Ghost Story (19 page)

"Hell," he said out loud. The car was still in the drive; he had been in the house only long enough to get warm. The midday restlessness, the feeling that if he did not move some bad thing would happen—that something worse than the accident was aimed at him like a gun—was back. Lewis went up to his bedroom, removed the sweater and parka and put on a clean shirt, a rep tie and double-breasted blazer. He'd go to Humphrey's Place and have a hamburger and a few beers. That was the ticket.

A keening note on the fiddle stitched into his brain as soon as he was inside, and Lewis frowned at the musician sawing away on the bandstand, hair down to his shoulders, left hip and right foot jigging in time, but the boy's eyes were closed and he never noticed. Then an instant later the music was just music again, but his headache remained. The bar was crowded and so warm that Lewis began to perspire almost immediately. Big shapeless Humphrey Stalladge, an apron over his white shirt, moved back and forth behind the bar. All the tables nearest the band seemed to be filled with kids drinking beer from pitchers. When he looked at the backs of their heads, Lewis honestly couldn't tell the boys from the girls.

What if you saw yourself running toward you, running toward the headlights of your car, your hair flying and your face twisted with fear ...

"Get you anything, Lewis?" Humphrey asked.

"Two aspirin and a beer. I've got a rotten headache. And a hamburger, Humphrey. Thanks."

Down at the other end of the bar, as far from the bandstand as he could get, looking both damp and filthy, Omar Norris was entertaining a group of men. As he talked his eyes bulged, his hands made swooping motions, and Lewis knew that if you were close enough to him you'd eventually see Omar's spittle shining on your lapels. When he had been younger, Omar's stories of getting out from under his wife's heel and of W. C. Fields-like stratagems for avoiding all work but running the town snowplow and working as the department store Santa had been amusing enough, but Lewis was mildly surprised that he could get anyone to listen to him now. People were even buying him drinks. Stalladge came back with his aspirin tablets and set a glass of beer beside them. "Burger's on the way," he said.

Lewis put the aspirins on his tongue and washed them down. The band had stopped playing
Wabash Cannonball
and was doing something else, a song he didn't recognize. One of the young women at the tables in front of the band had turned around and was staring at him. Lewis nodded to her.

He finished his beer and looked over the rest of the crowd. There were only a few empty booths by the front wall, so he caught Humphrey's eye and pointed to his glass, and when it was filled he started to go across the room to one of them. If he didn't get one early enough, he'd be pinned to the bar all night. Halfway across the room he nodded to Rollo Draeger, the druggist—come out to get away from Irmengard's endless complaints—and belatedly recognized the boy seated beside the girl who had stared at him: Jim Hardie, Eleanor's son, usually seen these days with Draeger's daughter. He glanced back at the couple, and found them both staring at him now. Jim Hardie was a suspect kid, Lewis thought: he was broad and blond and strong, but he looked like he had a streak of wildness as wide as the county. He was always grinning: Lewis had heard from Walt Hardesty that Jim Hardie was probably the one who had burned down the deserted old Pugh barn and set a field on fire. He could see the boy grinning as he did that. The girl with him tonight was older than Penny Draeger; better-looking, too.

Lewis remembered a time, years ago, when everything had been simple, and it would have been he sitting beside a girl listening to a band, Noble Sissle or Benny Goodman—Lewis with his heart on fire. The memory made him automatically look around the room for Stella Hawthorne's commanding face, but he knew that the moment he'd entered he had half-consciously recorded that she was not in the room.

Humphrey appeared with his hamburger, looked at his glass and said, "If you're gonna drink that fast, maybe you want a pitcher?"

Lewis had not even noticed that his second beer was finished. "Good idea."

"You don't look so hot," Humphrey said.

