A Winter Haunting Read online

  “Why?” said Dale. “Is it haunted? Is Mr. McBride’s crazy second wife sealed in up there or something?”

  Ms. Whittaker could only stare. Her lipsticked mouth hung slightly open.

  “Just kidding again,” Dale said hastily, making a mental note not to joke with Sandy Whittaker again. Had she been this literal as a kid? He could not remember. He had not hung around the girls much. “Now I remember when I lived here as a kid,” said Dale, “Duane saying something about their second story being shut off because of the heating bills.”

  Sandy Whittaker finally managed a nod. “I assure you, Dale . . . Mr. Stewart . . .”

  “Dale,” said Dale.

  “I assure you, Dale, that as far as I know, that’s absolutely the only reason for the second floor to be sealed off. The old coal furnace was converted to propane in the 1950s and was never as efficient afterward. Mrs. Brubaker slept in the study—I think Mr. McBride had slept there as well after his wife died—and, well, no one needed the second floor.”

  “I just made the joke because you said Alma—the housekeeper, right?—Alma wouldn’t go up there,” Dale said lamely.

  “Alma is seventy-four years old,” said Sandy. “With a bad hip. It’s the staircase she’s afraid of. Now . . . you’ve rented the entire house, Mr. . . . Dale. If you would like the upstairs to be opened up, I’ll get my nephew over here to take the plastic down and then Alma—or Alma’s daughter—will help me clean and air out the rooms. I imagine that the air up there could be a little stale if it’s been shut off for almost fifty years . . .”

  Dale held his palms up. He had almost made a joke about unsealing Tutankhamen’s tomb, but stopped himself in time. “I don’t need the second floor,” he said. “If I do, I’ll tell you. And for a hundred and seventy-five dollars a month, the first floor and that nice study should work for me.”

  “If you think the rent is too high . . .” began Sandy.

  Dale had to sigh and shake his head. “Even in Missoula, you couldn’t rent a decent room for that amount, Sandy. Everything’s fine. Did you say that there’s a shower in the basement?”

  FOUR

  * * *

  THERE was more than a shower in the basement. Dale had forgotten that Duane had more or less lived in the basement of this farmhouse.

  When Dale had been a boy in Elm Haven, he had been terrified of his own basement. It had been a labyrinth of small rooms with the coal bin far in the back of the maze, and he’d been frightened every night when he had to go down and shovel coal into the hopper.

  The McBride basement could not have been more different. Essentially it was one large room—the huge furnace taking up much of the south end—but clean, tidied up, with workbenches along one wall, an old washing machine with wooden rollers, coils of clothesline, a huge jerry-rigged shower tapping into the plumbing under the first-floor bathroom, an old-fashioned but complete darkroom setup near the water pipes, and Duane’s corner.

  Dale remembered that he had been in Duane’s home only once—breaking in through one of the six narrow windows set high up on the cement walls here—after Duane had died. He had come for Duane’s private notebooks, and he still had them—wrapped and secure out in the Land Cruiser. Thirteen thick, spiral notebooks filled with Duane’s small, almost illegible shorthand script.

  Duane’s “room” was still there: a corner of the basement partitioned off by a quilt hanging on a clothesline—the quilt smelled freshly laundered to Dale as he stood next to it—and by various crates piled high and filled with paperbacks. Dale slid back the quilt.

  Duane McBride had assembled an old brass bed down here, and the thick mattress looked more comfortable than the smaller daybed in the parlor upstairs. All around the bed were more bookcase-crates, filled with paperbacks and old hardcover books, and on top of most of the crates were radios: clunky 1960 transistor radios, complicated receivers obviously made from kits, simple crystal sets, several Bakelite 1950s models, and even a huge Philco floor radio against the wall near the foot of the bed. At a small desk between the bed and the Philco sat a real shortwave radio—able to send as well as receive—with antenna wires running up and out the narrow window.

  “I forgot that Duane had been a ham radio operator,” Dale said softly, almost whispering.

  “We don’t know if it still works,” whispered Sandy Whittaker. “But Mrs. Brubaker kept everything clean down here as well.”

