Goodlow's Ghosts (14 page)

"I understand."

"You wish you did."

"Of course. Yes."

"But you don't."

"I do, and I accept. Yes."

Silence.

"Sam?"

Nothing.

"Sam, are you still here?" He paused. "Are you still
here
, Sam?"

But Ryerson knew that he wasn't.

~ * ~

Fredrick's daughter was a tall, auburn-haired, and attractive woman of fifty-two whose name was Hanna Beckford. She came to look in on her father every couple of days, and although Fredrick knew that she thought of him as an invalid, and he resented her for it, he often looked forward to her visits. She was intelligent and had a droll sense of humor, much as had Fredrick's wife—Hanna's mother.

This morning, Hanna had found her father in the cellar babbling about "the face," and she was very concerned. She was even more concerned because he was cradling his cat in his arms, which he often did; but this morning, the cat was dead.

Hanna sat on the bottom cellar step, next to her father. She was trying to coax the dead cat from him, and she was trying, also, to find out what her father meant by "the face."

"Dad, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," she told him, "but Adam is dead. Why don't you give him to me, Dad." And she put her hands on the dead cat, next to her father's hands.

But Fredrick protested, "He's sleeping, don't wake him, dammit!"

Hanna withdrew her hands.

"There's someone
down
here, you know!" Fredrick said.

Hanna shook her head. "Just you and me, Dad."

"And Adam. And the face."

"What face, Dad?"

Fredrick took one hand from the dead cat and pointed tremblingly toward the cellar wall. "There."

"That's just a wall."

"Dammit, I
know
it's a wall. I'm telling you that
someone
was standing in
front
of it." He idly scratched Adam behind the ears.

"Who?" asked Hanna.

"Who, who? Who knows who, for Pete's sake. Someone."

"And where is he now?"

"He? Did I say 'he'? I did not. It was a she."

"Oh."

"Oh? And what does that mean—`oh'? You think I'm having some geriatric sex fantasy, don't you, my girl? Well I'm not, and I
know
I'm not, because I know what geriatric sex fantasies are, I have them all the time, and this wasn't one of them."

Hanna sniffed. She smelled something odd.
Fish?
she wondered.

Fredrick said, "Smell that? Fish?"

"Do you feed the cat down here, Dad?"

"No, no, no. What a stupid suggestion. It takes me three hours to get down those damned stairs."

"But isn't that a can of cat food there?" Hanna nodded at the floor in front of Fredrick's feet. He leaned over a little, saw the can, said, "I was coaxing Adam with it."

Hanna smelled salt air. Wet clay. She glanced at the cellar windows—perhaps one was open and it was letting in salt air from the ocean six miles away. But the windows were closed.

She grew tense suddenly, as if someone were watching her. She turned her head, looked toward the big furnace. It was on the far side of the cellar, and it was lost in shadow.

"Dad, can you stand up?" She put a hand on Fredrick's elbow to coax him up.

"Smell that?" he said. "The ocean."

"Yes, I do. Stand up, Dad." She was becoming very tense, now.

"The ocean, Hanna. Down here in my cellar." He seemed oddly pleased.

"Stand up, dammit!"

He stood, shakily, and then looked as if he were going to fall. "Let go of the cat, Dad," Hanna told him. "The cat is dead."

He nodded. "I know." He stroked the cat lovingly. "I know he's not asleep, Hanna. I know he's dead. I'm going to bury him."

"That's good, Dad. Let's just get upstairs, okay." He nodded again, but stayed put.

Hanna glanced quickly once more at the area of the furnace. The juxtaposition of furnace and shadow seemed to have changed. "Dad, move!"

"I'm trying to, Hanna. I can't."

"Of course you can. Just turn around and walk up the goddamned stairs."

"You do it, Hanna. I'm going to bury Adam." "For God's sake, you can't bury him down here."

"But I can, Hanna." He smiled. It was a smile full of secret pleasure.

He moved forward, off the bottom step and toward the wall, where the face had appeared.

Hanna grabbed his arm.

He shook it away. "Leave me alone, girl!" The venom in his voice made his daughter step back. "Dad?" she pleaded.

He took another step toward the wall. Another. Another.

And he was gone.

~ * ~

"I'm surprised to see you, Rye," said Captain Bill Willis.

"I've had time to think things over," Ryerson said, "and I want to see if I can help." He nodded at Willis's desk. "Is that the file?"

Willis nodded and handed the file over. Ryerson opened it, looked through it quickly, closed it. "You don't seem to have added anything in the past week."

Willis shrugged. "It's not a high priority case, Rye. Legally, Sam
Goodlow's
simply a missing person, which is about as unique as athlete's foot."

Ryerson smiled, took some jelly beans from the open decanter on Willis's desk, and popped them into his mouth. He asked, as he chewed, "Can I take this?"—meaning the file on Sam
Goodlow
.

Willis shrugged again. "Sure. Just don't let anyone out there see you taking it, okay?" He nodded to indicate the big precinct room beyond his office.

"Okay," Ryerson said. He stood. "So you can't tell me anything that's not here?" He tapped the file, which he held under his left arm.

Willis shook his head. "I'm hoping
you'll
be able to tell
us
something, Rye."

"I'll do what I can," Ryerson said.

Rebecca
Meechum
had a key to Sam's office, and when she opened the door late that evening, she went immediately to the big window—it looked out on a railroad yard—and closed the wide, dark green shade, then the curtains. She felt very theatrical doing this, and it pleased her. Cloak-and-dagger stuff was fun.

