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

The rest of the night turned out to be longer than a ten-mile hike in tight boots. While the sheriff shooed everyone back to bed, I spent a couple of hours lurking around the McIntosh lumberyard without catching so much as a whiff of the night watchman, who supposedly trailed a smoky scent wherever he haunted. I did, however, discover that the yard’s back gate had been left ajar. That was the first I’d ever heard of a ghost needing to open a gate to go through it.

From there I ambled on past the Dewitt Drug Emporium, but all was quiet. Too quiet, if you asked me. I half expected to spot the two young ghosts who had been Rutherford’s brothers playing leapfrog out front, but I didn’t catch so much as a flicker of them. What I did get an eyeful of was a white horse galloping down main street. Its eyes might have been blazing. I couldn’t tell for sure because I was so busy watching the rider’s sword swoosh through the night air. His blade cut the moonlight to shreds and left me pressed against a dark wall, holding my breath for all I was worth.

Against my better judgment, I struck out after him. On foot, of course. I didn’t have time to wake up my old nag, fling a saddle on her, and give chase, which was just as well. I wasn’t completely sold on catching up to any apparitions. Just seeing the general direction he was headed was more than enough to satisfy me, and besides, as I was tiptoeing after him, I noticed a light still burning at Etheline Spavin’s. Usually her place was dark as the river.

I was beginning to get the notion that I might have been missing a thing or two on my nightly rounds. Keeping that in mind, I checked up and down the street, then crept up to the lighted window to make sure everything was safe and sound with Etheline. I found myself staring at a bedside oil lamp and an empty wheelchair, but I never got a chance to figure out if she was tucked in for the night. A flutter and chill drew my eyes upward first, toward the widow’s walk. With a lurch, I found myself gazing at a cloaked figure I’d never noticed before, only heard of.

For a few twitchy heartbeats that hooded thing and me stood there staring at each other as if one of us owed the other money. That ended when someone screeched behind me. Naturally I whipped around, expecting to find the horseman bearing down on me. But except for moonlight, the street was empty. The screech kept on going, though, sounding awful high and thin to belong to a cavalry captain swinging a sword. Slowly it dawned on me that it might not be a screech but the work of an opera singer trying to tackle a high C. Whoever it was held the note long enough to make the whole night seem about to shatter and come crashing down. The note stretched out thinner and thinner until almost gone. By then I could barely separate it from the rustling of the last few leaves still clinging to the trees. And then it cut off. Everything went back to being still as the instant before you fall asleep.

Rechecking the widow’s walk, I found the cloaked figure gone, and just as I lowered my eyes to the window I’d been peering through, the oil lamp inside got snuffed out, leaving me with nothing to look at but black. I raised a hand to rap on the glass and call out to Miss Etheline, but thought better. How was I ever going to explain what I was doing peeking in a lady’s bedroom window?

Instead, I listened until hearing the rustle of bedsheets. Satisfied all was safe, I pushed off toward the cemetery to see if any ghosts were cavorting out there. I thought there was a good chance there might be, seeing as how that’s the direction the horseman had galloped off.

When I got there a thin layer of mist hung over the gravestones, but nothing was stirring, unless you counted the tail of Preacher Scrim’s horse, which happened to be white and tied up to the cemetery’s gate. When I ran a hand over its flank, I found it’d worked up a fine lather, but a quick glance toward the parsonage told me everything was quiet there.

That summed up my night, though I figured I’d found out enough to make the sheriff think twice about ever sending me after ghosts again.

The next day, about noon, I rolled out of the jail cell where I sleep, stretched and scratched, and headed down to Lady Small’s Café for lunch. The proprietress clanked a cup of coffee down in front of me as if mad at the world, which was unusual, considering what a cheery chatterbox she was. Normally she never got tired of telling me about her days as a circus performer who’d warbled and taken bows before the crowned heads of Europe. She had a photo mounted on the wall to prove it too. Just listening to her call out an order to her cook was worth the price of a meal. When I asked what’d flown up her nose today, she patted her throat and grimaced as if coming down with the first cold of the season, though she didn’t seem to have any sniffles. Still, whatever she had didn’t sit well. You could tell she was just dying to ask me about all the ghosts that were scaring half the town to death. But sore as her throat was, she didn’t have any choice but to let her other customers pester me half to death about what was going on.

They did a bang-up job of it, too, throwing up questions and possibilities fast as I could knock them down. Hard as they went at it, you didn’t need a newspaper reporter to tell you that the whole town was in an uproar. To eat my meal in peace, I had to pick up my roast beef sandwich and leave, though as I was easing out the door, I couldn’t resist letting slip that they could all rest easy because the sheriff was pretty close to making an arrest. So far as I knew he wasn’t any closer to that than Sisyphus was to getting his rock up that hill, and now he’d have everyone hounding him to reveal what he had up his sleeve. Maybe that’d teach him to go whispering my name around a graveyard.

And then, wouldn’t you know, I began to wonder if the scoundrel might actually be onto something he wasn’t sharing. He’d sicced me after those ghosts awful quick and seemed to be finding time to have some fun to boot. Unable to shake the idea that he was holding out on me, I headed toward his house to find out what he’d been up to.

I didn’t bother knocking at the front door but slipped directly around back to the sheriff’s shed, where I found him whittling a hickory stick down to nothing. That was never a good sign, though at least all his fingers were still attached.

“Deputy Joe,” he said, sulking the way he did whenever he and his missus had been chawing on each other, “I’m thinking we’d better gather the interested parties together tonight so’s we can make the telephones of Marquis, Iowa, safe again. I’ll leave it to you to let everyone know. And, Deputy, in case you’re wondering, that includes my missus. She’ll probably take it better from you. Let’s tell them to meet at Etheline Spavin’s place, shall we? You know how hard it is for her to move about, especially so late. Tell ’em a little before midnight. And order up a storm if you can. For drama.”

I never got a chance to try and talk my way out of it. Tossing what was left of his whittling aside, he pushed off for main street before I could, saying he had a loose thread or two to pull together. Perhaps. Just as likely, he was clearing out fast before I tackled Mrs. Becky. All well and good because I was still wondering what her and Archibald Dewitt had been so thick about down at the drug emporium.

But when I circled back up front, I found out why the sheriff had been whittling so fiercely. There sat Archibald in the drawing room, having another word with Mrs. Becky. The two of them appeared stuck fast together as thieves, which left me wondering if the sheriff’s wife hadn’t finally decided to leave her husband for good. Archibald was single enough for her needs and appeared to be just basking in her attentions. And the cookies he was being served didn’t seem to break his molars or curl his tongue, either. Those were good signs if he was planning on running off with Mrs. Becky. She was the kind of woman who had more important things to do than wrestle with recipes over a hot stove.