Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 56, No. 5, May 2011

The Case of the Telephoning Ghost by Joe Helgerson

The only reason that Sheriff Huck Finn ever went fishing was to catch forty winks, and no, a wink isn’t some kind of fish you’ve never heard of. So as soon as I spotted him down by the river holding a bamboo pole, the dreads hit me. For one thing, it was too early in the day for him to be out and about, unless he was dodging work. And if he’d already caught wind of the fact there was some sheriffing needed doing, that doubled or tripled the hazards I was facing as his deputy.

So I waited a while, secretly hoping that someone else might wake him up. After all, there was an entire survey crew working along the riverbank where he was resting, but he snoozed on, ignoring the way they shouted numbers back and forth, and slammed their poles around, and pretty near tripped over him. Hearing other folks work was like the singing of a lullaby to that man.

Finally I gave up waiting and went to stand beside him, positioning myself so that my shadow fell over him. It was a coolish October morn in the year 1904, and cutting off his source of heat woke him up sooner than gunshots would have. Lifting his white hat for a look, he grumbled, “Can’t you see I’m thinking?”

“We got us another one,” I told him.

“You sure?”

“All the signs,” I told him. “Ain’t breathing. Don’t yelp when I poke him. Look of terror on his face.”

“Well, you’ve been known to make mistakes before, Deputy. Maybe you better go double check.”

“Don’t you even want to know who?”

“Not yet.” He eased his hat down over his eyes. “Might get my hopes up.”

In addition to being lazy, the sheriff was also a stubborn cuss, known to hold grudges and play favorites whenever possible, though so far as I knew, wishing his enemies dead was as far as he ever took it. I wandered off without mentioning where I was headed and when I might be back. Naturally I made a point of walking away from the Whipplemore place, not that I expected to fool him. Something told me he already knew which way I was headed.

Marquis, Iowa, where we lived along the Mississippi, had maybe a half dozen streets you could count on in the wet part of the year. After a drought or hard freeze, another dozen streets became passable. During a flood, you’d better have a boat.

Cedric Whipplemore had lived on one of those back streets that no one had bothered to name. His place had gables and tall windows that were shrouded with heavy draperies that people said had once belonged to a famous theater. That was back in Cincinnati, where Cedric came from. The curtains gave the windows a heavy, haunted look, which fit right in with everyone’s view of Cedric, who owned the local opera house. No need to tell you which. There ain’t but one.

At first his opera house was a rip-roaring success. Around these parts howling cats can nearly always draw a crowd. But eventually Cedric made the mistake of falling in love with one of his singers. After that, it was all moonlight and mud. Same old story. St. Louis has quite a pull around here and it was calling to her. He begged her to stay. Right on the main street he did it, down on his knees. There’s old-timers around willing to tell you the story. Don’t even have to bribe them with a chaw. But she laughed him off and said she didn’t want anything to do with his little one-balcony opera house. To everyone’s surprise — and delight — he rose up off his knees and cursed her. Said he hoped that steamboat she was boarding never made it to St. Lou but ended up planted on the bottom of the river. And do you know, he got his wish. A huge explosion ripped that boat apart down by the Clarksville ferry.

Reason I’m telling you all this? That’s how Cedric Whipplemore got his ghost. She came back to try for a high C whenever there was a ring around the moon and hearts were full of romance. Poor Cedric had to shut his business down because she scared all his customers off. Least that’s what Cedric always claimed. Me, I think maybe he was just too brokenhearted to go down there anymore. Whichever the case, the Whipplemore opera house has been vacant since before the sheriff hired me on as a deputy, told me that my given name of Stanley Two-shot didn’t fire up his imagination any, and took to calling me Injun Joe. It wasn’t a huge insult that he didn’t like my real name, seeing as how he didn’t care for his own either. A name like Humfredo Mullendorfer, which was the handle the sheriff’s ma and pa dropped on him, didn’t have voters doing handsprings along the levee, so he changed it. Plucking a name out of a boy’s book, he took to calling himself Huck Finn and got himself elected a lawman.

And now Cedric Whipplemore was an old man, an old dead one at that, having flopped over his dining room table with a look of terror on his splotchy face and his telephone receiver clutched in his splotchy hand. I was sitting in the next room with the closest things he had to family, waiting on the sheriff.

“Well?”

That well belonged to Becky Finn, who had enough of them to spare. Being the wife of the sheriff, she had plenty of chances to put them to use too. She was a handsome woman, in a stern, blonde way, and I generally stayed as far from her as I did from thundering locomotives, especially when she started asking where her husband was.

“Expect he’ll be along shortly,” I mumbled, praying that was the case. “He had a little work to finish first.”

Covering up for the sheriff was one of my regular duties. Of course he knew his missus would be at the crime scene as soon as I told him we had another one. He also knew that all the other people who owned a telephone in town would be there, too, all seven of them, except for the two who were now dead, and maybe if we squinted real hard we might even have been able to see them, too, looking wispy and peaked and not quite with us anymore but not quite departed from us either. The sheriff generally put on a show worth hanging around for.

About a week back the first dead telephone owner had shown up, a glass of lemonade in one hand, her telephone receiver in the other. I’m talking about the Widow Brown, who’d received a call from a ghost wanting to know if she was ready to pass over to the other side. Nobody figured that restless spirit was talking about the other side of the river. How did we know it was a ghost? Because everyone else who owned one of those infernal talking machines had gotten a call too. And they all claimed the voice they’d heard sounded too stretched out and windblown to be from this world, though that was about all they could agree on. Votes were split on whether it was a man or woman spirit ringing them up. And poor Etheline Spavins, who was fraying on the edges anyway, she kept changing her mind about even that. All her dithering kept her nipping on her nerve medicine, which she was more than willing to share, kindly soul that she was, though I couldn’t help but notice that when she did pass her flask around, everyone’s recollections of the voice grew shriller, not calmer.

’Course sensible folks wanted to pin the Widow Brown’s end on the Confederate captain who haunted her livery stable. Didn’t matter that the widow had been found slumped over her telephone with nary a sword mark or hoof print on her — people figured that Confederate cavalryman finally got some peace. After all, he’d been shot in the back by the widow’s husband in the war and followed him home afterward. On moonless nights he was said to prance his white stallion down main street while brandishing a sword and whooping it up worse than ten comancheros. I’d never seen the fella myself, but everyone who had said it wasn’t a show you wanted to miss.

But was that Confederate captain the spook who did in Cedric too? That didn’t quite make sense, especially with a phantom opera singer waiting in the wings. Naturally half the town — the womanly half — was going to chime in that she deserved her due too.

And that wasn’t the end of our visitors from the other side. We had a real bumper crop of them that year, and everyone wanted to nominate their favorite as the culprit. The only one of the surviving telephone owners who didn’t have an opinion on the matter seemed to be the sheriff’s wife Becky, and that was because she claimed she never answered the phone and didn’t care what the local spooks were up to. So far as she was concerned no one in our town ever said anything worth hearing, and that included the ghosts.

“What I want to know,” Rutherford Dewitt stated for the record, “is what the sheriff is doing to protect those of us who are still breathing. We do pay his salary. Yours too, Deputy.”

