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Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

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BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings

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I turned in the dark, my eyes adjusting. I could see my hand now, and the black outline of the gun in it. The vague furniture shapes, the hulk of the bar. The smoky mirror a tunnel of welcoming darkness, reflecting nothing. James Hastings wasn’t even here. The meaning came to me then, the message I was searching for. It was as clear in my mind as her face once had been, and it would be my deliverance back to her. I wrapped my finger around the trigger and set the muzzle to my temple. My teeth clenched. My muscles tensed, tensed, and a cold hand wrapped around my bare arm.

‘James, wait,’ Stacey said. ‘You’re not alone.’

I jerked away and the trigger went
click
. A thousand tingling pins pushed into my skin. The cold pressure of her fingers lingered on my arm as I whirled, swatting the air, touching nothing as I fled. Somewhere in this panic, the gun fell to the floor.

I made it to the ballroom’s double doors, yanked them open and ran down the hall, to the front landing. I stormed down the stairs and leaped over the last four, landing in the foyer with a slam that made the chandelier twinkle like wind chimes. I backed myself into the kitchen, my heart aching as if it were trying to pump marbles. What I had been on the verge of in that room - I never intended that. But for a moment there, something had gotten inside me. Something had made the prospect seem not only sane but . . . comforting.

She wants me to join her.

I was clawing my car keys from the counter when the footsteps began to thud above, continuing at a leisurely pace toward the back of the house. I knew Stacey was dead and that her body (her broken, discarded body with its obscenely bulging eye and contorted pelvic bones) had been cremated almost a year ago. I also knew that I had heard her voice, close enough to my ear to feel her breath, not two minutes ago.

The footsteps approached the top of the stairs. There were fifteen stairs. I’d counted them many times. I tried and failed to count the footsteps coming down them now, but there couldn’t be more than a couple more to go—

Thump, tha-thump
, stop.

Whatever it was had reached the bottom. I imagined it standing there, cold, eyes adjusting to the light, tracking my scent. I watched the short hall between the foyer and the kitchen, giving me a clear view to the front door. Even if it went through the front door, I’d see whatever this turned out to be.

The footsteps scraped over the foyer oak. The brown rug bunched at one corner. A flat leather sandal came into view, smoothing the rug. A woman cleared her throat. The sandal became a shiny pale leg under denim cut-offs, a black t-shirt smeared with powder-blue paint, a mess of strawberry hair. She walked to the mouth of the kitchen and stopped. I was looking at her, a face, not Stacey’s, a stranger’s face. The woman was pale with wide goldfish eyes and a soft flared nose, everything rounded and smooth. She stood with her arms a few inches from her sides, posing in a manner that was almost masculine, cocky.

‘I’m sorry, James,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

Her voice was rich, just shy of assertive, and oddly calm. I had never heard it before. I was immediately disarmed by dual emotions. First an almost overwhelming attraction. She was not beautiful in the model sense, but comely, possessing the kind of strangely ordinary features that become harder to look away from the longer one regards them. The second was the disorienting feeling of familiarity, the kind which makes men in bars say, ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ and mean it. I was frightened by her unexplained presence in my house, and yet I wanted to look into her eyes, sink into the glossy green wet of them.

As a consequence my mouth seemed to fill with wool. She was still twenty feet away but I noticed how she flushed, as if she were reading my admiration and it embarrassed her, or excited her. She pulled a strand of hair over one ear and clasped her hands in front of her waist, mockingly prim.

She said, ‘I’m here now. I’m your wife.’

The word ‘wife’ was a tight band of leather around my neck, shunting my circulation. For a moment her voice echoed Stacey’s, but Stacey’s had been softer, younger. It wasn’t my wife’s voice this woman used.

‘You’re not my wife,’ I said. ‘My wife left a year ago.’

Her charm deflated, and there was sadness now. ‘No, I said I’m here . . . about your wife.’

Had I heard her wrong? I was certain I had not, and yet I must have.

‘I’ve been watching you for a little while,’ she said. ‘I was worried I would be too late.’

‘For what?’

‘To keep you from doing whatever it was you were thinking about doing upstairs.’

I felt shame, and was once again at a loss for words.

‘This is going to be hard,’ she said. ‘Can we sit down?’

I stared at her in wonder.

‘My name is Annette Copeland. I just moved in next door.’

My new neighbor? The shadow on the porch? Was that why she looked familiar? No, I hadn’t seen her well enough to explain the intensity of my feelings now.

‘I know how your wife was killed,’ she said.

How your wife was killed.
Not ‘how she died’. Adrenaline blasted alcohol through my veins, pushing it through my pores in a cold sweat. In an instant I was sober.

‘I didn’t know what happened until a few weeks ago, otherwise I would have come sooner. It was an accident. A terrible—’

‘You . . .’ I said, short of breath. ‘You were there?’

‘No. My husband was involved. His name was Arthur. He ran into her with his truck.’ She was clutching the hem of her shirt. ‘He took his own life twenty-six days ago.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hope he’s rotting in hell.’

Annette Copeland began to cry.

