A Winter Haunting

TWENTY-THREE

IT snowed all the rest of Christmas Day. Exhausted and confused, Dale stood at the study window and watched the deputy’s car disappear into the snow, and then just stood there watching the snow continue to fall. After a long period of this during which his thoughts were as vague and opaque as the low gray clouds, Dale went over to his ThinkPad and powered it up. Switching from Windows to the DOS shell, he typed after the blinking C prompt—

>Am I cracking up?

Dale did not expect an answer—certainly not while he sat there waiting—and he did not receive one. After a while he wandered out to the kitchen, washed the plates, and tidied up. Someone—Michelle last night?—had put Saran wrap around some of the ham and placed it on the second shelf of the refrigerator. Dale knew that he should be hungry, since he hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before— Did I reallyhave dinner last night, or did I imagine it as well? —but he had no appetite now. Dale pulled on an extra sweater and his peacoat and went out into the snow.

Several inches of wet, heavy snow had accumulated in the turnaround. Dale headed west, past the white-shrouded sheds and the barn—its large door still slightly open—out toward the low, flat hill above the creek. There were no dog tracks on the rutted lane, no human footprints in the corn-stubbled field, no sign of an injured woman dragging herself.

Am I nuts?It seemed probable. Dale realized that the deputy’s advice had been sound—he should call his therapist. Dale might have called from Oak Hill if not for the presence of the deputy during the ride back.

It was snowing harder when Dale reached the small rise where Duane had buried his faithful collie, Wittgenstein, that same summer of 1960. The trees along the creek running north and south were indistinct in the snowfall, and Dale could not see even the barn, much less the farmhouse. Sound seemed muted. Dale remembered days like this from his childhood in Elm Haven and elsewhere: a day so still that the slight thrumming of one’s own heartbeat or pulse sounded like the settling of snowflakes.

1960. Dale tried hard to remember the details of that summer. Nightmares—he remembered nightmares. White hands pulling his younger brother under his bed in their shared bedroom in the tall white house across from Old Central in Elm Haven. The ancient school itself, boarded up and awaiting demolition, but burning mysteriously at the end of that summer before the wrecking balls could bring it down. A green glow from the shuttered cupola atop the monstrous old building. The kids had created legends and spooky tales around that school. And some of those legends seemed real after Duane died in these very fields that summer.

Dale turned slowly around. Below the slight rise, a few shattered cornstalks were the only hint of even faded color against the featureless white, rows upon rows of slight mounds that had been high stalks even this summer past.

What the hell happened to our generation?Dale tried to remember his college energy and idealism. We promised so much to so many—especially to ourselves. He and other professors his age had often commented on it—the easy cynicism and self-absorption of today’s college-age students, so different from the commitment and high ideals of the mid and late 1960s. Bullshit, thought Dale. It had all been bullshit. They had bullshitted themselves about a revolution while really going after exactly what every previous generation had sought—sex, comfort, money, power.

Who am I to talk?Dale tasted bile as he thought of his Jim Bridger books. It was work-for-hire these days: a set fee for a series of formulaic frontiersmen-and-Indian-maiden tales. They might as well have been bodice rippers for all the serious intent that Dale had brought to the writing the past few years.

Sex, comfort, money, power.He had obtained everything on the list but the last—and had schemed and connived in faculty politics to obtain even his pathetic version of that over the years—and what had it brought him? Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with a ghost.

Dale left the low hill and began walking south along the creek, using the wooden cross-braces to climb over fences. A dog was barking far away to the west, but Dale could tell from the sound that it was just a run-of-the-mill farm dog, a real dog, a mortal dog. As opposed to what? My hellhounds?

Dale wished that he believed in ghosts. He could not. He realized that everything—life, love, loss, even fear—would be so much easier if he did. For decades of adulthood now he had tried to understand the psychology of people who prided themselves in believing in ghosts, spirits, feng shui, horoscopes, positive energy, demons, angels. . . God. Dale did not. It was a form of easy stupidity to which he preferred not to subscribe.

Have I gone crazy?Probably. It made the most sense. He knew that he had not been sane when he had loaded the Savage over-and-under a little more than a year earlier and set the muzzle to the side of his head and reached to pull the trigger. He could recall with perfect tactile memory what that circle of cold steel had felt like pressing into the flesh of his forehead. If he was crazy enough to do that, why not all this?