After she'd closed the curtains, she turned on the desk lamp and opened the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk until it caught. She reached into the back of the drawer, then up, withdrew a manila envelope lodged on the slats supporting the drawer above, put the envelope into her purse, and headed for the door.

"What's that?" she heard. She didn't recognize the voice. It was the voice of a man, and it was oddly accented. She stiffened, halfway to the door.

"That envelope," the voice said. "What is it?"

She shook her head. "Nothing. Who are you?"

"Christ, who am I? Just tell me what's in the damned envelope, Becky."

"How do you know me?"

"How do I know you? How do I know you? Peels, don't sack my chin."

"Huh?"

"Like I said."

Rebecca turned her head. The desk lamp was still on, and in its yellow light, she could see that the small room was empty. Perhaps the man was in the bathroom. She looked at the bathroom door; it was closed. The closet, then. She looked. Its door was closed, too. "You're not there," she whispered.

"There, where," said the voice. "Don't yank my chain, Becky."

"Where are you?"

"Who knows, who knows. The envelope, please."

A form appeared behind the desk. It was as tall as a man and as indistinct as smoke.

Rebecca screamed, ran from the office and out to her car.

The form behind the desk muttered to itself, "Was it something I dead, I sighed? Something I lied? Something I said?"

~ * ~

Stevie Lutz had always loved the ocean. She'd swum in it, surfed in it, fished in it, sailed on it. She'd taken several ocean cruises to nowhere in particular. The destinations were not important;
being there
, on the ocean, was.

What she loved most about the ocean was it bigness. It was big in a way that even large lakes are not. An ocean's horizon stretches beyond itself.

She had always wanted to live in a house next to the ocean, but her husband had nixed that idea. The ocean made him queasy, he said. It was the smell of fish, he said. But she knew better. The ocean, so vast and so powerful, was beyond his control. And he
needed
to be in control.

This fact alone had, more than once, made her think about leaving him and finding someone else. But he had been her childhood sweetheart and they had always planned on being married. What an awful disappointment if all that planning and hope came to nothing. In that other life, it would be unbearable.

Here, it wasn't.

Because she had always loved the ocean.

And so she loved this place, created from the mist of her memory.

She
was in control here.

She did not feel oppressed here. Or half alive.

~ * ~

Ryerson was walking Creosote on a well-lit street near his home. Creosote was not an easy dog to walk. He was too short, and the leash was too short, it was raining, and Creosote was reluctant to do his business in the rain, wanted to break out into a run, and could not. Ryerson had thought about getting a longer leash, a self-retracting fifteen-foot leash that would give the little dog some running room, but city ordinances did not allow such leashes, so Creosote had to be content to run in the town house.

A man was walking toward Ryerson. He was tall and stocky, was dressed in an overcoat and hat, and he made Ryerson feel suddenly tense. Ryerson could not see the man's face; the man's hat cast a shadow, but the man's gait—hands in his overcoat pockets, head down slightly, steps quick and short and purposeful—seemed threatening, and Ryerson stopped walking when the man was still fifty feet away.

The man stopped walking.

Creosote growled. It was more like a loud and ragged purr than a growl, and the man in the overcoat chuckled and called, "I'm sure he means well."

Ryerson didn't recognize the man's voice. It was deep, and accented, though he couldn't place the accent. Ryerson said, "Do you have business with me?"

"I'm not sure."

"You don't know if you have business with me?"

"Is your name Sam
Goodlow
?"

"No."

"Then I don't have business with you."

"Why did you stop walking when I stopped walking?"

"I wasn't aware that I had."

"Yes, you did."

The man looked down at his feet. "You're right. I'm not walking."

Ryerson felt a moment of confusion. It was not his own confusion, he realized. It was the man's confusion. He was not what he appeared to be.

The man took his hands from his coat pockets. He shrugged, turned around, and walked back the way he had come, down the well-lit street, then, while Ryerson watched, turned left, down another street, and was gone.

Moments later, a car appeared from the street the man had turned on. The car was big and important looking, but Ryerson was lousy with makes of cars and so could not say what kind it was. It turned away from Ryerson; he heard the hum of its big engine, noted the car's license number—a vanity plate; it read BIG MAMA—and then, in a split second, the car was gone, as if the rainy night had swallowed it up.

Ryerson glanced at Creosote, who glanced back, flat face a blank. Ryerson said, "What the hell was
that
all about, do you think?" Had the man really been on the street? Ryerson wondered. Or the car?

But Creosote wasn't talking.

~ * ~

Ryerson was on the phone with Captain Bill Willis minutes later. "I need you to check out a license plate number for me, Bill."

"Sure. What is it?"

"Massachusetts, I think; B-I-G," he spelled, "space, M-A-M-A."

"`BIG MAMA'?"

"'BIG MAMA.'"

"Okay. The Motor Vehicle Department's closed now, of course, but I'll call you tomorrow morning."

~ * ~

The man's wife had been dead for ten years, but he still missed her terribly. He missed her so much, in fact, that he hadn't dated anyone in the decade since her death, although he was a good-looking man and had had many offers.

He dreamt of her often. He dreamt of their brief time together, of their lovemaking—which had been nothing short of spiritual—of their quiet moments, their public hand-holding and caressing, their wordless conversations, the kinds of conversations that only two very alike people can have.