McBain's Ladies Too: More Women of the 87th Precinct

Hillary Scott

Hillary Scott called Carella at home at eight-thirty Saturday morning. He was still in bed. He propped himself up on one elbow and lifted the receiver of the phone on the night table.

"Hello," he said.

“Were you trying to reach me?”

"Yes," he said.

“I sensed it," Hillary said. “What is it?"

"How'd you get my home phone number?” he asked.

"From the phone book.”

Thank God, he thought. If she'd plucked his home phone number out of thin air, he’d begin believing all sorts of things. There was, in fact, something eerie about talking to her on the telephone, visualizing her as she spoke, conjuring the near-duplicate image of his wife, who lay beside him with her arms wrapped around the pillow, her black hair spread against the pillowcase. Teddy Carella was a deaf-mute; she had not heard the ringing telephone; she did not now hear Carella's conversation with the woman who looked so much like her. He wondered, abruptly, whether — if Teddy had a voice — it would sound like Hillary Scott's.

"You tried me at the apartment, didn't you?" she said.

"Yes."

"I'm here now," she said. "I came back to get some clothes. The flux was strongest around the telephone."

"Yes, well, good," he said. "Can you tell me where you're staying now, so in case I need to…?"

"You can reach me at my sister's," she said. "Her name is Denise Scott; the number there is Gardner 4-7706. You'd better write it down, it's unlisted."

He had already written it down. "And the address?" he said.

"Thirty-one-seventeen Laster Drive. What did you want, Detective Carella?"

"The security guard who normally has the noon to six at Harborview called last night. Jerry…"

"Jerry Mandel, yes."

"Yes. He said Mr. Craig had a visitor at 5:00 p.m. on the day he was murdered. A man named Daniel Corbett. Does that name mean anything to you?"

There was a silence on the line.

"Miss Scott?"

"Yes. Daniel Corbett was Greg's editor on Shades."

"He was described to me as a young man with black hair and brown eyes."

"Yes."

"Miss Scott, when we were in the apartment yesterday…"

"Yes, I know what you're about to say. The spirit I described."

"A young male, you said. Black hair and brown eyes." Carella paused. "Did you have any reason for…?"

"The flux was strongest at the desk."

"Aside from the flux."

"Only the flux," she said.

"But you do know Daniel Corbett."

"Yes, I know him."

"Is he, in fact, a young man?"

"Thirty-two."

"With black hair and brown eyes?"

"Yes."

"Where do I reach him, Miss Scott?"

"At Harlow House."

"Where's that?"

"That's the name of the publishing firm. Harlow House. It's on Jefferson and Lloyd."

"Today's Saturday. Would you know his home number?"

"I'm sure Greg has it in his book."

"Are you in the bedroom now?"

"No, I'm in the living room."

"Could you go into the bedroom, please, and look up the number for me?"

"Yes, of course. But it wasn't Daniel I was sensing yesterday. It wasn't Daniel at all."

"Even so…"

"Yes, just a minute, please."

He waited. Beside him, Teddy rolled over, and stirred, and then sat up and blinked into the room. She was wearing a cream-colored baby doll nightgown he'd given her for her birthday. She stretched, and smiled at him, and then kissed him on the cheek, got swiftly out of bed, and padded across the room to the bathroom. No panties. The twin crescents of her buttocks peeped from below the lace hem of the short gown. He watched her as she crossed the room, forgetting for a moment that she was his own wife.

"Hello?" Hillary said.

"Yes, I'm here."

The bathroom door closed. He turned his full attention back to the medium on the telephone.

"I've got two numbers for him," Hillary said. "One in Isola, and the other in Gracelands, upstate. He has a place up there he goes to on weekends."

"Let me have both numbers, please." In the bathroom, he heard the toilet flushing and then the water tap running. He wrote down the numbers and then said, "Thank you, Miss Scott, I'll be in touch."

"It wasn't Daniel," she said, and hung up.

Teddy came out of the bathroom. Her hair was sleep-tousled, her face was pale without makeup, but her dark eyes were sparkling and clear, and he watched her as she crossed to the bed and for perhaps the thousandth time thanked the phenomenal luck that had brought her into his life more years ago than he cared to remember. She was not the young girl he'd known then, she did not at her age possess the lithe body of a twenty-two-year-old like Hillary Scott, but her breasts were still firm, her legs long and supple, and she watched her weight like a hawk. Cozily she lay down beside him as he dialed the first of the numbers Hillary had given him. Her hand went under the blanket.

"Hello?" a man's voice said.

"Mr. Corbett?"

"Yes?" The voice sounded a trifle annoyed. Carella realized it was still only a little before nine on a Saturday morning — the big Christmas weekend no less. Under the blanket, Teddy's hand roamed familiarly.

"I'm sorry to bother you so early in the morning," Carella said. "This is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad. I'm investigating the murder of Gregory Craig."

"Oh. Yes," Corbett said.

"I was wondering if I might stop by there a little later this morning," Carella said. "There are some questions I'd like to ask you."

"Yes, certainly."

Carella looked at the bedside clock. "Would ten o'clock be all right?"

Beside him, Teddy read his lips and shook her head.

"Or eleven," Carella corrected, "whichever is more convenient for you."

"Eleven would be better," Corbett said.

"May I have the address there, please?"

Corbett gave it to him. As Carella wrote, Teddy's hand became more insistent.

"I'll see you at eleven," he said, "thanks a lot," and hung up, and turned to her.

"I have to call Cotton first," he said.

She rolled her eyes heavenward.

"It'll only take a minute."

She released him as suddenly as she had grasped him and with a sigh lay back against the pillow, her hands behind her head, the bedclothes lowered to her thighs, the baby doll gown carelessly exposing the black triangular patch of hair below the hem.

"Cotton," he said, "I've made an appointment with Daniel Corbett for eleven o'clock. He's down in the Quarter. Can you meet me there?"

"How'd you find him?" Hawes asked.

"The Spook called."

"Out of the blue?"

"Flux. Write this down, will you?" Carella said, and read off the address. "Eleven o'clock."

"See you there," Hawes said, and hung up.

Carella put the receiver back on the cradle and rolled over to Teddy. Her hands were still behind her head; there was an expression of utter boredom on her face. "Okay," he said.

She sat up suddenly. Her hands fluttered on the air. He watched her fingers, reading the words they formed, and then began grinning.

"What do you mean, you've got a headache?" he said.

Her hands moved again, fluidly, fluently.

I always get headaches when people stay on the phone too long, she said.

"I'm off the phone now," he said.

She shrugged airily.

"So what do you say?"

She shrugged again.

"You want to fool around a little?" he asked, grinning.

Her eyes narrowed smokily, in imitation of some bygone silent-movie star. She wet her lips with her tongue. She lowered one strap of the gown from her shoulder, exposing her breast. Her hands moved again. I want to fool around a lot, big boy, she said, and licked her lips again, and fell greedily into his arms.

The second crank call — or so it seemed at first — came twenty minutes after the first one. He lifted the receiver from its cradle and said, "Eighty-seventh Squad, Carella."

"It has something to do with water," a woman's voice said.

"What?"

"Water," the voice repeated, and suddenly he recognized her.

"Miss Scott?" he said.

"Yes. The murder has to do with water. Can I see you this afternoon? You're the source."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not sure yet. But you're the source. I have to talk to you."

He remembered what Gregory Craig's daughter had told them yesterday: She drowned. They said it was an accident. Water, he thought, and said at once, "Where will you be?"

"At my sister's," she said.

"Give me half an hour," he said.

"I'll see you there," she said, and hung up.

When she opened the door for him, she was wearing a short robe belted over either pantyhose or nylons. She wore no makeup; without lipstick, rouge, or liner, she resembled Teddy even more than she had before.

"I'm sorry," she said at once. "I was dressing when my sister called. Come in."

The apartment was in the Stewart City section of Isola. Stewart City was not really a city, or even a town, but merely a collection of swank apartment buildings overlooking the River Dix on the true city's south side. If you could boast of a Stewart City address, you could also boast of a high income, a country place on Sands Spit, and a Mercedes-Benz in the garage under your building. You could give your address with a measure of snobbery and pride. There were few places left in the city — or perhaps the world — where you could do the same. Hillary's sister's apartment, as befitted its location, was decorated expensively but not ostentatiously; it had the effect on Carella of making him feel immediately uncomfortable. The cool white artificial Christmas tree in one corner of the room compounded his sense of ill ease. He was accustomed to the scuzziness of the Eight-Seven, where the Christmas trees were real and the carpeting underfoot — unlike the lawn growing in this place — was more often than not tattered and frayed.

"Miss Scott," he said, "on the phone, you…"

"Is it still snowing out there?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I'm supposed to be downtown at five for a cocktail party. Are there any cabs on the street?"

"A few."

"Can I get you a drink?" she asked. "What time is it anyway?"

"Four o'clock," he said.

"That's not too early for a drink, is it?"

"I can't," he said.

"Right, you're on duty," she said. "Mind if I have one?"

"Go right ahead."

