Crimes by Moonlight

Ralph looked embarrassed and said, “Oh, stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Well… ever since we moved in, there’s been… incidents.”

I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “Like what? I don’t like games, Mr. Toland, so tell me what’s been going on here, what’s occurred so that you felt compelled to bring in two strangers from Massachusetts to spend the night here, one of whom is now dead in your house.”

That certainly got his attention, and he stared at a point about a foot above my left shoulder and said, “Little stuff at first. Carrie’s always on me for leaving the toilet seat up, and I swear, I always put the seat down… and she’d always find it up. And doors would open and shut by themselves… and you’d be walking down the stairs and man, you’d just get a blast of cold air… and at night… well, sometimes it got worse at night.”

I didn’t say a word. Just waited, and he added, “Just as you’d be drifting off to sleep, there’d be whispers out there, whispers that you could barely hear… and when you’d sit up, they’d go away. Or if you went around, thinking maybe the TV or a radio was left on, there’d be nothing. But back into bed… more whispers. And… shadows on the wall… odd lights that would just flicker at the corner of your eye…”

I sighed. “Mr. Toland… this house is more than a century old. Odd things happen to the foundation. The house can settle and either close or open doors, make creaking noises, or let in drafts that’ll freeze your fingers. Old pipes can rattle or gurgle water… make it sound like whispers. And lights… the eye can play tricks at night, especially… well, especially when you’re predisposed to think something’s going on.”

He stopped staring over my shoulder, now looked at my face. He said, “Two weeks ago, my wife woke up screaming, saying something cold had grabbed onto her foot. And before you ask, no, it wasn’t me. So don’t tell me it’s just an old house, all right?”

I went to my notebook. “All right, we’ll leave that be. Now, tell me about these two ghost hunters.”

Another shrug. “At the time… like I said, it was just a hoot. I called their one-eight-hundred number, they came up here, asked if they could spend the night, and we said, sure. They have all this gear, you know, cameras that can take pictures in the night, stuff that measures variations in temperature and electromagnetic radiation. I was going to stay up with them, but they said, no, they got better results with the homeowners not being present. So Carrie and I went to bed, and just before two a.m… I woke up, heard some screaming, and then a thumping sound, and then more yelling. That’s when I got out of bed.”

“Where did you go?”

“Up to where I heard Josh yelling, yelling about his bud Peter. His friend… it was awful. Blood everywhere. And that’s when I had Carrie call nine-one-one.”

“And what was Josh yelling about his friend Peter?”

“Upset talk… that’s all… that he had fallen, was bleeding hard, what was he going to tell his parents, stuff like that.”

“All right,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might help with our investigation?”

He shook his head. “To think something like this would happen in our house…”

And I don’t know, maybe I was feeling grumpy or something for being woken up and having my weekend ruined, but I said, “Oh, one thing, Mr. Toland. Just so you know.”

“What’s that?”

“Earlier you said this was your house. Not entirely accurate. This is the Logan house, named after the man who built it, back in 1882. It may be your house for a while, but it will always be the Logan house. Fu

I don’t think Mr. Toland liked being corrected like that, and truth be told, I didn’t particularly care.

NEXT I spoke to Carrie Toland in her fine kitchen, which was mostly a waste of time. She was at times weepy and other times angry, and she mostly repeated what her husband had said, with one notable exception, that the visit of the alleged paranormal experts was entirely her husband’s idea, and not hers.

And when Peter had died a couple of hours ago, she was fast asleep and heard a thump, and yelling, and that’s all she knew. She got up from bed with her husband, went upstairs to the second-floor landing, and when she saw the blood on the stairs and the crumpled form of Peter, she retreated back downstairs to the living room and called 911.

“All right,” I said, looking at my notebook. “But tell me this. Your husband claims that ever since you moved into the house, that there’s been… incidents. True?”

She tried to draw her bathrobe even closer about her neck. “I… I don’t know.”

“Could you be a bit more precise, Mrs. Toland?”

“Ralph… he’s really the one who thinks something’s been going on here. At first, it was a little joke, you know? That there was somebody else living here, somebody sharing our house. We even talked about charging rent or something… just a little joke.”

“Was you waking up a couple of weeks ago, screaming that something had grabbed your leg, was that a little joke?”

Her eyes were sharp, and I could just imagine what she’d be saying to her husband at the first opportunity, about telling family secrets, and she said, “No. That was just a nightmare. Nothing else.”

“Your husband believed otherwise.”

“Maybe so, but I never really believed. I just thought it was Ralph and his imagination…”

And then her mood and voice changed. “His damn imagination. And look what it’s brought us. A dead boy in the house. A dead boy.”

She shivered and said bitterly, “But maybe Ralph will be happy now. A real dead body in our house. Maybe that poor boy’s spirit will haunt us now…” Then the sniffling started, and I patted her on the shoulder and said we were done for now.

JOSH Lincoln, the surviving 50 percent of the New England Ghost Hunters field team, seemed kind of shaky, so we sat at a dining room table in the rear, adjacent to the kitchen. I took notes as we talked, and after getting his age, hometown, and that usual stuff, I said, “So. How long have you been doing this kind of work?”

“Just over a year,” he said glumly, looking down at his tattooed hands.

“What else do you do?”

“Huh?”

I said gently, “Oh, come on, Josh. This can’t be a paying gig, can it? What else do you do?”

He looked a bit embarrassed. “Tend bar. In Newburyport, Massachusetts.”

“And your buddy Josh?”

“Dishwasher. Same place as me.”

“So how did you end up doing this?”

Josh shrugged. “We love Goth stuff, the supernatural, that sort of thing. King, Poe, Lovecraft… and Newburyport ’s got a lot of haunted history. We read up on ghosts and ghost-hunting on the Web, seemed like fun, you know? Do stuff firsthand. Got some gear, made a co

“And probably get to boast some to the young ladies, right?”

Just the hint of a smile. “Maybe.”

“And how did you end up here, in Salem Falls?”

“The guy that owns the house, he gave us a ring. And once we looked into the history of this house, man, of what happened here-”

I held up a hand. “I know. The Logan place. I’m a native. I know all about it.”

“Oh,” he said.

“So how many times have you done investigations like this?”

“About ten, fifteen times,” he said.

“Any ghosts? Spirits? Things that go bump in the night?”

Josh rubbed his hands together. “Indications… increased levels of electromagnetic radiation, some whispers caught on audiotape, flashes of light… stuff like that.”

“But no pirate ghosts, waving a sword, that sort of thing?”

He wiped at his eyes. “Look, maybe you’re having fun with this, you know? But my buddy’s dead out there.”