Ghosts

“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 pla

“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 to the 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 ru

“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 begi

“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.

9

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 closest 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.