She went to a tall cabinet on the wall opposite the tree and opened both doors of it to reveal an array of bottles within. She poured generously from one of the bottles, took two ice cubes from a bucket, and dropped them into the glass. Turning to him, she said, "Cheers, happy holidays."

"Cheers," he said.

"Sit down," she said. "Please." Her smile was so similar to Teddy's that he found himself experiencing an odd sense of disorientation. The woman in this apartment should have been in his Riverhead house instead. He should have been telling her about the hard day's work he'd put in, soliciting sympathy for the policeman's lot; he should have been mixing her a scotch and soda and laying a fire for her on the hearth. Instead, he was here to talk about water.

"So," he said, "what about water?"

She looked at him, puzzled, and then said, "Thanks, I prefer it on the rocks."

He looked back at her, equally puzzled. She sat in the chair opposite him, the robe falling away as she crossed her legs. She rearranged the wayward flap at once.

"Are you sure you won't have one?" she asked.

"Positive."

"She may be a while, you know."

"I'm sorry, what…?"

"My sister. I spoke to her half an hour ago."

"Your sister?"

"Yes."

"What's she got to do…?"

"Hillary," she said.

"Hillary?" he said, and blinked. The lady, as he'd surmised from the very beginning, was a prime candidate for the loony bin. "Miss Scott," he said, "I'm sorry, but I don't understand what…"

"My twin sister," she said.

He looked at her. She was smiling over the rim of her glass. He had the feeling she had done this many times before and enjoyed doing it each and every time.

"I see," he said.

"I'm Denise," she said. "We look a lot alike, don't you think?"

"Yes, you do," he said cautiously, wondering whether there really was a twin sister or whether Hillary was just having a little sport with him at the city's expense. "You say you spoke to her…"

"Yes, half an hour ago."

"Where was she?"

"At the office. She was just leaving. But with this snow…"

"Listen," he said, "are you really…?"

"Denise Scott," she said, "yes," and nodded. "Which of us do you think is prettiest?"

"I couldn't say, Miss Scott."

"I am," she said, and giggled, and rose suddenly, and went to the liquor cabinet. He watched as she poured herself another drink. "Are you sure?" she asked, and lifted the glass to him.

"I'm sorry, I can't."

"Pity," she said, and went back to her chair and sat again. She crossed her legs more recklessly this time. The flap of the robe fell open again, and he saw the gartered tops of nylon stockings. He glanced away.

"I have twins myself," he said.

"Yes, Hillary told me."

"I never mentioned to her…"

"Psychic, you know," Denise said, and tapped her temple with her forefinger.

"How about you?" he said.

"No, no, my talents run in other directions," she said, and smiled at him. "Aren't you glad garter belts are coming back?" she said.

"I've… never much thought about it," he said.

"Think about it," she said.

"Miss Scott," he said, "I know you have an appointment, so if you want to get dressed, I'll be perfectly all right here."

"Wouldn't dream of leaving you alone," she said, and suddenly bent over the coffee table to spear a cigarette from the container there. The upper half of the robe gapped open over her breasts. She was wearing no bra. She held the pose an instant longer than she needed to, reaching for the cigarette, looking up at him and suddenly smiling.

"Miss Scott," he said, rising, "I'll be back in a little while. When your sister gets here, tell her…"

He heard a key turning in the door behind him. The door swung wide, and Hillary Scott came into the room. She was wearing a raccoon coat open over a white blouse and a red skirt. Her dark brown boots were wet. She looked across the room to where Denise was still bent over the coffee table. "Go put on some clothes," she said, "you'll catch cold." To Carella, she said, "I'm sorry I'm late. I had a hell of a time getting a cab." She looked at her sister again. "Denise?"

"Nice meeting you," Denise said, and rose, and tucked one flap of the robe over the other, and tightened the belt. He watched her as she left the room. The door to what he assumed was the bedroom whispered shut behind her.

"Didn't know there were three of us, did you?" Hillary said.

"Three of you?"

"Including your wife."

"You've never met my wife," Carella said.

"But we resemble each other."

"Yes."

"You have twins."

"Yes."

"The little girl looks like your wife. She was born in April."

"No, but that's her name."

"Terry. Is it Terry?"

"Teddy."

"Yes, Teddy. Franklin? Was her maiden name Franklin?"

"Yes," he said. He was staring at her unbelievingly. "Miss Scott," he said, "on the phone you told me…"

"Yes, water."

"What about water?"

"Something to do with water. Did someone mention water to you recently?"

Beyond the bedroom door he heard either a radio or a record player erupting with a rock tune. Hillary turned impatiently toward the door and shouted, "Denise, turn that down!" She waited a moment, the music blaring, and then shouted, "Denise!" Just as the music dropped six decibels. Angrily she took a cigarette from the container on the table, put a match to it, and let out a stream of smoke. "We'll wait till she's gone," she said. "It's impossible to achieve any level of concentration with her here. Would you like a drink?"

"No, thank you."

"I think I'll have one," she said, and went to the cabinet, and poured a hefty shot of whiskey into a tumbler, and drank it almost in one gulp. Carella suddenly remembered the Craig autopsy report.

"Was Craig a heavy drinker?" he asked.

"Why do you want to know?"

"The autopsy report indicated he'd been drinking before his death."

"I wouldn't say he was a heavy drinker, no."

"Social drinker?"

"Two or three before dinner."

"Did he drink while he was working?"

"Never."

In the next ten minutes, while her sister dressed in the other room, Hillary consumed two more healthy glasses of whiskey, presumably the better to heighten her psychic awareness. Carella wondered what the hell he was doing here. Take a phone call from a crazy lady who claimed to be psychic, link it foolishly to a drowning in Massachusetts that happened three years ago, and then wait around while the clock ticked steadily and the snow kept falling and the whiskey content in the bottle got lower and lower. But she had known his wife's name without being told it, knew they had twins, almost zeroed in on April. He did not for a moment believe she could actually read minds, but he knew that people with extrasensory perception did possibly exist, and he was not about to dismiss her earlier reference to water. Gregory Craig's wife had drowned three years ago — and his daughter could not believe it was an accident.

The bedroom door opened.

Denise Scott was wearing a clinging green jersey dress slit outrageously wide over her breasts and held precariously together at the midriff with a diamond clasp the size of Taiwan. The dress was somewhat shorter than was fashionable these days, giving her legs an extraordinarily long and supple look. She was wearing green high-heeled satin pumps; Carella gave them a life expectancy of thirty seconds in the snow outside. She walked to the hall closet without saying a word, took off the pumps, zipped on a pair of black leather boots, took a long black coat from the closet, picked up a black velvet bag from the hall table, tucked the pumps under her arm, opened the door, grinned at Carella, said, "Another time, amigo," and walked out without saying good-bye to Hillary.

"Bitch," Hillary said, and poured herself another drink.

"Go easy on that, okay?" Carella said.

"Tried to take Greg away from me," she said. "Went to the apartment one afternoon while he was working, pulled the twin-sister routine on him. I found her naked in bed with him." She shook her head and took a swift swallow of whiskey.

"When was this?" he asked at once. She had just presented him with the best possible motive for murder. Good old-fashioned slayings were now in vogue again: husbands shooting wives and vice versa, lovers taking axes to rivals, sons stabbing mothers and sisters; your average garden-variety homespun killings. Hillary Scott had found Gregory Craig in bed with her own sister.

"When?" he asked again.

"When what?"

"When did you discover them together?"

"Last month sometime."

"November?"

"November."

"What happened?"

"Little nympho bitch," Hillary said.

"What happened? What did you do?"

"Told her if she ever came near that apartment again…" She shook her head. "My own sister. Said it was a joke, said she wanted to see if Greg could tell us apart."

"Could he?"

"He said he thought she was me. He said she fooled him completely."

"What did you think?"

"I think he knew."

"But you're here with her now."

"What?"

"You're staying with her. Even after what happened."

"I didn't talk to her for weeks. Then she called one day in tears and… she's my sister. We're closer than any two people in the world. We're twins. What could I do?"

He understood this completely. Despite their constant bickering, his own twins were inseparable. Listening to their running dialogues was like listening to one person talking out loud to himself. When both of them were engaged in make-believe together, it was sometimes impossible to break in on what amounted to a tandem stream of consciousness. He had read someplace that twins were a gang of miniature; he had understood the writer's allusion at once. He had once scolded Mark for carelessly breaking an expensive vase and had punished him by sending him to his room. When he'd mentioned to her that she wasn't the one being punished, April had said, "Well, I just thought I'd help him out." If there was any truth to the adage that blood ran thicker than water, it ran doubly thick between twins. Hillary had found her sister in bed with Gregory Craig, but Craig was the stranger, and Denise was her twin. And now Craig was dead.

"How'd that affect your relationship with him?" Carella asked.

"I trusted him less. But I still loved him. If you love somebody, you're willing to forgive a lapse or two."

Carella nodded. He supposed she was telling the truth, but he wondered at the same time how he'd have felt if he'd found Teddy in bed with his twin brother, if he had a twin brother or any brother at all, which he didn't have.

