The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

David Beaty Ghosts

From Mystery in the Sunshine State

It was just before sunset in Biscayne Estates, and the Armstrongs were safe at home. Darryl paced around his study, sipped scotch, and listened on his cordless telephone as a client screamed threats at him in broken English. Finally, he said, “Narciso, old buddy, stay calm. This is a temporary setback.” He kept his voice reasonable but firm. “You’ve been going on about killing me all week. What good would that do you?”

Darryl cleared his throat. He said, “And believe me, I understand your anger. Nobody likes to lose money. But you wanted to play with the big boys, remember? Then the market went limit down three days in a row.” He paused, not certain of what he’d just heard. “What? Simultaneous buy and sell orders? Who told you that? That’s a lie. I don’t care who told you. I’ve never dumped a bad trade in your account. That one? You gave me a direct order. Well, no, I can’t play it back for you because your order came over my untaped line.” He winced and said, “Hey, c’mon, you’re calling me at home.”

He took a greedy swallow of scotch and said, “Stop it. That’s enough. I need a vacation from hearing about how I’m going to die. I’ll hang up now, okay? But call me if you get any more crazy ideas. Don’t sit there obsessing. We’re going to work this out. You have my word on that, okay? Bye, bye.” He lowered the telephone into its cradle.

While Darryl talked in his study, his wife, Caroline, drifted among the racks of clothes and shoes in her walk-in closet, searching for a simple blouse to wear. She wondered at the forces in herself that had driven her to buy so many bright, costly things. Who was the woman who’d chosen them? Where was the exhilaration and hope they’d represented? She couldn’t visualize herself in them now. The sight of them embarrassed her. When she looked around the closet, she imagined an aviary of tropical birds.

Caroline had recently turned thirty-three, and now, with a rueful laugh, she told friends that she was quickly closing the gaps: next year she’d be eighty-eight! Last week she’d resigned from her civic committees, her charities, her mothers’ groups: places where she’d been spinning her wheels. She felt herself changing. She was tired of people who thought about money and not much else — and that included herself. She yearned for a more spiritual life. She wanted to break free.

At the moment, however, she felt blocked. A free-floating gloom seemed to hang over her life.

The telephone was driving her crazy. It started ringing as soon as Darryl came home from the office. When she answered it, the caller hung up, but he stayed on if Darryl took the call. Then Darryl would hurry into his study and shut the door. He pretended that everything was fine, but she knew better. Worrying about it — and how could she not? — kept her under the thumb of depression. Caroline turned again in her closet, sorrowing over the constant losses, the daily disconnections from hope, that seemed to define her life now.

Darryl, forced out of his study by the need for more scotch, signaled his availability to Kyle, age nine, and Courtney, age eleven, by cracking open a tray of ice in the bar. They appeared behind him in the doorway, energetic and needy.

He wondered when Narciso would call again. Silence was a danger signal. Silence meant: “Grab your wallet and go out the window!” Darryl poured scotch over the smoking ice in his glass. He had to keep Narciso talking, had to draw off his anger, like draining pus from a wound, or God only knew what that maniac might do. He wondered. But what if my luck has deserted me?

He fled onto the patio with the children chattering at his heels like dwarfish furies. He sagged into a white plastic chair and tried to quiet Courtney and Kyle with the promise that if they ate all the food on their plates and didn’t give Mrs. Hernandez a hard time, they’d get a big surprise after dinner.

“Oh, what surprise?” Kyle said. Feeling full of the idea of surprise, he danced around the patio. Courtney, who liked to mimic adults, folded her arms on her chest, struck a pose, and said, “Daddy, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Something of interest to you, my little madam.” He talked to distract them, afraid that they could hear the voice of Narciso raging and threatening in his head. His children circled him — his fragile offspring, driven by such blatant needs. He felt the spinning pressure of their love. What have I done to them? he wondered and abruptly closed his mind against that thought. He offered them a face all-knowing and confident. “If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise. Wait until after dark.” He drank deeply.

“After dark!” Kyle shouted. “Wow!” Making airplane noises, he skimmed away. He ignored a barrage of furious looks from Courtney and settled into a holding pattern around the patio table. Courtney said, “But. Daddy, you didn’t answer me.”

Daddy’s attention, however, had been captured by the sapphire beauty of his swimming pool, and by his trim green lawn, where sprinklers whispered chuck, chuck, chuck and tossed quick rainbows in the evening light, and by the Lay-Z-Girl, his sixty-foot Bertram yacht, which seemed to bob in polite greeting from its mooring on the canal. It was a typical view in Biscayne Estates, just south of Miami, and fragrant with the odors of damp earth and thrusting vegetation and the faint coppery tang of the ocean, but this evening its beauty and the achievement it proclaimed seemed like a trap to Darryl. Like one of those insect-eating flowers, but on a huge scale.

