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

Everyone turned toward Etheline, though slowly, as if they’d rather not.

“Cedric got a call last night,” Etheline whispered with a wobbly chin. “At the stroke of midnight.”

“Does the sheriff know about that?” I said.

“Ask him yourself,” Mrs. Becky answered with a nod toward the doorway, where a white apparition had appeared.

It wasn’t any ghost that’d joined us though, only Sheriff Huck with the morning sunlight streaming all around him thick as a hundred flares. He’d taken to wearing a starchy white suit as if it made him shine like some beacon of justice.

“Who’s bit the dust now?” the sheriff grumbled, though I could tell what he was really asking was, Why me?

Telephones had been around ever since thirty some years back when Mr. Alexander Graham Bell just had to prove he could ship the human voice through metal wires and have it come out the other end. I’m still not sure on what carried it in between, and if I had my druthers, I’d rather not know. Seems to me that people talk entirely too much as it is, and this machine just adds to the racket. The goods news about all that? If it’s taken the town of Marquis, Iowa, thirty years to get seven phones set up, it’ll probably take nine or ten centuries at least to get a phone in every house, so maybe I’m safe.

We wouldn’t even have those seven phones if thirty years ago Becky Finn’s father hadn’t felt a powerful itch to travel all the way to Philadelphia for a chance to see the centennial exposition, and President Ulysses S. Grant, and exactly what rubber from India was. And there was talk of an ostrich egg hatcher that caught his eye too. When he came back with news of what an electric telephone could do, he nearly got laughed out of town until young Jimmy Dubois said that he’d read about Mr. Bell’s work in a scientific journal that some gent on a passing steamer had left behind. That had the loafers on Main Street rolling in the dust and holding their sides, hard as they were cackling. It was all downhill from there.

To save face, Becky’s father had young Jimmy build a phone line between his house and the Dewitt Drug Emporium so that he wouldn’t have to hoof that long three blocks downtown every time he needed another dose of those special salts that kept him regular as the nine-oh-five from Quincy.

Soon as the finer sorts heard that Becky’s pa didn’t have to go traipsing downtown on a rainy day but could just ring Rutherford up and place an order — well everybody who was anybody had to have one of them dowickets put in their house. The line connecting those seven homes up ran in a big loop, with the Dewitt Drug Emporium marking the beginning and end of it. There were some drawbacks to that arrangement. Say you wanted a private telephone chat? Forget it. Anyone on the line could listen in anytime they wanted. And offer free advice if they’d a mind to, which some did. All they had to do was pick up their receiver and have at it. The Marquis telephone line wasn’t any place to keep a secret. On the other hand, it was exactly the place to go if you wanted to fan a rumor, like say news of the town’s ghosts doing away with telephone owners.

“Anybody touched anything?” The sheriff generally liked to pop a question like that to start things off. It let people know who was in charge.

“Did you want us to?” That was his wife, Becky.

He did his best to ignore her, saying, “It appears Cedric didn’t finish his drink.” He strolled behind the dead man, nodding toward the half empty glass. An open bottle of brandy stood next it. “Didn’t bother hanging up his phone, either.”

“Might have been too busy dying to get around to it,” I pointed out.

“So I hear,” the sheriff went on, ignoring me, “that this is some ghost’s handiwork. Anybody care to tell me about that?”

Several did, all at once, so the sheriff suggested at the top of his lungs that they take turns, then pointed at Molly McIntosh to start us off.

“I heard the telephone ring four times,” Molly said.

Four rings was the signal for Cedric’s place. Each house had its own signal. “At the stroke of midnight,” Alfreda Scrim clarified.

“And then?” the sheriff prodded because everyone suddenly clammed up.

When nobody rushed in to answer, Becky laughed and spoke her mind. “They all hurried over to lift up their receivers and find out why someone would be calling Cedric at that time of night.”

“It could have been an emergency,” Alfreda huffed.

“Turned out it was,” the sheriff agreed. “So what’d you hear?”

Now Alfreda and Etheline both ’fessed up to hearing the ghost extending Cedric an invitation to join her in the next world.

“Her?” the sheriff pounced.

“Could have been him,” Etheline wavered.

Making a face, the sheriff said, “That’s what Widow Brown’s ghost said, too, am I right?”

“For once,” Mrs. Becky conceded.

“Did Cedric say anything to the ghost?” the sheriff soldiered on.

There was disagreement, but in the end they decided he’d said nothing, though Alfreda insisted she’d heard him gasp.

Etheline’s jaw trembled extra hard, as if she had something to say, but nothing was coming out. Finally her nephew spoke up on her behalf, saying, “My aunty thinks that these ghosts are upset by people using the telephones. The electromagnetic current those phone lines give off doesn’t give the spirits a minute’s rest. It may be that the only way to stop these terrible deeds is to rip out the telephone lines that are causing—”

“No!” Etheline stubbornly blurted, as if her nephew had willfully gotten her message all wrong. “That’s not what I wanted to say at all, and you know it. I wanted all of you to know that being a shut-in such as I am, my only connection to the entire world is through these marvelous talking machines and that I have decided to bequeath my entire fortune to the city of Marquis, to be used for the installation of a telephone in every house hereabouts.”

That was more than double the talking I’d ever heard from Miss Etheline in all the years I’d known her, and she sounded more than usual off the tracks too. But considering her health, allowances were made, especially when she seized up and started to cough. Her nephew patted her back gently, saying he best take her home to rest. “Her strength’s not what it should be,” he explained

“Poor dear,” Molly McIntosh cooed as Etheline got wheeled away.

“She could be next,” Alfreda Scrim predicted, leaning on her experience as a preacher’s wife. “Her color doesn’t look at all right.”

“I’ll send her some salts,” Rutherford boomed.

“I can tell you one thing,” Mrs. Becky judged, casting a thoughtful glance at the back of Etheline’s wheelchair. “She knows more than she’s letting on.”

That was a trumpet call to battle for the sheriff, who straightened up, hitched his thumbs in his vest pocket, and declared, “Oh, folderol. That poor old girl’s scared half to death, that’s all. I dare say she’s just talking to save her own skin.”

That put Mrs. Becky’s back up considerably, and she let fly, “And how, pray tell, does her promising to buy telephones for this little fly-speck of a town do that?”

“Why, can’t you see?” the sheriff asked. “She’s trying to warn this ghost not to fool with her because if he or she does, they’ll be a lot more than seven telephones around to upset them.”

You could almost hear the juices bubbling inside Mrs. Becky’s head after being talked to so high handed. Without wasting a word, she sashayed out of Cedric Whipplemore’s parlor as if she had far better ways to pass the time than listening to her husband blow hot and cold.