"What's this about water?" he said. "You told me on the phone…"

"Someone mentioned water to you, am I right?"

"Yes, someone did."

"Something about water. And biting."

She drowned in the Bight, Abigail Craig had told him, two miles from where my father was renting his famous haunted house.

"What else?" Carella asked.

"Bite," she said.

"Yes, what about it?"

"Give me your hands."

He held out his hands to her. They stood two feet apart from each other, facing each other, their hands clasped. She closed her eyes.

"Someone swimming," she said. "A woman. Tape. So strong. I feel it pulsing in your hands. Tape. No, I'm losing it," she said abruptly, and opened her eyes wide. "Concentrate! You're the source!" She squeezed his hands tightly and closed her eyes again. "Yes," she said, the word coming out like a hiss. She was breathing harshly now; her hands in his own were trembling. "Drowning. Tape. Drowning, drowning," she said, and suddenly released his hands and threw her arms around him, her eyes still closed, her own hands clasping him behind the neck. He tried to back away from her, but her lips found his, and her mouth drew at him as though trying to suck the breath from his body. Hissing, she clamped her teeth onto his lower lip, and he pushed her away at once. She stood there with her eyes closed, her entire body shaking. She seemed unaware of him now. She began to sway, and then suddenly she began talking in a voice quite unlike her own, a hollow sepulchral voice that seemed to rumble up from the depths of some forgotten bog, trailing tatters of mist and a wind as cold as the grave.

"You stole," she said. "I know, I heard, you stole, I know, I'll tell," she said, "you stole, you stole…"

Her voice trailed. The room was silent except for the ticking of the clock. She stood there swaying, her eyes still closed, but the trembling was gone now, and at last the swaying stopped, too, and she was utterly motionless for several moments. She opened her eyes then and seemed surprised to find him there.

"I… have to rest," she said. "Please go."

She left him alone in the room. The door to the bedroom eased shut behind her. He stood there watching the closed door for a moment, and then he put on his coat and left the apartment.

The way they reconstructed it later, the killer had gone after the wrong person. The mistake was reasonable; even Carella had made the same mistake earlier. The killer must have been watching her for the past several days, and when he saw her — or the person he assumed was Hillary Scott — coming out of the Stewart City apartment building at eight-thirty Wednesday morning, he followed her all the way to the subway kiosk and then attempted to stab her with what Denise Scott later described as "the biggest damn knife I've ever seen in my life."

Minutes after Denise rushed into the apartment with the front of her black cloth coat and her white satin blouse slashed, Hillary called first the local precinct and then Carella at home. He and Hawes got there an hour later. The patrolmen from Midtown South were already there, wondering what they were supposed to do. They asked Carella whether they should report this to their precinct as a 10–24 — an "Assault Past" — or would the Eight-Seven take care of it? Carella explained that the attack might have been linked to a homicide they were working, and the patrolmen should forget about it. The patrolmen seemed unconvinced.

"What about the paper?" one of them asked. "Who'll take care of the paper?"

"I will," Carella said.

"So then maybe we get in a jam," the second patrolman said.

"If you want to file, go ahead and file," Carella said.

"As what? A 10–24?"

"That's what it was."

"Where do we say it was?"

"What do you mean?"

"The guy tried to stab her outside the subway on Masters. But she didn't call us till she got back here. So what do we put down as the scene?"

"Here," Carella said. "This is where you responded, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but this ain't where it happened."

"So let me file, okay?" Carella said. "Don't worry about it."

"You ain't got a sergeant like we got," the first patrolman said.

"Look, I want to talk to the victim," Carella said. "I told you this is a homicide we're working, so how about letting me file, and then you won't have to worry about it."

"Get his name and shield number," the second patrolman advised.

"Detective/Second Grade Stephen Louis Carella," Carella said patiently, "87th Squad. My shield number is seven-one-four, five-six-three-two."

"You got that?" the second patrolman asked his partner.

"I got it," the first patrolman said, and they both left the apartment, still concerned about what their sergeant might say.

Denise Scott was in a state of numbed shock. Her face was pale, her lips were trembling, she had not taken off her coat — as if somehow it still afforded her protection against the assailant's knife. Hillary brought her a whopping snifter of brandy, and when she had taken several swallows of it and the color had returned to her cheeks, she seemed ready to talk about what had happened. What had happened was really quite simple. Someone had grabbed her from behind as she was starting down the steps to the subway station, pulled her over backward, and then slashed at the front of her coat with the biggest damn knife she'd ever seen in her life. She'd hit out at him with her bag, and she'd begun screaming, and the man had turned and begun running when someone started up the steps from below.

"It was a man, you're sure of that?" Carella said.

"Positive."

"What did he look like?" Hawes asked.

"Black hair and brown eyes. A very narrow face," Denise said.

"How old?"

"Late twenties, I'd say."

"Would you recognize him if you saw him again?"

"In a minute."

"Did he say anything to you?"

"Not a word. He just pulled me around and tried to stab me. Look what he did to my coat and blouse," she said, and eased the torn blouse aside to study the sloping top of her left breast. Hawes seemed very interested in whether or not the knife had penetrated her flesh. He stared at the V opening of her blouse with all the scrutiny of an assistant medical examiner. "I was just lucky, that's all," Denise said, and let the blouse fall back into place.

"He was after me," Hillary said.

Carella did not ask her why she thought so; he was thinking exactly the same thing.

"Let me have the coat," she said.

"What?" her sister said.

"Your coat. Let me have it."

Denise took off the coat. The knife thrust had torn the blouse over her left breast. Beneath the gaping satiny slash, Hawes could glimpse a promise of Denise's flesh, a milkier white against the off white of the satin. Hillary held the black coat against her own breasts like a phantom lover. Closing her eyes, she began to sway the way she had after she'd kissed Carella. Hawes looked at her and then looked at her sister and decided he would rather go to bed with Denise than with Hillary. Then he decided the exact opposite. Then he decided both of them wouldn't be bad together, at the same time, in the king-sized bed in his apartment. Carella, not being psychic, didn't know that everybody in the world had threesomes in mind this holiday season. Hillary, claiming to be what Carella knew he wasn't, began intoning in a voice reminiscent of the one she'd used after she'd kissed him, "Tape, you stole, tape," the same old routine.

Befuddled, Hawes watched her; he had never caught her act before. Denise, used to the ways of mediums, yawned. The brandy was reaching her. She seemed to have forgotten that less than an hour ago someone had tried to dispatch her to that great beyond her sister was now presumably tapping — Hillary had said it was a ghost who'd killed Gregory Craig, and now the same ghost had tried to kill her sister, and her black overcoat was giving off emanations that seemed to indicate either something or nothing at all.

"Hemp," she said.

Carella wasn't sure whether or not she was clearing her throat.

"Hemp," she said again. "Stay."

He hadn't planned on leaving, so he didn't know what the hell she meant.

"Hemp, stay," she said. "Hempstead. Hampstead."

Carella distinctively felt the hair on the back of his neck bristling. Hawes, watching Denise — who now crossed her legs recklessly and grinned at him in brandy-inspired abandon — felt only a bristling somewhere in the area of his groin.

"Mass," Hillary intoned, her eyes still closed, her body swaying, the black overcoat clutched in her hands. "Mass. Massachusetts. Hampstead, Massachusetts," and Carella's mouth dropped open.

Hillary opened her eyes and stared blankly at him. His own stare was equally blank. Like a pair of blind idiot savants sharing the same mysterious knowledge, they stared at each other across an abyss no wider than three feet, but writhing with whispering demons and restless corpses. His feet were suddenly cold. He stared at her unblinkingly, and she stared back, and he could swear her eyes were on fire, the deep brown lighted from within with all the reds and yellows of glittering opals.

"Someone drowned in Hampstead, Massachusetts," she said.

She said this directly to him, ignoring Hawes and her sister. And Carella, knowing full well that she had lived with Craig for the past year and more, knowing, too, that he might have told her all about the drowning of his former wife two miles from where he was renting the haunted house he made famous in Deadly Shades, nonetheless believed that the knowledge had come to her from the black overcoat she held in her hands.

When she said, "We'll go to Massachusetts, you and I," he knew that they would because Craig's wife had drowned up there three summers ago, and now three more people were dead, and another murder attempt had been made — and maybe there were ghosts involved after all.

They had hoped to get there by one in the afternoon, a not unrealistic estimate in that they left the city at a little after ten and Hampstead — by the map — was no more than 200 miles to the northeast. The roads outside the city were bone-dry; the storm that had blanketed Isola had left the surrounding areas untouched. It was only when they entered Massachusetts that they encountered difficulty. Whereas earlier Carella had maintained a steady fifty-five miles an hour in keeping with the federal energy-saving speed limit, he now eased off on the accelerator and hoped he would average thirty. Snow was not the problem; any state hoping for skiers during the winter months made certain the roads were plowed and scraped the instant the first snowflake fell. But the temperature had dropped to eighteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the roadside snow that had been melting during the midmorning hours had now frozen into a thin slick that covered the asphalt from median divider to shoulder and made driving treacherous and exhausting.