At one time, this life was all Darryl had hoped for. Now the prospect of working to sustain it made him think of a photograph he’d seen in National Geographic, of Irish pilgrims crawling on their knees over a stony road in the rain.

He felt, on his eardrums, the light percussion of rock music from next door, where Mr. Dominguez, a successful importer of flowers, fruits, and vegetables from Colombia, lived with his young wife, Mercedes, and a son Kyle’s age, a sweet boy named Brandon. There was another son, from his first marriage, Jorge, a seventeen-year-old monster with shocking acne, who lived there too. Jorge was forever wounding Darryl’s sense of neighborliness with his sleek red Donzi speedboat, his roaring Corvette, his end-of-the-world music, and his endless succession of guests, who used Darryl’s lawn to drink and drug and screw and then left their detritus for Courtney and Kyle to puzzle over. Whenever Darryl trotted next door to complain, Mr. Dominguez laid a manicured hand over his heart and said, “I sorry, I sorry,” and somehow managed to imply that he was apologizing for Darryl’s bad manners, not Jorge’s.

Jorge was a painful reminder that there were millions of teenagers out there having a high old time with their parents’ money. Meanwhile, Darryl’s resources dwindled away. If only he could get a tiny slice of what those parents were wasting on their kids. The idea of offering an Armstrong Education Fund shimmered in his mind, then faded. The word “slice” had turned his thoughts back to Narciso and his death threats.

Darryl didn’t want to think about Narciso, so he let himself get angry with Jorge Dominguez. A door cracked open in Darryl’s mind, and Darryl scampered down the rough stone steps to the dark arena where he played his special version of Dungeons and Dragons with his enemies. There, in his imagination, he passed a few delightful moments clanking around, teaching Jorge Dominguez to howl out his new understanding of the word “neighbor.”

And then, from somewhere close by, Darryl heard the sounds he’d been dreading. He raced up from his mental dungeon to see the water empty from his swimming pool, and the swimming pool float into the sky and join the other clouds turning pink in the evening light. After that, the noises of a chain saw and a wood chipper came growling toward him and his gardenia bushes, hibiscus, sea grape, the low hedge of Surinam cherry that separated him from the Dominguezes, and all of his palms fell over, crumbled into mulch, and blew away. His lawn burst into flame and burned with the fierceness of tissue paper, exposing earth the color of an elephant’s hide, dusty and crazed with cracks. The Lay-Z-Girl popped her lines and fled down the canal into Biscayne Bay. Behind him, Darryl heard glass shattering and sounds of collapse and rushing wind, and he knew that if he turned around he’d find empty space where his house had once stood. His world had vanished. Ashes filled his heart.

Then it was over. His vision cleared. He lifted his shaking hand and glanced at his watch and guessed that no more than half a minute had passed. He look a swallow of scotch and saw, with gratitude. Kyle circling the table and Courtney staring at him.

He looked away from them and regarded the Lay-Z-Giri. Another broken-down dream. At first, Darryl had retained a full-time captain, but when that became too expensive, he’d found someone less competent who was willing to work part-time. Now he couldn’t even afford that. A week ago, without telling Caroline, he’d fired the man. Yesterday he’d called a yacht broker and put the Lay-Z-Giri on the market.

Tonight, however, he dreamed of sailing away with his family to a new life. Tortola. The Turks and Caicos. A home on the ocean wave. Yes. He said to Courtney, “Mommy knows I’m here?”

“Mommy knows,” a voice behind them said. Caroline, barefoot, dressed in designer jeans and a white linen blouse, closed the sliding glass door on the greenish talking face of the television news announcer and stepped onto the patio, darting shy, uncertain glances at Darryl.

He said, “Baby, you look great.” She brightened and gave him a smile and a kiss.

He sniffed the air between them. “Love the perfume too.”

The children cut across their current, clamoring for attention. A moment of plea bargaining with their mother ensued, after which Kyle and Courtney trudged away toward the kitchen, where Mrs. Hernandez, a smiling Nicaraguan who was going to apply for her green card any day now, stood ready to dish out their supper before she began her trek out past the guardhouse and estate gates to the bus stop, and her night off.

“Any better today, sweetness?” Caroline asked, sitting down and taking a joint from her jeans pocket and lighting up.

The phone rang inside the house. Darryl lurched to his feet, saying, “I did okay in coffee. Made a buck or two. But I got hammered again in currencies. Big time.” He stepped into the house, carefully closing the sliding glass door behind him.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Caroline muttered, watching him pick up the phone in the television room. She took a hit off her joint. When she exhaled, it sounded like a sigh.

She smoked and watched Darryl waving a hand and talking. Behind him, the colors on the television screen changed into electric blues, greens, and reds and became a map of Israel, Jordan, and Syria, which was replaced by the image of a handsome young man in a safari jacket talking into a microphone in a desert. Caroline wondered, Would he find me attractive? The correspondent’s eyes narrowed, as if he were thinking it over. Then his hair lifted, like the wing of a bird, revealing a bald spot the size of Jordan. Caroline shouted with laughter.