I skipped over mentioning how little they paid. Rutherford wasn’t the sort you felt like complaining to. He was too big for most horses to carry and didn’t have any more sense of humor than a hangnail. He spent most of his days glowering and talking louder than necessary because he was hard of hearing but wouldn’t admit it. I answered loudly that the sheriff was tracking down several lines of inquiry, which went over about as well as a storm cloud on a wedding day.

“He has yet to even come talk to me,” Molly McIntosh informed everyone. She was a slight, pasty-faced woman who’d dressed in black ever since her father had passed on some years ago. “I am all alone down at the lumberyard, you know.” Her voice faded away to a hoarse whisper to add, “Almost.”

She didn’t want anyone to forget she had her own ghost, of course. You see, except for Becky, all the telephone owners claimed to have spirits plaguing them quite regular, and since everyone but Becky was getting on in years, they couldn’t sleep worth a hoot and stayed up half the night, complaining to each other over the telephone about what bedevilment their ghosts had been up to. Molly’s restless spirit had been the night watchman at her family’s lumberyard. He’d been burned to a crisp in a blaze that twenty years back turned most of her family’s business to ash. To hear Molly tell it, that spook never gave her a moment’s peace.

“Now now, Molly, you’ve only got one ghost haunting you. I’d think you’d have the decency to let these lawmen concentrate on my place first.” That was Alfreda Scrim, the preacher’s wife, who lived right next the cemetery and liked to reflect that it never rained but it poured when it came to ghosts and such around her house.

“Yes, but Alfreda, you’ve a preacher to protect you,” Molly reminded. “When the clock chimes midnight, I’m all alone.”

“The preacher?” Alfreda harrumphed, having no high opinion of her husband’s way with ghosts, or anything else for that matter. “When the clock strikes twelve he’s gone to world, and I’m all on my own, same as you, excepting I don’t have just one lazy visitor from the hereafter to contend with. I’ve got a whole graveyard full of unhappy sinners right outside my door. And I have to tell you, lately any time my phone rings after dark, they’re stirring. Something about that sound makes them restless. Injun Joe, if you and the sheriff are finally going to start looking for a culprit, I’d say you’d be wise to start in that cemetery.”

“As if they could hear the phone ringing above your voice,” Rutherford declared with a snort. Other than Mrs. Becky, he was the only one with a telephone who didn’t admit to having a ghost, though everyone claimed he had a pair of them. Two little boys, not more than seven and eight, who’d been known to flicker in and out of sight during lightning flashes. People whispered they were his drowned brothers.

“Couldn’t we all just try to not talk about them?” asked a weak, wobbly voice. Naturally that was the local steamboat heiress, Etheline Spavin, speaking. She could lay claim to the best known ghost in town, namely her mother, who’d thrown herself from the widow’s walk of their riverside mansion upon discovering that her husband had a whole other family down below Cape Girardeau. All that personal misfortune had settled a great shyness over Etheline, especially when her father abandoned her with an elderly aunt and went to live with his other wife and kids. Etheline turned inward after that and had as little to do with the outside world as possible. In fact, I was shocked to see her in Cedric’s overstuffed parlor at all. She wouldn’t have been there if her nephew, Perry Woodley, hadn’t pushed her over in that high-backed wheelchair that she hadn’t left for years. But there she sat, with one of her cats purring on her lap and her eyes darting everywhere as if she could see things no one else could.

“Aunty has something she thought you better know,” Perry Woodley said. Being a lawyer, he had a way of saying things that made people expect the worst.

Everyone turned toward Etheline, though slowly, as if they’d rather not.

“Cedric got a call last night,” Etheline whispered with a wobbly chin. “At the stroke of midnight.”

“Does the sheriff know about that?” I said.

“Ask him yourself,” Mrs. Becky answered with a nod toward the doorway, where a white apparition had appeared.

It wasn’t any ghost that’d joined us though, only Sheriff Huck with the morning sunlight streaming all around him thick as a hundred flares. He’d taken to wearing a starchy white suit as if it made him shine like some beacon of justice.

“Who’s bit the dust now?” the sheriff grumbled, though I could tell what he was really asking was, Why me?

Telephones had been around ever since thirty some years back when Mr. Alexander Graham Bell just had to prove he could ship the human voice through metal wires and have it come out the other end. I’m still not sure on what carried it in between, and if I had my druthers, I’d rather not know. Seems to me that people talk entirely too much as it is, and this machine just adds to the racket. The goods news about all that? If it’s taken the town of Marquis, Iowa, thirty years to get seven phones set up, it’ll probably take nine or ten centuries at least to get a phone in every house, so maybe I’m safe.

We wouldn’t even have those seven phones if thirty years ago Becky Finn’s father hadn’t felt a powerful itch to travel all the way to Philadelphia for a chance to see the centennial exposition, and President Ulysses S. Grant, and exactly what rubber from India was. And there was talk of an ostrich egg hatcher that caught his eye too. When he came back with news of what an electric telephone could do, he nearly got laughed out of town until young Jimmy Dubois said that he’d read about Mr. Bell’s work in a scientific journal that some gent on a passing steamer had left behind. That had the loafers on Main Street rolling in the dust and holding their sides, hard as they were cackling. It was all downhill from there.

To save face, Becky’s father had young Jimmy build a phone line between his house and the Dewitt Drug Emporium so that he wouldn’t have to hoof that long three blocks downtown every time he needed another dose of those special salts that kept him regular as the nine-oh-five from Quincy.

Soon as the finer sorts heard that Becky’s pa didn’t have to go traipsing downtown on a rainy day but could just ring Rutherford up and place an order — well everybody who was anybody had to have one of them dowickets put in their house. The line connecting those seven homes up ran in a big loop, with the Dewitt Drug Emporium marking the beginning and end of it. There were some drawbacks to that arrangement. Say you wanted a private telephone chat? Forget it. Anyone on the line could listen in anytime they wanted. And offer free advice if they’d a mind to, which some did. All they had to do was pick up their receiver and have at it. The Marquis telephone line wasn’t any place to keep a secret. On the other hand, it was exactly the place to go if you wanted to fan a rumor, like say news of the town’s ghosts doing away with telephone owners.

“Anybody touched anything?” The sheriff generally liked to pop a question like that to start things off. It let people know who was in charge.

“Did you want us to?” That was his wife, Becky.

He did his best to ignore her, saying, “It appears Cedric didn’t finish his drink.” He strolled behind the dead man, nodding toward the half empty glass. An open bottle of brandy stood next it. “Didn’t bother hanging up his phone, either.”

“Might have been too busy dying to get around to it,” I pointed out.

“So I hear,” the sheriff went on, ignoring me, “that this is some ghost’s handiwork. Anybody care to tell me about that?”

Several did, all at once, so the sheriff suggested at the top of his lungs that they take turns, then pointed at Molly McIntosh to start us off.

“I heard the telephone ring four times,” Molly said.

Four rings was the signal for Cedric’s place. Each house had its own signal. “At the stroke of midnight,” Alfreda Scrim clarified.

“And then?” the sheriff prodded because everyone suddenly clammed up.

