Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

Haunts by George C. Chesbro

© 1993 by George C. Chesbro

In his fourth case for EQMM, cool-headed private detective Garth Frederickson is asked to turn ghostbuster by an elderly acquaintance who complains that her house’s friendly ghosts have turned hostile...

“They’re here!” Madame Bellarossa shrieked as the flames of the seven candles on the table guttered and then Mary screamed, her voice joining the other woman’s in a duet of horror, her features twisted with the same terror Garth had seen on Elsie Manning’s face when he had found her huddled on the ground at his back door at three o’clock in the morning one week before, too weak to pound any more, scratching at the screen like a stricken cat.

“They want me to die, Garth!” the eighty-year-old woman had said in a strangled whisper as she clutched at the hem of Garth’s robe.

Garth Frederickson looked around, saw nothing in the warm September night beyond the glow cast by his porch light, heard nothing but the sibilant whisper of waves washing up on the beach fifty yards away. He bent down, placed his hands under the woman’s frail arms, gently lifted her to her feet, and held her as she trembled violently and grabbed the lapels of his pajama top. Despite the fact that he knew the answer, he asked, “Who wants you to die?”

“My ghosts.”

“They can’t hurt you here, Elsie,” Garth said in a soothing tone, leading her into the house, the kitchen, where he eased her down into a chair at the rectangular butcher-block table. He took off his woolen robe and wrapped it around her, then went to the range to heat water for tea. He looked up when his wife appeared in the doorway. Brilliant blue eyes still blurred by sleep, white-streaked, waist-length blond hair disheveled. Mary Tree was still the most beautiful woman he had ever known, and the love he felt surging in him like a tide at the sight of her came as a welcome relief from the pall cast by the trembling old woman Garth considered to be ill with a kind of spiritual leprosy she had consciously nurtured, indeed reveled in and boasted about, for so many years, and which had now resulted not only in what Garth believed to be the most bizarre and perverse legal decision in the history of the country, but had also cost her the sale of her home and the money he knew she desperately needed, and might also be killing her. “Elsie’s had a fright, Mary. She needs some time to rest.”

The folk singer sighed sympathetically, then quickly walked into the kitchen and sat down next to the other woman, resting her large hands with their long fingers on Elsie Manning’s still-quaking shoulders. “Oh, Elsie, Elsie, it’s all right now. Everything’s all right. Your ghosts?”

Elsie Manning seemed unable to speak. Her pale, watery green eyes were still wide with shock and horror as she stared somewhere over Mary’s head, transfixed by her own private haunt that only she could see. Without her dentures in place her cheeks were sunken, and her mouth formed an O as she slowly nodded her head.

The kettle began to whistle. Garth prepared three cups of tea, brought them to the table, placed one in front of Elsie. “Sip some of that, Elsie,” he said, smiling reassuringly. “It will make you feel better. Just be careful; it’s hot.”

Mary placed her hands around the old woman’s, helping to steady them as Elsie lifted the cup to her mouth and sipped some of the steaming brew. When she set the cup back down, her hands and body did not seem to be trembling as much, and her pale green eyes had come back into focus. “I just don’t understand it,” she said weakly. “I’ve lived in that house all my life, and the ghosts were always so friendly. They were young lovers who committed suicide in an upstairs room rather than let their parents force them apart. They loved my parents, and they loved me. Sometimes, when I was a child, I’d see them sitting at the foot of my bed, all aglow, smiling at me. Sometimes they’d sing lullabies to put me to sleep. I always felt so comfortable with them. They kept me company. Now... they hate me because I want to sell the house and leave them. I feel their hatred, know that they want me to die. They send cockroaches.”

“You called the exterminator about the cockroaches,” Garth said. “Didn’t he take care of them?”

Elsie nodded tentatively. “Yes. But they came back. I was too ashamed to tell you. The exterminator came again, but the cockroaches were back a week later. Now they’re all over the house. And rats, and terrible smells. Garth, you and Mary have been in my home; you know I keep a clean house. And then the phone will start ringing at all sorts of odd hours. I’ll answer, but there’ll be nobody there. I hang up, and the phone starts ringing again. Sometimes that will go on for hours, all night. I just can’t fathom how spirits who had been so loving could have turned so spiteful.”