Darryl paced around the television room: tall, red-haired, muscular, dressed in chinos and a blue Izod shirt, moving his right arm as if he were conducting the conversation. Still handsome, Caroline thought. She’d fallen in love with him when she was sixteen years old and he was twenty. He desired her still. She was as certain of that as she was of anything else in this darkening world. Lately, though, he had been making love to her with such a blind, nuzzling intensity that she felt herself recoiling from him. His need frightened her. At the same time, her response left her feeling inadequate and guilty.

Well, she would get him a nice safari jacket for his birthday. She watched the frown on his face and drifted into a fantasy: Darryl was talking to the correspondent in the desert. Together they were solving a knotty international problem. “I told Arafat that he better cut the crap.” Something like that.

Darryl slid open the door and returned to slump into the chair next to her.

Caroline glanced at him. “What’s happening, Mr. A?”

His face looked drained. “That client keeps calling to say that he’s going to kill me.”

Dread thumped on Caroline’s heart. She blinked and fingered a button on her blouse. “Have you called the police?”

“It’s under control.”

“Control?” She sat up and flicked away her joint. “Whose control? He’s calling you at home?”

“Well, he’s upset.”

“And you’re not? He should be locked up.”

“I’ve got to keep him talking. Calm him down.”

“So, are we in danger? And damn you, Darryl, don’t you lie to me.”

“He’ll calm down. And there’s a guard on the gate and police on tap. We’re safe.”

“I don’t feel safe. I mean — you’re going to do nothing?”

“I’ve just got to live with it for a while. It’ll blow over. Someday I’ll kick his ass. He’s a jerk. The market turned against him and he started hollering that I’d robbed him.”

Caroline asked where the client was from, and Darryl said that, as far as he could make out, he’d begun in Ecuador but had ended up in Panama. Darryl shrugged. “He uses a Panamanian passport. But who knows? He hangs out in Key Biscayne when he’s not in Panama.”

“He’s the only one complaining?”

Darryl looked darkly at her. “In a down market, everybody complains.”

“But he says you clipped him? Why would he think that?”

Darryl shrugged. It wasn’t what she thought. This guy loved playing the commodities market. Darryl had made a lot of money for him in the past. Last week, however, he’d lost big time — stopped out, three days in a row. Darryl had told him, “Cool off.” But he was hot to jump in again. Well, he’d lost again, big time. Now he claimed it was Darryl’s fault. He wanted his money back.

“And the threats?”

“You want his actual words?”

She looked away. She didn’t want to hear the threats. “Well, anyway, this isn’t Ecuador, or wherever he’s from.”

“Oh, no. Thank God we live in little old Miami, where everybody fears God and pays their taxes.” Darryl nodded over his shoulder. “Like that nice Mr. Dominguez.”

“This is not a sane way to live.”

“Well, my choices are limited at the moment.”

Caroline asked if maybe, just maybe, Darryl was getting too old for the commodities game?

Darryl bristled. “You don’t like the style of life we have down here? I do it for you and the children. You want to go back to Chunchula, Alabama?”

She gave him a troubled smile. She told him that she surely loved him more alive than dead. And his children did too.

“Lover,” he said, calming down. He took her hand and kissed it and admitted that maybe his life was a little too exciting now. That happened in his business. It was part of the adventure. As soon as he was clear of this little problem, they would think about changing things. Right now, he had to sit tight and roll with the punches.

Darryl told her a story about how Napoleon interviewed officers slated for high rank. The last question Napoleon asked was: Are you lucky? If they hesitated, or said no, he didn’t promote them. Darryl grinned. “I damn well know what I would’ve told him.”

Caroline had heard the story before. Tonight, it lacked its old magic. An aggressive attitude to luck might help on a battlefield. But in business? She worried that Darryl bragged about luck just to keep himself moving through the scary scenarios he seemed bent on creating for himself these days. Maybe bragging was a fuel. Or a mantra. Or a charm. He’d always been addicted to danger, to the edge, to the thrill of winning big. A little impromptu craziness had made life interesting for him. It used to refresh him. Now it seemed to her as if something else was going on.

She worried about Darryl’s attitude toward other people’s money. She used to love hearing him romance a client: his voice had carried a weird and beautiful music, rich and deep and sexy — a “brown velvet” voice, somebody had once called it. But over the years she had identified new sounds, less beautiful. Now when the check changed hands, the music suffered a modulation too. She heard dry notes of contempt in Darryl’s voice. Darryl acted as if the client had signed away his rights over his own money, and Darryl resisted with bewilderment and outrage any client’s attempts to withdraw his account. He acted as if the client were trying to weasel away his, Darryl’s, property.