All what? Dining with ghosts? Imagining being seduced by the sexiest girl in sixth grade? Writing questions and answers and acrostics to himself on the computer?

If Michelle had been a ghost—if ghosts existed, which Dale did not believe for a second—why would she be here? She barely knew his dear friend Duane McBride. Twelve-year-old Michelle Staffney, the doctor’s daughter, simply did not play with raggedy-ass boys like Duane or Harlen or Mike or Kevin. . . or Dale. Besides, Michelle Staffney aka Mica Stouffer had hated Elm Haven. She had lived in California for more than thirty years and—it seemed absolutely certain—had died there. If she were going to haunt someplace, why not haunt the Bel Air home of her lover, Diane Villanova, where both of them had been murdered? Or better yet, haunt her husband’s place—the esteemed producer of the Val Kilmer Die Free series.

Jesus.Dale shook his head at the banality of the world. The movement shook free snow that had been clinging to his hair. He realized that he’d not brought so much as a baseball cap and his hair was soaked, his face sheened with melted snow. It was cold.

Dale looked around and realized that he had walked to the little woods not far from the Johnson farm. The black dogs had followed him this far a few weeks ago. Had they? There was almost certainly a real black dog somewhere in all this hallucination—a visual trigger for these fantastic illusions—just as there was probably a real, living red-haired woman that he’d glimpsed at the Oak Hall City Market some weeks ago that had made him obsess on the memories of the sixth-grade sex grenade, little Michelle Staffney.

Anne’s hair is an auburn red—in the right light.

Dale rubbed his face, realizing that he had forgotten his gloves as well as his hat. His hands were chapped and red with cold.

The hellhounds could be behind you right now, moving silently through the snow, stalking you.He turned slowly, not feeling real alarm.

Empty fields and falling snow. The already dim light was fading farther. Dale checked his watch—four-thirty. Could it be so late? It would be hard dark in half an hour. The snow had accumulated to seven or eight inches now, wet, soaking through his chinos. . . the same bloody chinos he had been wearing the night before. It was his blood, of course, from where he struck his head on the door during his fall. What made me fall? Who made me fall?

He walked back toward the unseen farmhouse, cutting diagonally across the frozen fields and climbing two more fences where they came together at a post. He was approaching the barn from the south along the fenceline there when the house came into view, a dark gray shape against the dark gray evening.

A Sheriff’s Department car was in the drive, but it was the bigger vehicle, years older than the ones the deputies drove. The sheriff’s car.

C.J. Congden stood near the chicken coop, gray Stetson covered by one of those clear plastic hat covers that state troopers and county mounties wore when it rained or snowed. Congden had his hand on his holstered pistol and was tapping the white grip of the gun. He was grinning.

“Thought you had orders to stay in the house, Professor,” the big man said.

“They told me to stay at the farm,” said Dale. “I’m at the farm.” His head began hurting in earnest again. His voice sounded dull even to himself. “Did you have a good Christmas vacation trip, Sheriff?”

Congden grinned more broadly. His teeth were yellowed from nicotine. Dale could smell the cigarette and cigar smoke on the fat man’s jacket. “So, you all through telling ghost stories, Professor ?”

Suddenly Dale felt as if someone had put snow down the back of his neck. “Wait a minute,” he said, reaching out as if to grab Congden’s jacket. The sheriff stepped backward so as not to be touched. “You were there.”

“Where?” C.J. Congden’s grin had gone away. His eyes were cold.

“At the schoolyard that night. You saw her. Presser had so convinced me that I was nuts that I almost forgot. . . you saw her. You spoke to her.”

“To who?” asked Congden. He was smiling slightly again. It was dark enough now that Dale had to lean closer just to see the expression on the former bully’s face under the brim of the cowboy hat. With no lights on in the house, the big structure seemed to be disappearing with the last of the winter daylight.

“You know goddamned well who I’m talking about,” snapped Dale. “Michelle Staffney. You offered to drive her home, for Christ’s sake.”

“Did I?”

“Fuck this,” said Dale. He brushed past Congden and started walking up toward the house. “Arrest me if you’re going to. I’ve had enough of this shit.”