When nobody rushed in to answer, Becky laughed and spoke her mind. “They all hurried over to lift up their receivers and find out why someone would be calling Cedric at that time of night.”

“It could have been an emergency,” Alfreda huffed.

“Turned out it was,” the sheriff agreed. “So what’d you hear?”

Now Alfreda and Etheline both ’fessed up to hearing the ghost extending Cedric an invitation to join her in the next world.

“Her?” the sheriff pounced.

“Could have been him,” Etheline wavered.

Making a face, the sheriff said, “That’s what Widow Brown’s ghost said, too, am I right?”

“For once,” Mrs. Becky conceded.

“Did Cedric say anything to the ghost?” the sheriff soldiered on.

There was disagreement, but in the end they decided he’d said nothing, though Alfreda insisted she’d heard him gasp.

Etheline’s jaw trembled extra hard, as if she had something to say, but nothing was coming out. Finally her nephew spoke up on her behalf, saying, “My aunty thinks that these ghosts are upset by people using the telephones. The electromagnetic current those phone lines give off doesn’t give the spirits a minute’s rest. It may be that the only way to stop these terrible deeds is to rip out the telephone lines that are causing—”

“No!” Etheline stubbornly blurted, as if her nephew had willfully gotten her message all wrong. “That’s not what I wanted to say at all, and you know it. I wanted all of you to know that being a shut-in such as I am, my only connection to the entire world is through these marvelous talking machines and that I have decided to bequeath my entire fortune to the city of Marquis, to be used for the installation of a telephone in every house hereabouts.”

That was more than double the talking I’d ever heard from Miss Etheline in all the years I’d known her, and she sounded more than usual off the tracks too. But considering her health, allowances were made, especially when she seized up and started to cough. Her nephew patted her back gently, saying he best take her home to rest. “Her strength’s not what it should be,” he explained

“Poor dear,” Molly McIntosh cooed as Etheline got wheeled away.

“She could be next,” Alfreda Scrim predicted, leaning on her experience as a preacher’s wife. “Her color doesn’t look at all right.”

“I’ll send her some salts,” Rutherford boomed.

“I can tell you one thing,” Mrs. Becky judged, casting a thoughtful glance at the back of Etheline’s wheelchair. “She knows more than she’s letting on.”

That was a trumpet call to battle for the sheriff, who straightened up, hitched his thumbs in his vest pocket, and declared, “Oh, folderol. That poor old girl’s scared half to death, that’s all. I dare say she’s just talking to save her own skin.”

That put Mrs. Becky’s back up considerably, and she let fly, “And how, pray tell, does her promising to buy telephones for this little fly-speck of a town do that?”

“Why, can’t you see?” the sheriff asked. “She’s trying to warn this ghost not to fool with her because if he or she does, they’ll be a lot more than seven telephones around to upset them.”

You could almost hear the juices bubbling inside Mrs. Becky’s head after being talked to so high handed. Without wasting a word, she sashayed out of Cedric Whipplemore’s parlor as if she had far better ways to pass the time than listening to her husband blow hot and cold.

After his wife left, the sheriff sent everyone else packing, too, with instructions to stay away from their telephones.

“Even if they ring?” Alfreda asked.

“Especially if they ring,” the sheriff answered with his steely voice, the one he trots out whenever he wants to promote law and order. “Go on now. Git. Injun Joe and I have our work to do.”

So the two of us stayed behind, all alone with a dead man. I can’t says it was where I would have chosen to spend my morning, but now and then a corpse, especially a ripe one, has been known to liven up the sheriff. And that was always a sight worth seeing.

First thing the sheriff did was take a seat directly across from Cedric, hold the unfinished glass of brandy up to his nose, and make a face. Sniffing the open bottle of brandy, he made the same face again.

“If I was you,” the sheriff advised, “I’d steer clear of this stuff. Don’t smell right.”

Then he went to studying the telephone receiver in Cedric’s hand, and the wire leading to the phone box on the wall behind the dead man, and finally he bent over and took a peek beneath the table. I didn’t bother following his lead ’cause I’d already checked under there. And besides, he was just testing me. If I’d looked, he’d have given me one of those gotcha winks. Straightening back up, he said, “I do have one little question, Deputy. How did this ghost manage to ring up Cedric? I mean, when did Mr. Bell start installing these dojiggers in the Hereafter?”

“Who said there was one there?” I asked.

“Well where else is this ghost calling from?”

He had me there, so I kept my thoughts to myself while we streeled down to the Dewitt Drug Emporium to find out more about how these calls from the other side were getting patched through to the here and now.

The Dewitt Drug Emporium wasn’t anywhere near as big as it sounds. The sign out front was barely wide enough to hold its name, and the store wasn’t much wider, though it was long. Mostly it was filled with glass cases and cabinets and stout smells that kind of grabbed at you as you passed by.

Way at the back there was a narrow counter where Rutherford stood around all day, patting down his fast-thinning hair and talking to himself rather loud. Behind that counter was a tiny room where Rutherford’s assistant lived. That assistant, whose name was Archibald Dewitt, also happened to be Rutherford’s cousin, though the two look about as much alike as December and July do. Archibald was a little bit of a fella, all ears and Adam’s apple, with a full head of hair that needed wetting down every hour or so. And he was jittery. Maybe because of the way Rutherford was always barking at him to move faster.

“The sheriff wants to know about the telephone,” Rutherford announced about five times louder than need be as we traipsed into Archibald’s living quarters. There was a cot, chair, and a couple of hooks for his clothes, and on one wall hung a telephone switchboard with an old kerosene lantern burning above it.

My first good look at the switchboard nearly stole my breath away. The thing brought to mind a grinning skeleton. But once you got used to the tangle of wires and brass facing you, it wasn’t anywhere near so scary, more strange and wonderful, in a complicated sort of way. Archibald glanced from the sheriff to me and back again while clearing his throat three or four times before managing to ask, “Cedric?”

“That’s right,” Rutherford barked. “So what’s on your mind, Sheriff? Those of us still living would kind of like to know.”

“For starters, how’s this monstrosity work?” The sheriff was standing nose-to-nose with the switchboard, looking as though he was about to tug on one of its wires.

“Well,” Archibald started out, doing his best to pull the sheriff’s hand back before he broke something, “whoever wants to make a call cranks up their telephone’s handle and picks up their receiver. That rings that bell up there.” He pointed to a little brass box atop the switchboard. “I pick up the receiver on my end here and ask who’s there.” He demonstrated. “They tell me, and I say how do and ask who they want to talk to, and they—”

Right about then the drug emporium’s front door opened and some lady yoo-hooed for help. Rutherford waved for Archibald to head out front and see to the customer.

“Hold on,” the sheriff said. “I got a couple a quick questions for your man here, and then he can go sell your lozenges. So you talked to the ghost before connecting it up to Cedric, right?”

“Had to,” Archibald reluctantly agreed.

“What’d it have to say?”

“He asked to speak to Cedric. Real polite like.”

“So it was a he?”

“Think so, though it’s hard to tell on these things. Most everyone who owns one is hard of hearing and generally shouts and the connections ain’t much good, crackle all the time, ’specially if it’s storming.”

“All right, all right,” the sheriff said, not liking all the excuses. “Answer me this. Can you at least tell where it was calling from?”

