The Haunting Ballad (24 page)

Once home, I embraced my pillow like a long-lost pal. Sleep came swiftly. Tonight's dream had some of the elements of the previous one but was lacking others. For example, there was no Statue of Liberty. No pterodactyls either (and, thankfully, no Quetzalcoatls in their place). Audrey wasn't there, though Lorraine Cobble was. As in yesterday's dream, I found myself standing at a considerable height. Not quite so high as Lady Liberty's head, but high enough. This time I was atop the giant arch in Washington Square Park. Lorraine was up there beside me, her long golden hair whipping about in the strong wind. Her hand was almost touching mine, but not quite.

She asked me a question. “Did you know that the Washington Arch was modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris?”

I answered yes, because I did. I'd learned that little tidbit somewhere along the line. I stared down and took in the great concrete sprawl of the park below. It was alive with movement. Around the central fountain, which was spouting bright silver water, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were roaming about in a spiral. Most of them carried guitars that they strummed with wide sweeps of their arms. Strangely, though, this legion of strings made no sound. All I could hear was the wind whirling around me.

Eventually, Lorraine asked me another question. “Did you know that I really, really wanted to live?”

Her voice sounded so brittle and sad then that I turned to look at her. Only she had changed. She was a young girl now, perhaps eleven, with her hair in long braids. She wasn't looking back at me but at what lay below—which now was nothing. The people had all vanished, as had the fountain and the park itself. There was nothing there at all, not even last night's churning, ghost-filled sea. Just an abyss, black and endless. Instinctively, I grabbed for the girl and held her tightly to my side.

“Be very, very careful,” I told her.

“You, too,” she said back, her voice soft and trembling. “You be careful, too, Mr. Plunkett.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

 

I called Audrey first thing in the morning. “What would you think of breaking tradition this once and doing the Bugle Boy Sunday instead of Saturday?”

The silence at the other end of the line made me think a rejection was being prepared. Then she spoke, sounding a little subdued but pleased. “Breakfast? This morning? Sure. I don't think anyone will chastise us for switching things up.”

She was wrong. Forty minutes later, Beatrice, our seventy-seven-year-old waitress, was raking us over the coals in her crusty, merry way.

“So where were you two yesterday?” she demanded. “I almost sent out an all-points bulletin. You get to be a certain age, you expect a little consistency in your life. You don't want your customers jumbling things up, for mercy's sake.”

We offered a contrite apology, leaving out the reason for yesterday's absence. Fortunately, Beatrice didn't probe further, content to take our order and trudge off to badger more of her beloved customers.

Once we were alone, I was the one to start things off. “I saw Byron Spires last night.”

Audrey gulped softly. “Yes?”

“It was in the course of the investigation. I wasn't there to track him down.”

“Um-hm.”

“I wasn't looking for him, but—I won't lie to you—when I ran into him I wanted to punch the living daylights out of the guy.”

In less complicated times, Audrey probably would have interjected some playful barb here. Maybe something about the unlikelihood of me being able to beat a single sunbeam out of a guy, never mind a full complement of daylights.

She didn't do that now.

“I stayed my hand.” That sounded remarkably noble, so I said it again. “I stayed my hand—after giving him a piece of my mind, that is.”

For a moment, I heard my father's voice, blunt and growly, lecturing me:
Are you kidding, Lee? Bum tries to steal your girl, and all you do is give him a scolding? What are you, a schoolmarm?

I shoved Dad back to the beyond. This was
my
problem,
my
life.

“Spires told me you called him yesterday,” I said.

Audrey held my gaze. “Did he tell you why?”

“He did.”

Then we didn't say anything for a while, but Audrey did reach over and scoop up my hand in both of hers.

She spoke again first. “You and me, Lee—I'm in it for the long haul.”

For some reason, that struck me as an extraordinarily tender thing to say. When I opened my mouth to respond, I found that some damned frog must have snuck in there. How else to explain the fact that my throat was suddenly hoarse and I could barely get a word out? Seeing my affliction, Audrey squeezed my hand tighter.

