Текст книги "Ghosts"

Автор книги: Ed McBain

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

“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.

“Don’t know how he got away with it,” she said. “Claimed it was a true story and then didn’t tell anybody where the house actually was. Said it was to protect the innocent. What innocent? Frank Loomis has been dead for fifty years, and his two sons are living in California and couldn’t care less whether there are ghosts in the house. All they’re interested in is renting it each summer. Still, I guess he might’ve been afraid of legal complications. You’d know more about that than I would,” she said, and smiled at Carella.

“Well, I’m not a lawyer, ma’am,” Carella said, and returned the smile, aware that he’d just been flattered. “I wonder if you can tell me who rented the house three summers ago.”

“Yes, I looked for the lease right after you called. It was a man named Jack Rawles.”

“What’d he look like?”

“A pleasant-looking person.”

“Young, old?”

“In his late twenties, I’d say.”

“What color hair?”

“Black.”

“Eyes?”

“Brown.”

“And his address?”

She gave him the slip of paper on which she had copied Rawles’s Commonwealth Avenue address from the lease, and then she said, “It’s not an easy house to rent, you know. Frank never did modernize it. There’s electricity, of course, but the only heat’s from the fireplaces. There’re three of them, one in the living room, one in the kitchen, and another in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It’s not too bad during the summer, but it’s an icebox in the wintertime. Are you sure you want to go out there just now?”

“Yes, we’re positive,” Hillary said.

“I’d go with you, but I haven’t fixed my husband’s supper yet.”

“We’ll return the key to you as soon as we’ve looked the place over,” Carella said.

“There’s supposed to be a dead woman there, searching for her husband,” Mrs. Barton said.

At a local garage Carella bought a pair of skid chains and asked the attendant to put them on the car while he and Hillary got something to eat at the diner up the street. It was still snowing when they left the town at 7:00. The plows were working the streets and the main roads, but he was grateful for the chains when they hit the cutoff that led to the strand of land jutting out into the Atlantic. A sign crusted with snow informed them that this was Albright’s Spit, and a sign under it warned that this was a dead-end road. The car struggled through the thick snow, skidding and lurching up what Carella guessed was a packed sand road below. He almost got stuck twice, and when he finally spotted the old house looming on the edge of the sea, he heaved a sigh of relief and parked the car on a relatively level stretch of ground below the sloping driveway. Together, the flashlight lighting their way, he and Hillary made their way to the front door.

“Yes, this is it,” Hillary said. “This is the house.”

The front door opened into a small entryway facing a flight of stairs that led to the upper story. He found a light switch on the wall to the right of the door and flicked it several times. Nothing happened.

“Wind must’ve knocked down the power lines,” he said, and played the flashlight first on the steps leading upstairs and then around the small entryway. To the right was a door leading to a beamed kitchen. To the left was the living room—what would have been called the “best room” in the days when the house was built. A single thick beam ran the length of the room. There were two windows in the room, one overlooking the ocean, the other on the wall diagonally opposite. The fireplace was not in the exact center of the wall bearing it; the boxed stairwell occupied that space. It was, instead, tucked into the wall beyond, a huge walk-in fireplace with a black iron kettle hanging on a hinge, logs and kindling stacked on the hearth, big black andirons buckled out of shape from the heat of innumerable fires. On the mantel above the fireplace opening, Carella found a pair of candles in pewter candlesticks. He did not smoke; he asked Hillary for a match and lighted both candles.

The room, he now saw, was beautifully furnished in old American antiques, the likes of which could hardly be found for sale anywhere these days, except at exorbitant prices. There were several hurricane lamps around the room, and he lighted these now, and the richly burnished wood of the paneling and the furniture came to flickering life everywhere around him. If there were ghosts in this house, they could not have found a more hospitable place to inhabit. In a brass bucket by the fireplace he found several faded copies of the Hampstead News. The dates went back two years, the last time the house had been rented for the summer. He tore the newspapers to shreds, laid a bed of kindling over them, and stacked three hefty logs on top of that. The fire dispelled the lingering chill in the room and, with it, any possible notion that poltergeists might pop out of the woodwork at any moment. Outside, the wind howled in over the ocean and the shutters rattled, but the fire was crackling now, and the lamps and candles were lighted, and the only ghosts visible were the fire devils dancing on the grate. Carella went out into the kitchen, lighted the candles and lamps there, and then started another fire in the second fireplace. Neither he nor Hillary had yet gone up to the second story of the house.