“Stewart!” The noise was at once a bark and a command. Dale froze and turned slowly.

“Come here a minute, Stewart. I want to show you something.” Congden took a step back, half turned, and took two more steps. Toward the barn.

“What?” said Dale. Suddenly he was afraid. It was dark out now, really dark. He had no flashlight. Once, in that same summer of 1960, C.J. Congden and his pal—Archie?—had stopped Dale along the railroad tracks outside of Elm Haven and Congden had aimed a.22 rifle at Dale’s face. It was the first time that Dale Stewart had felt absolute, knee-weakening, bladder-loosening fear.

He felt it again now.

“Come here, goddamnit,” growled Congden. “Now! I don’t have all day.”

No.

“No,” said Dale.

Go to the house. Hurry.

Dale turned and began walking quickly, expecting and fearing the fast strides behind him or the gleam of hounds’ eyes ahead of him.

“Stewart, goddamn you to hell, come here ! I want to show you something in the barn!”

Dale broke into a clumsy run, ignoring the pounding in his head that throbbed every time his boots struck the frozen earth through the snow. He couldn’t see the house. It was too dark.

Dale almost ran into a barbed-wire fence, realized that he was behind the chicken coop, and ran to his left and then to his right again. The house became visible as a shape in the darkness. Dale threw a glance over his shoulder, but he could not see Congden in the gloom. Snow stuck to his eyelashes and threatened to blind him.

“Stewart, you pussy!” came the sheriff’s voice, but from Dale’s right somewhere in the dark, closer. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”

Dale thudded up the cement steps, threw open the door, slammed it behind him, locked the main lock, and threw the heavy bolt. His head throbbing, he turned slowly in the dark kitchen, listening for movement or breathing in the house. If there was any, he could not hear it over his own panting and the pounding of his heart.

He peered out the window, but even the sheriff’s car was lost to the gloom and the heavy snow. Jesus, that son of a bitch has a gun. And I don’t. And he’s crazier than I am.

Not turning on a light, Dale went down into the basement and felt along the wall near the crates of books. The big console radio was playing 1950s hits softly, its glowing dial the only light in the room. There it is. Dale hefted the Louisville Slugger and carried it back up to the kitchen. It was no match for the huge.45 Colt pistol Congden carried in his holster, but perhaps in the dark—

In the dark. Dale peered through the window, standing to one side so that he could not be seen himself. Suddenly he had the image of C.J. Congden’s face pressed against the glass less than an inch from his own, teeth yellow, skin yellow, tongue lolling.

Holy fuck, thought Dale, instinctively raising the bat. There was no face at the window. Congden wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the few feet he could see in the dark. Maybe he drove off when I was getting the bat and I didn’t hear the car.

And maybe he didn’t.

Maybe he’s already in the house with you.

Dale realized that he was shaking, his hands clutching the Louisville Slugger so tightly that his fingers were cramping. Jesus, God, I am losing it. I’m coming apart at the fucking seams.

Dale slid down the wall against the stove, still holding the bat as he sat on the old tile and pressed the side of his face against the cool metal of the stove itself. He felt the melted snow in his hair running down his temple and cheeks. The cold circle of the muzzle. Dale was glad that Presser hadn’t returned the Savage to him—he felt so low and frightened at the moment that pulling the trigger seemed almost a welcome escape. Would it fire this time? Dale thought, Yes.

There was a movement outside on the stoop just a foot away through the door. Snow dropping from the eaves? A stealthy footstep, those scuffed cowboy boots? Someone shifting an ax from his left hand to his right?

Sitting on the linoleum floor, face against the stove, Dale Stewart closed his eyes and slept.

The thing was banging the door inches from Dale, clawing to get in. Dale jerked awake, crawled on the linoleum still half asleep, found the baseball bat, and lifted it as he got to his feet.

Daylight streamed in through the curtains across the kitchen door. He had slept through the night. Someone knocked again, and Dale peered out at a sheriff’s green jacket, a badge, a Stetson. It wasn’t C.J. Congden. A newer Sheriff’s Department car idled in the turnaround. The snow was more than a foot deep, and the only break in it was from the parallel tracks of the sheriff’s tires.