Beatrice appeared at the perfect moment, juggling coffee cups, plates of waffles, and bowls of cereal and complaining spryly about the demands this job made on her poor old bones. We barely waited for her to exit before delving into our breakfast. I was suddenly feeling famished, as if I'd just run a hundred-meter sprint. Maybe Audrey was feeling the same. We weren't kidding ourselves that this race was by any means really done. No doubt, down the line, there was still a lot of hashing out for us to do, a lot of bruised feelings for us to shift through. For now, though, this was just fine. Here we were, as the gods of Thelmont intended, breaking bread together at the Bugle Boy Diner (albeit a day late) with our coffee steaming, Beatrice grousing, and the warm April sun spilling through the windows. Life was okay. Good, even.

*   *   *

AFTER BREAKFAST, I
told Audrey that I needed to go to my office to attend to some paperwork. She suggested riding over there with me, just to stay together for a little while longer. Though she'd already missed morning church to join me at the diner, Audrey assured me she could catch a later service at no danger to her soul. Since the church was only a modest walk from my office, it seemed like an orderly plan. I was happy to have her beside me once again as I steered Baby Blue across town. As I've previously mentioned, my Nash always looked at its jazziest with Miss Audrey Valish in the front seat. It was one of those curiosities that probably belonged in our Catalog of Life's Little Truths.

Entering my office, Audrey moaned softly, as was her habit whenever finding herself in my cramped, drab workspace. For the hundredth time, she surveyed the beat-up furniture, murky green walls, and one curtainless window and cringed a little.

“You know, Lee, a coat of paint and a set of drapes wouldn't be a crime.”

“To Yowler Yarr they would.”

“Remember how we've said Fred Mertz is the worst landlord? Well, your Mr. Yarr deserves serious consideration.”

“One reason he keeps my rent low is because I preserve the space like Dad had it. Yowler and Buster were old chums, and this space is sort of a monument to that chummery.”

“Chummery's not a word.”

“Tell that to Yowler.”

Audrey stared up the Theodore Roosevelt portrait, the room's only decorative touch. “Couldn't you even replace Teddy here? He always looks so perturbed.”

“You would be, too, if you had to wrestle rhinos in darkest Africa.”

“He did that?”

“
Dad
thought he did.”

It was good to be bantering in the old comfortable way. It gave me hope for our future.

Audrey volunteered to rummage through the mail from the last couple of days, a task she knew I wouldn't fight her for. I turned my own attention to organizing the notes I'd been compiling from the current investigation. Though I couldn't boast my father's toughness or my Celtic colleague's keen mind, I was hell on wheels with the note-taking. I began writing up a diagram of sorts featuring the individuals we'd encountered, plus the various threads that had presented themselves. For example:

LC jumps/thrown from roof in evening.

→
Cornelius sees Hector Escobar near stairwell
→
Hector denies this.

Letter #1 (by unknown writer) requests meeting at 10
a.m.
day of death.

→
Ruby meets with LC at 10
a.m.
that day, not planned (?)

LC steals Cardinal Meriam's song set
→
Letter #2 (Cardinal, threatening).

→
Compare with: LC stealing Minnie Bornstein's Navaho trip (1945).

→
Compare with: Spires stealing LC's Scottish song.

Etcetera. I put it all down very neatly and concisely—without knowing what in God's green acre anything really meant. As I was completing my diagram, Mr. O'Nelligan stepped into the office.

“Ah! Behold the twain!”

By that, I assumed he meant Audrey and me. I could see his pleasure in finding this particular twain keeping company again.

Audrey gave our Irishman a warm hug and told him, “It's a good thing you showed up. Poor Lee has been sitting here groaning and gnashing his teeth trying to crack the case.”

“That's a big stinking lie,” I begged to differ.

Audrey smiled wickedly. “He's flummoxed. Please solve it for him.”

“Not I alone.
Coniunctis Viribus
!” my partner proclaimed.

Audrey scrunched up her button nose. “That sounds like some kind of rash.”