Garth and Mary exchanged glances, and Garth reached across the table to touch the old woman’s liver-spotted hand. “Elsie, you’ve been under tremendous stress since what happened with the buyer you had. I don’t think you’ve ever really understood that most people aren’t as comfortable with ghosts — friendly or otherwise — as you are. Humans are a very superstitious breed, and Americans are just as superstitious as the rest of the world. For years, you’ve been enjoying your haunted house, talking about it to anybody who would listen. You loved the attention when the local paper would run a story on your haunted house every year. But now you want to move into a retirement community where all your needs will be taken care of — staff to prepare your meals and clean your apartment, and doctors to look after you — and you need a lot of money to get into the place where you want to go. You’ve already lost one buyer who offered a fair price and gave you a sizable binder because a week before the closing he got wind of the fact that the house was supposedly haunted. We may agree with your attorney that the binder should have been yours because he reneged, but incredibly, the judge ruled that you should have told him the house was haunted. In effect, the state of New York has offered a legal opinion that yes, there really are such things as haunted houses, and one of them happens to be in Cairn. And now you have a worse problem because the wire services have picked up on it, and it’s become a national news story. You’ll probably continue to be deluged with phony seers, sages, astrologers, psychics, and professional magicians who’ve discovered they can pick up a lot of free publicity simply by issuing a press release saying they’re thinking of buying your haunted house. But they don’t want your house, and most couldn’t begin to afford the three quarters of a million it’s worth. They just want the attention. And nobody else wants your house, at least not at the moment. What you have to do, Elsie, is give the story time to die down. Eventually you’ll find another buyer, because it’s a fine old house sitting right on the Hudson River, and there aren’t too many of those. But — above all else — you have to stop advertising the fact that you think it’s haunted.”

“I don’t think I have much time,” the woman said in a hollow voice. Her eyes had once again gone out of focus, and she put a shaking hand to her throat. “Tonight one of them touched me — here. It woke me up. They were both there, in hooded robes, standing next to my bed in the moonlight. I could see them just as clearly as I see the two of you right now. But this was different from the other times when they’ve come to me. They’ve never worn hooded robes before, never hidden their faces. And they’ve never touched me before. The hand on my throat was so cold, like it had been in ice water. I didn’t think he was going to let me up, but he did, and that’s when I ran over here. I—” She abruptly stopped speaking, looked hard at Mary, then at Garth. “I know you don’t believe me. You think it’s all my imagination. You’ve always been too polite to say so, but I know you think I’m just a batty old woman.”

“Elsie,” Garth replied in an even tone, “I don’t find what you believe any more improbable than the things believed in by ninety-nine percent of the population of Cairn, or the country, and I don’t consider most of my other friends and neighbors batty.”

“But you don’t believe there are ghosts in my house, do you?”

“That shouldn’t surprise you.”

“But one touched me tonight, Garth!”

Garth sighed. “Elsie, Mary, my brother, and I have faithfully attended every one of your Halloween séances ever since Mary and I settled in Cairn — in fact, we’ve felt honored to be invited. We find them great fun. My brother would be the first to tell you that he’d love nothing better than to meet a ghost, sit down with it, and have a nice long chat about whatever.”

“But your little brother doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

“No, he doesn’t believe in ghosts either. But he’s open to the possibility of anything because he believes in mystery, and he’d be highly amused to find out that he’s wrong, and that there really are such things as ghosts. But the fact of the matter is that there have never been any visitations at the six séances we’ve been to, not a peep from anyone or anything that wasn’t present and accounted for.”

“It’s because you and Mary and your little brother don’t believe in them. They won’t appear if you don’t believe in them.”

Garth caressed his wife’s cheek with the back of his hand, then rose from the table. “Elsie, I’m going to get dressed and go check on your house to make sure there’s nobody there.”

The old woman stiffened in her chair, clutched at Mary’s arm. “No, Garth, don’t go! There’s no use! You won’t find anything. They won’t appear to you. It’s me they’re after.”

Suddenly Elsie Manning began to cry — not in racking sobs, but softly, more now in hopeless despair than the terror she had displayed earlier. She closed her eyes, threw her head back, and opened her shrunken O of a mouth in a silent howl of torment as a steady stream of tears welled from between her eyelids and coursed down her cheeks. Garth had gone around the table, wrapped his powerful arms around the woman, and held her as close as, a week later, he now held Mary, who had collapsed from her chair to the floor. Mary’s limbs twitched spasmodically, and her eyes rolled in her head. Garth kissed her cheeks, gently rocking his wife back and forth in the silence that was broken only by Madame Bellarossa’s heavy breathing and Elsie’s quavering voice offering a prayer. Finally Mary grew still, opened her eyes. “They’re here, Garth. My God, they really are here in this room with us.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m so cold...”

“Don’t try to talk. Just rest here. I’ll get you a blanket.”

“No, Garth. There’s no time. They won’t wait.”

“Let her speak,” Madame Bellarossa said in a low voice that had grown slightly hoarse. “It’s important. Mary’s been chosen as the messenger.”

Garth nodded to the portly black woman with the crimson lipstick and huge hoop earrings who was leading the séance, then looked back at his wife. “What happened?”

