Death Trance

'No. But I think I've heard her singing. And several times, I think I've heard her whispering my name. You remember in the office, yesterday morning?'

Mr Bedford nodded. He seemed to be so overwhelmed by emotion that he could scarcely speak. 'I've heard about it, of course. Well, nobody admits to it. But you can't look after their births and their marriages and their wills without getting an inkling that something's going on, can you?'

'What's going on?' I asked him. 'I don't understand.'

He sniffed, and cleared his throat, and then burrowed into his pocket for his handkerchief. 'I don't know very much about it. Only what some of my clients have told me. But many people say that Granitehead is no ordinary community, and never has been. Many people say that if you live in Granitehead, the chances of seeing your loved ones again, after they die, are remarkably high. You may know that the town once used to be called Resurrection, before it was changed by order of the governor of Massachusetts to Granitehead. Well, the reason it was called Resurrection was because the dead were said to visit the living, until the living, too, reached the end of their lives.'

'You believe me,' I said, in shock.

'Did you think I wouldn't?'

'Of course I thought you wouldn't. I've murdered an elderly woman, and my alibi is that a ghost did it?'

Mr Bedford tucked away his handkerchief. 'You really saw Jane,' he whispered. 'My God, I wish I could have been there. I would have given a year of my life, just to see her again.'

'I shouldn't make promises like that,' I told him. 'If Edgar Simons' ghost is anything to go by, these whatever-they-are, manifestations, might be extremely malevolent.'

Mr Bedford smiled and shook his head. 'Can you really imagine Jane doing anything cruel, or hurtful?'

'Not the Jane I knew when she was alive, but — '

'Jane would never hurt anybody, alive or dead. She was an angel, you know, John. An angel when she was living; and now she's gone, an angel still. I'm going to have to tell her mother, you know.'

'Walter, I hate to come back to brass tacks,' I told him. 'But I still don't see how you're going to get me off this homicide charge. Not if ghosts are my only alibi.'

Mr Bedford paused in silence for a long time. Then he looked up at me with reddened eyes, and said, 'Mrs Simons was killed in a most remarkable way, wasn't she?'

'Not just remarkable. Impossible. At least for me to have done it. Or anybody human.'

'Well,' said Mr Bedford, 'I think I'll go talk to the district attorney. I'm sure it's going to be possible to come to some arrangement. He's an old friend of mine, you know. We both belong to the same golf club.'

'You really think you can swing something?'

'I can but try.'

He stood up, and put away his pad. He couldn't stop himself from smiling. 'I can't wait to tell Constance,' he said. 'She'll be delighted.'

'I don't really see what you've got to be delighted about.'

'John, my dear boy, we have everything to be delighted about. Well, almost everything. Once you're released, and back at the cottage, we can visit you, can't we, and see Jane again for ourselves?'

I couldn't think what to say. I shook his hand, uncertainly, and then sat down on my chair as abruptly as if somebody had hit me with a sockful of wet sand. Mr Bedford left and I heard his rubber-soled shoes squeaking up the polished police station corridor.

The police sergeant poked his head around the door again.

'What are you sitting there for?' he wanted to know. 'It's back in the slammer for you.'

Eleven

I was released late in the afternoon on $75,000 bail, put up by an Essex County real-estate corporation of which Mrs Constance Bedford was a major stockholder. Outside, it was bright, dry and windy, and I was picked up by Tom Watkins, one of Walter Bedford's clerks, and driven back to Quaker Lane Cottage.

Tom Watkins was young and flush-faced, with a fluffy little mustache. He had never been involved with a homicide case before, and I think I quite scared him.

'I read the police report on Mrs Edgar Simons' death,' he told me, as he drove. 'That was some way to die.'

I nodded. It was impossible to explain to anybody what I felt about the gruesome events of the previous evening. I was still suffering from residual shock, and a kind of persistent nausea. I could actually imagine what that chandelier chain must have felt like, passing right through Mrs Simons' insides, cold and uncompromising and beyond any human capability to remove. Worst of all, though, I still felt dread. If Mrs Simons' dearly beloved Edgar had been powerful and cruel enough in his spirit state to impale his widow like that, what would Neil try to do to Charlie Manzi, or Jane try to do to me? And from what Walter Bedford had told me, Charlie and Mrs Edgar Simons and I weren't the only people in Granitehead who had been visited by flickering visions of their dead relatives.

For some unknown reason, it seemed as if this year the influence of these manifestations was stronger than usual, although I hadn't really been living in Granitehead long enough to know what 'usual' might be. Mrs Simons had said something about the manifestations being seasonal, more frequent and more obvious in the summer months than they were in the winter. Only God knew why that could be: maybe there was more static electricity in the air in the summer, feeding the apparitions with natural power.

Tom Watkins said, 'Mr Bedford will get you off of this rap. You just wait and see. He talked to the district attorney already, and tomorrow he's going to have a meeting with the chief of police. Actually, the police don't really think you did it, either. They don't know how the hell Mrs Edgar Simons got herself up on that chandelier chain, but they don't really believe that it was you who put her there. They had to arrest you as a matter of procedure; and to satisfy the newspapers.'

'It's in the newspapers? I haven't seen one.'

Tom Watkins nodded towards the back seat. 'There's a couple of the locals there. Help yourself.'

I reached over and picked up the Granitehead Messenger. The main headline read, WIDOW IMPALED IN GRISLY GRANITEHEAD KILLING, local antique dealer held. Underneath there was a morgue photograph of Mrs Edgar Simons taken when she was ten years younger, and a picture of me that had been taken outside Trenton Marine Antiques when it first opened.

'That'll be good for business,' I said, folding up the newspaper and tossing it back on to the seat.

Tom Watkins drove up Quaker Lane, turned around in a circle outside my cottage, and parked. 'Mr Bedford said that he'd call you later this evening. Something about making an appointment to drop over.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Is there anything else you need? Mr Bedford said I was to go get anything you wanted.'

'No, I don't think so, thank you. I want a drink more than anything else.'

'You're sure you're going to be okay?'

'I'm sure. Thanks for the ride. And tell Mr Bedford thanks, too.'

Tom Watkins drove off, and once again I was standing alone outside Quaker Lane Cottage, my hands in my pockets, unsure of what lay waiting for me inside, what strange disturbances from a time and a place that I could only guess at. Was it heaven? Or hell? Or a shifting, displaced limbo; a half-seen world of distorted psychic energy, where the spirits of the dead faded and flickered like those garbled radio messages which you can pick up during the hours of darkness?

The house watched me with its neutral, shuttered eyes. I walked up the garden path, took out my keys, and opened the front door.

Everything was exactly as I had left it yesterday evening. At least I had had the presence of mind to turn off the oven before I ran out, leaving a half-cooked lasagna dinner on the middle shelf. I went into the living-room and the fire was dead, ashes blowing across the rug from the draught which blew down the chimney. My books were laid out on the floor, and propped up against the side of a chair, the painting of the David Dark.