The Best of Sisters in Crime (24 page)

Laurie took his
face in her hands. “Help me to be like her.”

Together they
brought in their suitcases and the groceries they had purchased along the way.
Mike went down to the basement. He grimaced when he glanced into the coalbin.
It was fairly large, a four-feet-wide by six-feet-long plankboard enclosure
situated next to the furnace and directly under the window that served as an
opening for the chute from the delivery truck. Mike remembered how when he was
eight he’d helped his grandmother replace some of the boards on the bin. Now
they all looked rotted.

“Nights get cold
even in the summer but we’ll always be plenty warm, Mike,” his grandmother
would say cheerily as she let him help shovel coal into the old blackened
furnace.

Mike remembered
the bin as always heaped with shiny black nuggets. Now it was nearly empty.
There was barely enough coal for two or three days. He reached for the shovel.

The furnace was
still serviceable. Its rumbling sound quickly echoed throughout the house. The
ducts thumped and rattled as hot air wheezed through them.

In the kitchen
Laurie had unpacked the groceries and begun to make a salad. Mike grilled a
steak. They opened a bottle of Bordeaux and ate side by side at the old enamel
table, their shoulders companionably touching.

They were on
their way up the staircase to bed when Mike spotted the note from the real
estate agent on the foyer table: “Hope you find everything in order. Sorry
about the weather. Coal delivery on Friday.”

They decided to
use his grandmother’s room. “She loved that metal-frame bed,” Mike said. “Always
claimed that there wasn’t a night she didn’t sleep like a baby in it.”

“Let’s hope it
works that way for me.” Laurie sighed. There were clean sheets in the linen
closet but they felt damp and clammy. The boxspring and mattress smelled musty.
“Warm me up,” Laurie whispered, shivering as they pulled the covers over them.

“My pleasure.”

They fell asleep
in each other’s arms. At three o’clock Laurie began to shriek, a piercing,
wailing scream that filled the house. “Go away. Go away. I won’t. I won’t.”

It was dawn before
she stopped sobbing. “They’re getting closer,” she told Mike. “They’re getting
closer.”

The rain
persisted throughout the day. The outside thermometer registered thirty-eight
degrees. They read all morning curled up on the velour couches. Mike watched as
Laurie began to unwind. When she fell into a deep sleep after lunch, he went
into the kitchen and called the psychiatrist.

“Her sense that
they’re getting closer may be a good sign,” the doctor told him. “Possibly she’s
on the verge of a breakthrough. I’m convinced the root of these nightmares is
in all the old wives’ tales her grandmother told Laurie. If we can isolate
exactly which one has caused this fear, we’ll be able to exorcise it and all
the others. Watch her carefully, but remember: She’s a strong girl and she
wants to get well. That’s half the battle.”

When Laurie woke
up, they decided to inventory the house. “Dad said we can have anything we
want,” Mike reminded her. “A couple of the tables are antiques and that clock
on the mantel is a gem.” There was a storage closet in the foyer. They began
dragging its contents into the living room. Laurie, looking about eighteen in
jeans and a sweater, her hair tied loosely in a chignon, became animated as she
went through them. “The local artists were pretty lousy,” she laughed, “but the
frames are great. Can’t you just see them on our walls?”

Last year as a
wedding present, Mike’s family had bought them a loft in Greenwich Village.
Until four months ago, they’d spent their spare time going to garage sales and
auctions looking for bargains. Since the nightmares began, Laurie had lost
interest in furnishing the apartment. Mike crossed his fingers. Maybe she
was
starting to get better.

On the top shelf
buried behind patchwork quilts he discovered a Victrola. “Oh, my God, I’d
forgotten about that,” he said. “What a find. Look. Here are a bunch of old
records.”

He did not
notice Laurie’s sudden silence as he brushed the layers of dust from the
Victrola and lifted the lid. The Edison trademark, a dog listening to a tube
and the caption
His Master’s Voice
, was on the inside of the lid. “It even has a needle in it,” Mike
said. Quickly he placed a record on the turntable, cranked the handle, slid the
starter to ON, and watched as the disk began to revolve. Carefully he placed
the arm with its thin, delicate needle in the first groove.