Caroline worried that Darryl was growing addicted to the stronger jolt, the darker thrill, of losing big. She had been trying to identify- the signs. Was she seeing another example tonight? She wasn’t sure. He’d deny it, of course. Could she tell before it was too late? The fragility of their life worried Caroline, but it seemed to excite something in Darryl.

“Lover?” he said. “Didn’t you hear me? I said I’m thinking of making some big changes.”

“When?”

“Well, as soon as I get clear of these problems.”

They looked at each other, and then away, toward the canal, where the Lay-Z-Giri gently chafed at its moorings in the evening breeze.

Courtney and Kyle returned to the patio just as the telephone rang again. Their father went into the television room and returned immediately, shaking his head at their mother.

“So, Daddy,” Kyle said. “What’s the big surprise?”

His remark startled his parents. They stared at him.

“Surprise?” Caroline said, reaching up to finger the button at her throat.

“Daddy,” Courtney said, “you promised us a surprise.”

“Oh, that surprise.” Their father put his face in his hands and choked with laughter, and his neck Hushed bright pink. When he didn’t stop laughing, the children grew uneasy. They looked to their mother for guidance and saw her staring at the top of their father’s balding head, as if there were something wrong with its color or shape. The phone rang and both parents moved, but their father was faster. His absence left everybody on the patio wordless and uneasy.

He was back in a moment. As he came out onto the patio, Darryl breathed out sharply, clapped his hands, and shouted, “Ghost!” That got everybody’s attention. He said, “We’re playing Ghost tonight. That’s the surprise.” He waited for the confusion to subside. They’d played it once before: after their dinner, Mommy and Daddy had turned out all the lights and come searching for Courtney and Kyle.

Caroline said, “Not tonight.”

Courtney said, “I hate that game.”

Kyle said, “What’s the prize?”

“Something really nice,” Darryl said. “Now listen up.” They’d play for only an hour. Kyle giggled and said, “I’ll hide at Brandon’s house.” No, Darryl told him, nobody could leave the house. Whoever remained free, or was the last to get caught, won the game.

“What’s the prize?” Kyle said.

“It’s a su-prize,” Darryl said. The children examined this statement and rejected it as adult nonsense. Kyle gasped, “We’re staying up late,” and his mother said, “Not too late. School tomorrow. Tonight’s special.” Why was it special? the children wanted to know, and their mother directed them to their father for their answer. He winked and said that it was a secret. “Why is everything a surprise or a secret?” Courtney said.

“Is this necessary?” Caroline said. She sensed her evening sliding toward a dark corner. But she knew that marijuana stoked her paranoid tendencies, and she was confused about what she really felt, so she went out of her way to enunciate her doubts in reasonable tones. “Do we really need this tonight, honey?” They were eating on the patio. The children had been banished to the television room. Caroline served the food that Mrs. Hernandez had prepared — pork chops and rice, a salad of crispy greens, and a bottle of Chilean cabernet — and then she brought out the portable television so she could keep an eye on a rerun of Star Trek while she ate.

Darryl had drunk himself into a mood where he found life piquant. “C’mon,” he said. “I need a little lighthearted fun. It’s just a game.” He laughed. “It reminds me of what my daddy said to me at his own daddy’s funeral: ‘These are the jokes, so start laughing.’ ”

“Stop.” Caroline put down her fork.

The image of Mr. Spock came on the television screen and said, “Irritation. Ah, yes. One of your earth emotions.”

“Darryl, this just doesn’t sound right.”

He shrugged. “Isn’t it like life? You’re in your house and it feels safe, but suddenly it’s dark as Hades, and out there are people who are coming to get you.”

“I forbid you to talk like that.” Caroline blinked at the pale light coming down over the canal and felt a heavy downward drop in her emotions. “Let’s just take the kids to Dairy Queen, okay?”

They wrangled quietly. “I was joking,” Darryl said. “The kids were bugging me. We’ll play for an hour.”

Caroline, unhappy and distrustful, looked over at the portable television. Mr. Spock, wearing earphones, said, “This must be garbled. The tapes are badly burned. I get the captain giving the order to destroy his own ship.”

Caroline told Darryl that she’d think about it. She busied herself with her dinner, even though she wasn’t hungry now, and pretended to concentrate on Star Trek. Captain Kirk was ordering a twenty-four-hour watch on the sick bay.

And then she thought, Maybe I’m not being fair to him. Maybe I’m not being helpful. He’s so edgy tonight. He needs to play more than the kids do. She wavered and then gave in. “Okay. Okay. But only for an hour.” He brightened immediately. She looked away, feeling slightly creepy.

“Let’s do it right this time,” Darryl said. They discussed ways to turn themselves into ghosts. “We need sheets,” Darryl said. “You’re not cutting my good sheets,” she said. “I’m talking about old sheets.” Darryl said. Caroline said that all their sheets were new. She said, “Everything in this house is new.”

