“When was this?”
“After Labor Day.”
“In September?”
“That’s when Labor Day is. Each and every year.”
“That would’ve been after his wife drowned,” Carella said.
“Yes, she drowned in August. Late August.”
“Was Mr. Craig at the inquest?”
“Didn’t need to be. They were divorced, you know. There was no reason to call him for the inquest. Besides, he’d already left Hampstead by then. I forget the actual date of the inquest…”
“September sixteenth.”
“Yes, well, he was gone by then.”
“How much of the book had you finished typing before he left?”
“I told you, it wasn’t a book. It was just this rambling on about ghosts.”
“More or less his notes for a book, is that how you’d describe—?”
“No, it was stories more than notes. About the candles flickering, you know, and the door being open after someone had locked it. And the woman searching for her husband. Like that. Stories.”
“Mr. Craig telling stories about ghosts, is that it?”
“Yes. And using a sort of spooky voice on the tape, do you know? When he was telling the stories. He tried to make it all very dramatic, the business about waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the woman coming down from the attic and then taking a candle and going out into the hall and seeing her there. It was all nonsense, but it was very spooky.”
“The stories.”
“Yes, and his voice, too.”
“By spooky…”
“Sort of…rasping, I guess. Mr. Craig was a heavy smoker, and his voice was always sort of husky. But not like on the tape. I guess he was trying for some kind of effect on the tape. Almost like an actor, you know, telling a spooky story on television. It sounded a lot better than it typed up, I can tell you that.”
“Mrs. Jenkins, have you read Deadly Shades?”
“I guess everybody in this town has read it.”
Except Hiram Hollister, Carella thought.
“Was it similar to what you typed from the tape?”
“Well, I didn’t type all of it.”
“The portion you did type.”
“I didn’t have it to compare, but from memory I’d say it was identical to what I typed.”
“And you returned the tape to him before he left Hampstead?”
“Yes, I did.”
“How long a tape was it?”
“A two-hour cassette.”
“How much of it had you typed before he left?”
“Oh, I’d say about half of it.”
“An hour’s worth, approximately?”
“Yes.”
“How many pages did that come to?”
“No more than fifty pages or so.”
“Then the full tape would have run to about a hundred pages.”
“More or less.”
“Mrs. Jenkins, I haven’t read the book—would you remember how long it was?”
“In pages?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, it was a pretty fat book.”
“Fatter than a hundred pages?”
“Oh, yes. Maybe three hundred pages.”
“Then there would have been other tapes.”
“I have no idea. He just gave me the one tape.”
“How’d he get in touch with you?”
“I do work for other writers. We get a lot of writers up here in the summer. I guess he asked around and found out about me that way.”
“Had you done any work for him before this?”
“No, this was my first job for him.”
“And you say there was no title at the time?”
“No title.”
“Nothing on the cassette itself?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, there was. On the label, do you know? Written with a felt-tip pen.”
“What was on the label?”
“Ghosts.”
“Just the single word ‘ghosts’?”
“And his name.”
“Craig’s name?”
“Yes. ‘Ghosts’ and then ‘Gregory Craig.’”
“Then there was a title at the time.”
“Well, if you want to call it a title. But it didn’t say, ‘By Gregory Craig,’ it was just a way of identifying the cassette, that’s all.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins, you’ve been very helpful,” he said.
“Well, all right,” she said, and hung up.
He frankly didn’t know how she’d been helpful, but he guessed maybe she had. During Hillary’s trance last Saturday she had mentioned the word “tape” over and again and had linked it with the word “drowning.” He had conjured at once the image of a drowning victim whose hands or feet had been bound with tape—a flight of fancy strengthened by the fact that Gregory Craig’s hands had been bound behind his back with a wire hanger. In one of Carella’s books on legal pathology and toxicology, he had come across a sentence that made him laugh out loud: “If a drowned body is recovered from the water, bound in a manner that could not possibly have been self-accomplished, one might reasonably suspect homicidal intent.” Stephanie Craig’s body had been unfettered, neither chain, rope, wire, nor tape trussing her on the day she drowned. But here was another kind of tape entering the picture—and Carella could not forget that Hillary had linked “tape” with “drowning.”
She came into his room now without knocking. Her face was flushed, her eyes were glowing.
“I’ve just been on the phone with a woman named Elise Blair,” she said. “She’s the real estate agent whose sign was in the window of the house Greg rented.”
“What about her?” Carella asked.
“I described the house that was in Greg’s book. I described it down to the last nail. She knows the house. It was rented three summers ago to a man from Boston. She wasn’t the agent on the deal, but she can check with the Realtor who was and get the man’s name and address from the lease—if you want it.”
“Why should I want it?” Carella asked.
“It was the house in Shades, don’t you understand?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It was the house Greg wrote about.”
“So?”
“He wasn’t living in that house, someone else was,” Hillary said. “I want to go there. I want to see for myself if there are ghosts in that house.”
10
The real estate agent who had rented the house three summers ago worked out of the back bedroom of her own house on Main Street. They trudged through the snow at a quarter past 6:00, walking past the lighted Christmas tree on the Common, ducking their heads against the snow and the fierce wind. The woman’s name was Sally Barton, and she seemed enormously pleased to be playing detective. She had known all along, she told them, that the house Craig wrote about was really the old Loomis house out on the Spit. He had never pinpointed the location, had never even mentioned the town of Hampstead for that matter—something she supposed they should all be grateful for. But she knew it was the Loomis house. “He loved the sea, Frank Loomis did,” she said. “The house isn’t your typical beach house, but it looks right at home on the Spit. He fell in love with it when he was still living in Salem, had it brought down here stick by stick, put it on the beachfront land he owned.”
“Salem?” Carella said. “Here in Massachusetts?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Barton said. “Where they hanged the witches in 1692.”
She offered them the key to the house, which she said she’d been unable to rent the summer before, but that had nothing to do with Gregory Craig’s ghosts. Not many people outside the town knew that this was the house he’d made famous in his book.