The record was
scratched. The singers’ voices were male but high-pitched, almost to the point
of falsetto. The effect was out of synch, music being played too rapidly. “I
can’t make out the words,” Mike said. “Do you recognize it?”

“It’s ‘Chinatown,’”
Laurie said. “Listen.” She began to sing with the record, her lovely soprano
voice leading the chorus.
Hearts that know no other world,
drifting to and fro.
Her voice broke. Gasping,
she screamed,
“Turn it off, Mike. Turn it off
now!”
She covered her ears with her hands and
sank onto her knees, her face deathly white.

Mike yanked the
needle away from the record. “Honey, what is it?”

“I don’t know. I
just don’t know.”

That night the
nightmare took a different form. This time the approaching figures were singing
“Chinatown” and in falsetto voices demanding Laurie come sing with them.

At dawn they sat
in the kitchen sipping coffee. “Mike, it’s coming back to me,” Laurie told him.
“When I was little. My grandmother had one of those Victrolas. She had that
same record. I asked her where the people were who were singing. I thought they
had to be hiding in the house somewhere. She took me down to the basement and
pointed to the coalbin. She said the voices were coming from there. She swore
to me that the people who were singing were in the coalbin.”

Mike put down
his coffee cup. “Good God!”

“I never went
down to the basement after that. I was afraid. Then we moved to an apartment
and she gave the Victrola away. I guess that’s why I forgot.” Laurie’s eyes
began to blaze with hope. “Mike, maybe that old fear caught up with me for some
reason. I was so exhausted by the time the show closed. Right after that the
nightmares started. Mike, that record was made years and years ago. The singers
are all probably dead by now. And I certainly have learned how sound is
reproduced. Maybe it’s going to be all right.”

“You bet it’s
going to be all right.” Mike stood up and reached for her hand. “You game for
something? There’s a coalbin downstairs. I want you to come down with me and
look at it.”

Laurie’s eyes
filled with panic, then she bit her lip. “Let’s go,” she said.

Mike studied
Laurie’s face as her eyes darted around the basement. Through her eyes he
realized how dingy it was. The single light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The
cinder-block walls glistening with dampness. The cement dust from the floor
that clung to their bedroom slippers. The concrete steps that led to the set of
metal doors that opened to the backyard. The rusty bolt that secured them
looked as though it had not been opened in years.

The coalbin was
adjacent to the furnace at the front end of the house. Mike felt Laurie’s nails
dig into his palm as they walked over to it.

“We’re
practically out of coal,” he told her. “It’s a good thing they’re supposed to
deliver today. Tell me, honey, what do you see here?”

“A bin. About
ten shovelfuls of coal at best. A window. I remember when the delivery truck
came how they put the chute through the window and the coal roared down. I used
to wonder if it hurt the singers when it fell on them.” Laurie tried to laugh. “No
visible sign of anyone in residence here. Nightmares at rest, please God.”

Hand in hand
they went back upstairs. Laurie yawned. “I’m so tired, Mike. And you, poor guy,
haven’t had a decent night’s rest in months because of me. Why don’t we just go
back to bed and sleep the day away. I bet anything that I won’t wake up with a
dream.”

They drifted off
to sleep, her head on his chest, his arms encircling her. “Sweet dreams, love,”
he whispered.

“I promise they
will be. I love you, Mike. Thank you for everything.”

The sound of
coal rushing down the chute awakened Mike. He blinked. Behind the shades, light
was streaming in. Automatically he glanced at his watch. Nearly three o’clock.
God, he really must have been bushed. Laurie was already up. He pulled khaki
slacks on, stuffed his feet into sneakers, listened for sounds from the
bathroom. There were none. Laurie’s robe and slippers were on the chair. She
must be already dressed. With sudden unreasoning dread, Mike yanked a
sweatshirt over his head.

