Cecil Radcliffe murmured, “If I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes...”
The Chief Inspector was angry enough to rip open the panel with his bare hands. He thought someone was having a laugh at his expense, and he resented it.
Lady Sara told him to relax. “It is a laugh at all of us,” she said soothingly. “This should make the case memorable for you. Few chief inspectors have ever seen a ghost. Most ghosts avoid them. Though I must confess that in a way I found it disappointing. I would venture to say, Mr. Radcliffe, that your own ghostly performance was probably much superior to the real one we just witnessed.”
“Do you honestly think so?” Radcliffe sounded gratified.
“I’m convinced of it. If you are wise, you’ll leave it at that.”
“I will! Oh, I will!”
As our carriage drove off, I asked Lady Sara to account for the extra ghost.
“It bore a noticeable resemblance to Mr. Radcliffe’s young footman,” she said. “I’m afraid Radcliffe is incorrigible. He so enjoyed staging my warehouse scenario that he has begun a new career. He has retired from acting and taken up directing.”
Next of Kin
by William Link
Annabella was synchronizing her aerobics with an old Raquel Welch tape on her VCR when the phone rang.
“You sound out of breath,” Janice said. “Business or pleasure?”
“Neither.” There was a fresh, longitudinal streak of sweat on the front of her leotard. It tickled.
Janice chuckled. “Well, conserve your strength, honey. You got an out-call in Silver Lake, l09 Montrose.”
Annabella groaned. She had wanted the whole afternoon to herself to pick up some dry cleaning, check out a new computer, get a manicure appointment. “Damn. What time?”
“Four.”
She jotted it down. “Where’s Montrose exactly?”
“Beats me. Use your Thomas Guide or look it up on MapQuest. Who’s that talking?”
“Just a tape.” She silenced it with the remote. “Hot again?”
Janice sounded surprised. “You been in all morning?”
Annabella didn’t think she deserved an answer. She was already twisting out of her leotard, juggling the phone.
“Hot. And smoggy. Might have something for you this evening too.”
“Leave it on my machine.” She hung up.
Naked, she went into the tiny kitchenette, opened a can of V8, gulped it, finished a container of peach yogurt while she skimmed through Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” and took a cup of instant coffee into the bathroom. After her shower, she fixed her hair into a ponytail and made her face up in a bulb-ringed mirror that she always saw in the old movie musicals. Then she put on a low-cut, silk black blouse and midnight blue slacks, and impaled her still-damp lobes with a glitzy, scarab-shaped pair of earrings. She decided against the black snakeskin boots — too hot. She wasted ten minutes choosing the proper shoes. An analyst had once told her that the shoe fetish was some kind of surrogate prophylactic, a protection to ward off an onslaught of venereal germs, even AIDS. “But doctor,” she remembered telling him, “wouldn’t I be just as obsessed choosing a pair of panties?”
In the car, driving, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. The mask of sunglasses across her eyes, the tiny drops of sweat in the sleek, dark wings of her hair.
She hadn’t been in Silver Lake in months. She didn’t much like it. Once a community of low- and middle-income families in shabby frame bungalows, it was slowly in the expanding throes of gentrification, like a fat lady opening her corset. As usual in L.A., the real estate people were getting rich. But they would never get rid of the hazy smog that barely hid the San Gabriel Mountains to the north.
The house she was looking for was a shimmer of faded beige stucco, slatted windows, a sagging porch. No car on the drive or in the carport. Either the guy was out, had forgotten the appointment, or worse yet, didn’t even drive a car in a city that made one a necessity. Instinctively, she touched her handbag on the seat beside her, felt the reassuring flat bulk of the mace canister.
She parked in the drive and got out, smelling hot tar. She went up the porch steps and peered in through the screen door at a dark living room. Someone was lying on the floor. But then she made out that it was the sprawled form of a dog, hunkered next to the dim, flowered shape of a sofa.
She rang the bell.
“Just a minute,” a voice called. “Coming.”
A disembodied T-shirt sorted itself out of the dimness. A compact, stocky young man came toward her, moving slowly, almost cautiously. The T-shirt read “No Clever Message.”
He stopped at the screen door. He had a wiry, unkempt, full black beard and very pale blue eyes, with beads of sweat shining in his curly black hair. “Who—?”
“You called the out-service.”
“Yes.”
He groped around and finally unlatched the door. He held it open awkwardly as she came in, blinking in the stale air, holding back a sneeze brought on by the musty, unlived-in atmosphere.
The dog growled. Now she saw it in a better light — a large Alaskan Malamute, its thick coat the color of mottled oatmeal, powerful, but old, and probably more lethargic than lazy. She immediately didn’t like it. The analyst had excavated the probable cause: As a child she had gone to Mass by herself on Sunday mornings, leaving her indolent, agnostic parents in bed. The Sabbath world of Milan was a din of dogs and church bells, some of the animals fierce, some tethered, some loose and on the prowl.
A friend had told her that dogs can detect fear through their ultrasensitive olfactory nerves, and she was sure that her sweat glands had betrayed her. Luckily, she had never been attacked, although a mean Weimaraner had once followed her right to the church door.
“Herman,” the young man said, “cool it.”
She noticed there were no lights lit in the living room. There was a set of jazz drums near the sofa, a couple of director-type chairs with their canvas backs, but no television set. And no books or magazines or newspapers. All the scant furniture looked like secondhand castaways.
The young man mumbled something.
“What?”
“What’s your name?”
She was going to have to get all the money up front. “Annabella.”
He nodded to himself, an act of assimilation. He wore bleached-out jeans and topsiders. All his clothing was very clean. But there was something off-kilter about him — something elusive, hidden, that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She was staring at him, examining everything about him, but he didn’t seem to mind or, for that matter, even seem to notice. Strange.
“Would you care for some apple cider? The only trouble is it’s warm. The refrigerator’s shut off.”
He didn’t pay his light bill? “No. Thank you.”
“You mind if I have one? A beer, I mean?”
“No, go ahead.” She watched him head toward what she supposed was the kitchen. He moved very deliberately, almost cautiously, as if he was afraid he might trip over something. The dog had stiffened, its head nodding at his slow progress to the refrigerator. The young man seemed sealed in a protective bubble, guided by the dog’s sonar.
“Sure you don’t want something?”
“No. I’m sure.”
He came slowly back with a can of Miller Light, popping it open as he walked. “Annabella. Didn’t you say that’s what your name is?”
“Yes. What’s yours?”
“Corey.”
She noticed he wasn’t looking at her before she spoke. But now his head turned a fraction, locked in on her voice, and she knew her suspicion was correct.
She said, “You can’t see, can you?”
He blushed. “No, I can’t.”
She looked into his eyes. They were slightly milky, protuberant, as if coated with a special membrane.