“They... came to me, Garth. I felt them.”

“Felt them how?”

Mary swallowed hard, licked her lips. “At first there was just this terrible cold. I’m all right now, but for just a moment there I felt colder than I ever have in my life. And then they came into my thoughts, started to tell me why they’re so angry. It has something to do with selfishness, and terrible greed.”

“They think Elsie’s being greedy just because she wants to sell her home? All she was asking for was what had been appraised as its fair market value.”

Mary shook her head. “It’s not that.”

“Then what greed, Mary? Whose greed?”

“I... don’t know. I think they were about to tell me all of it, but then I passed out.”

“They’re still here in the room,” Madame Bellarossa said in a distant monotone, slurring her words slightly. “They want us to know, but the circle has to be restored.”

Garth looked up at the black woman; her eyes were half closed and her arms stretched out over the table as if she were in a trance. The black man standing stiffly beside her, Jeffrey Bond, was staring at Mary, his mouth half open and his eyes filled with amazement. Both John and Linda Luft, the young, blond, black-eyed married couple who looked so much alike they might have been brother and sister, had stepped back from the table and were standing at the very edge of the flickering pool of candlelight. Linda Luft’s eyes were glazed with shock, and she was very pale. Her husband, too, looked pale in the dim light, but the lines of his mouth were drawn down in a frown of scepticism. Elsie was standing at the opposite end of the table from Madame Bellarossa; the old woman’s eyes were closed, and her thin lips continued to move in silent prayer. The only person at the table who had remained seated was Harry Parker, Garth’s friend, a professional magician and world-renowned debunker of psychic charlatans and supernatural occurrences. Parker seemed perfectly calm. He was leaning back in his chair, thick arms folded across his barrel chest. His face was impassive as he stared back at Garth, who asked, “Anybody else see, feel, or hear anything?”

Jeffrey Bond coughed, cleared his throat. “I felt the cold,” he said, looking around somewhat sheepishly at the others. “I got a blast of it right on the back of my neck. It was just like Mary said; for just a moment, it was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. And we all saw what happened to the candles.” He paused and again looked around the table at the others. “Didn’t we?”

“You’re the expert, Harry,” Garth said to his friend. “What happened to Mary and Jeff? What’s going on here? Mass hysteria?”

The big man with the blue eyes and close-cropped black hair slowly blinked and seemed about to reply when he suddenly started. “I’ll be damned,” he said in a quiet but thoroughly astonished tone as he slowly unfolded his arms and looked down at his chest where blood was slowly seeping across the front of his white shirt, staining the cotton fabric as red as the dawn that had announced its presence and begun to push away the night the previous week when Garth, Mary, and Elsie Manning had sat around the butcher-block table in Garth’s home.

“I guess I should go home now,” Elsie had said in a small voice. She was still very pale, but she had stopped trembling. Mary had brushed the woman’s hair, and this had seemed to calm her. “I’ve bothered you people long enough, woke you up and kept you up all night.”

“Elsie,” Mary said, gently squeezing the other woman’s hand, “you’re a dear friend, not a bother. And you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want.”

Elsie slowly shook her head. “It’s still my home, at least until I’m able to sell it. I belong there. They don’t come during the day anymore, not since they turned mean.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Garth said, rising from his chair.

Garth took a flashlight, but it wasn’t needed. As they walked along the beach, the shortest and easiest route to Elsie’s home an eighth of a mile away, the sun appeared in the east over the Westchester hills across the river, causing the waters of the Hudson to glow first reddish orange, then golden. By the time they reached the three-story Victorian mansion that was Elsie’s home, it was day. Garth opened the door, walked with Elsie through the large, lushly carpeted living room decorated with antique tapestries into the dining room, which was dominated by a heavy oak table in the center.

“Thank you, Garth,” Elsie said with a sigh, easing herself down into a chair. She removed his robe from around her shoulders, handed it back to him. “Thank you for everything.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Garth, I don’t know what to do.”

“You know I’m not the one who can help you with your ghost problem, Elsie.”

“I don’t know who else to turn to.”

“Maybe a priest or minister.”

“They don’t believe me either,” she replied, bitterness creeping into her voice. “They only believe in their own ghosts.” She paused, shook her head, and once again tears misted her pale eyes. “Even though I know you don’t believe there are ghosts here, you’re the only person I can feel comfortable with anymore talking about it. I’m so afraid, Garth. What should I do?”

Garth pulled another chair out from the table, sat down, and leaned close to the old woman, looking intently into her eyes. “Stop believing.”

“...What?”

“The ghosts in this house live off you, because of you. Stop feeding them with your belief and they’ll go away.”

“But Garth, one did touch me! He put his hand around my throat!”