  “I’ll say she did,” said Dale. “This basement is cleaner than my ranch in Montana.”

  Sandy Whittaker did not know what to say to that, so she pursed her lips and nodded.

  “Seriously,” said Dale, gesturing around the large basement, “there’s more light here than upstairs.” Besides the six uncovered basement windows—working almost like clerestory windows set high on the wall—there were four hanging lightbulbs illuminating the open space and two small lamps that still worked next to Duane’s old bed. The place was actually cozy.

  Sandy Whittaker glanced at her watch. “Well, I just wanted to make sure that everything was ready for you. I’d better get back to the office.”

  They paused in the kitchen. The snow had stopped, but it was still cloudy and cold outside. “I wish I had something to offer you,” said Dale. “Maybe a glass of water?”

  Sandy Whittaker frowned at the tap. “We think the water is all right—it’s well water, not city water—but you might consider bringing in bottled water to be safe.”

  Dale nodded, smiling again. He had not heard the phrase “city water” for more than four decades. All of the implications came back to him now: Elm Haven’s tap water had been sulfurous, gritty, nasty, undrinkable. Even people in town had used backyard wells.

  The Realtor was handing him several pieces of paper: a receipt for the checks he had mailed her for damage deposit and first and last months’ rent—he planned to stay nine months; a list of emergency phone numbers, most of them in Oak Hill, he noticed; her number; the addresses of a medical clinic in Oak Hill, a dentist, and various stores.

  “I need to do some grocery shopping before nightfall,” said Dale. “I noticed that the A & P and Corner Pantry were gone. Where do people in Elm Haven shop these days?”

  Sandy made a gesture and Dale noticed how dainty her wrists and hands were, even with such plump arms. “Oh, most people drive to the old Oak Hill grocery store a block from the park or into the west side Peoria Safeway. Or, if they’re in a hurry, out to the KWIK’N’EZ.” She spelled it for him. “It’s that travel convenience store built onto the Shell station out at the I-74 interchange,” she explained. “Bread, milk, that sort of thing. Prices are ridiculous, but it’s easy to get to.”

  “KWIK’N’EZ,” repeated Dale. He hated chain stores and convenience stores only slightly less than he hated TV evangelists and World War II–era Nazi war criminals.

  Dale accompanied Sandy Whittaker out to her huge black Buick. The woman paused by the car. “Do you hear from any of your old friends from the old days, Dale?”

  “Elm Haven pals, you mean?” said Dale. “No. I wrote letters for a while after we moved back to Chicago in 1961, but I haven’t heard from any of the old gang for years. Any of them still live here?”

  The Realtor thought for a second. “Not that group you were with—Mike O’Rourke, Kevin Grumbacher, those boys, right?”

  “And Jim Harlen,” said Dale with a smile.

  “Oh, well, maybe you know that Jim Harlen became a U.S. senator from Illinois.”

  Dale nodded. Harlen had been in the Senate twenty years before a sex scandal had ruined his chances for reelection in 2000.

  “The O’Rourkes—the parents—still live in the same house,” said Sandy.

  “My God,” said Dale, “they must be a hundred years old.”

  “In their eighties,” said Sandy. “I haven’t spoken to them for years. I understand that Michael was hurt real bad in Vietnam and then became a priest.”

  “That’s what I heard as well,” said Dale. “But
I can’t find any trace of him on the Internet.”

  “And Kevin Grumbacher . . .” continued Sandy, not listening to him. “His parents died, you know. The last I heard he was working for NASA or some such.”

  “Morton Thiokol,” said Dale. He noticed the lack of comprehension in her eyes. “That’s the company that builds the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle. I found some old articles—evidently Kevin was working for them during the Challenger disaster in 1986 and blew the whistle on them . . . testified about the fact that the company knew about the faulty O-rings.”

  Sandy Whittaker still stared blankly at him.

  Dale shrugged. “Anyway, he resigned in protest in ’86 and I couldn’t find any other articles or listings about him. I think he lives in Texas.” He felt uncomfortable talking about his old friends with this woman, even though he was curious about what she knew. To change the subject, he said, “What about your old school friends from Elm Haven? Still in touch with Donna Lou Perry?”