The band, which had been discussing something, noisily went back to work and spared Lewis the necessity of replying. Humphrey's two relief barmaids, Anni and Annie, came in, releasing a wave of cold into the room. They were just enough reason to stick around. Anni was gypsyish, with curly black hair fluffing out around a sensual face; Annie looked like a Viking and had strong well-shaped legs and beautiful teeth. Both of them were in their mid-thirties and talked like college professors. They lived with men off in the country and were childless. Lewis liked both of them enormously, and sometimes took one or the other out for a meal. Anni saw him and waved, he waved back, and the guitarist, backed by a seesawing fiddle, yelled

When he looked up Ned Rowles was standing beside him. Lewis raised his eyebrows and, still chewing, half-stood and motioned for Rowles to enter the booth. He liked Ned Rowles too; Ned had made
The Urbanite
an interesting newspaper, not just the usual smalltown list of firemen's picnics and advertisements for sales at the grocery stores. "Help me drink this," he said, and poured beer from the pitcher into Ned's nearly empty glass.

"How about me?" said a deeper, dryer voice over his shoulder, and, startled, Lewis turned his head to see Walt Hardesty glinting down at him. That explained why Lewis had not seen Ned at first; he and Hardesty had been back in the room where Humphrey stacked his surplus beer. Lewis knew that Hardesty, who was year by year surrendering himself to the bottle as surely as Omar Norris, sometimes spent all afternoon in the back room—he would not drink in front of his deputies.

"Of course, Walt," he said, "I didn't see you before. Please join me." Ned Rowles was looking at him oddly. Lewis was sure that the editor found Hardesty as tiresome as he did himself and had no desire for more of his company, but did he expect him to send the sheriff away? Whatever the look meant, Rowles slid over on his side of the booth to make room for Hardesty. The sheriff was still wearing his outer jacket; that back room was probably cold. Like the college student he resembled, Ned went as long as possible with only a tweed jacket for protection against winter.

Then Lewis saw that both men were looking at him oddly, and his heart jumped—had he hit the girl after all? Had someone written down his license number? He'd be guilty of bit and run! "Well, Walt," he said, "is this about anything special, or do you just want a beer?" He filled Hardesty's glass as he spoke.

"Right now, I'll settle for the beer, Mr. Benedikt," Hardesty said, "Quite a day, right?"

"Yes," Lewis said simply.

"A terrible day," said Ned Rowles, and he passed a hand through the hair falling over his forehead. He grimaced at Lewis. "You don't look so good, pal. Maybe you ought to go home and get some rest."

Lewis was even more puzzled than before by this remark. If he had struck the girl and if they knew about it, the sheriff would not just let him go home. "Oh," he said, "I get restless at home. I'd feel a lot better if people stopped telling me I looked terrible."

"Well, it's a miserable business," Rowles said. "I guess we'd all agree to that."

"Hell, yes," Hardesty said, finishing off his beer and pouring another. Ned's face was set in a painful expression of—what? It looked like sympathy. Lewis splashed more beer into his glass. The fiddler had switched to guitar, and now the music had become so loud that the three men had to bend over to be heard. Lewis could hear fragments of lyrics, phrases bawled into the microphones.

"Benny
Goodman?"
Hardesty snorted. "Myself, I like country. Real country, Hank Williams, not the junk these kids play. That's not country. Take your Jim Reeves. That's what I like." Lewis could smell the sheriff's breath—half beer and half some terrible foulness, as if he'd been eating garbage.

"Well, you're younger than I am," he said, pulling back.

"I just wanted to say how sorry I was," Ned interjected, and Lewis looked at him sharply, trying to figure out just how much trouble he was in. Hardesty was signaling to Annie, the Viking, for another pitcher. It came within minutes, slopping over when Annie set it on the table. When she walked away she winked at Lewis.

Sometime during the morning, Lewis remembered, and sometime during his drive ... bare maples ... he had been aware of an odd, dreamy clarity, a sharpness of vision that was like looking at an etching—a haunted wood, a castle surrounded by spiky trees—

"You're the law, what do you make of it?" Lewis said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the band.

"I say it's a damn funny world—gettin' to be a damn funny world," Hardesty shouted at him, and gave Lewis one of his Texas hard-guy looks.
"Real
damn funny. I'd say that your two old lawyer buddies know something about it, too."

"That's unlikely," Ned understated. "But I ought to see if one of them wants to write something about Dr. John Jaffrey for the paper. Unless you'd like to, Lewis."