“He touched you because you believe he touched you, because you believe there are ghosts and that they can touch you.” Garth suppressed a sigh, brought his chair even closer, and took both the woman’s hands in his. “Elsie, we all have our haunts. Haunts are just bad memories. It’s when we don’t recognize them for what they are that we start to give them the power to hurt us in the present.”

Shadows moved in the woman’s pale eyes as she stared back at Garth. Finally she asked, “You have haunts too?”

“Of course. But I don’t ask them for stock tips, I don’t let them sit on my bed, and I don’t let them wrap their fingers around my throat.”

“Would you tell me one of your haunts?”

“I grew up on a farm in Nebraska. I was maybe nine or ten when one day my favorite uncle, Uncle Bill, for no reason that anybody could fathom, up and left our Methodist church and joined a fundamentalist sect that was into handling rattlesnakes as a way of demonstrating their faith. About two weeks after he joined, Uncle Bill was bit in the throat by a rattler, and he died. The people in the sect he’d joined said he’d died because he lacked sufficient faith.”

“Do you believe he died because he lacked sufficient faith?”

“Of course not. He died because he lacked sufficient brains. You have to be very careful what you believe, Elsie, because you become what you believe. Think of it as a question of mental hygiene. My Uncle Bill became a victim of his own belief system, exactly the same as you’ve become a victim of yours. Belief in gods or ghosts is like a brain fever; some have it, some don’t, and some only pretend to have it because it seems to them that everyone else around them has it, and they don’t want to be different. Just as with what happened to you, the fever is passed from generation to generation, and so all over the world we have tens of millions of people believing in ghosts they call God, Satan, Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus, devils, or angels. But some infections are more virulent and dangerous than others, and they’ll bite you just as surely as that rattlesnake bit my uncle. For whatever reason, your belief system has turned on you. So stop believing before it does you more harm. Or change it. If you insist on believing in the supernatural, why don’t you try something a little less toxic, like Unitarianism, or Reform Judaism, or maybe Zen Buddhism?”

Garth waited for some response from the woman, but there was none. Elsie’s mouth opened and closed repeatedly, as if she wanted to say something but could not find the words. It did not surprise Garth, who gave the woman’s hands a gentle squeeze, then leaned back in his chair and sighed. He knew from the confusion swimming in the woman’s eyes that she had no real comprehension of what he was talking about, and the stunned expression on her face was not unlike that on Harry Parker’s as he sat at this same table a week later during the interrupted séance and stared down at the bloodstain spreading across the front of his shirt. There were shocked gasps from the others around the table, and Linda Luft screamed. Garth eased Mary down on the carpet, then rose to his feet and strode quickly around the table toward his friend. He stopped when Harry Parker held up his hand. “It’s all right, Garth,” the burly man said in a tone that was at once distant and disbelieving, yet firm. “I’m okay.”

“For Christ’s sake, Harry, you’re bleeding.”

“Not anymore,” the magician and investigator of the paranormal replied in the same distant voice. He unbuttoned his shirt to show his bare chest. The thick, wiry hair there was matted with blood, but there was no longer any seepage. “I’m not even cut. The blood must have come right through my pores. Wow.”

“It’s a sign,” Madame Bellarossa intoned. Her head was tilted back now, her arms still extended out over the table. “They want to be taken seriously.”

John Luft cleared his throat loudly. When the others turned to the young man with the blond hair, dark eyes, and thin face, he took his arm from around his ashen-faced, trembling wife and tapped his watch. “Uh, I really think Linda and I should be toddling off. It’s getting pretty late.”

Suddenly Madame Bellarossa’s head came forward and her eyes opened wide. “That could be dangerous!” she snapped. “They haven’t finished telling us what they want us to know!”

For the first time since the séance had begun, Elsie spoke in words not offered as a prayer. She seemed composed now, determined. She looked directly at John and Linda Luft and spoke in a soft but firm tone. “I understand now that this thing will have to be done if there’s ever to be peace in this house. They’ve spoken to Mary this time, not to me, but I sense that they won’t harm us — as long as they can finish their story. But they want the two of you here. If we listen to all of it, I think they’ll go away at last. God knows I need to sell this house, but in good conscience I can’t allow anyone else to move in here until this is resolved. Especially not a nice young couple like you. I certainly understand your fear — but if you don’t stay and continue, then I can’t let you have the house.”

“That’s just fine with me,” the young woman said in a quavering voice as she turned toward the living room. “I’m out of here.”

John Luft grabbed his wife’s arm, pulled her back beside him. His bright eyes reflected the flickering candles as he looked around at the others, then finally settled his gaze on Elsie. “You’re saying that this could be like a kind of exorcism? If the ghosts tell Mary what’s on their minds, and Mary tells us, then they’ll leave the house when you leave?”