  “She’s dead,” said Sandy. “Murdered.”

  Dale could only blink.

  “A long time ago,” she said. “Donna Lou married Paulie Fussner in . . . I think it was 1970 . . . and she tried to get a divorce in ’74, I think it was. He tracked her down and beat her up. She went back home to live with her folks in Elm Haven, but he waited for her one morning and shot her.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Dale. Donna Lou was the one female from his childhood here whom he’d hoped to run across, to apologize for something that had happened on the baseball diamond forty-two years earlier. Now he never could. “Jesus,” he said.

  Sandy nodded. “It’s been a long time. The new century makes me feel like we’re all ancient, talking about people and things from the middle of the last century and all. Who else was in that group of yours?”

  “Cordie Cooke,” said Dale, still thinking about the murdered Donna Lou.

  “Don’t know what happened to her.”

  Dale did—he had found out through the Net that the moon-faced little white-trash Cordie Cooke had become a millionaire a hundred times over, had sold the largest waste management company in America a few years ago, and was currently running an expensive rehabilitation center for cancer victims on the Big Island of Hawaii. He didn’t take time to share all this with the Realtor.

  “There was some other boy in your bunch,” said Sandy.

  Dale thought for a moment. “My kid brother Lawrence?”

  “No, someone else . . .”

  “Duane McBride?” he said.

  Sandy Whittaker actually blushed. “Yes, I guess that’s who I was thinking of.” She got in the car and started the engine.

  Dale stepped back, preparing to wave good-bye, but Sandy rolled the window down. “Oh, I meant to tell you, Dale. My cousin’s boy—Derek—when he heard you were renting the place, he said he knew all about you.”

  Oh, Christ, thought Dale, a Jim Bridger: Mountain Man fan.

  “Derek’s sort of a . . . well, a problem child, I guess you could say, though he’s nineteen now, so not really a child. Anyway, my cousin Ardith says that Derek knew your name from his Internet friends. That they’d sent your photograph and articles out to all the others.”

  “Articles?” said Dale. “Do you mean novels?”

  “No, the articles that were in some Montana newspaper.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Dale said aloud. “Do you mean the editorials on the Montana Militia?” At the height—or depths, to be more accurate—of his clinical depression a year earlier, he had written a series of editorials about the right-wing militias. “I thought those were only being routed around to other neo-Nazi groups and skinheads.”

  Sandy bit on her lower lip. “I don’t think Derek is a whatchamacallit Nazi, but he does hang around with skinheads. Heck, he is a skinhead. Anyway, I wanted to tell you. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Derek and his friends.”

  “Sounds like I already have,” said Dale. He folded his arms. Great beginning to my sabbatical. It was starting to rain again.

  “Call me if you need anything,” said Sandy Whittaker. She rolled up the window, ponderously turned the huge Buick around in the muddy lot, and drove down the long driveway in the rain. In the dim daylight, the dead crabapple trees looked even sadder and more skeletal.

  Dale shook his head, went over to the Land Cruiser, and started hauling his boxes of junk—his life—into the McBride farmhouse.

  FIVE

  * * *

  THE last time Dale had seen his young lover, Clare, more than a year earlier in the clean, bright, achingly blue-sky Montana mid-September, they had saddled up at the ranch—she on the spirited roan he had bought for his oldest daughter and that his daughter had ridden only twice but that Clare had ridden a score of times, he on the docile, older gelding that had come with the ranch—and then they had led two pack mules up into the high country for a three-day camping trip. The weather stayed perfect during the entire long weekend. The great clone groves of aspen covering the subalpine hillsides had gone golden earlier that week and because it had been a wet, warm summer, the leaves were a perfect yellow-gold, shimmering against the blue-vaulted sky and filling the hillsides and valleys below them with a constantly dancing light. Clare reminded him that aspen leaves glittered that way because they were attached to the branch at a slight angle so that both sides of each leaf could photosynthesize during the short growing season. Dale reminded her that he had taught her that a year earlier.