“It's Latin for
With Powers United,
” my partner explained. “Not through any individual effort but by exploring side by side will Lee and I unravel this mystery.”

“You make us sound like the Hardy Boys,” I said.

“The Hardy Boys?” Mr. O'Nelligan seemed genuinely at a loss. “Are they rival investigators?”

I grinned. “Aha! Finally, I've stumped the Great O'Nelligan with a literary reference. Yes, the Hardys
are
fellow PIs—though their beards aren't as gray and distinguished as your own.” Then, to sweeten the pot, I added, “They leap into their cases as fast as blue darters.”

“Touché,” my partner muttered.

The three of us spent the next several minutes tossing more good-natured banter back and forth. With Mr. O'Nelligan in the mix, it was feeling even more like the glorious pre-Spires days of yore. Eventually, Audrey checked the time and announced that she needed to be on her way. I told her I'd walk her outside.

Mr. O'Nelligan parted with her poetically, as he was want to do. “To draw from Yeats, dear Audrey: Go forth … and seize whatever prey the heart longs for.”

She assured him she'd do just that, and we headed down the staircase. Outside, we paused on the sidewalk for our good-byes. Audrey took one of my hands and squeezed it tightly.

“Will you be around later, Lee?” she asked, a certain tentativeness returning to her voice.

“Not sure yet,” I said. “We haven't talked over what our next step is. Maybe another trip to Greenwich Village.”

She nodded and smiled gently. “Well, if you want to go snowshoeing…”

It was a running joke with us. We'd tried donning snowshoes several winters back and had ended up spending most of the experience on our snow-numbed butts. Now, no matter what the season, we'd reference that fondly remembered failure.

“I need to restring my pair,” I joked. “Once they're fixed, just try to hold me back.”

We laughed together. Not boisterously, but comfortably. If the ghost of Byron Spires wasn't fully dispelled, it at least was receding into the shadows. We shared a kiss, long enough for the moment, and got in a final squeeze of the hands.

“Off now toward the steeple,” I said.

“I'll put in a prayer for you. A long, drawn-out one.” She was only half-kidding, I think.

*   *   *

AS I REENTERED
the office, Mr. O'Nelligan was lowering the telephone receiver.

“Did someone call?” I asked.

My partner, seated now behind my desk, didn't reply for several seconds. When he did, there was a certain far-off quality to his tone.

“That was Mrs. Pattinshell,” he said.

“Our dear old spook-crooner?”

“What she had to convey was brief—yet intriguing.”

“Did the ghosts send her a snappy new tune?”

“In a word, yes. Mrs. Pattinshell wanted to sing it to me over the phone, but I told her it would be best if we came down and heard it in person. I've arranged for us to meet at her apartment at five
P.M.
today. You see, the point of origin of this particular song is rather startling.”

“Well? Who'd she claim sent it?”

“Lorraine Cobble,” my partner said quietly. “She says it's the spirit of the murdered Lorraine.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

 

For the third time in as many days, we found ourselves in Mrs. Pattinshell's darkened, Gothic parlor. Again, she was seated behind the round table with its covering of black lace. And again, candle smoke and incense wafted across the room. My partner and I sat opposite our hostess. As with our previous visits, the resident Siamese had shown its displeasure by bursting out of the room like a low, shrieking rocket.

“Lorraine told me that she wants you to hear this song,” Mrs. Pattinshell said.

“Us specifically?” Mr. O'Nelligan asked. “Lee and I?”

“Yes. The song just came to me this morning. Lorraine feels you need to hear it and learn what truth it affords.” She flashed me a look of minimal expectation. “If you are at all capable of doing so.”

I smiled warmly at her. “We're all ears.”

Noticeably unwarmed, the gaunt woman looked away and settled herself in her high-backed chair. “I'll attempt to retrieve the song now.”

I pulled out my notepad to jot down the lyrics. Mrs. Pattinshell now closed her eyes and tilted her head back, just as she'd done yesterday. Then her lips parted, and her creaky singing voice pushed out the song. Lorraine's song. It was a slow, haunting ballad, the melody of which seemed to wander all over the place.