It was Madame Bellarossa who answered. “That is correct.”

“Then let’s do it,” Luft said, virtually pushing his wife back down into the chair she had jumped out of when Mary had collapsed.

“Hoo, boy,” Harry Parker said, flapping the ends of his shirt in an effort to speed the drying of the blood that had soaked it, “I’ve been exposing phoney-baloney occult scams for most of my life, but I’ve never seen anything like this. I don’t mind telling you I’d really like to see how it all comes out.”

“No,” Garth said as he walked back to where Mary was still sitting on the floor, looking dazed. He put a hand under her arm, helped her to her feet. “Let’s not do it.”

The others stared at him in stunned silence, which Mary finally broke. “Garth? What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry, Elsie,” Garth said to the old woman. “It’s your house, and your ghosts, but it’s my wife they’re using as a mouthpiece — and they knocked her to the floor to get her attention. That’s a bit rough, and it’s not at all my idea of how to start a pleasant conversation. Neither is making Harry bleed. If they want to talk to me, that’s fine, but I’m not letting Mary sit back down at that table. The only hand she’s going to hold for the rest of the evening is mine.”

“Garth,” Mary said, a quiet urgency in her voice, “it’s all right. I want to do it — for Elsie, and for John and Linda. I want to help end all this. They don’t mean to hurt me; they don’t want to hurt anybody. They’re just very angry. They want to be heard.”

“That is correct,” Madame Bellarossa whispered.

Garth shook his head. “If they need a lawyer, then let them talk through me.”

“They won’t. They’ll only talk through me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Mary replied, then put her arms around him and gently kissed him on the cheek the way she had when she’d drifted up from sleep and found him awake the night after he had discovered Elsie cowering outside their back door. “Who are you calling?” she had asked dreamily.

“Elsie.”

“Garth, it’s past midnight.”

“That’s why I’m calling. I’ve been trying to reach her for the last fifteen minutes. There’s no answer.”

“Remember she said she heard the phone ringing all the time. Now she’s probably not answering the phone, even when it really is ringing. With Elsie, I’d say that’s a healthy sign.”

Garth hung up, waited ten seconds, then dialed again. “I’m worried about her. I want to talk to her, make sure she’s all right.”

“Garth, let the poor woman sleep. If her ghosts were hassling her, she’d be over here just like she was last night. You’re starting to act like you believe in them.”

“I believe in terror, Mary,” Garth said evenly, hanging up the phone and rising. “That’s what I saw in Elsie. I had an uncle who died from what he believed, and I don’t want the same thing to happen to Elsie. I’ll be back in a little while.”

He quickly dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers, took the flashlight from a shelf in the kitchen, then went out into the night, down to the beach. A full moon painted the river silver and silhouetted the Victorian mansion that loomed up out of the darkness into a sky of midnight blue as he approached it. He knocked on the door, waited, then knocked again, louder. When there was no answer, he retrieved the spare key he knew Elsie kept behind a potted plant on the porch, opened the door, and let himself in. He started as he swept the beam of his flashlight across the hardwood floor of the foyer and a moving, shiny carpet of cockroaches skittered away in all directions. There was a strong smell of rotting garbage.

“Elsie?!” he called. “Don’t be afraid! It’s Garth! I’ve come to make sure you’re all right!”

There was no answer. He reached to his left and flipped a light switch, but the house remained shrouded in darkness. From somewhere upstairs, barely perceptible, came flopping and scratching sounds, as if someone or something with long nails was hopping around and slapping bare hands or feet against the floor. He went to the foot of the stairs and the flopping and scratching sounds grew more pronounced.

“Elsie?!”

There was another flop, the crash of a lamp or dish hitting the floor, and then he heard a soft moan. He immediately bounded up the stairs, heading for the old woman’s bedroom on the second floor. The door was closed. He yanked it open, stepped into the room.

Garth Frederickson was a man who had faced death a hundred times, and he no longer feared anything, but he was thoroughly startled when something slimy, soft, and heavy smacked into the side of his head and claws raked his cheek. He stumbled and went down to one knee as the thing fell off him and leaped away into the darkness, landing fifteen feet away with a sharp slapping sound. But the shock passed as he realized almost immediately what the thing was, and even as his heartbeat rapidly began to return to normal, anger, swift-running and hot, rose in him.

He got back to his feet and swept the light around the room until the bright beam found Elsie huddled on the floor beside her bed, her arms wrapped around her. Her face was purple, and she was rapidly opening and closing her mouth in a desperate struggle to breathe.