“But what’s a ghost without a sheet?” Darryl said.

From the television, Mr. Spock shouted, “We’re entering a force field of some kind! Sensor beam on!”

“Hold it,” Caroline shouted. “We’re almost ready. But not yet, so you can’t come in.” Courtney and Kyle wouldn’t stop tapping on the locked bedroom door, so their mother, whose hair had suddenly turned white and who was wearing the palest makeup she could find, burst out of the bathroom in her bra and panties, trotted across the bedroom, and shouted through the door for them to knock it off. The telephone rang and she picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?” She waited, and when nobody spoke she muttered, “Oh, fuck you,” and dropped the receiver into the cradle and walked to her dressing table and looked at the image of herself with white hair. She shook her head, closed her eyes, and sighed. She felt exhausted.

She reached into a drawer and retrieved a small vial. She dipped her finger, applied it to each nostril and inhaled, rubbed the finger around her gums, and then replaced the vial and went back into the bathroom, where Darryl waited nude in the shower stall singing an old Pink Floyd number about money, and she finished powdering his hair with flour.

She wiped the flour off his shoulder with a towel, kissed him on the lips, tweaked his nipples, and fondled his penis. She stepped back, her eyes hard and sparkling, and considered her handiwork. From the shower stall, Darryl, smiling, red-faced, and drunk, blew kisses at her. “Hmmmnnn,” she said. “Hmmmnnn what, baby?” he said. She said, “I just wanted to see how you’d look as an old white-haired cracker with a hard-on.”

The children rushed through the doorway and halted just inside the bedroom and almost fell over with fright. In front of them, holding hands side by side on the bed, sat two laughing ghosts with pale, shiny faces, chalky while heads, and bloodshot eyes. They wore flowing white sheets. The ghosts raised their hands in the air, flopped them around and wailed, “Whoooooooo!” and Kyle turned and ran into the door frame.

A ghost jumped up and took Kyle’s face in its white-dusted hands and said, “Honey, you all right?” Kyle looked up with one of his eyes shut and said, “Mom?” The ghost nodded. Kyle said, “You scared me.” The ghost bent back Kyle’s head to examine the bump over his eye and asked, “You sure you’re all right?” Kyle nodded. “You want to play the game?” Kyle nodded again. “I guess so.” “It’s only for an hour,” the other ghost said, and Courtney said, “Kyle’s so spastic.”

“So, if we’re all okay...,” Darryl said. He reminded them that no lights or flashlights were allowed during the game.

“And Kyle better find his own hiding place,” Courtney said.

Darryl told them that the ghosts would wait in this bedroom, then come out and search for the children, ha, ha, ha. Courtney pressed her hand to her forehead and said, “Dad, you’re weird.”

Darryl, noticing a look on Kyle’s face, said, “And you can’t just give up. If you’re caught, you’ll have to wait in the TV room — with the TV off. Under no circumstances can you go outside the house. OK?”

Kyle nodded and touched the bump on his forehead and said, “But what’s the prize?” “A Peanut Buster Parfait at Dairy Queen,” Darryl said. “Tonight?” Kyle said, in a rising voice. Darryl nodded. “Wow!” Kyle said, and even Courtney forgot herself enough to show enthusiasm. “So, we’re ready?” Darryl asked.

From where the children waited in the TV room, they caught glimpses of the ghosts floating around the house, turning off lights. They heard, in the gathering darkness, one ghost remind the other about the alarm system. Then the ghosts returned to the doorway of their bedroom, their sheets billowing behind them.

Darryl called out, “Children, can you hear me? Can you hear me?” “Yes,” the children shouted. They had ten minutes to hide themselves, he announced. He looked at his digital watch and called out, “From now.” He slammed shut the bedroom door, and he and the other ghost groped toward the bed and lay down side by side in the darkness.

He said, “Lordy, think of them creeping around out there like mice.” Caroline said that she didn’t know if she had the energy to spend an hour chasing the kids around a dark house, and Darryl reached over and touched her nipple and said, “Who says you have to do that? I’ve got a great idea. Want to hear?”

“Hmmmnnn — probably not,” she said. “But tell me anyhow.”

As he began to speak she sat up, moved off the bed, and found her way over to her dresser. She quietly opened the drawer, found her little vial, and applied some of its contents to her nostrils and gums, and when her husband paused to ask what on earth she was doing at her dressing table, she sniffed and told him that she was looking for her eye drops, because flour from her hair was irritating her eyes. “I’ll take some,” Darryl said. “Some what?” she said. “Eye drops,” he said, and she said, “Coming right up!” A moment later she started swearing because, she said, she’d just dropped the container on the shag carpet and now she couldn’t find it.