They reached Hampstead at two-twenty-five that afternoon. The sky was overcast, and a harsh wind blew in over the ocean, rattling the wooden shutters on the seaside buildings. The town seemed to have crawled up out of the Atlantic like some prehistoric thing seeking the sun, finding instead a rocky, inhospitable coastline and collapsing upon it in disappointment and exhaustion. The ramshackle buildings on the waterfront were uniformly gray, their weather-beaten shingles evoking a time when Hampstead was a small fishing village and men went down to the sea in ships. There were still nets and lobster pots in evidence, but the inevitable crush of progress had threaded through the town a gaudy string of motels and fast-food joints that thoroughly blighted what could not have been a particularly cheerful place to begin with.

The Common, such as it was, consisted of a sere rectangle of untended lawn surrounded by the town's municipal buildings and a four-story brick hotel that called itself the Hampstead Arms. The tawdry tinsel of the season encompassed the square like a squadron of dancing girls in sequins and spangles. An unlighted Christmas tree was in the center of the Common, looking rather like a sodden sea gull that had lost its bearings. Carella parked the car, and together he and Hillary walked to the Town Hall, where he hoped to find the Coroner's Office and the records pertaining to the death of Gregory Craig's former wife. Hillary was wearing a bulky raccoon coat, a brown woolen hat pulled down over her ears, brown gloves, brown boots, and the same outfit she'd been wearing in her sister's apartment that morning: a tweedy beige skirt flecked with threads of green and brown, a turtleneck the color of bitter chocolate, and a green cardigan sweater with leather buttons. Carella was wearing much of the finery that had been given to him two days earlier: a pair of dark gray flannel slacks from Fanny, a red plaid flannel shirt from April, a tweed sports jacket the color of smoked herring from Teddy, a dark blue car coat with a fleece lining and a fake fur collar, also from Teddy, and a pair of fur-lined gloves from Mark. His feet were cold; he had put on loafers this morning, not expecting to be trodding the streets of an oceanfront town in Massachusetts, where the temperature lurked somewhere just above zero and the wind came in off the Atlantic like the revenge of every seaman ever lost in those dark waters offshore. As they crossed the Common, Hillary nodded and said, "Yes, I knew it would look like this."

Hampstead's Town Hall was a white clapboard building with a gray shingled roof. It faced westward, away from the ocean, shielding the sidewalk outside from the fierce Atlantic blasts. All the lights were on in defense against the afternoon gloom; they beckoned like beacons to lost mariners. Inside, the building was as toasty warm as a general store with a potbellied stove. Carella studied the information board in the lobby, a black rectangle with white plastic letters and numbers on it, announcing the various departments and the rooms in which they might be found. There was no listing for a Coroner's Office. He settled for the Town Clerk's Office and spoke there to a woman who sounded a lot like the late President Kennedy. She told him that the Coroner's Office was located in Hampstead General Hospital, which was about two miles to the northeast, just the other side of the Bight. Reluctant to face the frozen waste yet another time, Carella nonetheless walked with Hillary to where he'd parked the car and then drove due north along an oceanfront road that curved past what appeared to be a large saltwater pond, but which was identified by a roadside sign as HAMPSTEAD BIGHT.

"That's where she drowned," Hillary said. "Stop the car."

"No," Carella said. "First let's find out how she drowned."

The coroner was a man in his late sixties, as pale and as thin as a cadaver, with a fringe of graying hair around his flaking bald pate. He was wearing a threadbare brown sweater, rumpled brown slacks, a white shirt with a frayed collar, and a tie the color of cow dung. His desk was cluttered with a sheaf of loosely scattered file folders and a black plastic sign that announced his name in white letters: MR. HIRAM HOLLISTER. Carella spoke to him alone; it was one thing to bring your medium with you when you went calling on ghosts; it was quite another to conduct official business in the presence of a startlingly beautiful twenty-two-year-old wearing a raccoon coat that made her look cozily cuddlesome. Hillary waited on a bench in the corridor outside.

"I'm investigating three possibly linked homicides in Isola," Carella said, showing his shield. "One of the victims was a man named Gregory Craig, who…"

"What's that say there?" Hollister asked, peering at the gold shield with its blue enameling and its embossed city seal.

"Detective," Carella said.

"Oh, detective, yup," Hollister said.

"One of the victims was a man named Gregory Craig. His former wife, Stephanie Craig, drowned in Hampstead Bight three summers ago. Your office concluded that the death was accidental. I wonder if I might…"

"Three summers ago, yup," Hollister said.

"Do you remember the case?"

"No, but I remember three summers ago, all right. That was the year we got all that rain."

"Would you have a record of what happened? I'm assuming there was an inquest…"

"Oh, yes, there woulda been in a drowning."

"Stephanie Craig," Carella said. "Does that name mean anything to you?"

"Not offhand. We get tourists here, you know, they don't know how tricky the currents can be. We get our share of drownings, I'll tell you, same as any other coastal community."

"How about Gregory Craig?"

"Don't recollect him either."

"He wrote a book called Deadly Shades."

"Haven't read it."

"About a house in this town."

"Nope, don't know it."

Carella thought briefly about the illusiveness of fame. Behind his desk Hollister was nodding as though he had suddenly remembered something he had not earlier revealed.

"Yup," he said.

Carella waited.

"Lots of rain that summer. Washed away the dock outside Logan's Pier."

"Mr. Hollister," Carella said, "where would I find a record of the inquest?"

"Right down the hall," Hollister said, and looked at his watch. "But it's getting on three o'clock, and I want to start home before the storm hits. Supposed to be getting at least six inches, did you know that?"

"No, I didn't," Carella said, and looked at his own watch. "If you'll pull the folder for me," he said, "I can take a look at it and then leave it on your desk, if that would be all right with you."

"Well," Hollister said.

"I can sign a receipt for it in my official capacity as…"

"Nope, don't need a receipt," Hollister said. "Just don't want it getting all messed up and out of place."

"I'll be very careful with it," Carella said.

"Get out-of-state police in here every so often," Hollister said, "they don't know about neatness and orderliness."

"I can understand that, sir," Carella said, figuring a "sir" wouldn't hurt at this uneasy juncture. "But I'm used to handling files, and I promise I'll return the folder in exactly the condition I receive it. Sir," he added.

"Suppose it'd be all right," Hollister said, and eased himself out of his swivel chair, surprising Carella with a six-foot-four frame that should have belonged to a basketball player. He followed Hollister down the corridor, past Hillary, who sat on the bench and looked up at him inquiringly, and then into an office succinctly marked records on the frosted glass panel of its door. The office was lined with dusty wooden file cabinets that would have fetched handsome prices in any of Isola's antique shops.

"How do you spell that last name?" Hollister asked.

"C-R-A-I-G," Carella said, and thought again about fame, and wondered if somewhere in America there was at this very moment someone asking how you spelled Hemingway or Faulkner or even Harold Robbins.

"C-R-A-I-G," Hollister said, and then went to one of the file cabinets, and opened the drawer, and kept spelling the name over and over to himself as he leafed through the folders.

"Stephanie?" he asked.

"Stephanie," Carella said.

"Here it is," Hollister said, and yanked out an inch-thick folder, and studied the name on it again before handing it to Carella. "Just put it here on top the cabinet when you're through with it. I don't want you trying to file it again, hear?"

"Yes, sir," Carella said.

"Mess up the files that way," Hollister said.

"Yes, sir."

"You can use the desk over there near the windows if you like, take off your coat, make yourself comfortable. Who's that lady outside looks like a grizzly bear?"

"She's helping me with the case," Carella said.

"You can bring her in, too, if that suits you; no sense her freezing her butt off in the hallway. Terrible draft in that hallway."

"Yes, sir, thank you," Carella said.

"Well, that's it, I guess," Hollister said, and shrugged and left Carella alone in the room. Carella poked his head outside the door. Hillary was still cooling her heels on the bench, impatiently jiggling one of her crossed legs.

"Come on in," he said, and she rose instantly and came down the corridor, the heels of her boots clicking on the wooden floor.

"What've you got?" she asked.

"Record of the inquest."

"We'd learn more at the Bight," she said.

Carella turned on the desk's gooseneck lamp and then pulled up a chair for Hillary. She did not take off the raccoon coat. Outside, it was already beginning to snow. The clock on the wall ticked off the time: seven minutes to three.

"I want to make this fast," Carella said, "and get out of here before the storm hits."

"We have to go to the Bight," Hillary said. "I'm here because I want to see the Bight. And the house Greg rented."

"If there's time," he said.

"We won't get out in any event," she said. "They've already closed Route 44."

"How do you know that?" he asked, and she gave him a weary look. "Well… let's hurry, anyway," he said. "Did you want to look at this with me? Is there anything here that…"

"I want to touch the papers," she said.

