Halloweenland (4 page)

“Smells like paint in here,” Ganley said, stretching his arms over his head and yawning.

“You know something?” Grant asked, tapping his pencil on the desk and staring at Ganley.

“No,” Ganley said, looking at the ceiling.

“Well, I’ll tell you anyway. The older I get, the more tired I get of guys like you. I’ve known you since you were, what, seventeen? And you’re still the same punk at thirty-four.”

Ganley smiled, showing white teeth through his thick handlebar moustache. “Thirty-five next week, Detective. You gonna throw me a party?”

Ganley looked down from the ceiling. For a moment their eyes locked, and Ganley’s smile went away.

Man, this guy has weird eyes
, Ganley thought.
The rest of him is a complete wreck, but those eyes have seen way too much.

For a brief moment, a pang of something almost like pity went through the young man. Then that, too, went away.

Ganley grinned. “Can we get to it, please? I’ve gotta be back at work.”

“As long as it takes, Bud,” Grant said, lost in his notebook now.

Suddenly Ganley sat up straight and put his hands on the desk. “Look,” he said, trying to make his voice sound reasonable, “you know I didn’t lay a hand on Marianne—”

“I’m not sure of that, Bud.”

The way Grant’s voice sounded sent a chill through Ganley. “You’re not gonna try to tell me that DNA test—”

Grant was regarding him with a level stare now, then gave a nearly imperceptible nod.

“That’s
impossible
! I didn’t do anything to her! I swear I didn’t! Petee swore up and down I was with him the whole time! The nurses at the hospital—”

“You had time after you left the hospital,” Grant said evenly. “And you certainly had motive.”

Ganley exploded, standing up. His face grew red. “That was fifteen years ago! And those charges were dropped!”

Grant tapped his pencil against his head. “Not in here they weren’t. You tried to rape Marianne when she was in high school.”

“I was in love with her! And I got drunk and a little bit
out of hand!” Ganley abruptly sat down and put his head in his hands. “Oh, man . . .”

Grant waited patiently. Ganley looked at the floor for a few breaths, then looked up at the detective. “Look,” he said earnestly, “straight talk, okay?”

“Fine with me.”

“What I did back then . . .” He took a deep breath. “What I did back then was way wrong. I even knew it at the time. I guess they call it date rape now. Or at least attempted date rape. But I was nuts about her, absolutely out of my head. And I knew we were going to break up, and my head was just full of snakes and I was drunk—”

“No excuse. Not now, not back then.”

Ganley took another deep breath. “Okay, you’re right. And thank God I didn’t really do it.”

“But you would have, if Jack Carlin hadn’t knocked you on your ass.”

Ganley nodded. “Yeah.”

“I always found it puzzling how you and Jack became such good friends, especially after he and Marianne hooked up after that night.”

“It just happened, man! Jack’s a great guy—
was
a great guy . . .” He put his head in his hands again and looked at the floor.

“You can leave, Bud,” Grant said.

Ganley looked up, puzzled. “But you said about the DNA—”

“I didn’t say anything. And like they say in the movies: don’t leave town.”

Ganley bounced out of his chair, suddenly grinning, his trademark bopping gait evident as he wove his way through the maze of desks in the bull pen. At the front desk he stopped and smiled at the sergeant. “Chip! How’s it hangin’!”

Chip Prohman tried to put a dispassionate look on his fat face. “Hope you didn’t get yourself in big trouble this time, Bud.”

“Nev-ah, my man! Nev-
ah
!”

He was out the door, all eyes on him, except for Grant’s, which were set like lasers on his notebook, while he frowned.

Something in the corner again.

Marianne came awake at a sound like two pieces of soft fabric being drawn one over the other. Reflexively, she looked over at the bedside table, but the clock, set back in place, was blank, broken. It was deep night, the window open a crack, cold breath of breeze barely bothering the curtains, no hint of moonlight in the darkness behind the curtains.

The sound came again, from the corner.

Marianne pulled herself up in the bed and stared into the gloom.

“Jack . . . ?”

The sound increased in volume. Now she heard a louder, more distinct sound, like a cape flapping. The shadow in the corner grew deeper in the soft darkness surrounding it, and a hint of blank white, like an oval, peeked out at her and then was gone.

“Jack, is that you?”

“No.”

The sound of the voice, suddenly loud and deep and
distinct, sent a bolt of ice through her. She clutched the sheets to her like a life jacket.

“Who—” she began, her voice trembling.

“Someone . . .” the voice said, and now the form took on more edges, moved out of the corner toward her. The pale oval appeared and disappeared again, cut with a slash of red at the bottom: a mouth.

The figure stopped at the foot of the bed. Now the face became wholly visible: a pale oval the color of dead fish, two empty eyes like cutouts of darkness, a red bright slash of mouth like a wound. He was enfolded in a black cape that swirled and snapped as if it were in a stiff breeze.

The temperature in the room dropped; dropped again.

Marianne shivered.

“Where’s . . . Jack?” she managed to whisper hoarsely.

The figure tilted its head slightly to one side, but said nothing. Marianne noticed now that there were arms of a sort, also dead fish colored, and hands with unnaturally long fingers, enfolded in the cape.

“I wanted to see you,” the thing said. It’s voice was deeply neutral, without inflection.

Marianne shivered, hid her eyes as the thing drew up over the bed toward her.

“No!” she gasped.

She clutched the sheet and blanket to her face, felt a wash of cold unlike anything she had ever felt before. It was like being dropped into a vat of ice water. No, it was worse than that—like being instantly locked in a block of ice.

