Robert Lopresti: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 56, No. 5, May 2011

“Well?”

That well belonged to Becky Finn, who had enough of them to spare. Being the wife of the sheriff, she had plenty of chances to put them to use too. She was a handsome woman, in a stern, blonde way, and I generally stayed as far from her as I did from thundering locomotives, especially when she started asking where her husband was.

“Expect he’ll be along shortly,” I mumbled, praying that was the case. “He had a little work to finish first.”

Covering up for the sheriff was one of my regular duties. Of course he knew his missus would be at the crime scene as soon as I told him we had another one. He also knew that all the other people who owned a telephone in town would be there, too, all seven of them, except for the two who were now dead, and maybe if we squinted real hard we might even have been able to see them, too, looking wispy and peaked and not quite with us anymore but not quite departed from us either. The sheriff generally put on a show worth hanging around for.

About a week back the first dead telephone owner had shown up, a glass of lemonade in one hand, her telephone receiver in the other. I’m talking about the Widow Brown, who’d received a call from a ghost wanting to know if she was ready to pass over to the other side. Nobody figured that restless spirit was talking about the other side of the river. How did we know it was a ghost? Because everyone else who owned one of those infernal talking machines had gotten a call too. And they all claimed the voice they’d heard sounded too stretched out and windblown to be from this world, though that was about all they could agree on. Votes were split on whether it was a man or woman spirit ringing them up. And poor Etheline Spavins, who was fraying on the edges anyway, she kept changing her mind about even that. All her dithering kept her nipping on her nerve medicine, which she was more than willing to share, kindly soul that she was, though I couldn’t help but notice that when she did pass her flask around, everyone’s recollections of the voice grew shriller, not calmer.

’Course sensible folks wanted to pin the Widow Brown’s end on the Confederate captain who haunted her livery stable. Didn’t matter that the widow had been found slumped over her telephone with nary a sword mark or hoof print on her — people figured that Confederate cavalryman finally got some peace. After all, he’d been shot in the back by the widow’s husband in the war and followed him home afterward. On moonless nights he was said to prance his white stallion down main street while brandishing a sword and whooping it up worse than ten comancheros. I’d never seen the fella myself, but everyone who had said it wasn’t a show you wanted to miss.

But was that Confederate captain the spook who did in Cedric too? That didn’t quite make sense, especially with a phantom opera singer waiting in the wings. Naturally half the town — the womanly half — was going to chime in that she deserved her due too.

And that wasn’t the end of our visitors from the other side. We had a real bumper crop of them that year, and everyone wanted to nominate their favorite as the culprit. The only one of the surviving telephone owners who didn’t have an opinion on the matter seemed to be the sheriff’s wife Becky, and that was because she claimed she never answered the phone and didn’t care what the local spooks were up to. So far as she was concerned no one in our town ever said anything worth hearing, and that included the ghosts.

“What I want to know,” Rutherford Dewitt stated for the record, “is what the sheriff is doing to protect those of us who are still breathing. We do pay his salary. Yours too, Deputy.”

I skipped over mentioning how little they paid. Rutherford wasn’t the sort you felt like complaining to. He was too big for most horses to carry and didn’t have any more sense of humor than a hangnail. He spent most of his days glowering and talking louder than necessary because he was hard of hearing but wouldn’t admit it. I answered loudly that the sheriff was tracking down several lines of inquiry, which went over about as well as a storm cloud on a wedding day.

“He has yet to even come talk to me,” Molly McIntosh informed everyone. She was a slight, pasty-faced woman who’d dressed in black ever since her father had passed on some years ago. “I am all alone down at the lumberyard, you know.” Her voice faded away to a hoarse whisper to add, “Almost.”

She didn’t want anyone to forget she had her own ghost, of course. You see, except for Becky, all the telephone owners claimed to have spirits plaguing them quite regular, and since everyone but Becky was getting on in years, they couldn’t sleep worth a hoot and stayed up half the night, complaining to each other over the telephone about what bedevilment their ghosts had been up to. Molly’s restless spirit had been the night watchman at her family’s lumberyard. He’d been burned to a crisp in a blaze that twenty years back turned most of her family’s business to ash. To hear Molly tell it, that spook never gave her a moment’s peace.

“Now now, Molly, you’ve only got one ghost haunting you. I’d think you’d have the decency to let these lawmen concentrate on my place first.” That was Alfreda Scrim, the preacher’s wife, who lived right next the cemetery and liked to reflect that it never rained but it poured when it came to ghosts and such around her house.

“Yes, but Alfreda, you’ve a preacher to protect you,” Molly reminded. “When the clock chimes midnight, I’m all alone.”

“The preacher?” Alfreda harrumphed, having no high opinion of her husband’s way with ghosts, or anything else for that matter. “When the clock strikes twelve he’s gone to world, and I’m all on my own, same as you, excepting I don’t have just one lazy visitor from the hereafter to contend with. I’ve got a whole graveyard full of unhappy sinners right outside my door. And I have to tell you, lately any time my phone rings after dark, they’re stirring. Something about that sound makes them restless. Injun Joe, if you and the sheriff are finally going to start looking for a culprit, I’d say you’d be wise to start in that cemetery.”

“As if they could hear the phone ringing above your voice,” Rutherford declared with a snort. Other than Mrs. Becky, he was the only one with a telephone who didn’t admit to having a ghost, though everyone claimed he had a pair of them. Two little boys, not more than seven and eight, who’d been known to flicker in and out of sight during lightning flashes. People whispered they were his drowned brothers.

“Couldn’t we all just try to not talk about them?” asked a weak, wobbly voice. Naturally that was the local steamboat heiress, Etheline Spavin, speaking. She could lay claim to the best known ghost in town, namely her mother, who’d thrown herself from the widow’s walk of their riverside mansion upon discovering that her husband had a whole other family down below Cape Girardeau. All that personal misfortune had settled a great shyness over Etheline, especially when her father abandoned her with an elderly aunt and went to live with his other wife and kids. Etheline turned inward after that and had as little to do with the outside world as possible. In fact, I was shocked to see her in Cedric’s overstuffed parlor at all. She wouldn’t have been there if her nephew, Perry Woodley, hadn’t pushed her over in that high-backed wheelchair that she hadn’t left for years. But there she sat, with one of her cats purring on her lap and her eyes darting everywhere as if she could see things no one else could.

“Aunty has something she thought you better know,” Perry Woodley said. Being a lawyer, he had a way of saying things that made people expect the worst.