“Not unless I recognize the voice.”

The sheriff ground his teeth a bit before saying, “How about this. Could you tell whether it was the same ghost calling every time?”

Archibald hemmed and hawed a bit before admitting, “Not for sure.”

“Well thanks for muddying the waters up as much as you could,” the sheriff said. “As big a help as you’ve been, maybe you should get on with your drugstore work.”

Archibald took those lumps kind of hard and shoved off toward the front of the store as best he could. Soon as he was gone, the sheriff turned to Rutherford and whispered, “Can he be trusted?”

“What kind of a question’s that?” Rutherford boomed back.

“The kind a sheriff has to ask from time to time.”

That soured the druggist plenty but did drag out the following confession in a somewhat lower voice, “If you ask me, he’s too dang-blamed trustworthy. Got to count everything three ways from Sunday to make sure it’s accurate, that’s Archibald’s way.”

“Fair ’nough,” the sheriff allowed. “Joe,” he went on, giving me a start because I’d almost forgotten I was part of the party, “you got any questions?”

Figuring I had to say something or risk looking a complete fool, I come out with, “You ever use this switchboard?”

“’Course,” Rutherford blared. “If Archibald’s out making deliveries, I have to. And a fat lot of bother it is too. I can’t hardly hear what they’re saying.”

“So Archibald handles most of it?” I said. “’Specially at night?”

“That’s right. Why do you think I let him live back here for free?”

“All right, Joe,” the sheriff butted in, “I think that’s enough of that. No need to get the citizenry all up in arms. Why don’t you head over to the boneyard and see if there’s any ghosts who’ll confess to this business. And if you strike out there, well, check up on all the other spooks with access to one of these telephones. I’ll catch up to you later, after I ask Rutherford here a couple of questions about something ailing me.”

Ailing my foot. He was hoping to pry something out that’d give him an edge in cracking this case before me, so when I stepped out of the back room, I didn’t go far, about two feet was all, and kept an ear cocked for what the sheriff was fishing for. To my disappointment, all I heard him say was, “Rutherford, I’ve been having some problems with rats to home and the missus is scared to death of them.”

Thinks I, that’s the first I’ve heard of Mrs. Becky being scared of anything that walks God’s green earth.

“You got anything on the premises that could handle such varmints?” the sheriff asked. “Other than traps, I mean. I’m always forgetting where I put those blame things and stepping on them.”

Thinks I, Hard to step on anything when you’re all the time napping.

When Rutherford told him they had some poison that ought to do the trick, the sheriff wanted to know all about it, and if it worked on all kinds of rats, and if he had any recent customers who could recommend it to him, so I guessed he really did have rat problems. I didn’t stay around to hear the rest of his woes because just then I noticed who Archibald was helping up front. When he and his customer stepped out from behind a cabinet, I caught sight of the sheriff’s wife Becky. She didn’t seem to be after any rat poison though. It appeared that she and Archibald were chortling about something pleasanter than rats.

Seeing someone enjoy a chat with Mrs. Becky was something of a novelty. Pestilence and drought were usually more her kind of meat. Why, I would almost swear that I heard her tittering like a schoolgirl. I had my doubts that she’d ever made such a sound as that even when she’d been a schoolgirl. And then she turned and left, though not before she curtsied and Archibald bowed, as if they’d just agreed on something.

Needless to say, I was on fire to learn more about that, but when I buttonholed Archibald, he turned all red and forgetful, which left me only one choice — trying to pry something out of the sheriff’s wife. I’d almost talked myself into doing it, too, when I heard the sheriff and Rutherford stepping out of the back room. I took wing before the sheriff got a chance to ask what I was about.

Once outside, I caught sight of Mrs. Becky heading home, so I turned the other way, not wanting to draw attention to my interest in her, and ducked around the nearest corner. My getaway wasn’t clean though. Still looking behind me, I ran smack into the survey crew that had for the last week been trying to find the best place to stretch another railroad bridge across the river and bring Marquis into the twentieth century, same as Mr. Bell and his telephones were all a-pant to do. What with the considerable problems they were having driving stakes into river muck, those surveyors weren’t a happy bunch to begin with, and my knocking over one of their tripods didn’t improve their mood, nor mine, because all the cursing that followed drew the sheriff right to us.

“Injun Joe,” the sheriff bawled out, “don’t you dare punch that man. What’s wrong with you? I thought I warned you not to go knocking anybody into the next county again. And anyway, didn’t I tell you to head over to the cemetery? And you there. Yes, you. I wouldn’t plan on hitting my deputy over the back of the head with that stake, not unless you want to break the stake and spend the next six months in our hoosegow eating my wife’s cooking, I wouldn’t. We take a dim view of assaulting a lawman in these parts, particularly since Joe here’s the only man I got who’s big enough and brave enough to tackle a ghost. In case you haven’t heard, we’re right in the middle of a murder investigation here.”

That got me turned loose, along with several mouthfuls of smart talk about how they wouldn’t want to interfere with any lawman that brave, though they didn’t seem to care two figs about my size. They weren’t any pipsqueaks themselves. But I didn’t pay them much mind, not busy as I was wondering why the sheriff both was talking me up and doing his best to send me on my way. Mighty fishy. It got me to wondering if he was trying to get rid of me so that he could check out something himself. Thinking we’d see about that, I headed for the cemetery, only to double back to main street as soon as I was out of sight. I got there just in time to watch him duck into the law office of Etheline Spavin’s nephew, Perry Woodley.

Often as the sheriff dispenses free legal advice, I supposed it was possible he was dropping in there to discuss the fine points of the law. But I doubted it. The only opinion that ever counted with that man was his own, so I guessed that what he was really up to was having a word with Perry about his Aunty Etheline and that ghost.

I settled in with the loafers mooching chaws out front of the general store, waiting to see what might happen next. Ten minutes shoved off before the sheriff left the law office and headed straight to the Spavins’ riverbank mansion, where Miss Etheline was parked on her front veranda with Molly McIntosh riding shotgun and the usual assortment of cats who had the run of the place rubbing against their legs and bedding down in their laps.

The story of how Miss Etheline came to be wheelchair bound is wrapped in the mists of time, though most every explanation that pokes its head out of those mists says that her mother’s ghost pushed her off the same widow’s walk that she did a swan dive from herself. The poor lady must have been terribly lonely in the Hereafter to pull such a stunt as that.

For most of the next hour the sheriff sipped some of Miss Etheline’s famous tea and still managed to walk a straight line when he pushed off. That tea was known to be doctored with enough medicine to double the glow of a sunset. It had enticed many a dry throat and lonely soul to her door.

From there the sheriff headed to the reverend’s for a word with Alfreda. Of course, words were cheaper by the dozen with her, and she was still flinging them after him as he left. I could hear most of them fine from the tree I’d climbed up. She’d made up quite a list of the dearly departed who were buried out her front door but might still bear the world they’d left behind a grudge. As for my finding out about those ghosts, well, that had to wait until after dark anyway, didn’t it?

