The Haunted

Four

Claire looked up at the clock. It was just after ten. She was supposed to meet her sister, Diane, and their friend Janet for lunch at noon, but this morning’s only client had canceled, and she had nothing to do for the next two hours. She considered calling and rescheduling the lunch for eleven—it would be easier to get a seat at the earlier time—but both Diane and Janet were at work, and she wasn’t sure they’d be able to get off. She settled for e-mailing them, and received two quick replies, informing her that neither could meet any earlier.

Claire shook her head as she read the e-mails. She had learned to read and write before the advent of the online age and still felt out of place in the e e cummings world of the Internet, where nothing was capitalized, periods were known as dots, and the normal rules of grammar and punctuation did not apply.

At least her sister had spelled everything correctly.

Sighing, she leaned back in her chair. Shouldn’t more people be suing one another during a recession? When times were tough, weren’t people supposed to look for easy money and big payouts? The business of law didn’t really work that way, but that was the common perception, and she was a little surprised herself to find just how untrue it was. Right now, all she had on her plate were a couple of divorces, a dog bite case and a property-line dispute. She was meeting with the client disputing the property line this afternoon. The paperwork was pretty well finished on the other three cases, so there wasn’t anything for her to do until she met with those clients later in the week.

Claire glanced out the window, where David Molina was carrying out a metal rack of paperbacks and putting it next to the door of his bookstore. She contemplated routing the office phone to her cell and just going home for the next hour, but the woman bitten by the dog had been a walk-in, and she couldn’t take a chance that she might miss someone else coming in off the street. She needed the business.

On a whim, she e-mailed Liz Hamamoto, the only person from her old Los Angeles firm with whom she still kept in touch. She hadn’t spoken or written to Liz since they’d decided to move, and she made up for that by writing a long multipage message describing the new house in detail, as well as their reasons for moving, and providing Liz with her new address.

Now David was adding new paperbacks to the rack.

She was glad they’d bought the house. Just being able to walk to and from work made a huge difference, and she felt more a part of Jardine now than she had even as a child. Over the past few weeks, she’d actually made the acquaintance of some of the newer business owners, people whose establishments she’d driven by in the past and scarcely noticed. Downtown felt more like a community to her now rather than just a work destination, and if nothing else, their new home had helped integrate her more fully into the professional life of the town, which she hoped would pay dividends in increased business down the road.

The phone rang, a woman with questions about sexual harassment, and while discussing it would have counted as a consultation back in Los Angeles—and would have required Claire to meet with the woman in person and charge for the time—things were more informal here in Jardine, and she answered questions over the phone (though as vaguely as possible), hoping the woman would retain her services. She hung up having received neither a promise nor a commitment. But she had a good feeling, which was something, at least.

Claire glanced up at the clock. Fifteen more minutes. She looked outside again. The day was nice, and though she’d originally intended to drive to the restaurant, which was several streets over, she decided to walk. If she went down to the end of the block and cut across the park, it would probably be just as fast as sitting through all of those crowded stoplights and left-turn lanes as everyone took their lunch hours. Besides, she’d get some exercise and fresh air.

She turned off her computer, switched her phone so it went to voice mail on the second ring, picked up her purse and locked up the office. Outside, she waved to David across the street, shouted a hello to Pam Lowry, who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of her Cool Kids Clothing boutique, then headed down the street toward the park.

There was a rally on the field next to the playground, an angry middle-aged man with a megaphone railing against both high taxes and the president to a group of overweight men and women wearing slogan-festooned T-shirts. Claire was tempted to point out that taxes for lower-middle-class people like them had gone down under the current president, but they looked like a humorless bunch, and she was sure the irony would be lost on them. She recalled, a few years back, seeing on the news a self-contradicting placard stating, KEEP YOUR GOVERNMENT HANDS OFF MY MEDICARE! The thought of it made her smile even now, and she passed by the edge of the crowd, keeping a wide berth around a red-faced older woman who was shaking her fist in the air and shouting, “I want my country back!”