  The first night they camped below treeline, and they allowed themselves the luxury of a small campfire, sitting around it and talking over coffee for hours as the stars burned almost without twinkling above them. Before Dale lit the fire, Clare gave him a small box wrapped in perfect gold paper. He looked at her quizzically.

  “A small present,” she said.

  “What’s the occasion?” asked Dale.

  “Open it,” said Clare.

  Inside the box was a beautiful gold Dunhill cigarette lighter. “It’s beautiful,” said Dale. “But I know that you know that I don’t smoke.”

  “You don’t light campfires all that well, either,” said Clare. “I remember Ghost Ridge. Your matches are always wet or missing or something. That thing might save your life someday.”

  Dale had laughed and lighted their stack of kindling and wood with two flicks of the lighter.

  There had been several nights of frost, so there were no mosquitoes. The breeze from the high ridges was cold, but the fire was warm and they were comfortable in leather riding coats over fleece vests and flannel shirts. Clare told him about the first days of her graduate program at Princeton. He told her about the new book he had begun—a “serious” novel about Custer at the Little Bighorn, from the Native American perspective. Clare winced, as she always did, at the term “Native American,” but she made no issue of it this time. Neither of them mentioned the reason for her long flight back and extended weekend with him at such an important time in her life: namely, their plans to get together this year—Dale’s hopes of spending Thanksgiving break with her—their earlier plans to travel to Barbados during her Christmas break—their ultimate plans of Dale moving near Princeton to be with her starting the following summer, taking at least a year of sabbatical from his university and perhaps quitting to write full-time. All of their plans. All of their futures.

  They made love for hours by the dying campfire that first night, spreading Dale’s sleeping bag out on the soft grass and using Clare’s as a blanket over them when the cold winds blew over their sweaty bodies. Eventually the campfire embers dimmed and they slept a while, making love in the middle of the night and again just after sunrise. Dale noticed that Clare’s lovemaking was more intense than ever—as if she were trying to lose herself in the intimacy, thus putting distance between them—and he knew then that when they did talk, the news would be bad.

  The second night, camped high on the ridge above treeline, they used only the white-gas backpacking stove for
cooking and adjourned early to the tent as a freezing wind from outer space seemed to blow in. There was even less atmosphere up there to make the stars twinkle, but they seemed to shake more, as if also blasted by the arctic winds that made Clare and Dale huddle in their goose-down bags as they stroked each other and made love repeatedly, finding their orgasms separately and then together, knowing and respecting each other’s bodies and needs in the way only lovers long experienced with each other can appreciate true lovemaking. It was not enough. Dale again felt the distance and lay awake after Clare’s slow breathing began—the soft sighing of sleep lost in the wind-against-rainfly-nylon noise, but stirring warm and tactile against his bare shoulder. He knew for certain now that something was wrong. The day’s dialogues had been enthusiastic but abstract, intimate but impersonal, occasionally touching on their past experiences but never turning toward a shared future. This was profoundly different, and as Dale lay awake feeling his young beloved breathe on his shoulder, he thought of Anne and the girls, lost to him now by choice and action, and of the house in Missoula and of his job and the long academic year ahead—an unbelievably empty year if he was not pursuing his sabbatical as he and Clare had planned—and now he felt the cold and vacuum of the dark sky enter into him until he was shaking even in the warmth of the enveloping sleeping bags with Clare’s warm, bare breasts and thigh against him. He shivered and waited for dawn.

  She told him the next day, as they led the pack mules down the couloir toward the high pastures above the ranch.

  “It’s not going to work, Dale.”

  He did not have to ask her what was not going to work—it was the Great Unspoken Topic of the long weekend, of their life—and he played no games just to make himself feel better by seeing her feel worse. “All right,” he said. “Why not?”

  She had hesitated then. It was a warm day and she was wearing his oldest, most comfortable flannel shirt—the blue one that she had worn that first weekend more than four years earlier and that she wore each time they spent time together—wore it open today, sleeves rolled up, a white T-shirt showing the strain of the full breasts he had kissed at sunrise just hours ago.