This sheriff, a man in his thirties with a lean face, saw Dale and motioned for the door to be opened.

Dale blinked and set the baseball bat between the wall and the stove. It took him a few seconds to fumble the locks open. Cold air curled in when he opened the door and the man on the stoop—a smaller man than Congden, leaner and shorter than Dale—took a step back like a properly trained encyclopedia salesman, showing his deference to the homeowner.

“Professor Stewart?”

Dale rubbed his chin and nodded. He realized that his hair must be wild, and that he was still wearing the same soiled and wrinkled chinos, shirt, and sweater that he had put on for Christmas Eve dinner two days earlier.

“I’m Sheriff Bill McKown,” said the man in the sheriff’s jacket. “You mind if I come in?”

Dale shook his head and stepped aside. The man’s voice was deep and slow, his manner assured. Dale himself felt as if he was made of torn paper and broken glass and might cry at any second. He took a deep breath and tried to force calm into himself.

Sheriff McKown removed his Stetson, smiled, and seemed to glance around casually, but Dale saw that the man was taking everything in. “Everything all right here this morning, Professor Stewart?”

“Sure,” said Dale.

McKown smiled again. “Well, I just noticed that you answered the door with a baseball bat in your hands. And you seemed to be on the floor before that.”

Dale had no explanation, so he offered none. “You want some coffee, Sheriff?”

“If you’re making some for yourself.”

“I am. I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.” That was an understatement, thought Dale. “Have a seat while I make some,” he said aloud.

McKown watched silently while Dale fumbled out the Folgers can, filled the coffee pot with water, poured it into the coffeemaker, cleaned the filter under the tap, spooned out six servings, and got the thing percolated. Dale’s fingers felt swollen and clumsy, useless sausage balloons.

“That’s an interesting report you filed on Christmas,” said McKown, accepting his mug of coffee.

“Cream or sugar?” asked Dale.

McKown shook his head and sipped. “Good.” Dale tasted his and thought it tasted like cloudy bilge water.

“You feeling any better now?” asked the man with the sheriff’s badge.

“What do you mean?”

McKown nodded. “Your head. I hear you got nine stitches and maybe a light concussion. Any better?”

Dale touched his scalp and felt the crusted blood under the old bandage. “Yes,” he said. “The headache’s better this morning.” It was.

“You want to talk about the report? The woman you said went missing? The dogs? Anything?”

Dale sipped his coffee to gain time. Should he tell McKown about C.J. Congden’s visit?

No. Tell him nothing.

“I know how crazy the whole thing sounded,” Dale said at last. “It sounds crazy to me. I guess your deputy told you that I’ve been on some medication for depression. . .”

McKown nodded. “Did you get a chance to call the psychiatrist in Montana? What’s his name?”

Tell the truth.

“His name is Charles Hall. And no, I haven’t had time to call yet.”

McKown drank some coffee and set the mug down. “We called him, Professor Stewart. Just to check that you were a patient of his.”

Dale tried a smile, knowing how ghastly it must look. “Am I?”

“Not anymore,” said the sheriff. “I’ve got some bad news for you.”

Dale could only wait. He had no idea what the man was talking about.

“Dr. Charles Hall died on December nineteenth,” said McKown. “We talked to his answering service and then the doctor on call, Dr. Williams. That’s a woman, Dr. Williams.”

Dale stared. When he could speak, he said, “Was he murdered?”

McKown lifted his coffee mug but did not drink from it. “Why do you ask that, Professor Stewart?”

“I don’t know. The way things have been going. . . wait, you’re serious about this? Charles Hall is dead?”

“An auto accident on December nineteenth,” said Sheriff McKown. “Evidently he was on his way back from a long weekend skiing in Telluride, Colorado, when a drunk came across a center line.” McKown took a pink while-you-were-out slip from his stiffly ironed breast pocket and set the paper on the kitchen table. “This is Dr. Williams’s number. She wants you to call her as soon as you can so she can talk to you and make sure your prescription’s refillable—that sort of stuff.”

Dale lifted the slip and stared at the phone number. “Did you tell her. . . about Christmas? About me?”