After her performance with her sister's coat, he knew better than to scoff at her request. In the car on the drive to Massachusetts, she had tried to explain to him the powers she and others like her possessed. He had listened intently as she told him about extrasensory perception and psychometry in particular. She defined this as the ability to measure with the sixth sense the flux — or electromagnetic radiation — from another person, most often by touching an object owned or worn by that person. People blessed — "Or sometimes cursed," she said — with this gift were capable of garnering information about the past and the present and sometimes, in the case of particularly talented psychometrists, even the future. She explained that one might consider time, from the psychic point of view, as a huge phonograph record with millions upon millions of ridges and grooves, containing millennia of recorded data. The psychic, in a sense, was someone with the extraordinary power of being able to lift the metaphoric arm of a record player and drop the needle into any of the grooves, thereby reproducing in the mind any of the preserved information on the disc. She was not quite certain how this worked concerning future events; she had never been able to prophesy with any amount of accuracy something that was about to happen. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience all were talents beyond her meager capabilities. But she was entirely certain of her power to intuit correctly, from any object's electromagnetic leak of energy, the events — past or present — identified with that object. She had been able to do this with her sister's coat yesterday because the coat had come into contact with the killer's knife, and the knife had been held in the killer's hand, and the flux had been strong enough to transfer itself from human being to object to yet another object. Her dissertation, soberly delivered, did much to convince Carella even further that she did possess powers he was incapable of reasoning away.

Sitting at the desk beside her now, he opened the case folder and began reading. She did not read along with him. She simply touched the upper right-hand corner of each page, the way one might have if attempting to dog-ear it, holding the page between her thumb and index finger, feeling it as she might have felt a fabric sample, her eyes closed, her body slightly swaying on the chair beside him. She was wearing a heady perfume he had not noticed on the car ride up. He assumed her psychometric concentration was creating emanations of her own by way of body heat that hyped the scent of the perfume.

According to the Coroner's Inquest held on the sixteenth day of September, three weeks after the fatal drowning three summers ago, Stephanie Craig had been swimming alone in Hampstead Bight between three and three-fifty in the afternoon, when, according to observers on the shore, she suddenly disappeared below the surface. She came up twice, struggling and gasping for breath each time, but when she went under for the third time, she did not surface again. One of the eyewitnesses suggested at the inquest that Mrs. Craig (apparently she still used the "Mrs." form of address four years after her divorce from Craig) may have been seized from below by a shark "or some other kind of fish," but the Board rejected this at once, citing the fact that there had been no blood in the water and perhaps mindful of the many recent books and motion pictures that had done little to encourage the flow of tourists to oceanside communities; the last thing on earth Hampstead needed was a shark scare — or any other kind of fish scare.

The Board had conducted its inquiry meticulously, eliciting from Mrs. Craig's handyman the information that she'd left for the beach at two-thirty that afternoon, taking with her a towel and a shoulder-slung handbag and telling him she planned to "walk on over to the Bight for a little swim." She was wearing, as he clearly recalled, a blue bikini bathing suit and sandals. Witnesses at the beach recalled seeing her walking to the water's edge, testing the water with her toes, and then coming back from the shoreline to put down her sandals, her towel, and her handbag. One of the witnesses mentioned that it was the "first darn sunny day we'd had in weeks," a comment that must have done little to gladden the hearts of the two Chamber of Commerce members on the Board.

Stephanie Craig went into the water for her swim at 3:00 p.m. The Bight was even calmer that day than it normally was. Protected by a natural-rock breakwater that crashed with ocean waves on its eastern side, fringed with a white sand beach rare in these parts, it was a safe, current-free place for swimming and a favorite among locals and tourists alike. There were sixty-four people on the beach that day. Only a dozen of them witnessed the drowning. Each and every one of them told exactly the same story. She suddenly went under, and she drowned. Period. The Medical Examiner's report stated that there were no contusions, lacerations, or bruises anywhere on the body, dismissing once and for all the notion that a shark "or some other kind of fish" had seized her from below. The report further stated that the body had been delivered to the morgue clad only in the panties of the bikini bathing suit, the bra top apparently having been lost in Mrs. Craig's struggle to save herself from drowning. Findings for drugs or alcohol had been negative. The physician conducting the examination could not state whether a cramp had been the cause of her sudden inability to stay afloat, but the board nonetheless decided that the probable cause of the accident was "a severe cramp or series of cramps that rendered Mrs. Craig powerless in water estimated on that day to have been twenty feet deep where she was swimming." An eyewitness on the beach said that she went under for the last time at ten minutes to four; that meant she'd been swimming for close to an hour in waters not known for their cordial temperatures. But Stephanie Craig had been the winner of three gold medals on Holman University's swimming team, and the Board's report made no mention of this fact.

Carella closed the folder. Hillary passed her hands over the binder and then opened her eyes and said, "It wasn't an accident. Whoever typed this report knows it wasn't an accident."

Carella checked the report's first and last pages to see if there was a typist's name or initials anywhere on them. There was not. He made a mental note to call Hollister and find out who had done the typing.

"I want to go to the Bight now," Hillary said. "May we go, please? Before it gets too dark?"

It was almost too dark when they got there. Whatever light still lingered on the horizon was diffused by the falling snow, which made visibility and footing equally uncertain. They stood on the beach and looked out over the water. Stephanie Craig had drowned some fifty feet from shore, just ten yards within the breakwater protection afforded by the curving natural rock ledge. At Hillary's insistence, they walked out onto the breakwater now. It was shaped like a fishhook, the shank jutting out from the shore at a northeasterly angle, the rocks at the farthest end curving back upon themselves to form a natural cove. On the ocean side, waves crashed in against the ledge as if determined to pound it to rubble. But the cove on the bay side was as protected as the larger crescent of beach had been, and here only spume and spray intimidated the flying snowflakes. A rusting iron ladder was fastened to the ledge above the cove. Hillary turned her back to it, and Carella realized all at once that she was planning to go down to the stony beach below. He grabbed her arm and said, "Hey, no."

"It's safe down there," she said. "The ocean's on the other side."

He looked below. The cove did seem safe enough. On the ocean side, towering waves furiously pounded the ledge, but in the protected little cove below he would have trusted his ten-year-old daughter with a rubber duck. He preceded Hillary down the ladder and then turned away circumspectly when she climbed down after him, her skirt whipping about her legs and thighs. There was no wind below. A small cave yawned behind the stony beach, eroded into the ledge. Inside it, they could dimly perceive a beached dinghy painted a green that was flaking and stained red and yellow below its rusting oarlocks. Hillary stopped stock-still just outside the opening cave.

"What is it?" Carella said.

"He was out here," she said.

"Who?"

The light was fading rapidly; he should have taken his flashlight from the glove compartment of the car, but he hadn't. The cave seemed not in the least bit inviting. He had always considered spelunkers the choicest sorts of maniacs, and he feared ever being trapped in a small space, unable to move either forward or backward. But he followed Hillary into the cave, ducking his head to avoid banging it on the low ceiling, squinting into the darkness beyond the dinghy. The cave was shallow; it ended abruptly several feet beyond the boat. Its sloping walls were wet. Hillary touched one of the rusting oarlocks and then pulled her hand back as if she'd received an electric shock.

"No," she said.

"What is it?"

"No," she said backing away from the boat. "Oh, no, God, please, no."

"What the hell is it?"

She did not answer. She shook her head and backed out of the cave. She was climbing the ladder when he came out onto the stone-strewn beach behind her. When she reached the ledge above, the wind caught at her skirt, whipping it about her long legs. He climbed up after her. She was running along the breakwater now, the waves crashing in on her left, heading for the crescent beach beyond which he'd parked the car. He ran after her, out of breath, almost losing his footing on the rocks, almost realizing his second wildest fear, that of drowning. When he got to the car, she was already inside it, her arms folded over the front of the raccoon coat, her body trembling.

"What happened back there?" he said.

"Nothing."

"When you touched that boat…"

"Nothing," she said.

He started the car. There were at least two inches of snow in the parking lot. The dashboard clock read 4:00 p.m. He turned on the radio at once, hoping to catch the local news, and listened first to a report on the president's new plan for fighting inflation, then to a report on the latest trouble in the Middle East, and finally to a report on the weather. The storm that had inundated the city had finally reached Massachusetts and was expected to dump somewhere between eight and ten inches of snow before morning. Route 44 was closed, and the turnpike south and west was treacherous. Travelers' advisories were in effect; the state's Highway Department had asked that all vehicles be kept off the roads to allow the plows free access.

"We'd better get back to town," he said, "see if we can't get a couple of rooms for the night."

"No," she said. She was still shivering. "I want to see the house Greg rented that summer."

"I don't want to get stuck out here in the middle of no—"

"It's on the way," she said. "Two miles from the Bight. Isn't that what she told you? Isn't that what his daughter told you?"

Abigail Craig had said, She drowned in the Bight, two miles from where my father was renting his famous haunted house. Partial believer that he was, Carella was willing to accept the fact that Hillary could not have known of his conversation with Craig's daughter and had therefore divined it through her psychic powers. But skeptic that he still was, he realized Hillary was no doubt familiar with the book Craig had written about the house, so wasn't it now reasonable to assume he'd described it in detail, right down to its geographical location?

"Two miles from the Bight could be two miles in either direction," he said. "I don't want to be driving out into the Atlantic Ocean."

"No, it's on the way to town," she said.