“It’s Garth, Elsie,” he said, flashing the light on his face as he quickly went to her. He set the flashlight on a dresser, where it illuminated half the room, then lifted Elsie up and sat her on the edge of the bed. He braced one hand against her back, then gently pressed on her chest, released the pressure, pressed again. “Breathe, Elsie. Come on, now; breathe. I’m here now. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“The ghosts...”

“I’m pretty sure your ghosts have finished their work for the night and gone home. If they are still in the house, I guarantee I’ll break their necks and make real ghosts out of them.”

There was a scratching sound in the half of the room still in darkness, and then a heavy slap. The woman’s eyes went wide, and she again began to hyperventilate.

“I’m going to take care of that in a minute,” Garth said easily, “just as soon as I get you breathing normally. It won’t do for you to have a heart attack. I’m here, and I’m not going to let anyone hurt you. I’m going to see what I can do about taking care of your ghost problem. Now take a deep breath and tell me you’re not afraid any longer.”

Gradually, the woman’s color and breathing became more regular. She took a deep, shuddering breath and slowly let it out. “I’m... not afraid.”

“Tell me again.”

“You’re here, Garth. I’m not afraid.”

“Good,” Garth said as he rose from the bed and picked up the flashlight. “Now just sit there; be calm, and keep breathing normally.”

He stepped to the foot of the bed, swept the light around the floor, finally spotted the thing in a corner. In three quick strides he was across the room. He bent down as the creature was about to leap away, gripped it firmly around the haunches, picked it up. Thick, powerful legs with webbed feet clawed at the air as the animal writhed in Garth’s hand.

“Oh, my God,” Elsie said, putting her hands to her mouth. “What is it?!”

“Just what it looks like, and it certainly didn’t come out of the Hudson. Do you need to use the bathroom right away?”

“I... don’t think so.”

“Good,” Garth said evenly as he casually tossed the creature into the bathroom adjoining the bedroom, then closed the door. “I’ll take care of it later.”

“Do you believe me now about the ghosts, Garth?”

“I most certainly do, my dear, and I plan to do a little exorcising. Listen to me: I’m going downstairs to get the lights back on; it’ll take me about five minutes. I want you to just sit where you are, keep taking deep breaths, and think happy thoughts. I’ll be right back. Things are going to be all right now. Okay?”

“O... Okay.”

The living carpet of cockroaches scattered from the beam of light as Garth descended from the second floor and crossed the living room, flipping light switches as he went. The smell of rotting garbage grew more pungent as he went down into the basement. He opened the circuit-breaker box and found all the switches, and the lights in the house came back on. Next he moved around the cavernous, dust-filled basement, brushing aside thick, intricate tapestries of cobwebs as he went. The wine cellar that hadn’t been used in decades was empty, save for a mound of broken black plastic bags that was piled to waist height, spewing garbage. River rats as big as woodchucks scurried away as Garth swept the beam of his flashlight over the expanse of rotting food. He found a second cache of garbage in a tool room, and in another five minutes found an unlocked basement window. He locked the window, then went back up to the second floor, where he found Mary, dressed in jeans, sandals, and a baggy sweater, sitting on the bed next to Elsie.

“We owe our friend and neighbor an apology, Mary. She really has been haunted, and somebody did, in fact, touch her neck — probably after soaking his hand in ice water. Now I plan to do a little haunting of my own.”

“What the hell is that?!” Mary said, almost jumping off the bed as the creature in the bathroom smacked against the door.

Garth opened the door, went into the bathroom, and once again grabbed the animal, which had landed in the bathtub. He brought it into the bedroom, held it up. “It’s just a big frog.”

Mary’s eyes went wide as she stared at the creature, and she laughed nervously. “A very big frog!”

“It is that. I’d estimate this guy weighs upwards of fifteen pounds, and, unless it was stolen, it set Elsie’s ghosts back about a thousand dollars. These big guys come from South America. You may remember a few years back when some guy imported one and tried to enter it in that famous frog-jumping contest. It was finally disqualified after a lawsuit, but not before it had eaten half the competition.”

Mary shook her head. “Garth? I saw all the cockroaches downstairs, and the whole place reeks of garbage. You and I do know that Elsie keeps a clean house. What’s going on here?”

“Elsie’s going to tell us,” Garth replied, tossing the giant frog back into the bathroom and once again closing the door. He went to the bed, put his hand on the old woman’s shoulder. “Elsie, you said once before that you couldn’t afford to, as you put it, sell the house for a song. But somebody has been trying to buy it for a song, haven’t they?”

“Well, I don’t...”

“Did somebody come to you and make an offer after the stories about this house appeared in the papers and you couldn’t get any more buyers?”

Elsie brushed a wisp of white hair away from her eyes and looked up at Garth. “Yes — a really nice young couple. They came to see the house two or three times, looked all around from the attic to the basement. They made me an offer, but it was way too low. How did you know?”