That night I started at the cemetery. Soon as Alfreda Scrim saw me at the gate she came charging out to let me know which ghosts I ought to be arresting. Her list of suspects seemed to include an awful lot of folks who’d never given her the time of day whilst they were still among the living. It took her an hour or two to fill me in on all that, but her jaw eventually tired and she left me alone to do my job. I had some pretty one-sided conversations with a headstone or two before everything came to a stop because a low, gargly voice was calling out, “Injun Joe-e-e-e-e.” So I knew the sheriff was hiding somewhere nearby and trying to have himself a little fun.

“What?” I asked, casual like, hoping that I sounded as if I had graveyard voices talking to me daily.

“You’re needed back in town.”

Soon as I got back to the jailhouse, I found out why. Archibald Dewitt was fluttering around worse than a moth with singed wings. It seems the ghost had been telephoning again.

“To who?” I asked, on the grumpy side, I’m afraid, ’cause another reason for the sheriff flushing me out of the graveyard had now presented itself. He knew Archibald was on the prowl and wanted me to handle it.

“Molly McIntosh.”

“Well, we better get on over there then,” I said, shoving past him.

“She ain’t home,” he told me.

That put a stop to my rushing off. “How’s that?”

“She didn’t answer her phone.”

That’s when I started running, fearing the worst, which was exactly what I found when I got to Molly’s place. She was stretched out on the kitchen floor, a glass of spilt milk beside her, one hand reached out toward her telephone as if it was still ringing, and a look of midnight terror stretching out her wrinkled face. “You’re running out of folks to call,” I said, speaking up so the spirit could hear me, though he or she never bothered answering.

Thanks to Archibald spreading the alarm, the sheriff and Mrs. Becky soon joined me, followed by Alfreda and the reverend, Rutherford in his nightshirt, and last of all Etheline in her wheelchair came humping along, pushed by her nephew. Sheriff Huck took me aside to say, “I’ll handle this bunch. I want you to keep after this ghost before it gets an urge to talk to someone else.”

The rest of the night turned out to be longer than a ten-mile hike in tight boots. While the sheriff shooed everyone back to bed, I spent a couple of hours lurking around the McIntosh lumberyard without catching so much as a whiff of the night watchman, who supposedly trailed a smoky scent wherever he haunted. I did, however, discover that the yard’s back gate had been left ajar. That was the first I’d ever heard of a ghost needing to open a gate to go through it.

From there I ambled on past the Dewitt Drug Emporium, but all was quiet. Too quiet, if you asked me. I half expected to spot the two young ghosts who had been Rutherford’s brothers playing leapfrog out front, but I didn’t catch so much as a flicker of them. What I did get an eyeful of was a white horse galloping down main street. Its eyes might have been blazing. I couldn’t tell for sure because I was so busy watching the rider’s sword swoosh through the night air. His blade cut the moonlight to shreds and left me pressed against a dark wall, holding my breath for all I was worth.

Against my better judgment, I struck out after him. On foot, of course. I didn’t have time to wake up my old nag, fling a saddle on her, and give chase, which was just as well. I wasn’t completely sold on catching up to any apparitions. Just seeing the general direction he was headed was more than enough to satisfy me, and besides, as I was tiptoeing after him, I noticed a light still burning at Etheline Spavin’s. Usually her place was dark as the river.

I was beginning to get the notion that I might have been missing a thing or two on my nightly rounds. Keeping that in mind, I checked up and down the street, then crept up to the lighted window to make sure everything was safe and sound with Etheline. I found myself staring at a bedside oil lamp and an empty wheelchair, but I never got a chance to figure out if she was tucked in for the night. A flutter and chill drew my eyes upward first, toward the widow’s walk. With a lurch, I found myself gazing at a cloaked figure I’d never noticed before, only heard of.

For a few twitchy heartbeats that hooded thing and me stood there staring at each other as if one of us owed the other money. That ended when someone screeched behind me. Naturally I whipped around, expecting to find the horseman bearing down on me. But except for moonlight, the street was empty. The screech kept on going, though, sounding awful high and thin to belong to a cavalry captain swinging a sword. Slowly it dawned on me that it might not be a screech but the work of an opera singer trying to tackle a high C. Whoever it was held the note long enough to make the whole night seem about to shatter and come crashing down. The note stretched out thinner and thinner until almost gone. By then I could barely separate it from the rustling of the last few leaves still clinging to the trees. And then it cut off. Everything went back to being still as the instant before you fall asleep.

Rechecking the widow’s walk, I found the cloaked figure gone, and just as I lowered my eyes to the window I’d been peering through, the oil lamp inside got snuffed out, leaving me with nothing to look at but black. I raised a hand to rap on the glass and call out to Miss Etheline, but thought better. How was I ever going to explain what I was doing peeking in a lady’s bedroom window?

Instead, I listened until hearing the rustle of bedsheets. Satisfied all was safe, I pushed off toward the cemetery to see if any ghosts were cavorting out there. I thought there was a good chance there might be, seeing as how that’s the direction the horseman had galloped off.

When I got there a thin layer of mist hung over the gravestones, but nothing was stirring, unless you counted the tail of Preacher Scrim’s horse, which happened to be white and tied up to the cemetery’s gate. When I ran a hand over its flank, I found it’d worked up a fine lather, but a quick glance toward the parsonage told me everything was quiet there.

That summed up my night, though I figured I’d found out enough to make the sheriff think twice about ever sending me after ghosts again.

The next day, about noon, I rolled out of the jail cell where I sleep, stretched and scratched, and headed down to Lady Small’s Café for lunch. The proprietress clanked a cup of coffee down in front of me as if mad at the world, which was unusual, considering what a cheery chatterbox she was. Normally she never got tired of telling me about her days as a circus performer who’d warbled and taken bows before the crowned heads of Europe. She had a photo mounted on the wall to prove it too. Just listening to her call out an order to her cook was worth the price of a meal. When I asked what’d flown up her nose today, she patted her throat and grimaced as if coming down with the first cold of the season, though she didn’t seem to have any sniffles. Still, whatever she had didn’t sit well. You could tell she was just dying to ask me about all the ghosts that were scaring half the town to death. But sore as her throat was, she didn’t have any choice but to let her other customers pester me half to death about what was going on.

They did a bang-up job of it, too, throwing up questions and possibilities fast as I could knock them down. Hard as they went at it, you didn’t need a newspaper reporter to tell you that the whole town was in an uproar. To eat my meal in peace, I had to pick up my roast beef sandwich and leave, though as I was easing out the door, I couldn’t resist letting slip that they could all rest easy because the sheriff was pretty close to making an arrest. So far as I knew he wasn’t any closer to that than Sisyphus was to getting his rock up that hill, and now he’d have everyone hounding him to reveal what he had up his sleeve. Maybe that’d teach him to go whispering my name around a graveyard.

And then, wouldn’t you know, I began to wonder if the scoundrel might actually be onto something he wasn’t sharing. He’d sicced me after those ghosts awful quick and seemed to be finding time to have some fun to boot. Unable to shake the idea that he was holding out on me, I headed toward his house to find out what he’d been up to.

I didn’t bother knocking at the front door but slipped directly around back to the sheriff’s shed, where I found him whittling a hickory stick down to nothing. That was never a good sign, though at least all his fingers were still attached.