When did people get so angry? Claire wondered.

Maybe they’d always been angry. Maybe her perception that things used to be calmer and more civilized was just plain wrong. But it seemed to her that people these days, even in small towns, perhaps especially in small towns, had lost whatever sense of tolerance had enabled America to forge a unified nation out of the diverse peoples that coexisted within its borders.

The man with the megaphone was now talking about changing the Constitution so that immigrant babies born in the United States would not automatically be citizens.

“Yeah!” a man shouted.

Claire hurried through the park.

She got to the restaurant before her sister and her friend, who were both late, and got a table. Fazio’s was not only the most popular Italian restaurant in Jardine, but since the introduction of the Express Meal (“At Your Table in Five Minutes or It’s Free!”), it had become the town’s most popular lunch spot, period. The crowds were already starting to arrive, and Claire was lucky she got there when she did, because by the time Diane arrived, and then Janet, several minutes later, all of the tables were taken and the waiting area near the front door was filled.

They ordered—iced teas all around, small salads and different types of pasta for each of them—and while they snacked on bread and waited for their food to arrive, Diane mentioned that she’d driven by the rally in the park on her way over. “What was that all about?” she asked. “I didn’t hear anything about it.”

“Political rally,” Claire told her sister. “Patriots who want to take back our country.”

“Oh, shit.” Diane rolled her eyes. “Was it that anti-Mexican group?”

“I’m sure they were there.”

“How can they stand to live in this state?” Diane wondered. “This is America. And they’re in New Mexico? That has to drive them crazy.”

“There’s a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment out there,” Claire agreed.

“Anti-illegal immigrant sentiment,” Janet clarified.

“Come on!” Diane smacked her palm down on the table, and Claire had to smile. Her sister had lost none of her political fervor over the years. “No one’s worried about white people sneaking into the country, or talking about putting up a fence between us and Canada. This is racism, pure and simple.”

“Not exactly—” Janet started to say.

“Are you kidding? They’re talking about making it illegal for day laborers to stand in front of the hardware store. They hate Mexicans so much that in order to get rid of them they want to ban work!”

“It’s to keep immigrants from taking American jobs.”

“That’s not even a concept you believe in. Do you mean to tell me that if you got offered a job with a company in Italy or Canada or France, you don’t think you’d have the right to take it? Can you honestly say that you would become an Italian or Canadian or French citizen, and then you’d take the job? Bullshit! You’d sign up immediately, because you think you have the right to work anywhere at any time. As you should. As everyone should.”

Janet clearly disagreed, but she didn’t want to risk Diane’s wrath, so she said nothing. Claire changed the subject. “Anybody hear from Sherry lately?” Sherry was one of their friends who had relocated to Tucson in order to move in with a man she’d met online.

“No,” Diane said.

Janet shook her head. “I don’t know what happened to her.”

The food arrived, and the conversation drifted to safer topics. Claire learned that Janet’s mother was finally going in for hip replacement surgery, and that Diane’s supervisor at the electric company was being transferred to Bernalillo, which meant that if Diane played her cards right, she could be next in line for the position.

“Congratulations!” Claire told her sister. She held up her iced tea, and the other two followed suit, clinking their glasses together.

After lunch, both Diane and Janet offered her a ride, but Claire declined, saying she could use the exercise. She waved good-bye to her sister and their friend as the two women drove off, then decided to go home for a couple of minutes and pick up a few bottles of cold water before heading back to her office. Clients always liked bottled water. It gave the appearance of success, which instilled confidence—half the battle in the initial stages of the attorney-client relationship.

Claire cut through the park again, but the rally was basically over, and only a few stragglers stood around, reinforcing one another’s opinions through heated, one-sided exchanges with imaginary adversaries. She skirted their area, going around a sandy playground where young mothers pushed small children on swings or down slides, and, once out of the park, she walked the three blocks to their house.