"Write about John for
The Urbanite?"
Lewis asked.

"Well, you know, about a hundred words, maybe two hundred, anything you can think of to say about him."

"But why?"

"Jesus wept, because you don't want Omar Norris to be the only one—" Hardesty stopped, mouth open. He looked stupefied. Lewis craned his neck to see Omar Norris across the crowded room, still waving his arms and babbling. On the bar before him sat a row of drinks. The feeling of something bad nearby which had dogged him all day intensified. An out-of-tune fiddle chord went through him like an arrow:
this is it, this is it—

Ned Rowles reached across the table and touched Lewis's hand. "Ah, Lewis," he said. "I was sure you knew."

"I was out all day," he said. "I was—what happened?"
A day after Edward's anniversary,
he thought, and knew that John Jaffrey was dead. Then he realized that Edward's heart attack had come after midnight, and that
this
was the anniversary of his death.

"He was a leaper," Hardesty said, and Lewis saw that he'd read the word somewhere and thought it was the kind of word he should use. The sheriff took a swallow of beer and grimaced at Lewis, full of self-conscious menace. "He went off the bridge before noon today. Probably dead as a mackerel before he hit the water. Omar Norris there saw the whole thing."

"He went off the bridge," Lewis repeated softly. For some reason, he wished that he had hit a girl with his car—it was only a moment's wish, but it would have meant that John was safe. "My God," he said.

"We thought Sears or Ricky would have told you," Ned Rowles informed him. "They agreed to take care of the funeral arrangements."

"Jesus, John is going to be buried," Lewis said, and surprised tears came up in his eyes. He stood up and clumsily began to edge out of the booth.

"Don't suppose you could tell me anything useful," Hardesty said.

"No. No. I have to get over there. I don't know anything. I've got to see the others."

"Tell me if I can help at all," Ned shouted over the noise.

Not really looking where he was going, Lewis brushed into Jim Hardie, who had stationed himself unseen just outside the booth. "Sorry, Jim," Lewis said and would have gone by Jim and the girl, but Hardie closed his fist around Lewis's arm.

"This lady wanted to meet you," Hardie said, grinning unpleasantly. "So I'm making the introductions. She's stopping at our hotel."

"I just don't have the time, I have to leave," Lewis said, Hardie's hand still clamping forcefully on his forearm.

"Hang on. I'm doing what she asked me to do. Mr. Benedikt, this is Anna Mostyn." For the first time since he'd met her glance at the bar, Lewis looked at the girl. She was not a girl, he discovered; she was about thirty, perhaps a year or two on either side. She was anything but a typical Jim Hardie date. "Anna, this is Mr. Lewis Benedikt. I guess he's about the handsomest old coot in five or six counties, maybe the whole damn state, and he knows it too." The girl grew more startling the more you looked at her. She reminded him of someone, and he supposed it must have been Stella Hawthorne. It crossed his mind that he'd forgotten what Stella Hawthorne had looked like when she was thirty.

A ravaged figure from a low-life painting, Omar Norris was pointing at him from the bar. Still grinning ferociously, Jim Hardie let go of his arm. The boy with the fiddle swung his hair back girlishly and counted off another number.

"I know you have to leave," the woman said. Her voice was low, but it slid through the noise. "I heard about your friend from Jim, and I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was."

"I just heard myself," Lewis said, sick with the need to leave the bar. "Nice to meet you, Miss—"

"Mostyn," she said in her effortlessly audible voice.

"I hope we'll be seeing each other again. I'm going to work for your lawyer friends."

"Oh? Well ..." The meaning of what she had said reached him. "Sears and Ricky gave you a job?"

"Yes. I gather they knew my aunt. Perhaps you did too? Her name was Eva Galli."

"Oh, Jesus," Lewis said, and startled Jim Hardie into dropping his arm. Lewis plunged off into the interior of the bar before changing direction and rushing toward the door.

"Glamour boy musta got the shits or something," Jim said. "Oh. Sorry, lady. I mean, Miss Mostyn."