“Being in this house must enhance my psychic powers. Elsie, I want you to tell me all you know about this nice young couple.”

She did, and in a few days Garth had compiled sufficient information from computerized bank files, motor-vehicle records, credit bureaus, former employers, real-estate agents, the former owner of the house in an expensive section of Westchester where John and Linda Luft now lived, and their current neighbors, to visit the Luft home, where there was a large For Sale sign stuck in the front lawn.

“John Luft?”

The young man who had answered the door stared at Garth, making no effort to hide the suspicion in his dark eyes. He had the look of a man who was suspicious of a lot of people, and with good reason.

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“My name’s Garth Frederickson. I’m a friend of Elsie Manning. She asked me to come around and speak to you.”

At the mention of Elsie’s name, the suspicion left John Luft’s eyes, instantly replaced by an expression of innocence and charm. “Elsie Manning. What a lovely old lady. How is she?”

“Actually, she’s not doing too well — that house is really too much for her. She’s very anxious to sell it, and you and your wife were the last people to express an interest. That’s why I’m here.”

Now other things moved in Luft’s eyes, greed and triumph. He started to laugh nervously, cut himself off, licked his thin lips. “Uh, sure. Come on in.”

Garth entered the house and followed John Luft, who was walking jauntily and snapping his fingers, into a living room decorated with huge, garish, abstract paintings that Garth judged were expensive, but of dubious artistic merit.

“You want a drink or something?” Luft continued, motioning for Garth to sit down in an overstuffed chair.

“No, thanks,” Garth replied, easing himself down into the chair and casually crossing his legs.

“Garth Frederickson,” Luft said as he sat down on a sofa and studied the rangy, powerfully built man with shoulder-length, thinning, wheat-colored hair and soulful brown eyes who was also studying him. “You’re pretty well known, right?”

“Am I? I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen your picture in the papers. You’re a private investigator. You’re married to Mary Tree — my wife and I love her music, buy all her records — and you’ve got a weird little brother who’s even more famous than you are.”

Garth smiled thinly. “It sounds like you’ve got me pegged.”

“Uh, how come Elsie sent a private detective to talk to me?”

“She didn’t send a private detective; I’m here as her friend and neighbor. She asked me to speak with you on her behalf.”

“She’s... ready to sell the house?”

“Yes. Are you and your wife still interested in buying it?”

Luft again licked his lips, swallowed, cleared his throat. “Is she willing to accept the last offer we made her?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars, yes.”

The other man leaned back on the sofa, grinned. “How about that?”

“You’ve got yourself quite a bargain, Mr. Luft; two hundred thousand dollars for a house worth three quarters of a million. Considering the neighborhood you’re in, you’ll probably get more than enough from the sale of this house to buy the one in Cairn outright.”

“Yeah, well, Linda and I have been pretty lucky with our real-estate investments. We got this house at a good price, but for a very good reason. We were ready to go into hock up to our eyebrows to buy it, and then our building inspector discovered not only that the well on the property is polluted with toxic waste, but that there was a big termite infestation — lots of structural damage. There were other major problems as well. The owner was so disgusted that he just wanted out. He accepted our second offer. We’ve put a lot of money into fixing up this house.”

“I’ll bet you have.”

“Had to take out a huge home-equity loan to pay for the repairs. That’s why we couldn’t afford to offer Elsie any more than we did. But then, I figure we’re doing her a favor. What with what happened with the court case and all, she’s really in a jam. Nobody else wants to buy it, and she needs to go to a nursing home.”

“Aren’t you a little nervous about moving into a haunted house?”

Luft laughed — a kind of high-pitched giggle. “Are you putting me on? Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts.”

“Elsie’s willing to sell you the house, for the price you offered — but there’s one condition. If it’s not met, there’s no sale.”

Luft’s eyes narrowed. “What condition?”

“You and I may not believe in ghosts, but Elsie does. And she feels responsible for the ghosts in that house. You might say she wants to clean up her home before she sells it to anybody — especially a nice young couple like you and your wife. You and I know it’s crazy, but she insists on it. She wants to exorcise the ghosts, and she intends to do it with a séance. You and your wife must agree to be a part of it, since you’re the ones who’ll be moving into the house.”

Luft’s dark eyes shone with amusement. “She wants us to meet her ghosts?!”

“She insists on it. The séance will be tomorrow night, eleven o’clock. I hope you and your wife can be there.”

“Can we be there?!” Luft threw back his head and laughed, held his stomach. “God, we wouldn’t miss it for the world! Wait until I tell Linda we’re going to a séance tomorrow night in order to clean the ghosts out of our new home. She’ll love it!”