We were seated in the living room. After she started crying in the kitchen, I needed a beer and offered her one. She held it in front of her unopened as she followed me, shuffling like a frightened child. A hundred questions in my mind fought to get to the front of the line. She was on the couch, cowering at one end. The severity of her crying was the only thing that prevented me from screaming, throwing her out or binding her to a chair with an extension cord.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said, not really feeling sorry at all but wanting to get on with it.

She wiped her nose with her t-shirt. ‘I’m sorry. That’s disgusting.’

I nodded. Everything about this situation was disgusting.

‘He couldn’t live with it,’ she said. ‘He didn’t tell me what happened. But a year ago he came home early from work. He was drunk, in shock. He told me he was sick and went to bed. Every time I begged him to tell me what was wrong, he just said he was depressed. It was his job, he said. I thought it was a midlife. Our marriage was not the best before it happened, and it fell apart after.’

‘If you’re looking for sympathy—’

‘No, I’m not.’ She looked me in the eye. ‘I’m just trying to tell you. He hid it very well. He started drinking heavily. He was always a drinker, but he quit his job a few months ago. I told him I would leave him if he didn’t get some help. A month ago I went to stay with a girlfriend for the weekend. I was going to make a decision, intervention or separation. When I came back he was dead. The note he left explained what he had been hiding.’

‘He never turned himself in,’ I said, stating the obvious, maybe because I had to. ‘He killed my wife and just left? What kind of people are you?’

‘I’m not going to argue,’ she said. ‘I’m not here to defend him. It was unconscionable. I’ll do whatever you want.’

What did I want? My wife back. That wasn’t going to happen. Her husband’s head on a plate would have been nice, but that wasn’t going to happen either.

‘What do you want?’ I said. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I thought you deserved to know the truth. I kept driving by and when I saw the house for rent, I just thought . . . it was almost like a sign. Fate, as stupid as that sounds now. I needed to go somewhere, and I thought maybe if I was closer to you, I could think things through a little better and figure out the best way to . . .’

‘What?’

‘Approach you. Help in some way. I don’t know. I don’t have anything left, but whatever I have is yours.’

This angered me further. ‘What did this note say?’

Annette nodded. ‘He wrote it on a yellow legal pad and left the news article beside it, the item about Stacey.’

‘Don’t say that. Don’t say her name like you know her.’

‘I’m sorry. Your wife. He said he was sorry he had lied to me and hurt me this way, but there was no other way he could live with himself, even if he went to prison. He said that he was on his way to work that morning and traffic on the freeway was backed up, so he exited at Western Avenue. He sometimes used Western or La Brea to get to his office in Century City. When he got to the light at Western and Washington, there was construction. He was late for an important meeting. I knew he had been under a lot of stress because of his company. They packaged mortgages for commercial and high-end residential real estate and were attached to that whole sub-prime mess, like the other banks. He was late for a meeting with new investors, another bank who was preparing to offload Arthur’s company’s toxic portfolio. He lost his temper in traffic. He was trapped there and then he spotted the alley. He decided to cut through the alley to where it met up with Arlington. He said he was going almost sixty miles per hour when she stepped out of the garage.’

I couldn’t look at her. I had my hands over my eyes. I was leaning over my knees while she told it.

‘He stopped too late. He got out to help her, but she . . . it was instant. He said he looked around for help but there was no one. No one had seen him and it was too late and he knew it would ruin . . . he would lose the company and go to prison. He was scared. He gave in, in a moment of weakness.’

‘A moment of weakness. He murdered my wife.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ She started to cry again.

I hurled my beer at the wall. It crashed against a framed still from
Purple Rain
, cracking the glass right below Prince’s signature. Stacey had given it to me for my twenty-sixth birthday.

Annette reared back in terror.

‘Stop crying!’

She pulled into a tighter ball and, after another minute or two, composed herself. Very softly she said, ‘Do you want to hear the rest?’

No, but I had to know. I nodded.

She recited the rest of his note from memory. ‘He said, “I behaved like a monster. If another man had done the same thing to you, I would not hesitate to end his life. I have seen the core of myself, and I cannot live with what I have seen. There is no place for me in this world. I do not deserve to be forgiven for my crimes. But if you can, please try to forgive me for leaving you. I hope that one day we will be together again. Arthur.”’

I felt as if my head was going to explode, and I hoped it would. All this time I wanted know, but knowing was worthless at that moment.

‘You still haven’t been to the police,’ I said. They would have told me if she had, of course.

She shook her head. ‘But I will. And you should. I can give you the name of the officers who handled Arthur’s . . . I’ll show you the note, if you want.’

Something was wrong with that. ‘You didn’t show
them
the note? This note that spelled it all out? What else aren’t you telling me?’

‘What? No.’ She appeared hurt by the accusation. ‘It wasn’t like that. I, I was scared. I was still in shock. I was afraid they would take my home away. I had nothing. And then later I wondered if I would want to know, after a year. I waited a few days and then I was scared that I had held it back, that it would be worse since I waited, and it got harder to think and, and - I was paralyzed. I know I was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do except come see you first.’

‘You’ve been watching me for a month?’

‘No. Only a week or so. Maybe two.’

BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings

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