Kyle couldn’t find a place to hide. Every spot he chose turned out to be too obvious, or it bothered Courtney, who seemed to be playing a game of her own, popping up behind him in every room he went into and hissing at him to go away. He finally returned to the living room and squeezed himself under the sofa. Kosmo the cat came over to keep him company and interpreted all of Kyle’s efforts to shoo him off as invitations to play, and just when Kyle realized that he’d picked another stupid place to hide, he heard his parents’ bedroom door open. His father’s voice called out, “Ten minutes is up. This is now officially a ghost house. Only ghosts live here. Watch out, heeeeeerrrre we come!”

From under the sofa, Kyle looked over and saw the two ghosts standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom. He whimpered when they laughed like those jungle animals from Africa Kyle had seen on TV. As they began searching through the house, flapping their sheets and making terrible noises, Kosmo finally ran away, and Kyle squeezed himself into the tiniest ball he could imagine and tried not to think about the throbbing bump on his forehead, or about all the places on his body that itched, or the fact that he badly needed to clear his throat, at least once. An hour seemed like forever.

The game glided over Caroline’s imagination with the sinister smoothness of a dream bird. She felt more energetic now, and she put her best effort into it. Action kept her paranoia — the panic feeling that she was wavering like an old quarter around the edge of a bottomless pit — far enough away to be bearable.

They swept through the house making ghostly noises, and the first place they looked for Kyle was under the living room sofa, because they both remembered that when Kyle was a little younger he loved to crawl under this sofa and declare himself invisible. Caroline spotted one of his feet and pointed it out to Darryl, who nodded. They circled the sofa, moaning and flapping their sheets, and went on in search of Courtney.

Caroline’s senses twitched when they passed the broom closet just off the kitchen, and they stopped and flapped their sheets outside that. While she was dancing around and tapping on the freezer next to it, Caroline felt a stronger twitch of intuition, and she led Darryl to the linen closet by the laundry room. She had remembered that Courtney loved the floral smell of the sachets slipped between the laundered sheets and towels to keep out the smell of mildew. The ghosts wept out her name, and Caroline rattled the linen closet doorknob and felt a sudden pull from the other side. She pulled harder, but the door wouldn’t budge. She pictured Courtney obstinately hanging on to the doorknob, and a wave of irritation rose up in her, and she felt a wild urge to yank open the door and strike terror into her daughter’s heart, and then she felt ashamed. She loved Courtney. Why should she want to terrorize her? Caroline was appalled at herself. This game had gone too far. She turned away and signaled urgently to Darryl. They made one last sweep through the house, then silently departed through the sliding glass door to the patio and fled across the lawn.

Courtney sat on a pile of towels in the linen closet and hung on to the doorknob with both hands. She wept as silently as she knew how. She had felt, through the door, the force of her mother’s anger, and it had shocked her. What had she done to deserve it? She knew she was overweight and unlovely, but she couldn’t help it. Her father was acting so weird too. She cried harder now, because she wanted to love him but he wouldn’t let her, and she felt so alone.

Kyle strained until he thought his ears were going to pop, but he only heard the thumping of his own blood. Me waited and waited and waited for the ghosts to make a noise, and finally he just had to move his legs, and then he had to scratch all his itches, and after that he couldn’t stop himself and he cleared his throat. Time dragged by. He couldn’t remember the house being this quiet, ever.

Caroline and Darryl threw cushions down on the dew-dampened afterdeck of the Lay-Z-Girl and tore off each other’s sheets, T-shirts, shorts, and underwear and made love in the silvery light of an almost full moon, as if they were young again and back in a field outside Chunchula, Alabama. Ah, it was sweet and powerful, the best ever, they told each other afterward. Sweaty and relaxed, they dozed for a while, until the crisp growl of twin outboard engines, approaching in the canal from the direction of Biscayne Bay, awakened them. The outboard engines shut off close by, and they looked at each other and shook their heads. “Jorge?” “Jorge.” Both of them had thought the same thing: young Jorge Dominguez was returning home. Darryl got up into a crouch, looked over the railing, and glimpsed two figures moving across the Dominguezes’ lawn. He lay back down again next to Caroline. They decided that Jorge had taken his girlfriend out in his boat, to smoke a joint or fuck in the moonlight.

“Someday,” Darryl murmured, lying on his back and tracking the blinking lights of a passing airplane, “I’ll get me a sweet little .357 Magnum and take Jorge’s heart for a spin over the red line. I surely will. I swear it on the grave of my Aunt Alice, who always had a strap handy for uppity children — I’m not joking,” he said, turning toward Caroline.

“You’re my big strong hero,” she said, fondling him. “Sure you are.”

Kyle flitted from room to room, growing more and more upset. He was alone, all alone in this dark house. They’d gone away and left him. Even the cat was gone.

Or maybe they were playing a joke on him? Yes, that was it, he thought with a burst of blistering hatred, because Courtney was a bully and she always got what she wanted and she loved to gang up on him, and now they’d taken her side. Now they were all together someplace, laughing at him. They were waiting for him to act like a baby. Well, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t call out or turn on any lights.

