Gayle pressed home her advantage. “I asked Cass about it once. She looked at me funny and said they used to keep their TV on the hearth, too — only over a foot or so, because the furniture was arranged differently.”
Stryker’s grey eyes seemed to glow beneath his shaggy eyebrows. Russ knew the signs— Curtiss was on the scent.
Trying to control his own interest, Russ asked: “Cass is still in Knoxville, then?”
Gayle appeared annoyed with herself. “Yes, that’s why I wanted to keep this confidential. She and another girl have set up together in an old farmhouse they’ve redone — out toward Norris.”
“There’s no need for me to mention names or details of personal life,” Curtiss reassured her. “But I take it you’ve said something to Cass about these happenings?”
“Well, yes. She had a few things stored out in the garden shed that she finally came over to pick up. Most of the furnishings were jointly owned — I bought them with the house — but there was some personal property, items I didn’t want.” She said the last with a nervous grimace.
“So I came flat out and said to her: ‘Cass, did you ever think this house was haunted?’ and she looked at me and said quite seriously: ‘Libby?’”
“She didn’t seem incredulous?”
“No. Just like that, She said: ‘Libby?’ Didn’t sound surprised — a little shaken maybe. I told her about some of the things here, and she just shrugged. I didn’t need her to think I was out of my mind, so I left off. But that’s when I started to think about Libby’s spirit lingering on here.”
“She seemed to take it rather matter-of-factly.” Russ suggested. “I think she and Libby liked to dabble in the occult. There were a few books of that sort that Cass picked up — a Ouija board, tarot deck, black candles, a few other things like that. And I believe there was something said about Libby’s dying on April the 30th — that’s Walpurgis Night, I learned from my reading.”
Witches’ Sabbat, Russ reflected. So he was going to find his gothic trappings after all.
It must have showed on his face. “Nothing sinister about her death,” Gayle told him quickly. “Sordid maybe, but thoroughly prosaic. She was dead by the time they got her to the emergency room, and a check of her bloodstream showed toxic levels of alcohol and barbs. Took a little prying to get the facts on that. Family likes the version where she died of a heart attack or something while the doctors worked over her.
“But let me freshen those ice cubes for you. This show-and-tell session is murder on the throat.”
Stryker hopped out of his chair. “Here, we’ll carry our own glasses.”
Smiling, she led them into the kitchen. Russ lagged behind to work at the cheese. He hadn’t taken time for lunch, and he’d better put something in his stomach besides bourbon.
“There’s another thing,” Gayle was saying when he joined them. “The antique clocks.”
Russ followed her gesture. The ornate dial of a pendulum wall clock stared back at him from the dining room wall. He remembered the huge walnut grandfather’s clock striking solemnly in the corner of the living room.
“Came back one night and found both cabinets wide open. And you have to turn a key to open the cabinets.”
“Like this?” Stryker demonstrated on the wall clock.
“Yes. I keep the keys in the locks because I need to reset the pendulum weights. But as you see, it takes a sharp twist to turn the lock. Explain that one for me.”
Russ sipped his drink. She must have poured him a good double. “Have you ever thought that someone might have a duplicate key to one of the doors?” he asked.
“Yes,” Gayle answered, following his train of thought. “That occurred to me some time ago — though God knows what reason there might be to pull stunts like these. But I had every lock in the house changed — that was after I had come back and found lights on or off that had been left off or on one time too many to call it absent-mindedness. It made no difference, and both the TV and the clock incidents took place since then.”
“You know, this is really intriguing!” Curtiss exclaimed, beaming over his notepad.
Gayle smiled back, seemed to be fully at ease for the first time. “Well, I’ll tell you it had me baffled. Here, let me show you the rest of the house.”
A hallway led off from the open space between living room and dining area. There was a study off one side, another room beyond, and two bedrooms opposite. A rather large tile bath with sunken tub opened at the far end.
“The study’s a mess, I’m afraid,” she apologized, closing the door on an agreeably unkempt room that seemed chiefly cluttered with fashion magazines and bits of dress material. “And the spare bedroom I only use for storage.” She indicated the adjoining room, but did not offer to open it. “My son sleeps here when he’s home.”
“You keep it locked?” Russ asked, noting the outdoor-type lock. “No.” Gayle hastily turned the knob for them, opened the door on a room cluttered with far more of the same as her study. There was a chain lock inside, another door on the outside wall. “As you see, this room has a private entrance. This is the room they rented out.”
“Their boarder must have felt threatened,” Russ remarked. He received a frown that made him regret his levity.
“These are the bedrooms.” She turned to the hallway opposite. “This was Cass’s.” A rather masculine room with knotty pine panelling, a large brass bed, cherry furnishings, and an oriental throw rug on the hardwood floor. “And this was Libby’s.” Blue walls, white ceiling, white deep-pile carpet, queen-sized bed with a blue quilted spread touching the floor on three sides. In both rooms sliding glass doors opened onto the backyard.
“Where do you sleep?” Russ wanted to know.
“In the other bedroom. I find this one a bit too frilly”
“Have you ever, well, seen anything — any sort of, say, spiritual manifestations?” Stryker asked.
“Myself, no,” Gayle told them. “Though there are a few things. My niece was staying with me one night not long after I’d moved in — sleeping in Libby’s room. Next morning she said to me: ‘Gayle, that room is haunted. All night I kept waking up thinking someone else was there with me.’ I laughed, but she was serious.”
“Is that when you started thinking in terms of ghosts?”
“Well, there had been a few things before that,” she admitted. “But I suppose that was when I really started noticing things.”
Russ chalked up a point for his side.
“But another time a friend of mine dropped by to visit. I was out of town, so no one answered her ring. Anyway, she heard voices and figured I was in back watching tv, with the set drowning out the doorbell. So she walked around back. I wasn’t here, of course. No one was here. And when she looked inside from the patio, she could see that my set was turned off. She was rather puzzled when she told me about it. I told her a radio was left on — only that wasn’t true.”
“The dog ever act strangely?” Stryker asked.
“Not really. A few times she seems a little nervous is all. She’s a good watchdog though — barks at strangers. That’s one reason why I don’t suspect prowlers. Prissy lets me know when something’s going on that she doesn’t like.
“Aside from that, the only other thing I can think of is one night when my son was here alone. I got back late and he was sitting in the living room awake. Said he’d seen a sort of blue mist taking shape in the darkness of his bedroom — like a naked woman. Well, the only mist was the smoke you could still smell from the pot party he and his friends had had here earlier. We had a long talk about that little matter.”
Stryker studied his notepad. “I’d like to suggest a minor experiment of sorts, if you don’t mind. I’d like for Russ and myself to take a turn just sitting alone in Libby’s room for a few minutes. See what impressions we have — if any.”