Ed McBain - Ghosts

Except Hiram Hollister, Carella thought.

“Was it similar to what you typed from the tape?”

“Well, I didn’t type all of it.”

“The portion you did type.”

“I didn’t have it to compare, but from memory I’d say it was identical to what I typed.”

“And you returned the tape to him before he left Hampstead?”

“Yes, I did.”

“How long a tape was it?”

“A two-hour cassette.”

“How much of it had you typed before he left?”

“Oh, I’d say about half of it.”

“An hour’s worth, approximately?”

“Yes.”

“How many pages did that come to?”

“No more than fifty pages or so.”

“Then the full tape would have run to about a hundred pages.”

“More or less.”

“Mrs. Jenkins, I haven’t read the book—would you remember how long it was?”

“In pages?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, it was a pretty fat book.”

“Fatter than a hundred pages?”

“Oh, yes. Maybe three hundred pages.”

“Then there would have been other tapes.”

“I have no idea. He just gave me the one tape.”

“How’d he get in touch with you?”

“I do work for other writers. We get a lot of writers up here in the summer. I guess he asked around and found out about me that way.”

“Had you done any work for him before this?”

“No, this was my first job for him.”

“And you say there was no title at the time?”

“No title.”

“Nothing on the cassette itself?”

“Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, there was. On the label, do you know? Written with a felt-tip pen.”

“What was on the label?”

“Ghosts.”

“Just the single word ‘ghosts’?”

“And his name.”

“Craig’s name?”

“Yes. ‘Ghosts’ and then ‘Gregory Craig.’”

“Then there was a title at the time.”

“Well, if you want to call it a title. But it didn’t say, ‘By Gregory Craig,’ it was just a way of identifying the cassette, that’s all.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins, you’ve been very helpful,” he said.

“Well, all right,” she said, and hung up.

He frankly didn’t know how she’d been helpful, but he guessed maybe she had. During Hillary’s trance last Saturday she had mentioned the word “tape” over and again and had linked it with the word “drowning.” He had conjured at once the image of a drowning victim whose hands or feet had been bound with tape—a flight of fancy strengthened by the fact that Gregory Craig’s hands had been bound behind his back with a wire hanger. In one of Carella’s books on legal pathology and toxicology, he had come across a sentence that made him laugh out loud: “If a drowned body is recovered from the water, bound in a manner that could not possibly have been self-accomplished, one might reasonably suspect homicidal intent.” Stephanie Craig’s body had been unfettered, neither chain, rope, wire, nor tape trussing her on the day she drowned. But here was another kind of tape entering the picture—and Carella could not forget that Hillary had linked “tape” with “drowning.”

She came into his room now without knocking. Her face was flushed, her eyes were glowing.

“I’ve just been on the phone with a woman named Elise Blair,” she said. “She’s the real estate agent whose sign was in the window of the house Greg rented.”

“What about her?” Carella asked.

“I described the house that was in Greg’s book. I described it down to the last nail. She knows the house. It was rented three summers ago to a man from Boston. She wasn’t the agent on the deal, but she can check with the Realtor who was and get the man’s name and address from the lease—if you want it.”

“Why should I want it?” Carella asked.

“It was the house in Shades, don’t you understand?”

“No, I don’t.”

“It was the house Greg wrote about.”

“So?”

“ He wasn’t living in that house, someone else was,” Hillary said. “I want to go there. I want to see for myself if there are ghosts in that house.”

The real estate agent who had rented the house three summers ago worked out of the back bedroom of her own house on Main Street. They trudged through the snow at a quarter past 6:00, walking past the lighted Christmas tree on the Common, ducking their heads against the snow and the fierce wind. The woman’s name was Sally Barton, and she seemed enormously pleased to be playing detective. She had known all along, she told them, that the house Craig wrote about was really the old Loomis house out on the Spit. He had never pinpointed the location, had never even mentioned the town of Hampstead for that matter—something she supposed they should all be grateful for. But she knew it was the Loomis house. “He loved the sea, Frank Loomis did,” she said. “The house isn’t your typical beach house, but it looks right at home on the Spit. He fell in love with it when he was still living in Salem, had it brought down here stick by stick, put it on the beachfront land he owned.”

“Salem?” Carella said. “Here in Massachusetts?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Barton said. “Where they hanged the witches in 1692.”

She offered them the key to the house, which she said she’d been unable to rent the summer before, but that had nothing to do with Gregory Craig’s ghosts. Not many people outside the town knew that this was the house he’d made famous in his book.

“Don’t know how he got away with it,” she said. “Claimed it was a true story and then didn’t tell anybody where the house actually was. Said it was to protect the innocent. What innocent? Frank Loomis has been dead for fifty years, and his two sons are living in California and couldn’t care less whether there are ghosts in the house. All they’re interested in is renting it each summer. Still, I guess he might’ve been afraid of legal complications. You’d know more about that than I would,” she said, and smiled at Carella.

“Well, I’m not a lawyer, ma’am,” Carella said, and returned the smile, aware that he’d just been flattered. “I wonder if you can tell me who rented the house three summers ago.”

“Yes, I looked for the lease right after you called. It was a man named Jack Rawles.”

“What’d he look like?”

“A pleasant-looking person.”

“Young, old?”

“In his late twenties, I’d say.”

“What color hair?”

“Black.”

“Eyes?”

“Brown.”

“And his address?”

She gave him the slip of paper on which she had copied Rawles’s Commonwealth Avenue address from the lease, and then she said, “It’s not an easy house to rent, you know. Frank never did modernize it. There’s electricity, of course, but the only heat’s from the fireplaces. There’re three of them, one in the living room, one in the kitchen, and another in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It’s not too bad during the summer, but it’s an icebox in the wintertime. Are you sure you want to go out there just now?”

“Yes, we’re positive,” Hillary said.

“I’d go with you, but I haven’t fixed my husband’s supper yet.”

“We’ll return the key to you as soon as we’ve looked the place over,” Carella said.

“There’s supposed to be a dead woman there, searching for her husband,” Mrs. Barton said.

At a local garage Carella bought a pair of skid chains and asked the attendant to put them on the car while he and Hillary got something to eat at the diner up the street. It was still snowing when they left the town at 7:00. The plows were working the streets and the main roads, but he was grateful for the chains when they hit the cutoff that led to the strand of land jutting out into the Atlantic. A sign crusted with snow informed them that this was Albright’s Spit, and a sign under it warned that this was a dead-end road. The car struggled through the thick snow, skidding and lurching up what Carella guessed was a packed sand road below. He almost got stuck twice, and when he finally spotted the old house looming on the edge of the sea, he heaved a sigh of relief and parked the car on a relatively level stretch of ground below the sloping driveway. Together, the flashlight lighting their way, he and Hillary made their way to the front door.