“We confirmed that you’d been a patient of Dr. Hall’s and did ask her what you were being treated for. She didn’t want to talk about anything—it’s all confidential—but we told her that there was a possible missing person situation and that we just had to clarify that you weren’t delusional. She looked at Hall’s file on you—she’s taking half his patients, another doctor took another half—and she confirmed that you were just being treated for depression and anxiety.”

“‘Just,’ “said Dale.

“Yes,” said Sheriff McKown. “Well, she wants you to call her as soon as you can. I guess you can’t from this place, though.”

“No,” agreed Dale. Charles Hall dead. That prissy little office with the windows looking out on the tops of the trees. Who would use that office now?

“My deputy tells me that you seem to remember that you and I went to school together, Professor Stewart.”

“What?” Dale looked up from the pink piece of paper in his hand. “Sorry?”

McKown repeated the statement.

“Oh. . .” said Dale and stopped. He knew that he was coming across as a mental deficient as well as a lunatic, but his head was too full of conflicting information to process things right now.

“Might have been my uncle, Bobby McKown,” said the sheriff. “He graduated high school in ’66, so he would’ve been about your age.”

“I remember Bob McKown,” Dale said truthfully. “He used to play ball with us. Go hiking out at Gypsy Lane with us.”

The sheriff sipped coffee and then smiled thinly. “Uncle Bobby always told us little ones about that Bike Patrol you guys had going then. Bobby always wanted to be in it, but I guess you had enough members.”

“I don’t remember,” said Dale.

“Do you remember anything more about the other night, Professor Stewart? Anything about the dogs?”

Dale took a breath. “I’m pretty sure I’ve been seeing real dogs around here, Sheriff. There were paw prints the last few weeks. . .”

McKown’s expression was pleasant enough, but Dale saw that the man was watching and listening very carefully.

“I’ve never had hallucinations or delusions before, Sheriff,” Dale went on, “but I’m prepared to be convinced that I’m having them now. I’m still. . . depressed, I guess. I haven’t been sleeping too well. I’ve been trying to work on a novel, and that’s not going very well. . .”

“What kind of novel?”

“I’m not sure what kind it is,” said Dale with a self-deprecating chuckle. “A failed one, I guess. It was about kids—about growing up.”

“And about that summer of 1960?” asked McKown.

Dale’s heart rate accelerated. “I guess it was. Why do you say that, Sheriff?”

“Our uncle Bobby used to talk about that summer occasionally—very occasionally—but more often than not, he didn’t talk about it. It was like being a kid in Elm Haven back then was one long sunny day, except for that summer.”

Dale nodded, but as the silence stretched he realized that McKown wanted something more. “Bob McKown knew Duane McBride. . .” Dale gestured toward the old house around them. “Duane’s death that summer came as a real shock to a lot of us kids. We handled it in weird ways, if we handled it at all.”

“I’ve read the case files,” said McKown. “Mind if I have some more of this good coffee?”

Dale started to get to his feet, but McKown waved him back down, went to the counter, refilled his own mug, brought the pot over to top off Dale’s cup, and set the pot back in the coffeemaker burner. “Who do you think killed your friend Duane, Professor Stewart?”

“The sheriff then and the Justice of the Peace. . . J. P. Congden, C.J.’s father. . . determined that it was an accident,” said Dale, his voice unsteady.

“Yeah, I read that. Their report and the coroner’s report said that your friend Duane just started driving this combine in the middle of a July night—the combine didn’t even have its corn picker covers on—and they say that somehow this Duane, who everybody says was a genius, managed to fall out of the cab of that combine and then have the machine run over him, tearing him apart. You buy that, Professor Stewart? Did you buy that then?”

“No,” said Dale.

“I don’t either. A combine would have to drive in a full circle to run over someone who had been driving it. The corn pickers are in the front. A paraplegic would have time to get out of the way of a combine doing a full turn. I presume the coroner knew that about combines, don’t you?”

Dale said nothing.

“That particular coroner,” continued McKown, “was a good friend of Justice of the Peace J. P. Congden. Do you remember that Duane McBride’s uncle, Art, died that same summer? A car accident out on Jubilee College Road?”

“I remember that,” said Dale. His heart was pounding so hard that he had to set the cup of coffee down or spill it.

“The sheriff’s office then, all one of him, found some paint on this uncle Art’s Cadillac,” continued McKown. “Blue paint. Guess who drove a big old car those days that was blue?”