"Did he say so in his book?"

"I recognized it when we passed it," she said.

"You didn't answer my question."

"No, he did not give its exact location in the book."

"Why didn't you say something when we passed it?"

"Because the field was so strong."

"What field?"

"The electromagnetic field."

"So strong that it silenced you?"

"So strong that it frightened me."

"But the Bight didn't, huh? When we passed the Bight…"

"The Bight was only where she drowned. The house…" She shivered again and hunkered down inside her coat. He had never really heard a person's teeth chattering; he'd always thought that was for fiction. But her teeth were truly chattering now; he could hear the tiny click of them above the hum of the car heater.

"What about the house?" he said.

"I have to see it. The house was the beginning. The house was where it all started."

"Where all what started?"

"The four murders."

"Four?" he said. "There've only been three."

"Four," she repeated.

"Gregory Craig, Marian Esposito, Daniel Corbett…"

"And Stephanie Craig," she said.

The house was on the edge of the ocean, 1.8 miles from the Bight, according to the odometer. He parked the car in a rutted sand driveway covered with snow and flanked by withered beach grass and plum. A solitary pine, its branches weighted by the snow upon them, stood to the left of the entrance door like a giant Napoleonic soldier outside Moscow. The house was almost entirely gray: weathered gray shingles on all of its sides; gray shingles of a darker hue on its roof; the door, the shutters, and the window trim all painted a gray that was flaking and faded. A brick chimney climbed the two stories on its northern end, contributing a column of color as red as blood, a piercing vertical shriek against the gray of the house and the white of the whirling snow. This time he had remembered to take along the flashlight. He played it first on a small sign in the window closet to the entrance door. The sign advised that the house was for rent or for sale and provided the name and address of the real estate agent to be contacted. He moved the light to the tarnished doorknob and then tried the knob. The door was locked.

"That's that," he said.

Hillary put her hand on the knob. She closed her eyes. He waited, never knowing what the hell to expect when she touched something. A snowflake landed on the back of his neck and melted down his collar.

"There's a back door," she said.

They trudged through the snow around the side of the house, past a thorny patch of brambles, and then onto a gray wooden porch on the ocean side. The wind here had banked the snow against the storm door. He kicked the snow away with the side of his shoe, yanked open the storm door, and then tried the knob on the inner door.

"Locked," he said. "Let's get back to town."

Hillary reached for the knob. Carella sighed. She held the knob for what seemed an inordinately long time, the wind whistling in over the ocean and lashing the small porch, the storm door banging against the side of the house. When she released the knob, she said, "There's a key behind the drainpipe."

Carella played the light over the drainpipe. The spout was perhaps eight inches above the ground. He felt behind it with his hand. Fastened to the back of the spout was one of those little magnetic key holders designed to make entrance by burglars even easier than it had to be. He slid open the lid on the metal container, took out a key, and tried it on the lock. It slid easily into the keyway; when he twisted it, he heard the tumblers fall with a small oiled click. He tried the knob again, and the door opened. Fumbling on the wall to the right of the door, he found a light switch and flicked it on. He took a step into the room; Hillary, behind him, closed the door.

They were standing in a living room furnished in what might have been termed Beach House Haphazard. A sofa covered with floral-patterned slipcovers was on the window wall overlooking the ocean. Two mismatched upholstered easy chairs faced the sofa like ugly suitors petitioning for the hand of a princess. A stained oval braided rug was on the floor between the sofa and the chairs, and a cobbler's bench coffee table rested on it slightly off center. An upright piano was on a wall bearing two doors, one leading to the kitchen, the other to a pantry. A flight of steps at the far end of the room led to the upper story of the house.

"This isn't it," Hillary said.

"What do you mean?"

"This isn't the house Greg wrote about."

"I thought you said…"

"I said it started here. But this isn't the house in Deadly Shades."

"How do you know?"

"There are no ghosts in this house," she said flatly. "There never were any ghosts in this house."

They went through it top to bottom nonetheless. Hillary's manner was calm, almost detached. She went through the place like a disinterested buyer whose husband was trying to force upon her an unwanted purchase — until they reached the basement. In the basement, and Carella was becoming used to these sudden shifts of psychic mood, she bristled at the sight of a closed door. Her hands began flailing the air, the fingers on each widespread like those of a blind person searching for obstacles. Trembling, she approached the door. She lifted the primitive latch and entered a shelf-lined room that contained the house's furnace. Carella was aware all at once that the house was frighteningly cold. His feet were leaden, his hands were numb. On one of the shelves were a diver's mask, a pair of rubber fins, and an oxygen tank. Hillary approached the shelf, but she did not touch anything on it. Again, as she had with the dinghy in the cave, she backed away and said, "No, oh, God, no.

He felt something almost palpable in that room, but he knew better than to believe he was intuiting whatever Hillary was. His response was hard-nosed, that of a detective in one of the world's largest cities, compounded of years of experience and miles of empirical deduction, seasoned with a pinch of guesswork and a heaping tablespoon of hope — but hope was the thing with feathers. Stephanie Craig, an expert swimmer, had drowned in the Bight in a calmer sea than anyone could remember that summer. At least one of the witnesses had suggested that she'd been seized from below by a shark or some other kind of fish. In the basement room of the house her former husband, Gregory, had rented for the summer, they had just stumbled upon a diver's gear. Wasn't it possible…?

"It was Greg," Hillary said. "Greg drowned her."

She came into his room now without knocking. Her face was flushed, her eyes were glowing.

"I've just been on the phone with a woman named Elise Blair," she said. "She's the real estate agent whose sign was in the window of the house Greg rented."

"What about her?" Carella asked.

"I described the house that was in Greg's book. I described it down to the last nail. She knows the house. It was rented three summers ago to a man from Boston. She wasn't the agent on the deal, but she can check with the realtor who was and get the man's name and address from the lease — if you want it."

"Why would I want it?" Carella asked.

"It was the house in Shades, don't you understand?"

"No, I don't."

"It was the house Greg wrote about."

"So?"

"He wasn't living in that house, someone else was," Hillary said. "I want to see for myself if there are ghosts in that house."

The real estate agent who had rented the house three summers ago worked out of the back bedroom of her own house on Main Street. They trudged through the snow at a quarter past six, walking past the lighted Christmas tree on the Common, ducking their heads against the snow and the fierce wind. The woman's name was Sally Barton, and she seemed enormously pleased to be playing detective. She had known all along, she told them, that the house Craig wrote about was really the old Loomis house out on the Spit. He had never pinpointed the location, had never even mentioned the town of Hampstead for that matter — something she supposed they should all be grateful for. But she knew it was the Loomis house. "The house isn't your typical beach house, but it looks right at home on the Spit. Frank Loomis fell in love with it when he was still living in Salem, had it brought down there stick by stick, put it on the beachfront land he owned."

"Salem?" Carella said. "Here in Massachusetts?"

"Yes," Mrs. Barton said. "Where they hanged the witches in 1692."

She offered them the key to the house, which she said she'd been unable to rent the summer before, but that had nothing to do with Gregory Craig's ghosts. Not many people outside the town knew that this was the house he'd made famous in his book.

"Don't know how he got away with it," she said. "Claimed it was a true story and then didn't tell anybody where the house actual was. Said it was to protect the innocent. What innocent? Frank Loomis has been dead for fifty years, and his two sons are living in California and couldn't care less whether there are ghosts in the house. All they're interested in is renting it each summer. Still, I guess he might've been afraid of legal complications. You'd know more about that than I would," she said and smiled at Carella.

"Well, I'm not a lawyer, ma'am," Carella said, and returned the smile, aware that he'd just been flattered. "I wonder if you can tell me who rented the house three summers ago."

"Yes, I looked for the lease right after you called. It was a man named Jack Rawles."

"What'd he look like?"

"A pleasant-looking person."

"Young, old?"

"In his late twenties, I'd say."

"What color hair?"

"Black."

"Eyes?"

"Brown."

"And his address?"

She gave him the slip of paper on which she had copied Rawles's Commonwealth Avenue address from the lease, and then she said, "It's not an easy house to rent, you know. Frank never did modernize it. There's electricity, of course, but the only heat's from the fireplaces. There're three of them, one in the living room, one in the kitchen, and another in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It's not bad during the summer, but it's an icebox in the wintertime. Are you sure you want to go out there just now?"

"Yes, we're positive," Hillary said.

"I'd go with you, but I haven't fixed my husband's supper yet."

"We'll return the key to you as soon as we've looked the place over," Carella said.

"There's supposed to be a dead woman there, searching for her husband," Mrs. Barton said.

At a local garage Carella bought a pair of skid chains and asked the attendant to put them on the car while he and Hillary got something to eat at the diner up the street. It was still snowing when they left the town at seven o'clock. The plows were working the streets and the main roads, but he was grateful for the chains when they hit the cutoff that led to the strand of land jutting out into the Atlantic. A sign crusted with snow informed them that this was Albright's Spit, and a sign under it warned that this was a dead-end road. The car struggled through the thick snow, skidding and lurching up what Carella guessed was a packed sand road below. He almost got stuck twice, and when he finally spotted the old house looming on the edge of the sea, he heaved a sigh of relief and parked the car on a relatively level stretch of ground below the sloping driveway. Together, the flashlight lighting their way, he and Hillary made their way to the front door.