“Deputy Joe,” he said, sulking the way he did whenever he and his missus had been chawing on each other, “I’m thinking we’d better gather the interested parties together tonight so’s we can make the telephones of Marquis, Iowa, safe again. I’ll leave it to you to let everyone know. And, Deputy, in case you’re wondering, that includes my missus. She’ll probably take it better from you. Let’s tell them to meet at Etheline Spavin’s place, shall we? You know how hard it is for her to move about, especially so late. Tell ’em a little before midnight. And order up a storm if you can. For drama.”

I never got a chance to try and talk my way out of it. Tossing what was left of his whittling aside, he pushed off for main street before I could, saying he had a loose thread or two to pull together. Perhaps. Just as likely, he was clearing out fast before I tackled Mrs. Becky. All well and good because I was still wondering what her and Archibald Dewitt had been so thick about down at the drug emporium.

But when I circled back up front, I found out why the sheriff had been whittling so fiercely. There sat Archibald in the drawing room, having another word with Mrs. Becky. The two of them appeared stuck fast together as thieves, which left me wondering if the sheriff’s wife hadn’t finally decided to leave her husband for good. Archibald was single enough for her needs and appeared to be just basking in her attentions. And the cookies he was being served didn’t seem to break his molars or curl his tongue, either. Those were good signs if he was planning on running off with Mrs. Becky. She was the kind of woman who had more important things to do than wrestle with recipes over a hot stove.

When I said they certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves, Archibald straightened out as if he’d just shot himself in the foot. Mrs. Becky sized me up as if she’d be aiming for my foot next.

“So what if we are?” she asked, cool and level as could be.

“I was just wondering if you were talking about ghosts,” I said.

“That is none of your concern,” she informed me.

When I mentioned that her husband wanted to gather all the telephone owners at Miss Etheline’s place at midnight, she said, “Well of course he does, Stanley—”

Unlike some I could mention, she never took to calling me Joe or Injun Joe. Characters from a story book didn’t interest her at all. Cold hard facts was more her style, much to her husband’s discomfort.

“—he’s always planning things for after dark. Makes it easier to slip away when he flubs up. But don’t worry, Deputy, I wouldn’t miss this soirée for the world.”

That wasn’t anywhere near the answer I’d been expecting, which gave me something else to worry about. I’d never known Mrs. Becky to be so cooperative before. She even gave me a pleasant smile as she showed me to the door.

Etheline Spavin’s parlor had once been the finest room in town, though by now it had begun to list on its foundation. The furniture inside might be oak, but it was all mighty wobbly oak that looked about one overweight guest from kindling. All the cushions were threadbare, and the carpet worn through in more spots than I could count. The clock on the mantel said it was 5:43 and probably had been saying so for the past thirty years or more. Cobwebs connected it up to little cupid statues on opposite sides of the mantle. And of course there was the smell of cats, which filled every cushion and lap in sight.

Sheriff Huck had already appropriated the most comfortable chair by the time I pulled in. A large tabby had joined him. His wife Becky had settled down as far away from him as she could get. Rutherford Dewitt lined up to the sheriff’s left, looking considerably wrung out, and Alfreda Scrim was complaining to her husband, the Reverend Scrim, about how noisy the cemetery had been of late. I had asked the reverend to join us in case any of the spirits we were dealing with got too frisky. No one was paying Alfreda much mind, particularly her husband, who had a glazed look that anyone who’d spent any time around his wife recognized. I took the perspiration on the reverend’s brow to mean that he was uneasy about crossing paths with any spooks. That left our hostess, Etheline, in her wheelchair, and her nephew Perry, who appeared ready to protect his aunt from any spirits who showed up.

One last guest, a stranger, was ornamenting the chair to the sheriff’s right. Although this gent was wearing a tweed suit coat and thin black bowtie, he had a leathery, sun-creased look about him, particularly across his forehead, where a tan line showed that he usually wore a hat. The hat in question was resting on his knee. It was a weather-beaten, shapeless thing. As soon as I stepped into the parlor, this stranger challenged me with a frosty stare that said we’d met before. I didn’t have time to sort that out, though, not with the sheriff suddenly talking over Alfreda.

“Here’s my deputy,” Sheriff Huck announced, sounding as if he’d been bragging about me, which could only mean one thing — he’d found some way to one-up me. “Late as usual, but for a good reason, I’m guessing. Have you figured out which ghost’s to blame, Deputy?”

“Almost,” I answered.

“Only almost?” the sheriff chided. “We need to wrap this business up while we still got some telephone owners alive. Joe, maybe you better fill us in on what you’re thinking, holes and all. Somebody here might be able to supply the rest.”

Modesty wasn’t the sheriff’s strong suit, and there wasn’t much doubt he expected to be the one who’d pull everything together. The twinkle in his eye said he was ready to step on my back — soon as I fell flat on my face — and reveal what had really been truly going on. Unwilling to let him sail across the finish line without even breaking a sweat, I took the plunge, hoping things would sort themselves out as I went.

“The thing you’ve got to know about ghosts,” I started out, trying to sound as though my Indian heritage made me an expert on the subject, “is that they’re usually trying to tell you something.”

“Humbug!” Rutherford Dewitt declared, stomping his foot down.

“I wouldn’t be so fast on the draw there, Rutherford,” the sheriff cautioned. “Joe’s father was a medicine man, you know, so when it comes to the spirit world, I don’t trust anybody more than my deputy here. Ain’t that so, Joe?”

“Sometimes,” I allowed. Turning to Rutherford, I added, “Take those two little tykes that make you so jumpy, Mr. Dewitt. They mostly just want to say goodbye to you, and then I expect they’ll be on their way.”

The drugstore owner gurgled deep in his throat but didn’t manage to get anything else out. Mostly he just turned red in the face.

“What else you got, Joe?” the sheriff asked.

“A strong suspicion,” I said, stepping behind the sheriff and the stranger perched next him, “that it’s not the night watchman at the lumberyard who’s behind all this.”

“And what catapulted you to that conclusion?” the sheriff wanted to know, pleasant as could be, as if I was his prize pupil.

“Just the fact that whoever did away with Miss Molly left the rear gate to the yard open on her way out.”

“That was careless of them,” the sheriff agreed, “but what’s your point?”

Mrs. Becky answered that one for me. “That a ghost wouldn’t have needed to open the gate in the first place. They could have floated right through it.”

“Now that’s some first-rate detecting, if that’s what Joe was thinking,” the sheriff conceded. “But maybe that back gate being open doesn’t have anything to do with our case at all. You know as well as I do that schoolboys are always cutting through that lumberyard rather than going all the way around it. But my deputy did let something slip that gave me the prickles.”

Everyone but Mrs. Becky straightened up some at that announcement. She just shook her head disgusted like, as if she’d heard her husband pretend to know something too often to count.

“I heard him call this ghost a she,” the sheriff went on. “Does that mean you think it’s Cedric’s opera singer who’s behind all this mayhem?”

“Not at all,” I came right back. “And I’d like to also say that you could have saved your money, Sheriff.”

“Oh?” The sheriff sounded innocent as a cardsharp. “What money’s that?”

“The dollar or two that you shelled out to Lady Small to try and hit that high C.”