The kids were gone for the afternoon, Megan to her friend Zoe’s, James to the community pool with Robbie’s family. Julian was always home, of course, and Claire shouted a greeting up to him as she walked inside, closing the front door behind her. She had to pee and went down the hall to use the bathroom before heading into the kitchen to grab some cold bottles of Arrowhead to take back with her.

The laundry basket was sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator.

Claire frowned. Hadn’t she put that away this morning? She certainly hadn’t left it in the middle of the kitchen. She glanced toward the laundry room, but neither the washer nor dryer was on, and there was no indication that Julian had done another batch of clothes. She shook her head. Maybe it had been her. Come to think of it, the same thing had happened the other day. She’d swept and mopped the kitchen floor and thought she’d put both the broom and mop away in the closet where they belonged—yet, an hour later, she’d found the broom leaning against a wall in the master bathroom. Obviously she’d intended to clean the bathroom and had just spaced out, but she was pretty sure she’d put both cleaning implements away. She smiled to herself. Maybe she needed to start taking ginkgo biloba. Or eating more blueberries. Weren’t blueberries supposed to be good for the memory?

There was the sound of music from Julian’s office upstairs. Loud music. One of those obscure old rock records that Julian, in his geeky way, prided himself on owning. She wasn’t sure why he couldn’t use earphones like everyone else and keep his music to himself, leaving the rest of them in peace, but he insisted on blasting his ancient stereo and subjecting the entire household to whatever he felt like hearing.

“Turn it down!” she shouted up at the ceiling.

He obviously didn’t hear her, so she moved to the bottom of the stairs. She recognized the music now. The Men They Couldn’t Hang, a group whose music he’d played incessantly when they’d first started dating.

“Julian!” she shouted as loud as she could. “Turn it down!”

The music switched off. Or was turned so low that she could no longer hear it.

“Thank you!” she called out.

Seconds later, the back door opened, and Julian came walking through the kitchen. “Were you calling me?” he asked.

Claire jumped, startled. She glanced up the stairs, then over at her husband.

He looked as confused as she felt. “What?” he asked.

“You weren’t upstairs?”

“No, I was in the garage, looking for a box of old instruction manuals that I can’t seem to find.”

“I heard music. From upstairs.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I heard it.”

“What kind of music?”

“The Men They Couldn’t Hang.”

“I was listening to one of their records earlier this morning.”

“Did you turn off the record player? Maybe it could’ve—”

“No, it couldn’t. Besides, I put the record away. It’s not even on the turntable.”

She looked again at the stairwell, her mouth suddenly dry. “Then someone’s upstairs. Because they just turned it on a few minutes ago, and then switched it off when I yelled to turn it down.”

“No one’s upstairs,” Julian said.

“I know what I heard.”

“We’ll check it out.” Moving carefully, walking quietly, Julian led the way upstairs. The door to his office was open, the room empty. A quick check of the other upstairs rooms revealed that they were empty as well.

They went back into Julian’s office, and he strode directly over to his stereo. “Huh,” he said, glancing down at the record on the turntable.

Claire looked down at the round blue-sky MCA label in the center of the black vinyl album, reading the words. The Men They Couldn’t Hang. How Green Is the Valley.

She didn’t like the unsettling feeling creeping up on her. “How could this happen?”

“I don’t know.” He seemed genuinely puzzled, though not as worried as she thought he should be. “I know I put that record away.”

“Then how did it get here?”

He shook his head, confused. “I have no idea. Maybe I just thought I put it away. Or maybe I … forgot.”

“But how did it—”

“I don’t know. I guess I could have left it on before I went outside. There could be a problem with the sound, which is why it got loud and soft. …”

“Yeah,” she agreed quickly. “That’s probably it.” But she heard the hopefulness in her own voice and realized even as she latched onto that explanation how vague it was and how many questions it still left unresolved.

She took a deep breath. “You didn’t by any chance bring the laundry basket out into the kitchen, did you?” she asked.

“No,” he said, frowning. “Why?”

She shook her head slowly, still staring at the record as a chill caressed the back of her neck. “No reason,” she said. “No reason.”