He had just finished and was tying off when Millinship arrived.
“Who’s this then? Name of Allen?” He looked at his list. “Got him. Eleven tomorrow. Important one. War hero, you know.” He wheeled the corpse out through the glassine doors. “Done a good job on this guy, Harris,” he called. “Bit of a waste, though. We’re cremating him. All your handiwork up in smoke. Nothing’ll be left.”
Of course, Harris realized in an instant. He was going to call out, but never did. He said nothing, then or later. In fact, he only ever told one other person, and that was on the day of the newscast. He called Utton at home.
Had he seen the news? Yes, Utton said, and he had particularly liked the story about the great unsung hero from Greensburg, the soldier with that mortar shell in him, carried it for forty years and didn’t tell a soul. Great story. What a guy.
And then Harris confessed, swearing Utton to silence for eternity. Utton laughed like a drain at first, threatening to call the station, to tell them what really happened. But then, after Harris asked him who he supposed might benefit from such truth, Utton agreed. “Guess you’re right,” he said, chuckling. Then he cleared his throat and sounded authoritative. If such a thing should ever happen again — if a body came in with a tag on a toe, a request for a thighbone, and a pushy creep like Millinship calling for the body — then, Utton said, there were a bunch of chair legs in the hut outside, ready and waiting for such a purpose.
“They’re the perfect size for a thigh,” said Utton. “We always use them. Biodegradable and all that. And there’s no danger of one of them ever turning someone into a hero. You should use one next time. Far less complicated. You know what we always say? They’ll never know he has it in him.”
Detectiverse
Taxes
by Marian Rothe
© 1993 by Marian Rothe
Haunts
by George C. Chesbro
© 1993 by George C. Chesbro
In his fourth case for EQMM, cool-headed private detective Garth Frederickson is asked to turn ghostbuster by an elderly acquaintance who complains that her house’s friendly ghosts have turned hostile...
“They’re here!” Madame Bellarossa shrieked as the flames of the seven candles on the table guttered and then Mary screamed, her voice joining the other woman’s in a duet of horror, her features twisted with the same terror Garth had seen on Elsie Manning’s face when he had found her huddled on the ground at his back door at three o’clock in the morning one week before, too weak to pound any more, scratching at the screen like a stricken cat.
“They want me to die, Garth!” the eighty-year-old woman had said in a strangled whisper as she clutched at the hem of Garth’s robe.
Garth Frederickson looked around, saw nothing in the warm September night beyond the glow cast by his porch light, heard nothing but the sibilant whisper of waves washing up on the beach fifty yards away. He bent down, placed his hands under the woman’s frail arms, gently lifted her to her feet, and held her as she trembled violently and grabbed the lapels of his pajama top. Despite the fact that he knew the answer, he asked, “Who wants you to die?”
“My ghosts.”
“They can’t hurt you here, Elsie,” Garth said in a soothing tone, leading her into the house, the kitchen, where he eased her down into a chair at the rectangular butcher-block table. He took off his woolen robe and wrapped it around her, then went to the range to heat water for tea. He looked up when his wife appeared in the doorway. Brilliant blue eyes still blurred by sleep, white-streaked, waist-length blond hair disheveled. Mary Tree was still the most beautiful woman he had ever known, and the love he felt surging in him like a tide at the sight of her came as a welcome relief from the pall cast by the trembling old woman Garth considered to be ill with a kind of spiritual leprosy she had consciously nurtured, indeed reveled in and boasted about, for so many years, and which had now resulted not only in what Garth believed to be the most bizarre and perverse legal decision in the history of the country, but had also cost her the sale of her home and the money he knew she desperately needed, and might also be killing her. “Elsie’s had a fright, Mary. She needs some time to rest.”
The folk singer sighed sympathetically, then quickly walked into the kitchen and sat down next to the other woman, resting her large hands with their long fingers on Elsie Manning’s still-quaking shoulders. “Oh, Elsie, Elsie, it’s all right now. Everything’s all right. Your ghosts?”
Elsie Manning seemed unable to speak. Her pale, watery green eyes were still wide with shock and horror as she stared somewhere over Mary’s head, transfixed by her own private haunt that only she could see. Without her dentures in place her cheeks were sunken, and her mouth formed an O as she slowly nodded her head.
The kettle began to whistle. Garth prepared three cups of tea, brought them to the table, placed one in front of Elsie. “Sip some of that, Elsie,” he said, smiling reassuringly. “It will make you feel better. Just be careful; it’s hot.”
Mary placed her hands around the old woman’s, helping to steady them as Elsie lifted the cup to her mouth and sipped some of the steaming brew. When she set the cup back down, her hands and body did not seem to be trembling as much, and her pale green eyes had come back into focus. “I just don’t understand it,” she said weakly. “I’ve lived in that house all my life, and the ghosts were always so friendly. They were young lovers who committed suicide in an upstairs room rather than let their parents force them apart. They loved my parents, and they loved me. Sometimes, when I was a child, I’d see them sitting at the foot of my bed, all aglow, smiling at me. Sometimes they’d sing lullabies to put me to sleep. I always felt so comfortable with them. They kept me company. Now... they hate me because I want to sell the house and leave them. I feel their hatred, know that they want me to die. They send cockroaches.”
“You called the exterminator about the cockroaches,” Garth said. “Didn’t he take care of them?”
Elsie nodded tentatively. “Yes. But they came back. I was too ashamed to tell you. The exterminator came again, but the cockroaches were back a week later. Now they’re all over the house. And rats, and terrible smells. Garth, you and Mary have been in my home; you know I keep a clean house. And then the phone will start ringing at all sorts of odd hours. I’ll answer, but there’ll be nobody there. I hang up, and the phone starts ringing again. Sometimes that will go on for hours, all night. I just can’t fathom how spirits who had been so loving could have turned so spiteful.”
Garth and Mary exchanged glances, and Garth reached across the table to touch the old woman’s liver-spotted hand. “Elsie, you’ve been under tremendous stress since what happened with the buyer you had. I don’t think you’ve ever really understood that most people aren’t as comfortable with ghosts — friendly or otherwise — as you are. Humans are a very superstitious breed, and Americans are just as superstitious as the rest of the world. For years, you’ve been enjoying your haunted house, talking about it to anybody who would listen. You loved the attention when the local paper would run a story on your haunted house every year. But now you want to move into a retirement community where all your needs will be taken care of — staff to prepare your meals and clean your apartment, and doctors to look after you — and you need a lot of money to get into the place where you want to go. You’ve already lost one buyer who offered a fair price and gave you a sizable binder because a week before the closing he got wind of the fact that the house was supposedly haunted. We may agree with your attorney that the binder should have been yours because he reneged, but incredibly, the judge ruled that you should have told him the house was haunted. In effect, the state of New York has offered a legal opinion that yes, there really are such things as haunted houses, and one of them happens to be in Cairn. And now you have a worse problem because the wire services have picked up on it, and it’s become a national news story. You’ll probably continue to be deluged with phony seers, sages, astrologers, psychics, and professional magicians who’ve discovered they can pick up a lot of free publicity simply by issuing a press release saying they’re thinking of buying your haunted house. But they don’t want your house, and most couldn’t begin to afford the three quarters of a million it’s worth. They just want the attention. And nobody else wants your house, at least not at the moment. What you have to do, Elsie, is give the story time to die down. Eventually you’ll find another buyer, because it’s a fine old house sitting right on the Hudson River, and there aren’t too many of those. But — above all else — you have to stop advertising the fact that you think it’s haunted.”