The living room.
The dining room. The kitchen. Their coffee cups were still on the table, the
chairs pushed back as they left them. Mike’s throat closed. The hurtling sound
of the coal was lessening.
The coal.
Maybe. He took the cellar stairs two at a time. Coal dust was
billowing through the basement. Shiny black nuggets of coal were heaped high in
the bin. He heard the snap of the window being closed. He stared down at the
footsteps on the floor. The imprints of his sneakers. The side-by-side
impressions left when he and Laurie had come down this morning in their
slippers.

And then he saw
the step-by-step imprint of Laurie’s bare feet, the lovely high arched impressions
of her slender, fine-boned feet. The impressions stopped at the coalbin. There
was no sign of them returning to the stairs.

The bell rang,
the shrill, high-pitched, insistent gonglike sound that had always annoyed him
and amused his grandmother. Mike raced up the stairs. Laurie. Let it be Laurie.

The truck driver
had a bill in his hand. “Sign for the delivery, sir.”

The delivery.
Mike grabbed the man’s arm. “When you started the coal down the chute, did you
look into the bin?”

Puzzled faded
blue eyes in a pleasant weather-beaten face looked squarely at him. “Yeah,
sure, I glanced in to make sure how much you needed. You were just about out.
You didn’t have enough for the day. The rain’s over but it’s gonna stay real
cold.”

Mike tried to
sound calm. “Would you have seen if someone was in the coalbin? I mean, it’s
dark in the basement. Would you have noticed if a slim young woman had maybe
fainted in there?” He could read the delivery man’s mind. He thinks I’m drunk
or on drugs. “God damn it,” Mike shouted. “My wife is missing. My wife is
missing.”

For days they
searched for Laurie. Feverishly, Mike searched with them. He walked every inch
of the heavily wooded areas around the cottage. He sat, hunched and shivering
on the deck as they dragged the lake. He stood unbelieving as the newly
delivered coal was shoveled from the bin and heaped onto the basement floor.

Surrounded by
policemen, all of whose names and faces made no impression on him, he spoke
with Laurie’s doctor. In a flat, disbelieving tone he told the doctor about
Laurie’s fear of the voices in the coalbin. When he was finished, the police
chief spoke to the doctor. When he hung up, he gripped Mike’s shoulder. “We’ll
keep looking.”

Four days later
a diver found Laurie’s body tangled in weeds in the lake. Death by drowning.
She was wearing her nightgown. Bits of coal dust were still clinging to her
skin and hair. The police chief tried and could not soften the stark tragedy of
her death. “That was why her footsteps stopped at the bin. She must have gotten
into it and climbed out the window. It’s pretty wide, you know, and she was a
slender girl. I’ve talked again to her doctor. She probably would have
committed suicide before this if you hadn’t been there for her. Terrible the
way people screw up their children. Her doctor said that grandmother petrified
her with crazy superstitions before the poor kid was old enough to toddle.”

“She talked to
me. She was getting there.” Mike heard his protests, heard himself making
arrangements for Laurie’s body to be cremated.

The next morning
as he was packing, the real estate agent came over, a sensibly dressed,
white-haired, thin-faced woman whose brisk air did not conceal the sympathy in
her eyes. “We have a buyer for the house,” she said. “I’ll arrange to have
anything you want to keep shipped.”

The clock. The
antique tables. The pictures that Laurie had laughed over in their beautiful
frames. Mike tried to picture going into their Greenwich Village loft alone and
could not.

“How about the
Victrola?” the real estate agent asked. “It’s a real treasure.”

Mike had placed
it back in the storage closet. Now he took it out, seeing again Laurie’s
terror, hearing her begin to sing “Chinatown,” her voice blending with the
falsetto voices on the old record. “I don’t know if I want it,” he said.

The real estate
agent looked disapproving. “It’s a collector’s item. I have to be off. Just let
me know about it.”

Mike watched as
her car disappeared around the winding driveway.
Laurie, I want you.
He lifted the lid of the Victrola
as he had five days ago, an eon ago. He cranked the handle, found the “Chinatown”
record, placed it on the turntable, turned the switch to the ON position. He
watched as the record picked up speed, then released the arm and placed the
needle in the starting groove.