“J. P. Congden,” said Dale. His lips were dry.

“The Justice of the Peace,” agreed Sheriff McKown. “My uncle Bobby tells me that ol’ J. P. used to have the habit of racing people’s cars toward bridges like that one where Duane’s uncle got killed, and when folks hurried to cross the one-lane bridge ahead of him just to stay on the road, old man Congden used to pull them over and fine them a twenty-five-dollar ticket. Twenty-five dollars was real money back in 1960. You ever hear those stories, Professor Stewart?”

“Yes,” said Dale.

“You all right, Professor?”

“Sure. Why?”

“You look sort of pale.” McKown got up, found a clean glass, filled it with tap water, and brought it back to the table. “Here.” Dale drank.

“My uncle Bobby knew J. P. Congden and his kid, C.J., real well,” continued McKown when Dale had finished with the water. “He said they were both bullies and bastards. C.J., too.”

“You think that J. P. or C.J. ran Duane McBride’s uncle into that bridge abutment?” asked Dale, working to hold his voice steady.

“I think it would’ve been right up old J. P.’s alley, his sort of bullshit,” said McKown. “I doubt if he tried to kill Arthur McBride. Just shake him down, probably. Only the bridge ruined that plan.”

“Did anyone accuse him of it?”

“Your friend Duane did,” said the sheriff.

Dale shook his head. He did not understand.

“The report says that Duane McBride, age eleven, called the state police—you remember that the sheriff then, Barnaby Stiles, was a good ol’ boy friend of J. P. Congden—but the report says that one Duane McBride reported the paint match between his uncle Art’s Cadillac and the Justice of the Peace’s car.”

“And did they investigate?”

“Congden had a great alibi,” said McKown. “Over in Kickapoo drinking with about five of his pals.”

“So they dropped it.”

“Right.”

“AfterSheriff Barney told J. P. Congden that Duane was on to him.”

McKown sipped his coffee, showing no sign of how bitter the brew was.

“And did J. P. Congden have an alibi for the night Duane was killed?” asked Dale. His voice was shaking now, but he did not care.

“Actually, he did,” said McKown.

“Same five cronies at the bar, I bet,” Dale said.

McKown shook his head. “Not this time. Congden—J. P. Congden—was in Peoria at a traffic court seminar thing. At least half a dozen officers of the law were with him that night. But how old was C.J. Congden that year, Professor Stewart?”

“Sixteen,” said Dale. He had to force the words out through still-dry lips. “Whatever happened to C.J. Congden, Sheriff McKown?”

McKown flashed a grin. “Oh, he ended up where most small-town bullies do. . . he was elected county sheriff here four times.”

“But he’s dead now?” said Dale.

“Oh, sure. C.J. stuck the barrel of his pearl-handled.45 Colt in his own mouth in ’97, no, the summer of ’96, and blew his brains all over the inside of his double-wide.” McKown stood. “Professor Stewart, you’re not under arrest or anything, and I’d sure love to talk to you some more, but I think it’s important that you call this Dr. Williams in Missoula. You look tired, sir. How about if you get showered and shaved, and I’ll drive you into Oak Hill? You can call from the station house. Then I’ll drive you back here myself. How does that sound?”

“Fine,” said Dale. He got to his feet like an old man.

“Would you mind if I just looked around this house for a minute, Professor Stewart?”

“Search it?” said Dale. “I don’t mind. Your deputies already went through it.”

McKown laughed. For a small man, he had a big man’s easy laugh. “No, not search it, Professor. Just look around. I’ve never been in here and. . . well, you know. We lived on a farm about four miles from here when I was growing up and between local legends and Uncle Bobby’s stories and with the crazy old lady who lived here after Mr. McBride died, this was our local haunted house.”

McKown walked into the dining room. “This looks empty, but not especially haunted.”

Dale went into the study to get some clean clothes to take down to the basement for after his shower. The computer screen had his question from the day before and another line under it.

>Am I cracking up?

>Absolutely.

The sheriff walked through the front parlor and into the hall just outside the study. Dale killed the power on the ThinkPad and closed the lid.

“I’ll just be a minute,” said Dale, heading down the stairs. “Help yourself to the last of the coffee.”