"Yes, this is it," Hillary said. "This is the house."

The front door opened into a small entryway facing a flight of stairs that led to the upper story. He found a light switch on the wall to the right of the door and flicked it several times. Nothing happened.

"Wind must've knocked down the power lines," he said, and played the flashlight first on the steps leading upstairs and then around the small entryway. To the right was a door leading to a beamed kitchen. To the left was the living room — what would have been called the "best room" in the days when the house was built. A single thick beam ran the length of the room. There were two windows in the room, one overlooking the ocean, the other on the wall diagonally opposite. The fireplace was not in the exact center of the wall bearing it; the boxed stairwell occupied that space. It was, instead, tucked into the wall beyond, a huge walk-in fireplace with a black iron kettle hanging on a hinge, logs and kindling stacked on the hearth, big black andirons buckled out of shape from the heat of innumerable fires. On the mantel above the fireplace opening, Carella found a pair of candles in pewter candlesticks. He did not smoke; he asked Hillary for a match and lighted both candles.

The room, he now saw, was beautifully furnished in old American antiques, the likes of which could hardly be found for sale anywhere these days, except at exorbitant prices. There were several hurricane lamps around the room, and he lighted these now, and the richly burnished wood of the paneling and the furniture came to flickering life everywhere around him. If there were ghosts in this house, they could not have found a more hospitable place to inhabit. In a brass bucket by the fireplace he found several faded copies of the Hampstead News. The dates went back two years, the last time the house had been rented for the summer. He tore the newspapers to shreds, laid a bed of kindling over them, and stacked three hefty logs on top of that. The fire dispelled the lingering chill in the room and, with it, any possible notion that poltergeists might pop out of the woodwork at any moment. Outside, the wind howled in over the ocean and the shutters rattled, but the fire was crackling now, and the lamps and candles were lighted, and the only ghosts visible were the fire devils dancing on the grate. Carella went out into the kitchen, lighted the candles and lamps there, and then started another fire in the second fireplace. Neither he nor Hillary had yet gone up to the second story of the house.

In one of the kitchen cupboards he found an almost full bottle of scotch. The ice-cube trays in the refrigerator were empty, and the tap water had been turned oil. He was starting out of the room with the bottle and two glasses when he noticed the kitchen door was ajar. He put down the glasses and the bottle, went to the door, and opened it all the way. The storm door outside was closed, but the simple slip bolt was unlatched. He threw the bolt and then studied the lock on the inner door. It was a Mickey Mouse lock with a spring latch that any burglar could open in seconds with a strip of celluloid, a knife blade, or a credit card. He locked it nonetheless, yanked on the knob to make certain the door was secure, and then went back into the living room, carrying the bottle of scotch and the two glasses. Hillary was standing at the fireplace. She had taken off the raccoon coat and also the green cardigan sweater. She stood with her legs slightly spread, her booted feet on the stone hearth, her hands extended toward the fire.

"Want some of this?" he said.

"Yes, please."

"Only spirits in the place," he said, intending a joke and surprised when she didn't even smile in response. "We'll have to drink it neat," he said.

He poured generously into both glasses, put the bottle down on the mantel, raised his own glass, said, "Cheers," and took a swallow of whiskey that burned its way clear down to his toes.

"See any ghosts yet?" he asked.

"Not yet."

"Would you know one if you saw one?"

"I'd know one."

"Have you ever seen one?"

"No. But I understand the phenomenon."

"How about explaining it to me?"

"You're a skeptic," she said. "I'd be wasting my time."

"Try me."

"No. I'd rather not."

"Okay," he said, and shrugged. "Want to tell me about Craig's working habits instead?"

"What do you mean?"

"How did he work? There was a sheet of paper in his typewriter on the day he was killed. Did he normally type his stuff?"

"Yes."

"Always? Did he ever write in longhand, for example?"

"Never."

"Did he ever dictate?"

"To a secretary, do you mean? No."

"Or into a machine?"

"A recorder?"

"Yes. Did he put anything on tape?"

The word seemed to resonate in the room. He had not yet told her that Maude Jenkins had typed a portion of Craig's book from a two-hour cassette he'd delivered near the end of the summer three years ago. Hillary did not immediately answer. A log shifted on the grate; the fire crackled and spit.

"Did he?" Carella said.

"Not that I know of."

"What was his voice like?"

"Greg's voice?"

"Yes, I understand he was a heavy smoker. Was his voice hoarse or…?" He searched for another word and finally used the one Maude Jenkins had used in describing the voice on the tape. "Rasping? Would you call it rasping?"

"No."

"At least a portion of Deadly Shades was on tape," he said. "About a hundred pages of it. Were there…?"

"How do you know that?"

"I spoke to the woman who typed it. Were there any other tapes? The published book ran something like three hundred pages, didn't it?"

"Close to four hundred."

"So where are the tapes? If the first part of it was on tape…"

"I never saw any tapes," Hillary said.

"Who typed the final manuscript?"

"I don't know. I didn't know Greg while he was working on Shades."

"Who normally types his stuff? In the city, I mean."

"He hasn't had anything typed recently. He was still working on the new book, he had no reason to have it typed clean till he finished it."

"Would Daniel Corbett have known anything about the existence of any tapes?"

"I have no idea," Hillary said, and the candles on the mantelpiece went out.

Carella felt a sudden draft in the room and turned abruptly toward the front door, thinking it might have been blown open by the raging wind. He could see past the edge of the boxed stairwell to the small entryway. The door was closed. He went to it anyway and studied the lock — the same as the one on the kitchen door but securely latched nonetheless. He went out into the kitchen. The hurricane lamps were still burning on the fireplace mantel and the drainboard, but the candles he had lighted on the kitchen table were out — and the kitchen door was open.

He stood looking at the door. He was alone in the room. The extinguished candles sent wisps of trailing smoke up toward the ceiling beams. He put his glass down on the kitchen table, went to the door, and looked at the lock. The thumb bolt had been turned; the spring latch was recessed into the locking mechanism. As earlier, the storm door was closed — but the slip bolt had been thrown back. He heard a sound behind him and whirled instantly. Hillary was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

"They're here," she whispered.

He did not answer her. He locked both doors again and was turning to relight the candles when the hurricane lamp on the drainboard suddenly leaped into the air and fell to the floor, the chimney shattering, kerosene spilling from the base and bursting into flame. He stomped out the flames, and then felt another draft, and knew without question that something had passed this way.

He would never in his life tell a single soul about what happened next. He would not tell any of the men in the squadroom because he knew they would never again trust a certified lunatic in a shoot-out. He would not tell Teddy because he knew that she, too, would never completely trust him afterward. He was turning toward where Hillary stood in the doorway when he saw the figure behind her. The figure was a woman. She was wearing a long dress with an apron over it. A sort of granny hat was on her head. Her eyes were mournful, her hands were clasped over her breasts. She would have been frightening in any event, appearing as suddenly as she had, but the terrifying thing about her was that Carella could see through her body and into the small entryway of the house. Hillary turned in the same instant, either sensing the figure behind her or judging it to be there from the look on Carella's face. The woman vanished at once or, rather, seemed swept away by a fierce wind that sucked her shapelessly into the hall and up the stairs to the second floor of the house. A keening moan trailed behind her; the whispered name "John" echoed up the stairwell and then dissipated on the air.

"Let's follow her," Hillary said.

"Listen," Carella said, "I think we should…"

"Come," she said, and started up the stairwell.

Carella was in no mood for a confrontation with a restless spirit looking for a John. What did one do when staring down a ghost? He had not held a crucifix in his hands for more years than he cared to remember, and the last time he'd had a clove of garlic around his neck was when he'd had pneumonia as a child and his grandmother had tied one there on a string to ward off the Evil Eye. Besides, were you supposed to treat ghosts like vampires, driving stakes into their hearts and returning them to their truly dead states? Did they even have hearts? Or livers? Or kidneys? What the hell was a ghost? And besides, who believed in them?

Carella did.

He had never been so frightened since the day he'd walked in on a raving lunatic wielding a hatchet, the man's eyes wide, his mouth dripping spittle, someone's severed hand in his own left hand, dripping blood onto the floor as he charged across the room to where Carella stood frozen in his tracks. He had shot the man six times in the chest, finally dropping him an instant before the hatchet would have taken off his nose and part of his face. But how could you shoot a ghost? Carella did not want to go up to the second story of this house. Hillary was already halfway up the stairs, though, and neither did he want to be called chickenshit. Why not? he thought. Call me chickenshit, go ahead. I'm afraid of ghosts. This goddamn house was carried here stick by stick from Salem, where they hanged witches, and I just saw somebody dressed like Rebecca Nurse or Sarah Osborne or Goody Proctor or whoever the hell, and she was wailing for a man named John, and there ain't nobody here but us chickens, boss. Adios, he thought, and saw Hillary disappear around the corner at the top of the stairs, and suddenly heard her screaming. He pulled his gun and took the steps up two at a time.