But what was he supposed to do? Where was everybody? He’d checked everywhere — now he was coming out of his parents’ bathroom, leaving a safe zone of damp towels and reassuring smells, the scent of his mother’s perfumed powder, his father’s cologne. He walked through a house now unfamiliar, pretending not to notice how the walls bulged out at him. It was hard not to shout with fear when he saw the dark hairy animals that had taken the place of the chairs and sofas he had known. He pretended he didn’t see them, and the animals stopped breathing and watched with glowing eyes as he passed. He heard their hearts beating; they gave off a rank, rotten smell as they inched nearer in the darkness, on every side. He knew that they longed to touch him.

He slipped into the kitchen, quietly closing the door behind him, sniffing the air and finding faint traces of the pork chop and rice Mrs. Hernandez had served him for supper. He missed her and her kindly, rough hands. He felt so alone. He fetched up in front of the refrigerator, pondering his father’s last words: “This is now officially a ghost house.” Was that a secret message which Courtney had understood, but which he, Kyle, had missed? Would it be a ghost house forever? Did they have to abandon it? As Kyle repeated his father’s words in his mind, they became alien and threatening. He opened the refrigerator door. The light was wonderfully bright and warm. He reached in, grabbed four slices of bologna, shut the refrigerator door, and stuffed the bologna into his mouth. He stood there in the dark, chewing.

The more Kyle thought about it, the more he grew convinced that they were all someplace together, Mom, Dad, and Courtney. Well, if they weren’t inside, they weren’t playing fair.

They were together outside. That had to be it. He pictured them sitting together on the back terrace, near the pool, waiting to see how long it would take dumb Kyle to figure out their big joke, and because this picture was the brightest thing in his world at the moment, Kyle accepted it as the truth. Courtney had gotten hold of his mom and dad. Now they were on her side.

So now he’d leave the house too. He’d sneak around to the terrace, where they were sitting around playing their big joke on him, and he’d leap out of the bushes and give them the fright of their lives. “Ha, ha, ha,” he’d yell. He’d beat up Courtney. He’d wipe everybody out, pow, pow, pow. Then they’d be sorry. Boy, would everybody be sorry when Kyle the Avenger jumped onto that terrace. They’d see how Courtney had lied to them and they’d never ever play a stupid joke on Kyle again.

He grinned as he opened the kitchen door, slipped into the night, and began trotting toward the back of the house and the terrace. He was playing that scene over again in his mind, the one where Kyle the Avenger jumps onto the terrace and frightens the willies out of everybody, when he heard a noise behind him. He dropped down on the ground and froze against the side of the house. He looked back and saw two figures in dark clothes detach themselves from the Surinam cherry hedge. They had come from the Dominguezes’ yard. They walked directly over to the kitchen door and opened it, silently entered the house, and just as silently closed the door behind them. Kyle stared at where they’d been. They’d moved so smoothly, so quickly, so quietly. Like ghosts. For a moment, Kyle found it hard to breathe. He felt dizzy and lightheaded; he wanted to clear his throat, but he fought against it, and then he began to gag.

He jumped up and plunged through the Surinam cherry hedge and landed on his hands and knees in the Dominguezes’ yard, where he quietly vomited up the bologna. He wiped his mouth with his hand and flopped onto his back in the grass and lay shaking in the darkness. Music poured from the Dominguezes’ house, and it felt soothing and familiar to him. Dad hadn’t told him there were other people playing the game. Where’d they come from? Why were they wearing dark clothes?

Lying in the Dominguezes’ yard, Kyle looked up at the moon and thought of the ghosts in dark clothes. Boy, were they scary. He never wanted to play this game again. He closed his eyes and saw stars and felt dizzy, so he opened his eyes and stared up at the sky and wondered how long he’d have to wait until the game was finally over and he could go home and fall asleep in his own bed.

“Christ Almighty’, would you listen to that racket?” Darryl said when the heavy metal rock music started up at the Dominguez house. Darryl and Caroline had dozed off again; the music had awakened them.

“I’m going to the head,” Caroline muttered, “and then let’s collect the kids. Don’t forget we’ve got to take them to Dairy Queen.” She kissed him, then groaned as she got off the deck. “I’m getting old, sweetness,” she said, descending the stairs. “Old.”

Darryl moved to a chair moist with dew. He looked up at the stars and over at the lurid night sky above downtown Miami. He felt better than he had in a long while. Getting out of the house and away from the telephone and making love to Caroline in the moonlight had brought him to a place of balance between the ever-tight-ening inner craziness of the last few weeks and a sense of future possibilities. He felt refreshed. Hopeful. He loved his wife and he loved his children. He stretched, feeling sexy and content and not at all drunk. He knew he could solve his problems. He was ready to fight the fight. “Fucking rock music,” he muttered, staring at his neighbor’s house. How could old Dominguez stand that shit? Was he deaf?

