“Maybe one who talked less.”
Judy looked over her shoulder long enough to stick out her tongue. “And guess what else?”
“I give. What?”
“On the other side of us is a mean little man named Tate Curzon. He hates everybody. Had four wives, no less, children by one of them. But even his own kids—they’re grown up now—never go near him. Mrs. Gosness says we’re to have nothing to do with him.”
“Thanks for the advice, but I’ve met the gentleman.”
“Honest?”
“Sure,” I said, taking the cups and saucers from her to dry. “Went over and said hello. Wondered if he could tell me why Bickleford was so anxious to sell this house.”
Judy practically wriggled. “And did you find out?”
I hesitated, balanced on the point of a fib, then realized she would find out from Mrs. Gosness anyway. So I told her about young Andy Bickleford who’d been picked up in pieces and a mother whose mind hadn’t been able to take it and a father-husband to whom the end of the world had come.
“I’ll bet that sock was Andy’s. The room must have been his.” A suspicion of tears touched Judy’s eyes.
By bedtime, our first day of settling into our new home had got our minds off the tragic Bicklefords. They were, after all, strangers, and the present was much too vivid. I lounged in the master bedroom in shorts, my sleeping apparel, nonchalantly pretending to read with the pillow stuffed behind my head. Actually I had the dressing room doorway framed in my vision over the edge of the book; and then the door opened and Judy stepped into the soft bedroom lighting wearing a nylon nightgown that was next to nothing. My civilized veneer barely stifled a roar of pleasure.
Hair brushed about her shoulders and a little smile of mystery playing across her mouth, she seemed to glide toward me. A remark on my pulse rate would be needless.
Then as she passed the bureau, a strange thing happened. A ten by twelve inch picture of me which Judy had framed suddenly rose, hurled itself across the room and smashed against the wall.
The picture fell to the floor. There was a moment of dead silence, then a whispered tinkle as a bit of glass settled in the wreckage.
I sat up with the dream movements of a man swimming through molasses. Judy and I knelt beside the picture, neither wanting to touch it.
“Your gown must have brushed against it,” I mumbled.
“And knocked it all the way across the room?” Judy said with fearful logic.
I gathered the bits of broken glass, piled them on the picture, and carried the wreckage to the bureau. Judy watched me, wide-eyed and steeped in her own thoughts.
As I turned from the bureau, the murder mystery I’d been pretending to read jumped up and down on the bedside table. The edge of the book cover jarred against the lampshade. The lamp teetered, fell with a crash. Darkness flooded the room.
I wasn’t sure whether Judy or I moved first, but in an instant we were standing in shivery embrace.
“Maybe we should check into a motel for the night,” I suggested through chattering teeth.
Judy’s warmth stirred in my arms. “Nope,” she said, “I’m not being chased so easily out of our own house. Anyway, our poltergeist doesn’t want to hurt us.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“He hasn’t thrown anything at us or on us,” she said with supreme female logic. “He could have socked you with the picture frame if he were antagonistic.”
“He’s a sadist,” I said, “who’d rather scare people to death a little at a time.”
“Or a lonely fellow who’s trying to tell us something,” Judy mused. “He’s certainly picking out a variety of items to toss around, which means he has method and purpose. If we could just get the message, I’m sure he’d go away and rest in peace.”
Red-eyed and haggard, I muddled through my junior accountant’s job the next day. I was worried about Judy’s almost natural acceptance of the existence of a poltergeist. In the warm light of day, I just didn’t believe what I had seen for myself. There had to be an explanation, like the juxtaposition of magnetic forces at the spot where our house stood.
I would have welcomed some advice, but could think of no source. My hard-headed, realistic boss was definitely out. If I went to the cops, the newspapers would pick it off the public record.
We’d be subjected to the same glare of publicity that had roasted every other family so rash as to reveal acquaintance with a poltergeist. I wondered how many, like myself, had preferred to suffer the inexplicable in silence.
The house looked as normal as peaches and cream when I hurried up the front walk. A bouncy and smiling Judy had a not-very-dry martini waiting, the kind I like. She’d also fractured her grocery budget with a two-inch-thick T-bone steak, but I applauded her.
“No flying crockery today?” I asked as she slipped the steak under the broiler.
“Not even a saucer,” she said.
“Maybe the strain proved too much for him,” I said hopefully, munching the olive marinated in vermouth and gin.
We dined elegantly by candlelight, the table graced with snowy linen that had been a wedding present from my Aunt Ellen.
I’d had no appetite for lunch, but I worked like a scavenger on the steak. Judy served coffee, and we eyed each other across the table in affectionate silence.
The steak bone made like a Mexican jumping bean all of a sudden, rapping against the plate.
Judy blinked. I jumped. My chair tipped over backward. I grabbed the edge of the table and hung there, watching the bone jump up and down at eye level.
The bone made no threatening motions, but it was a desecration of our privacy. “Enough is enough,” I snarled. I rose, cupped my hands, and pounced on the bone. It offered no resistance as I smacked it against the plate. I raised my fingers one at a time, and was a little miffed when the bone just lay there after it was freed.
I sneaked a glance at Judy.
“You did see that, too, didn’t you?”
Judy nodded an affirmative, her eyes glinting. “I wonder what he meant?”
“Maybe that he’s hungry,” I growled. “Maybe you should brew him up a spot of newt’s eyes over some sulphur and brimstone.”
“Don’t be facetious, Jim!”
“Facetious? I’m not even rational any longer.”
While Judy washed the dishes and tidied up after dinner, I did a sneaky search of the house from attic to basement. I didn’t find any wires, magnets, or other device remotely resembling the tools of a screwball practical joker.
When I went upstairs from the basement, Judy was curled in our new wing chair before the television set.
“You might have saved your time,” she said with wifely forbearance. “I covered every nook and crack myself today. Not that I needed any more proof that we really have a poltergeist.”
“I favor selling,” I said. “I could put the place on the market by phoning the real estate agent at his home right now.”
She sat up. “Don’t you dare, Jim Thornton! This poor fellow got stuck here, and when he gets unstuck he will go away and leave us alone.”
“Oh, yeah? And I suppose you still think he’s trying to deliver a message?”
“More than ever. That rattling bone meant something…if I could just figure out what. Why’d he wait all day until he had the bone to rattle, if he wasn’t trying to tell us something?”
I eased to a sitting position on the hassock before her. “Judy,” I said gently, “I think I’d better get you out of here before we spend another night in this place.”
“Don’t be sil! It’s a perfectly lovely house.”
“But all this talk…”
“He’s a perfectly nice poltergeist—and I’m not going to leave.” She smiled, leaned forward to pat my cheek. “Be a darling and flip the tuner to channel twelve. There’s an hour-long comedy special coming up in about five minutes.”