Hillary, courageous ghost hunter that she was, had collapsed in a dead faint on the floor. An eerie blue light bathed the second-story hallway. The hallway was icy cold; it raised the hackles at the back of his neck even before he saw the women standing there. There were four of them. They all were dressed in what looked like late-seventeenth-century garments. He could see through them and beyond them to the window at the end of the hallway where snow lashed the ancient leaded panes. They began advancing toward him. They were grinning. One of them had blood on her hands. And then, suddenly, a sound intruded itself from someplace above — the attic, he guessed. He could not make out the sound at first. It was a steady throbbing sound, like the beat of a muffled heart. The women stopped when they heard the sound. Their heads moved in unison, tilting up toward the beamed ceiling. The sound grew louder, but he still could not identify it. The women shrank from the sound, huddling closer together in the corridor, seeming to melt one into the other, their bodies overlapping and then disappearing entirely, sucked away by the same strong wind that had banished the specter below.

He squinted his eyes against the wind. It died as suddenly as it had started. He stood trembling in the corridor, Hillary on the floor behind him, snowlight piercing the window at the farthest end, the steady throbbing sound above him. No, it was more like a thumping, the slow, steady thump of—

He recognized the sound all at once.

Someone was bouncing a ball in the attic.

He stood just outside the door to the story above, debating whether he should go up there, thinking maybe somebody was working tricks with lights and wind machines, causing apparitions to appear, a theater of the supernatural, designed to cause a psychic to faint dead away and an experienced detective to stand shaking in his sodden loafers. He told himself there couldn't be anything like ghosts — but he had already seen five of them. He told himself there was nothing to fear, but he was terrified. Fanning the air with his pistol, he made his way up the steps to the attic. The stairs creaked under his cautious tread. The ball kept bouncing somewhere above him.

She was standing at the top of the stairs. She was no older than his daughter April, wearing a long gray dress and a faded sunbonnet. She was grinning at him. She was bouncing a ball, and grinning, and chanting in tempo with the bouncing ball. The chant echoed down the stairwell. It took him a moment to realize that she was repeating over and over again the words "Hang them." The ball bounced, and the child grinned, and the words "Hang them, hang them" floated down the stairwell to where he stood with the pistol shaking in his fist. The air around her shimmered, the ball took on an iridescent hue. She took a step down the staircase, the ball clutched in her fist now. He backed away, and suddenly lost his footing, and went tumbling down the stairs to the floor below. Above him, he heard her laughter. And then, suddenly, the sound of the ball bouncing again.

He got to his feet and turned the pistol up the steps. She was no longer there. On the floor above he could see a blue luminous glow. His elbow hurt where he had landed on it in his fall. He dragged Hillary to her feet, held her limply against him, hefted her painfully into his arms, and went down the steps to the first floor. Above he could still hear the bouncing ball. Outside the house he carried Hillary to where he'd parked the car, the snowflakes covering her clothes till she resembled a shrouded corpse. He heaved her in onto the front seat and then went back to the house — but only to pick up their coats. The ball was still bouncing in the attic.

He heard it when he went outside again, stumbling through the deep snow toward the car. He heard it over the whine of the starter and the sudden roar of the engine. He heard it over the savage wind and the crash of the ocean. And he knew that whenever in the future anything frightened him, whenever any unknown dark terror seized his mind or clutched his heart, he would hear again the sound of that little girl bouncing the ball in the attic — bouncing it, bouncing it, bouncing it.

"Come in," Hillary said.

She was sitting dejectedly in an easy chair, the two cups of Irish coffee on a low table before her. She was still wearing the raccoon coat, huddled inside it.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I guess."

He took one of the cups from the table, sipped at it, and licked whipped cream from his lips. "Why don't you drink it before it gets cold?" he said.

She lifted the other cup, but she did not drink from it.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Drink your coffee."

She sipped at it, her eyes lowered.

"Want to tell me?"

"No."

"Okay," he said.

"It's just… I'm so damn ashamed of myself."

"Why?"

"Fainting like that."

"Well, it was pretty scary back there," Carella said, and sat on the edge of the bed.

"I'm still scared," Hillary said.

"So am I."

"I don't believe that."

"Believe it."

"My first real manifestation," she said, "and I…" She shook her head.

"The first time I faced a man with a gun, I went blind," Carella said.

"Blind?"

"With fear. I saw the gun in his hand, and then I didn't see anything else. Everything went white."

"What happened?" Hillary asked.

"He shot me, and I died."

She smiled and sipped her coffee.

"What happened was I came to my senses about three seconds before it would have been too late."

"Did you shoot him?"

"Yes."

"Did you kill him?"

"No."

"Have you ever killed anyone?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever been shot yourself?"

"Yes."

"Why do you keep doing it?"

"Doing what?"

"Police work."

"I like it," he said simply, and shrugged.

"I've been wondering how I can ever…" She shook her head again and put down the coffee cup.

"Ever what?"

"Go on doing what I'm doing. After tonight I wonder if I shouldn't simply get a job as a ribbon clerk or something."

"You wouldn't be good at it."

"I'm not so good at this either."

"Come on, you're very good," he said.

"Sure. Fainting like a…"

"I almost didn't come up those stairs after you," Carella said.

"Sure."

"It's the truth. I almost ran out of that damn house."

"Yet you're willing to face men with guns in their hands."

"A gun is a gun. A ghost…" He shrugged.

"I suppose I'm glad I saw them," she said.

"So am I."

"I wet my pants, you know."

"No, I didn't know that."

"I did."

"I almost wet mine."

"Fine pair," she said, and smiled again.

The room went silent.

"Do I really look like your wife?" she asked.

"Yes. You know that."

"I'm not sure of anything anymore."

Again the room went silent.

"Well," Carella said, and got to his feet.

"No, don't go yet," she said.

He looked at her.

"Please," she said.

"Well, okay, few minutes," he said, and sat on the edge of the bed again.

"Is your wife anything at all like me?" Hillary asked. "Or is the resemblance purely physical?"

"Purely physical."

"Is she prettier than I am?"

"Well… you really look a lot alike."

"I always thought my sister was prettier than I am," Hillary said, and shrugged.

"She thinks so, too."

"She told you that?"

"Yes."

"Bitch," Hillary said, but she was smiling. "Shall we order another round of these?"

"No, I don't think so. We've got a long drive back tomorrow. We'd better get some sleep."

"Yes, we'd better," Hillary said.

"So," he said, and rose again. "I'll leave a call for…"

"No, don't go," she said. "I'm still frightened."

"It's really getting late," he said. "We…"

"Every time I think of them I shudder."

"There's nothing to be afraid of," he said. "You're here, and our lady friends are miles from…"

"Stay with me," she said.

Her eyes met his. He looked into her face.

"Sleep here," she said. "With me."

"Hillary," he said, "thank you, but…"

"Just to hold me," she said. "In the night."

"Just to hold you, huh?" he said, and smiled.

"Well, whatever," she said and returned the smile. "Okay?"

"No," he said. "Not okay."

"I think you'd like to," she said. She was still smiling.

He hesitated. "Yes, I'd like to," he said.

"So what's…?"

"But I won't."

"We're stranded here…"

"Yes…"

"No one would ever know."

"I would know."

"You'd forgive yourself," she said, and her smile widened.

"Hillary, come on, let's quit it, okay?"

"No," she said. "Not okay"

"Look, I… come on, really."

"Do you know how my sister would handle this?" she asked. "She'd tell you she washed out her panties the minute she got back here to the room. She'd tell you her panties were hanging on the shower rod in the bathroom. She'd tell you she wasn't wearing any panties under her skirt. Do you think that would interest you?"

"Only if I were in the lingerie business," Carella said, and to his great surprise and enormous relief, Hillary burst out laughing.

"You really mean it, don't you?" she said.

"Yeah, what can you do?" Carella said, and shrugged.

"Well, okay then," Hillary said, "I guess." She rose, shrugged out of the coat, laughed gently again, murmured, "The lingerie business," shook her head, and said, "I'll see you in the morning."

"Good night, Hillary," he said.

"Good night, Steve," she said, and sighed and went into the bathroom.

He stood looking at the closed bathroom door for a moment, and then he went into his own room and locked the door behind him.

He dreamed that night that the door between their rooms opened as mysteriously as the doors at the Loomis house had. He dreamed that Hillary stood in the doorway naked, the light from her own room limning the curves of her young body for an instant before she closed the door again behind her. She stood silently just inside the door, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, and then she came softly and silently to the bed and slipped under the covers beside him. Her hand found him. In the darkness she whispered, "I don't care what you think," and her mouth descended.

In the morning, when he awoke, the snow had stopped.

He went to the door between the rooms and tried the knob. The door was locked. But in the bathroom he smelled the lingering scent of her perfume and saw a long black hair curled like a question mark against the white tile of the sink.

He would not tell Teddy about this encounter either. Seven ghosts in one night was one more ghost than anybody needed or wanted.

Ghosts, 1980