'Oh God, Walter, I'm sorry.'
He took a deep, sad breath. 'I'm a little giddy, I'm afraid. They gave me something to calm me down. What with that, and the tiredness, and the shock of it all, I guess I'm not much good for anything right at this moment.'
'Do you want me to take you home?'
'Home?' He stared at me questioningly, as if he didn't know what 'home' was any more. Home was only a building now, filled with unpossessed possessions. Rows of dresses that would never be worn; racks of shoes whose owner would never return. What does a single man do with drawers full of lipsticks and stockings and brassieres? The most painful part of a wife's sudden death, as I had discovered for myself, was clearing out the bathroom. The funeral had been nothing on clearing out the bathroom. I had stood there with a wastebasket full of nail varnish and hair-conditioner and skin-toner, and cried my eyes out.
'You mustn't blame yourself for it,' said Walter. 'You warned me explicitly enough. I somehow thought — well, I somehow thought that Jane would be benign. At least to her mother.'
'Walter, I saw her later myself. She tried to kill me, too. She isn't Jane, that's what I was trying to warn you about. Not the Jane that either of us used to know. She's like a kind of addict now, can you understand what I mean? Her spirit can't rest until she claims another life, to help feed the force that's controlling her.' 'Force? What are you talking about, force?' 'Walter,' I said, 'this isn't the time or the place. Let me drive you home; then you can get some sleep and tomorrow we'll talk it over.'
He glanced around over his shoulder, towards the room where Constance must have been lying. 'She's there?' I asked him, and he nodded.
'I shouldn't leave her,' he said. 'It doesn't seem right.'
'You won't be leaving her, Walter. She's gone already.'
He was silent for a very long time. Every line in his face seemed to have been filled with ash; and he was so numbed by exhaustion and tranquillizers that he could scarcely stay upright.
'Do you know something, John,' he told me. 'I don't have anybody now. No son, no daughter, no wife. All that family that I thought I would see growing up around me; all those people I loved. They're all gone, and now there's nobody but me. I don't even have anybody to will my gold watch to.'
He drew back his cuff, and unfastened his watch, and held it up. 'What's going to happen to this watch, when I die? Constance had it engraved, you know, with my name; and what she said was, "Someday, your great-grandson's going to wear this watch, and he's going to look at your name engraved on the back, and he'll know who he is, and where he came from. And do you know something? That boy will never be.'
'Come on, Walter,' I told him. ‘I’ll just go check with the doctor, and then I'll drive you home.'
'Are you going back to — that place tonight? Quaker Lane Cottage?'
‘I’ll stay with you if you want me to.'
He pursed his lips, and then nodded. Td like that. If it isn't any trouble.'
'No trouble, Walter. In fact, I'm glad to have an excuse not to go back there.'
We left the hospital, and walked across the parking lot to my car. Walter shivered in the evening wind. I helped him to climb into the passenger seat, and then we drove out through the suburbs of Salem, southwards towards Boston and Dedham. Walter said very little as we drove; but stared out of the window at the passing traffic, at the houses and the trees and the darkness of the oncoming night, the first night he had known for 38 years which he couldn't share with Constance. As we approached Boston, the lights of airplanes circling Logan Airport looked as lonely as anything I had ever seen.
The house at Dedham had been passed down by the Bedfords for four generations, father to son, and although Walter and his father had both worked in Salem, they had kept up residence in the old Dedham house for tradition's sake. For some years, Walter's father had also rented a small apartment near the centre of Salem, but Constance had insisted that Walter should drive the 25 miles home every evening, especially after Walter's mother had discreetly told her at Walter's father's funeral that Walter's father had been seeing 'women' at the Salem apartment, and that items of underclothing had been discovered under the bed.
It was a huge colonial house set in seven acres of ground; the original 41 acres having been parceled up by succeeding generations of Bedfords and sold off for property development. White-painted, with a peaked five-gable roof, it was approached by a curving driveway lined with maple trees, and in the fall it looked so picturesque you could hardly believe it was a real dwelling. I remembered how impressed I had been the first time that Jane had brought me back here: and I thought how much better it would have been for the Bedford family if I had turned around that morning and driven all the way back to St Louis, non-stop, day and night, anything to save them from the tragedy which had visited them these past few weeks, and from the fear which I knew was still to come.
I parked the car outside the front door and helped Walter to climb out. He gave me the front door key and I let us in. The house was still warm: the Bedfords had left the central heating on last night because they had walked out of the house with every intention of coming back. The first thing I saw when I switched on the hall light was Constance's spectacles, lying on the polished hall-table, just where she had left them only 24 hours ago. I looked up, and saw my distorted face in a circular gilt mirror, and behind me, Walter looking shrunken and strange.
'Number one priority is a large Scotch,' I told Walter. 'Come on into the sitting-room and take your shoes off. Relax.'
Walter fastidiously hung up his coat and scarf, and then followed me into the spacious sitting-room, with its waxed honey-coloured floors, its Persian rugs, and its mellow 19th-century furniture. Over the wide fire-place hung an oil-painting of old Suffolk County, in the days before Century 21 Realty and weekend cottages and the Massachusetts Turnpike. Beneath the painting, on the mantelshelf, there was a collection of Dresden figures which had obviously belonged to Constance.
'I feel numb,' said Walter, easing himself down into his armchair.
'You're going to feel numb for quite some time to come,' I cautioned him. I poured two large whiskies out of his heavy crystal decanter, and handed him one. 'It's your mind, protecting itself from the shock of what's happened.'
Walter shook his head. 'I can't believe it, you know. I can't believe any of it. I keep thinking back on what happened last night, the way that Jane appeared like that, and it seems like a horror movie, something I saw on television. Not real.'
'I guess it depends what you mean by real,' I said, sitting down opposite, and pulling my chair a little closer.
Walter looked at me. 'Will she always be there? Jane, I mean? Will she always be a ghost like that? Won't she ever rest?'
'Walter,' I said, 'that's one of the things I want to talk to you about. But not now. Let's wait until tomorrow.'
'No,' said Walter. 'Let's talk about it now. I want to think this whole thing out. I want to think about it and think about it until my mind gets tired of thinking about it, and I can't think about it anymore.'
'You're sure that's wise?'
'I don't know, but it's what I want to do. Anyway, who cares about wisdom? I don't have anybody. Have you thought about that? I have a ten-bedroomed house, and nobody to live in it but me.'
'Finish your whisky,' I instructed him. 'Let's have another. I need to be partially smashed to tell you about this.'
Walter swallowed, shivered, and then handed me his empty glass. When I had poured us both a refill, I sat down again and said, 'As far as I know, there's only one way in which Jane's spirit can be put to rest. Even that isn't certain. I've been hard put to keep believing in all this myself, because the more I find out about it, the weirder it gets. I think the only reason I've kept on believing it is because four or five other people believe it as welclass="underline" three guys I know from the Peabody Museum, and a girlfriend of theirs.’