“What ever gave you such an idea as that?”

“Two things. The fact that she used to sing in the circus while standing atop a horse, and the way she can’t hardly speak today, probably because she strained her cords working for you last night.”

“Pish-posh,” the sheriff said, waving me off. “If that’s all you got to complain about—”

“No, I’d also like to mention that I thought your horse-thieving days were all behind you.”

“Now what are you going on about?” the sheriff asked, turning testy. He’d made a mistake or two in his youth that he liked to keep buried.

“Just that you were seen riding down Main Street on Reverend Scrim’s white horse.”

“On whose word?”

“All the ghosts out to the cemetery.”

“Joe,” the sheriff lectured, “if that’s all the testimony you’ve got—”

“And the reverend,” I tacked on before he could build up a full head of steam.

The reverend gave the sheriff the kind of sad little helpless nod he passed out to sinners, and for once the reverend’s wife’s mouth was open without any sound rushing out.

“I hope you’re going somewhere with all this,” the sheriff crabbed, “ ’cause you’re shedding friends fast.”

“Only this,” I said, strolling behind everyone circled up in the parlor. One or two craned their heads to follow me, but mostly they all stared straight ahead, tensing up as if expecting me to tap them on the shoulder. “One of the people in this room,” I went on, “might not be exactly what they pretend to be.”

“Joe, Joe, Joe,” the sheriff lamented, wagging his head weary like, “that goes without saying. You can’t be human without accumulating yourself some secrets. That much is a given.”

“This particular suspect,” I continued while stopping behind Etheline Spavin’s wheelchair, “has been heard arguing over the telephone with every person who’s turned up dead.”

“I hope you’re getting all that from some kind of reliable source,” the sheriff cautioned.

Well, my theory was a little weak on that point, but I was hoping that Mrs. Becky would step up and join her voice with mine ’cause I was pretty sure she listened at her phone same as everyone else. I should have known that she was at least as prideful a creature as her husband and didn’t want anyone to know that she’d actually stooped to eavesdropping on that party line. When my eyes darted toward her, she was busy gazing out the nearest window, even though there was nothing to see out there but shadows. So my gamble was a bust, not that it kept me from playing my bluff out to the bitter end.

“I’m not just depending on one source,” I forged on. “I’m going by what I’ve seen with my own two eyes.”

“And what’s that, pray tell?” The sheriff fought a yawn.

“That some of the ghosts in this town aren’t as dead as others.”

That revelation at least got Rutherford Dewitt leaning forward to hear what I had to say next.

“Any in particular?” the sheriff quizzed.

“One,” I answered, and without warning, I took hold of Etheline Spavin’s wheelchair and tipped it forward.

What happened after that wasn’t exactly what I’d been planning on. Etheline didn’t stand up to break her fall, which was what I’d been hoping for. No, she tumbled onto the carpet, her legs as curled up and lifeless as a rag doll’s. That wasn’t what all my investigating had led me to expect at all. I had kind of doubted she’d make a run for it. She was in her upper eighties after all. But I did think she might blush a little for pretending to be an invalid all these years and maybe even ’fess up that she’d been sneaking around scaring people to death. How she’d managed that last part hadn’t exactly revealed itself to me — yet. But one step at a time, that’s my motto. Nothing of the sort happened though, and didn’t I feel the fool? Still, that didn’t explain who was wearing a cloak and floating around so grand up on the widow’s walk.

Etheline’s nephew made a grab to catch her but too late. And Alfreda Scrim found her voice long enough to say, “Well, I never.” And the sheriff had to pretend to cough to cover up a laugh ’cause he always enjoyed himself most when I was flailing around and sinking fast.

I didn’t get a chance to worry about any of that though, not as busy as I was trying to help Etheline back into her chair and flinging apologies and wishing I could turn invisible as a ghost myself so that I could fade through the nearest wall. There were six men in that room, and all of us but the sheriff lent a hand to get that poor old lady upright again. Once comfy, she was willing to forgive. Actually, she didn’t even seem to quite understand what had happened to her. Her nephew was another story.

Perry Woodley wanted me arrested on the spot. Given the general mood of the room, I’d be getting off easy if that’s all that happened, but then the sheriff did the one thing I would have never expected. He stood up for me. In his own way.

“Truth be told,” the sheriff said, “the first one I’ve got a mind to arrest is you, Perry Woodley. ’Cause my deputy here ain’t the sort of lawman who goes off half cocked, excepting maybe when he’s been misled by a professional.” He shot his wife a knowing little sneer, as if he suspected that she’d misled me about Etheline Spavin’s arguing with the others over the telephone. His thinking that only made sense if he’d caught her eavesdropping a time or two, so I’d been right about that much. “His instincts were sound,” the sheriff breezed on, “even if his aim was off. Perry Woodley, I do hereby arrest you for the murders of Widow Brown, Cedric Whipplemore, and Molly McIntosh.”

A steamboat whose smokestacks were spewing sparks could have cruised straight through the center of that parlor and I’ve got my doubts anyone would have noticed. Everyone was too keen on watching Perry Woodley straighten up to his full height, which was a good deal higher than any of us had ever noticed before, level a quaking finger at the sheriff’s nose, and demand to know, “What gives you the right—”

The sheriff didn’t even bother to get up, just answered from his chair, “Oh I think you know exactly what gives me the right. For starters, the fact that you happened to buy some rat poison from Rutherford here.”

“To take care of some rats for my aunty.”

“Now ain’t that a little too much to swallow?” the sheriff asked, patting the tomcat on his lap. “What with all the cats around here?”

“Tell him, Aunty.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know w-what to say,” Etheline Spavins sputtered.

“Remember?” Perry Woodley urged with a frown. “For down in the cellar. You don’t let the cats down there.”

Etheline’s jaw trembled as if she was trying to recall what her nephew was talking about but couldn’t. All she managed was a feeble, “Oh, dear.”

“Why would I want to murder those people?” Perry said, turning away from his aunty. “That’s crazy.”

“Maybe because you thought it would leave you rich?” the sheriff suggested.

“What are you talking about?”

“Yes, what?” Alfreda Scrim wanted to know, beside herself to think that someone in Marquis knew something she didn’t.

“His inheriting this mansion,” Sheriff Huck revealed.

“Are you daft?” Perry Woodley cried. “Aunty’s leaving it to the town. To install telephones. Everyone heard her say that.”

“And how do you feel about that?” the sheriff wheedled.

“As if it’s her business,” Perry Woodley answered, though it came out kind of stiff and resentful.

“And mightn’t there be something you think she should do with her inheritance?”

“What are you getting at, Sheriff?”

“That maybe you’re hoping to change your sweet old aunty’s mind about who gets what when she’s gone.”

“I resent—”

But the sheriff was playing to the whole room by then and talked right over him, saying, “If ghosts were to convince Etheline here that these telephones aren’t safe — which they aren’t — then she might forget this nonsense about putting one of the things in every house as her legacy. She might decide to do something else with her worldly possessions, something like leave them to her nephew here, who’s always so kind and Johnny-on-the-spot when she needs something done.”

“Why of all the black-hearted, low-down—” That was Alfreda Scrim sounding a little more country than usual.