“I hope so,” Garth replied evenly, and wondered now, as he held the woman’s hand in the restored circle at the candlelit table, if Linda Luft and her husband were enjoying the experience as much as the man had believed they would. The woman’s hand was clammy, trembling, slick with sweat.

“I feel them coming closer, Mary,” Madame Bellarossa whispered.

“Yes,” Mary said in a soft, dreamy voice. “I feel them too... very close. They’re so angry — but not with Elsie. And they’re not the ones who’ve been doing the terrible things to her. There are others... undead. Not dead. Greed; it’s all about greed, incredible selfishness, a young couple who think they’re entitled to anything they want just because they want it, no matter who’s hurt. I see money, pieces of paper... stocks! Yes! The man used to be a stockbroker, but he was fired for churning accounts, and suspicion of embezzlement. He stole... Wait! I see something...”

Garth looked up as a light began to glow in the darkness near the ceiling. The light resolved into a rectangle, and then became two figures in hooded robes, bathed in moonlight, approaching the house from the beach, opening a basement window. Linda Luft snatched her sweat-soaked hand from Garth’s grip.

“That’s enough!” John Luft shouted at almost the exact moment when the giant frog sailed out of the darkness and landed in the center of the table, knocking over half the candles, then hopped away toward the living room.

Garth rose from his chair, reached for the light switch on the wall behind him. The lights in the dining room came on. John and Linda Luft, their faces the color of old parchment, were standing back a pace from their overturned chairs, almost directly beneath the suspended screen with its mounted, remote-controlled rear projector, gaping at the people around the table who stared back at them now with undisguised hostility and contempt.

“I guess this is the part where we find out if the butler did it,” Mary said in a low, steely voice.

“I don’t have a butler,” Elsie said, her voice quavering with rage as she glared at the couple across the table from her.

“That wasn’t us!” John Luft shouted, pointing a trembling finger at the screen above his head. “We didn’t put the robes on un—!”

“Shut up!” Linda Luft screamed at her husband, punching him in the chest with her fist. “You idiot!”

John Luft grew even paler, took another step backward, then looked over at Harry Parker, who seemed to have lost interest in the proceedings now that the illusion he had helped create had been played out. He had taken off his shirt and was removing an apparatus of tubes and blood-filled capsules from around his lower waist. “Actually, I kind of like this house,” the big man mumbled to no one in particular. “It has atmosphere. If the frog’s part of the deal, I may buy it myself.”

Elsie slowly rose from her chair, pointed a finger at the Lufts. Her entire body was trembling with rage. “How could you?!” she said. “How could you be so mean?”

Now it was Linda Luft’s turn to lose control. Her face turned crimson as she stepped toward Elsie and screamed, “You shut up too, you old bitch! What do you want with the house or the money? You’re going to die soon, you hag! Why can’t you let somebody else enjoy it?”

John Luft gripped his wife’s shoulders, pulled her back from the table as he glared at Garth. “You set us up, Frederickson!” he said, his voice shimmering with both anger and fear.

“Set you up?” Garth replied mildly. “You’re damned lucky Elsie didn’t have a heart attack; you’d be facing manslaughter charges.” He paused, nodded toward Jeffrey Bond, who had a deep frown on his face as he stared at the young couple. “I introduced you to Jeff, but I don’t think I mentioned that he’s the Cairn Chief of Police. Madame Bellarossa is his wife, and her real name is Carol. She’s quite a well-known actress. Without her wig and makeup, I’m sure you’d recognize her.”

“You can’t prove a thing!” the man shouted at Jeffrey Bond.

“That remains to be seen,” the police chief replied evenly. “We have a videotape of these proceedings, for what that’s worth. Also, my friend Garth found the fellow you paid to mess up that guy’s house that you’re living in now, and then pose as a building inspector to give him the bad news. It seems he kept the sales slips for the acid you had him buy and inject into the wood joints to make it look like he had termite damage. The police across the river have a warrant out for your arrest. In addition to that, there’ll be a process server around to see you in the morning. You’re looking at a whopping lawsuit, in addition to any criminal penalties. I think I’ll let Westchester have you for now, and that will give me time to ponder all the charges I’m going to hit you with when they’re done.”

The lights in the living room came on. John and Linda Luft started, then wheeled around to see two uniformed policemen and the two young stagehands, friends of Carol Bond, who had handled the special effects for the evening’s performance standing in the archway between the two rooms. The giant frog was over in a comer contentedly munching on what appeared to be a cockroach, a survivor from the exterminator’s visit earlier in the day.

“The charges won’t stick!” John Luft screamed at Garth as he and his wife were handcuffed. “They can’t prove anything! You’re going to be sorry! I swear I’ll get you!”

“Boo,” Garth said.