There was a wash of breath over her, colder still—

She opened her eyes, gasped to see that face inches from her own, the empty black cutout eyes regarding her, unblinking.

The mouth opened, showing more blackness still—

“No!”

She covered her face again, and, instantly, she knew the figure was gone.

She lowered the blanket and sheet.

The room was as it had been, the corner a stand of gloom, empty, the cold gone.

A breeze from the open window rustled the curtains, and she drew in her breath.

Something beyond them, in the night, moved past the window, a flat retreating shadow.

Bill Grant hated his empty house.

It was full of memories, all of them bad the past few years. Even when his wife Rose had been alive the house had not been a happy place, her depression regulating their lives like a broken wristwatch. When they had bought the place on his lousy beat cop’s salary twenty years before, it had been filled with nothing but good memories. But when the dark moods began to overtake her, the parties stopped, and then the socializing altogether, and eventually even the amenities with family.

And then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving Grant with only his job, and all that other business—what Grant liked to call
weird shit
—that seemed to happen in Orangefield every Halloween.

And
weird shit
left nothing but more bad memories, which made his empty house feel even emptier.

So he did what he often did now, especially as Halloween approached, which was to sit in his chair in his finished basement with an open bottle of Dewar’s scotch,
get drunk, watch old movies, and hope to God that
weird shit
wouldn’t happen.

Grant poured two fresh fingers of scotch into his favorite glass—what had once been a jelly jar from the sixties encircled with pictures of the cartoon character Yogi Bear (outlined in yellow), his friend Boo Boo (outlined in blue) and Jellystone Park (drawn, originally in a garish green). Over the years and thousands of dish washings, all but the faintest outline of Yogi’s fat head was still visible, none of Boo Boo but one of his feet, and some bizarre section of Jellystone Park that may or may not have been a picnic table. Grant no longer remembered.

Grant used the jelly jar because it reminded him of himself: slowly fading away with each new washing of
weird shit
. . .

He downed the two fingers in two neat swallows and refilled the glass with two more fingers of scotch.

He hit the remote change button hard, angry that AMC had started to show commercials with their movies—he liked his westerns as neat and unblemished as his whiskey.

But Turner Classic Movies was showing a period piece, something along the lines of a 1930s version of
Dangerous Liaisons
without sex, so, grumbling, Grant hit the button hard again and put up with the few commercials breaking up the old John Wayne western
Stagecoach
on AMC.

“That’s more like it!” Grant toasted the TV as the movie came back on. What a great John Ford flick. The only one he liked better was
The Searchers
. He’d have to buy it on DVD someday to avoid all the breaks.

He was refilling his glass yet again when a tap came on the casement window to his left.

He nearly spit his whiskey back into the glass, remembering
the last time that had happened (
weird shit
), but then he went smoothly into cop mode, rose, and drew his 9mm out of the drawer in the side table next to his lounge chair.

The tap came again as he reached the window. Reaching up, he pushed the dirty white curtain abruptly aside.

There was a face there. A young girl . . .

She made a motion, and he recognized her. He nodded and pointed up.

The face retreated and Grant dropped the curtain back into place.

He grabbed the scotch and his glass on the way, thought better of it and put it back.

Leaving the TV on, he went upstairs, hearing his own heavy tread on the creaking stairs.

She was not at the back door, which was closest to the basement window, so Grant went to the front door and snapped on the porch light as he opened it.

“Come in, Marianne,” he said, holding the screen door open for her.

“I’m s-s-so sorry—” she began, but he cut her off.

“Nonsense. Come in and sit down. Can I make you some tea or coffee?”

She looked like a scared rabbit. “C-c-coffee would be great.”

“Are you all right?”

She nodded but was shivering like a leaf.

Grant moved past her into the kitchen, and she followed, sitting at the kitchen chair he pulled out for her. He fiddled with the coffeemaker, which had already been preprogrammed for tomorrow morning. After a few minutes of trying to fool the computer chip in it, he was able
to get it to work. In a few seconds the comforting
blurp
and
drip
sounds commenced.

Grant sat down at the table across from the young woman. She was looking at her hands, locked in a prayerful grip on the top of the table, as if she had never seen them before.

“I haven’t seen you in . . . what, two weeks?” Grant said, mustering his soothing cop voice. He knew he was pretty drunk, but was able to overcome it. He tried to lighten his tone and gave a small smile. “What’s bothering you? Besides everything, that is?”

The girl continued to stare at her hands on the table. It was obvious she was trying to bring herself to say something, so Grant continued his monologue.

“I know what you’re going through, Marianne. I lost my wife a few years ago. That hole still hasn’t filled up completely. But it does get better, I can tell you from experience.”

She was still fighting with herself.

“I . . . heard about your pregnancy, of course,” Grant went on. “As you probably know, the DNA results on Bud Ganley were negative.”

This was the spot where, like it or not, he would have to harden his voice a little. “You obviously did have relations with someone that night, Marianne. What I have to ask you is a hard question: who was it?”

Her eyes darted up from her hands, and Grant saw that they were filled with terror. For a moment, darker thoughts than Marianne Carlin’s private life assaulted him.

“Detective—”

Her hands were trembling, now, and when he reached over to steady them they were cold as winter.

“Don’t say anything yet.”

He abruptly got up and went to the coffee machine.
The cycle wasn’t finished yet but he yanked the carafe out and poured a cup for her anyway. He pushed the carafe back into its place and noted the spilled coffee hissing on the hot plate beneath it.