“And isn’t it convenient,” the sheriff rolled along, “that he’s a lawyer? In case any wills need changing, I mean.”

“The only thing my aunty’s got of any value,” Perry Woodley spouted, “is this mansion we’re sitting in. And it’s been falling apart for years. She’s been too poor to afford repairs and the next good flood will probably wash it down to Keokuk. So why would I want it?”

But the sheriff went right on spinning his web, saying, “Oh, I think we both know the answer to that.” Nudging the cat off his lap, he stood up to lay out one last piece of brilliance for us to admire. “The railroad’s looking to build a bridge across the river right here at Marquis, and if I’m not mistaken, the only place to do it is through the center of this house. That ought to make it worth a little something, don’t you think, Mr. Leavenworth?”

Here the sheriff turned toward the stranger he’d invited along. Of course everyone else turned with him. And I have to say that the stranger kind of enjoyed being the center of attention because he didn’t say a word in answer to the sheriff, just flashed his dimples while looking around as if the joke was on us.

“Mr. Leavenworth here is the head surveyor for the railroad,” the sheriff revealed.

At least that explained why the gent looked so familiar. We’d nearly come to blows when I almost bowled him over in the alley beside Dewitt’s Drug Emporium.

“I asked him along,” the sheriff continued, “to help fill out this little tale of greed that we have here. Go ahead.” The sheriff nodded to the surveyor. “Tell them how much the railroad is willing to pay for this prime riverbank location, sir.”

That’s when the stranger put on his hat, stood up, and said, “That lawyer’s not your man.”

The sheriff’s jaw did some flopping. “But I thought you said—”

“You old windbag,” the stranger cut the sheriff off. “If you’d been listening, instead of gassing on about how you’d found your murder suspect and your murder weapon, and reckoning you were going to outshine your deputy or bust, well, if you hadn’t been so wound up about all that, you might have heard me tell you what I’m going to say now. The place we wanted to buy belongs to that fool there.” He pointed at Rutherford Dewitt. “His store’s the only site where it makes any sense to build our bridge, and he says he won’t sell.”

“Can’t,” Rutherford boomed in a stubborn voice. “I’ve already left my brothers behind once. Won’t do it again.”

“Now hold everything,” Sheriff Huck squawked, but that’s all he got out. Mostly, he just stood there opening and closing his mouth as if his teeth didn’t fit quite right.

We were all so busy enjoying that spectacle that what happened next locked us up solid as yesterday’s porridge. The telephone rang.

Everybody flinched. Well, maybe not all of us. I did notice that Mrs. Becky was keeping such a close eye on everyone else that she managed to stay seated. Three times the bell rang, which was the signal for Etheline’s house. We all sat there gaping at the telephone on the wall as if it was a hangman’s noose.

“Somebody better answer it,” Mrs. Becky suggested, calm and cool as ever.

That started a stampede. The sheriff got there first because he was nearest but there were seven pairs of ears crammed as close to that receiver as they could get. The only people hanging back were Etheline, who was glancing all around as if she didn’t quite recognize what room she was in, and Mrs. Becky, who was still pretending that she never answered telephones. I didn’t hang back myself, not as much as I wanted to hear who was calling.

“Hello?” says the sheriff.

“Are you ready to join me?” croaked a nervous, wispy voice on the other end of the line. “The time is at...”

I didn’t get to hear the rest of what the caller had to say because just then Etheline screeched, “Is she asking for me? Tell her I’m coming.”

And from the folds of her shawl she pulled out a small silver flask and started to unscrew its cap with a shaky, withered hand. She never got a chance to raise it to her lips though. Mrs. Becky caught her by the wrist before she could get it there. Taking a whiff of the flask, she made a face and announced, “Here’s your murderer. And here’s your rat poison too.” She held up the flask she’d taken away from Miss Etheline, who at the moment had covered her face with her hands and was whimpering. “Everyone knows she was always offering to share her nerve medicine. You weren’t arguing with anyone over the telephone, were you Etheline? Something tells me you were arranging to have your nephew bring a dose of your medicine to friends who were having trouble sleeping after being telephoned by a ghost that sounded an awful lot like you, if someone was to listen instead of trying to talk.”

So I had been right! Partly, anyway. It had been Miss Etheline. I just hadn’t figured out all the particulars. Much as I hate to admit it, the sheriff had stumbled over some of the answer, too, though by my reckoning, not as much of it as I had. If you can’t quite picture how Sheriff Huck took his missus’s revelations, let me help. He laughed, and it wasn’t a pretty laugh, either, but a mean, toothy, don’t-be-foolish sort that fell on deaf ears because everyone was watching Perry Woodley bend down beside his aunty to ask what she’d done. Sounding more than a little surprised, the old lady answered, “Why, I’ll need someone to talk to in the hereafter, won’t I?”

We lost nearly all our ghosts that night. People quit believing there had ever been a phantom night watchman at the lumberyard, and more than one citizen came around to thinking that the cavalry captain on the white stallion was only Reverend Scrim coming home from comforting a member of his flock, though I had me some doubts about that, knowing how much the sheriff likes to dress up in old uniforms from that steamer trunk of his. Word got around too that Lady Small could almost hit a high C, which did away with anyone mentioning the ghost of the opera singer ever again, unless trying to scare someone new in town.

Rutherford Dewitt sealed any further talk about his two ghosts by selling his drug emporium to the railroad and moving west. About the same time the graveyard got awfully quiet too. I’m guessing that was because Alfreda Scrim moved on to arranging her church’s gala Christmas festivities.

That left only the spirit of Etheline Spavin’s mother to haunt our little town, and no one ever noticed that ghost after the following spring’s flood, which swept the widow’s walk and everything beneath it away in a swirl of brown water. I was making rounds the night it happened and have to report that the last I saw of the mansion was a cloaked figure standing atop it and waving farewell. Or at least I think that’s what I saw. And the river swallowed it.

You don’t need to worry about Etheline though. She’d already been moved to a mental hospital by then. I heard she made quite a fuss until her nephew suggested they try giving her a private telephone line. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t hooked up to anything. Etheline could hear her friends just fine.

So now we’re down to two telephones in town — Alfreda Scrim’s and Mrs. Becky’s, and they don’t bother talking to each other, never have. But lately word has gotten around that Sheriff Huck is considering having a telephone installed at the jail, in case people need him for an emergency. That rumor got its wings while everyone was buzzing about how the sheriff’s wife had solved the telephone murders, as they’ve become known in these parts.

It turned out it was Mrs. Becky who put Archibald Dewitt up to calling us at the stroke of midnight to flush out the culprit. Sharp as that thinking was, there’re some who have been mentioning that maybe it’s high time for Marquis to elect a woman sheriff. Mrs. Becky may be considering it too, or at least Archibald Dewitt says so. He’s clerking over at the general store now and seems to know a good deal about what the sheriff’s wife thinks. I can’t disagree with his judgment on the matter. Something tells me that she might be pretty good at arresting people. If she does decide to run for office, I’m not exactly sure who I’ll be voting for. Maybe I’ll just write my own name on the ballot, in case there’s a tie.

Copyright © 2011 Joe Helgerson