“That client — the one who’s been threatening you?” Caroline was coming back up onto the deck.

Darryl sighed.

She peered up at the sky and began to pick up her clothes. “What are you going to do?”

“Make a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“I’ll make them happy. I’m thinking of a way to pay them back.” She stopped dressing and stared at him. “Them?”

“Yes.” He looked at her. “I told you that.”

“You did?” She began crying.

He touched her, but she moved away. He opened his mouth but didn’t know what to say. He pulled on his shorts and T-shirt.

She zipped up her shorts, weeping. “What are we going to do?”

“I borrowed some of their money.”

“Borrowed?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, for God’s sake, give it back.” Her head emerged from her T-shirt.

“I don’t have it right now.”

“What have you done with it?”

“It’s gone.” He opened his hands. “I’m in a deep hole.”

She wept again. “Oh, tell them — anything.”

“I’ve been doing that.”

She hugged herself. “This is too much.”

“It’s business. I can’t panic, or they’ll be on me like sharks.”

“Aren’t we talking about your life — our lives? Is it all some kind of a game to you?”

“No.” He felt her receding from him and he wanted to set things right between them. He told her that he loved her, and he em-braced her, breathing in her smell, waiting to feel her soften. She didn’t, so he stepped back and willed a smile onto his face. “Look,” he said, “I screwed up, but I know a way to get out of it.”

“How?”

“My luck’s got to hold out a day or so, and then I’m clear. I want a different life. I can’t go on like this. And that’s a definite promise. We’ll sit down and you’ll tell me what you want and we’ll make a plan.”

She stared at him. “You’re never going to change, are you?”

He remembered the flour in his hair and felt self-conscious. He must look absurd. “I’m changing,” he said. “You’ll see.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“My biggest worry at the moment,” he went on, rubbing his head, “is how I’m going to get this gunk out of my hair. Go back to the house and round up the kids and we’ll go out to Dairy Queen. I’ll use the boat dock hose and be right there.”

She climbed down onto the concrete edge of the canal and then looked toward their house. It was dark and silent. Compared to the Dominguezes’, so bright, throbbing with music and energy, her house seemed like the negative of a house. The children, she thought, were being unusually patient and quiet. She looked up at Darryl. She was angry at him and disappointed. “Oh, hurry up,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.

She gazed up at him, then turned and started into the darkness. Darryl tried, and failed, to find something reassuring to call after her.

He stepped into the cockpit, groped around, found a key, fitted it into the ignition, and tried to start the twin diesel engines.

The Lay-Z-Girl was Darryl’s province, one in which Caroline was not interested. She hated fishing, and she complained about sunburn and seasickness.

The Lay-Z-Girl badly needed repairs. Now the main engines wouldn’t start. He couldn’t work the radio. The gauges for the three fuel tanks were hovering near empty. He gave out a deep sigh. How he had loved this boat. And what a mess his life had become. He had told Caroline the truth. He wanted to change. But what was he going to do about Narciso? A solution seemed impossible but at the same time close, very close.

On his way back to the railing, he almost tripped over the sheets that Caroline and he had shed on the deck. He threw them over his shoulder, climbed down onto the concrete dock, turned on the hose, then changed his mind and turned it off.

He’d seen the Dominguezes’ lawn explode into low fountains of water. Their automatic sprinklers had come on. In the light from their porch, Darryl saw droplets sparkling on their grass. It was a strange and beautiful sight. His own lawn was dark. So was the house. Caroline hadn’t turned on the lights. He halted, uneasy, and stared at his house and around his backyard. He felt that something was wrong with it all, but he didn’t know what it was.

His house was perfectly quiet. Darkness seemed to flow out of it toward him in dense waves. He felt a spurt of anxiety and fought to control it. Where was Caroline? Where were the kids?

“Caroline?” he called. There was no answer. He thought that he glimpsed a dark movement behind the sliding glass door to the living room. “Caroline?” he called again. Why didn’t she answer?

Darryl studied his house. For some reason, it didn’t look like his home. It seemed alien. He didn’t like it. He glanced with irritation at all the bright lights illuminating the Dominguezes’ house, and he wrestled down his anxiety.

He made up his mind: he’d had enough paranoia for one day. He was tired and he wanted this game to be over. There was, he decided, only one reason for the silence in his house. His family was waiting inside in the darkness to surprise him. Well, he’d play along, even though the notion of moving into that darkness gave him the creeps.

He wanted to be greeted by warmth and light and happy children. He had a vision of them standing just inside the door, holding their breath, waiting to switch on the lights and yell “Boo!” That vision propelled him forward, smiling.

Perhaps, he thought, as he walked up the lawn, rubbing the flour from his hair, perhaps when they got back from Dairy Queen, he’d switch on his porch lights and turn on his sprinklers and show the kids how beautiful water can be, even at night.