland of the New York and Boston newspapers. From Brant Point, the foghorn sounded mournfully every seven seconds.

  Annette spent most of the morning tidying her house. There were a few small pieces of extra furniture that had cluttered rooms. These she moved to the attic. She swept and vacuumed the top two floors of the house. Then she made a final series of trips to the attic, neatly storing suitcases and packing cartons in an area separate from the furniture.

  Even the Charlie McCarthy dummy, after some deliberation, made a trip to the topmost floor. There the dummy was carefully laid on a table and, to protect him from dust, beneath a heavy white sheet. Annette loved the dummy, but the reminder of her late mother remained painful. Better to keep Charlie out of sight for a while, she decided. Her housekeeping complete, Annette was filled with a sense of accomplishment.

  Then, early on Sunday afternoon, the rain slackened and there was a sharp knock on the front door of 17 Cort Street. Annette raised her eyes from the script that she was reading. She was in the living room of her house. She waited several seconds.

  Silence followed.

  Next came a series of knocks. Annette’s eyes left the story before her. In dismay, through her reading glasses, they settled upon the eighteenth-century hearth across the room.

  She waited. Annette was deeply annoyed to have a visitor. Enough of her time belonged to other people. “Go away,” she said softly. She meant it. After a few moments, a longer silence returned. She saw it as a victory and returned to her work.

  Annette had two ways of reading a movie script.

  Method One: She would read the first fifteen pages and make a decision whether or not to continue. If the story just plain didn’t interest her, she would stop. Or, if the screenwriter hadn’t set out his or her themes, characters, plots and subplots within the initial quarter hour of screen time, she could conclude that the structure of the story was already faulty. How could anyone hope that all of those vital elements would come together later—when bad craftsmanship was already apparent? So after fifteen minutes, bingo. If it didn’t work by then, it would land with a vengeful thud in the waste basket. It didn’t merit return postage.

  In truth, of course, Annette rarely received any scripts in this category. It was Joe Fischer’ job to screen out the clearly unprofessional efforts.

  Then, Method Two: If Annette liked the story as well as the character being offered to her and if the script passed the Twenty-minute litmus test, she would continue. Thereupon, she needed to read the complete work in one sitting—exactly the way the story would be presented on screen.

  One sitting. About an hour of reading time. Not one sitting with three interruptions, but one uninterrupted read. An intrusion, even after seventy pages, meant losing the feel of the story and the characters. She would have to go back to the beginning. Blessedly, there was no more knocking. A small wave of relaxation came over her. Annette sipped from a glass of diet Coke on the table by the sofa. Her eyes returned to the script on her lap.

  This one was titled Rumor of Guilt. It was a murder mystery set in Philadelphia, but which would be filmed in Vancouver. The author was an Englishman named Horace Westerly. Westerly was a successful television writer and a Joe Fischer client. He had also had two previous scripts produced as feature films. When restraining from all substance abuse, Joe Fischer had said, Westerly wrote well. Rumor of Guilt presented Annette with the role of a young woman who is suspected of poisoning a former lover so that her
current husband won’t learn of her affair. In trying to prove her innocence, the woman gradually reveals the affair, creates the impression that she is culpable and frames herself of murder.

  Joe Fischer thought the script was very cleverly written and had great possibilities, though it also reflected the author’s cynical view of the world. So far, Annette agreed on all counts. Her gaze drifted back to page thirty-one.

  Then there was a harder rapping at the front door. Annette’s eyes left the script again and her anger built rapidly. She had bought a house clear across the country to be left alone. She had closed her doors this afternoon. She had taken her phone off the hook.

  Why couldn’t the world take a hint? She didn’t want to be bothered.

  Fact was, had the weather not been dreary when the day began, she probably would have hauled the scripts off to an isolated beach on the south shore of the island. There the sea gulls, terns and greenhead flies didn’t care who was a movie star. There she could have sat in blissful isolation, listening to the surf pound and reading the material Joe Fischer had sent her.

  Again, the knocking.

  Furious, she stayed where she sat. Surely, whoever it was would inevitably go away. She would wait for peace and quiet to return.

  The final time, the knocking was so loud and insistent that it almost caused her to jump. And it came from a different source now. It was on the door at the rear of the house, the one next to the kitchen. It was loud and sharp. Seconds later, it was accompanied by an unfamiliar male voice calling out.

  “Hello…? Anyone home?”

  Annette muttered a long, low, single-syllable profanity. She laid aside her reading glasses on the table by her chair, putting them next to the glass of soda. She slammed the script down and stalked to the rear door. She peeked through the kitchen window.

  Her visitor—her nuisance—was a sandy-haired man in a blue short-sleeved shirt and tan slacks.