“It was an accident, I assure you. When I entered your store I had no intention of shooting anyone.”
“Then why did you carry a loaded weapon?”
“A matter of psychology. If my gun were empty, I might have exhibited a lack of confidence in what I was doing.”
“The fact remains that I am dead and you are alive and lying there scot free. I want you to go to the police and confess your crime.”
I demurred. “At my age, I think I would have difficulty adjusting to prison life.”
She smiled tightly. “In that case, I intend to haunt you until you turn yourself in. I’ll be with you always, wherever you go, though you travel to the ends of the earth.”
“Madam,” I said, “I’m a very tired man and I need my rest. I am now retreating to deeper sleep and you will dissolve.”
I closed my eyes. After a while I peeked through slitted eyelids. She still stood there, thoughtful but uncertain.
I waited another five minutes before I looked again. This time she was gone.
I slept deeply until almost ten the next morning.
When I opened my eyes I saw Bridget O’Keefe on the couch at the foot of the bed, staring intently at the cover of a library book I had left on the footstool. I was a bit shaken. I was definitely not dreaming now. Was I hallucinating?
I watched her for a while and then said, “Why the devil are you staring at the cover of that book?”
“I’m not staring at the cover,” she replied without looking up. “I’m reading the book. I’m on page 112. Being ethereal, I can’t open books or turn pages, but I can see through to any pages I want, even the reverse sides.”
I sighed. “I suppose you’ve come back to haunt me?”
“Let me finish this chapter first.”
I went to the bathroom and closed the door. She didn’t follow. After I washed, I returned and pushed the Murphy bed back into the wall.
Bridget finished her chapter and looked about the room. “I gather you’re not a very successful hold-up man, or why would you live in this miserable walk-up apartment?”
Her eyes seemed to focus on something beyond the room. “I deduce that you eat out a lot. There are no dirty dishes in the sink.”
Whether this was a dream or a hallucination, I thought I ought to make some effort to end it. “Madam, if I deprived your husband of your connubial companionship, I am deeply sorry. If I separated children from their mother, I am devastated. But I still have no intention of turning myself over to the police.”
“The only relative I have is my niece, Annie, in Cleveland,” she said. “I suppose you’re going out for breakfast now?”
I thought about it. “It’s much too late for breakfast. I’ll skip it.”
“You shouldn’t. A good breakfast starts the day.”
I began gathering together all the library books in my apartment. There were six of them, all mysteries. I put on my topcoat, hat, and gloves.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m returning these books to the library.”
She surveyed the books under my arm with her other-world vision. “I see you use scraps of paper as bookmarks.”
I shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“The bookmarks would indicate that you haven’t finished three of the books. So why are you taking them back to the library?”
“They’re overdue.”
“No, they aren’t. I distinctly see that they’re all due on the sixteenth. Today is the fourteenth.”
“Madam, I don’t believe in waiting until the very last moment. Besides, I’ve found these volumes extremely dull, and I’m not so compulsively obsessive that I must finish every book I begin.” I opened the door to the hall.
“I’ll be coining along,” Bridget said.
“It’s nippy out,” I told her “Hardly weather for anyone wearing a flimsy red jacket.”
“I don’t need to worry about weather any more,” she countered. “And nobody will be able to see or hear me but you, so you needn’t be embarrassed by my presence.”
As we walked to the neighborhood library, Bridget began a discourse on atonement for one’s sins, murder in particular.
At the library I returned the books and was about to leave when Bridget asked, “Aren’t you taking any books out? There are two shelves of new detective novels in the special section.”
“Madam,” I said, “I doubt very much if you would allow me the peace and quiet to read any one of them.”
The librarian at the desk looked up, her face startled, and I realized that as far as she was concerned, I had been talking loudly to myself.
I quickly left the building, Bridget following at my side. “I was talking about atonement for sins,” she said.
I sighed. “Must you?”
She nodded. “Since I’m no longer of the flesh I can’t choke people or push them down stairs or off cliffs. I have only one real weapon — my voice. And I intend to use it.”
“That’s not haunting, that’s nagging. I suppose you’re going to continue talking until the sound of your voice either drives me mad or to the police station?”
“That’s the general idea.”
The day being rather pleasant, and the prospect of returning to my dreary apartment unappealing, I decided on a long walk instead. I turned in the direction of one of the city parks, Bridget O’Keefe at my side, doing rather well on the subject of conscience and responsibility for one’s actions.
During the course of the morning and early afternoon, I learned that she was forty-five and had been an only child, so it had fallen upon her to take care of her aging parents. Her father died seven years ago and her mother soon after. She had been working for the same supermarket chain since she was eighteen and had spent twenty years operating a register at the checkout counter. It was boring but women had no opportunity for advancement in those days. However, she had been an assistant manager for seven years, and had just been promoted to manager on the night shift. The store was her responsibility from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m. six days a week.
The company had provided the red jacket, but it was tailored for a man so she had had to alter it. But she didn’t mind that too much because she liked to sew. And she’d been the manager just four months, which was why she had thrown the can of peas. She didn’t want it on her record that her store had been robbed while she still had an ounce of breath to defend it.
We got back to the apartment around two o’clock. I picked up an old newspaper and began ostentatiously reading.
Bridget was not deterred. She continued talking.
I looked up from the newspaper. “Suppose,” I said, “just suppose that I actually did go to the police and tell them I killed you last night? What do you think would happen?”
“They’d arrest you.”
“But they couldn’t prove that I killed you.”
“What proof do they need? You simply confess and that should be that.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t necessarily follow. After any killing in a city of this size, the police are usually plagued by individuals who are only too eager to confess to the crime, for various clinical reasons of their own. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if half a dozen people have already admitted to my crime, perhaps more convincingly than I could.”
She thought about that. “Well, Ellie could identify you. She was at the checkout counter.”
“I wore a beard.”
“How about taking your gun to the police? They could compare bullets, and that should nail it down.”
“Unfortunately, I flung the weapon into the harbor. At this moment it is in muck under perhaps sixty feet of water. I doubt very much whether it could be recovered.”
“But your fingerprints. They should be all over the things in your shopping cart and that ought to establish your presence at the scene of the crime.”