In one of the kitchen cupboards he found an almost full bottle of scotch. The ice-cube trays in the refrigerator were empty, and the tap water had been turned off. He was starting out of the room with the bottle and two glasses when he noticed the kitchen door was ajar. He put down the glasses and the bottle, went to the door, and opened it all the way. The storm door outside was closed, but the simple slip bolt was unlatched. He threw the bolt and then studied the lock on the inner door. It was a Mickey Mouse lock with a spring latch that any burglar could open in seconds with a strip of celluloid, a knife blade, or a credit card. He locked it nonetheless, yanked on the knob to make certain the door was secure, and then went back into the living room, carrying the bottle of scotch and the two glasses. Hillary was standing at the fireplace. She had taken off the raccoon coat and also the green cardigan sweater. She stood with her legs slightly spread, her booted feet on the stone hearth, her hands extended toward the fire.

“Want some of this?” he said.

“Yes, please.”

“Only spirits in the place,” he said, intending a joke and surprised when she didn’t even smile in response. “We’ll have to drink it neat,” he said.

He poured generously into both glasses, put the bottle down on the mantel, raised his own glass, said, “Cheers,” and took a swallow of whiskey that burned its way clear down to his toes.

“See any ghosts yet?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Would you know one if you saw one?”

“I’d know one.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No. But I understand the phenomenon.”

“How about explaining it to me?”

“You’re a skeptic,” she said. “I’d be wasting my time.”

“Try me.”

“No. I’d rather not.”

“Okay,” he said, and shrugged. “Want to tell me about Craig’s working habits instead?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did he work? There was a sheet of paper in his typewriter on the day he was killed. Did he normally type his stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Always? Did he ever write in longhand, for example?”

“Never.”

“Did he ever dictate?”

“To a secretary, do you mean? No.”

“Or into a machine?”

“A recorder?”

“Yes. Did he ever put anything on tape?”

The word seemed to resonate in the room. He had not yet told her that Maude Jenkins had typed a portion of Craig’s book from a two-hour cassette he’d delivered near the end of the summer three years ago. Hillary did not immediately answer. A log shifted on the grate; the fire crackled and spit.

“Did he?” Carella said.

“Not that I know of.”

“What was his voice like?”

“Greg’s voice?”

“Yes. I understand he was a heavy smoker. Was his voice hoarse or…?” He searched for another word and finally used the one Maude Jenkins had used in describing the voice on the tape. “Rasping? Would you call it rasping?”

“No.”

“At least a portion of Deadly Shades was on tape,” he said. “About a hundred pages of it. Were there—?”

“How do you know that?”

“I spoke to the woman who typed it. Were there any other tapes? The published book ran something like three hundred pages, didn’t it?”

“Close to four hundred.”

“So where are the tapes? If the first part of it was on tape…”

“I never saw any tapes,” Hillary said.

“Who typed the final manuscript?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know Greg while he was working on Shades.”

“Who normally types his stuff? In the city, I mean.”

“He hasn’t had anything typed recently. He was still working on the new book, he had no reason to have it typed clean till he finished it.”

“Would Daniel Corbett have known anything about the existence of any tapes?”

“I have no idea,” Hillary said, and the candles on the mantel-piece went out.

Carella felt a sudden draft in the room and turned abruptly toward the front door, thinking it might have been blown open by the raging wind. He could see past the edge of the boxed stairwell to the small entryway. The door was closed. He went to it anyway and studied the lock—the same as the one on the kitchen door but securely latched nonetheless. He went out into the kitchen. The hurricane lamps were still burning on the fireplace mantel and the drainboard, but the candles he had lighted on the kitchen table were out—and the kitchen door was open.

He stood looking at the door. He was alone in the room. The extinguished candles sent wisps of trailing smoke up toward the ceiling beams. He put his glass down on the kitchen table, went to the door, and looked at the lock. The thumb bolt has been turned; the spring latch was recessed into the locking mechanism. As earlier, the storm door was closed—but the slip bolt had been thrown back. He heard a sound behind him and whirled instantly. Hillary was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

“They’re here,” she whispered.

He did not answer her. He locked both doors again and was turning to relight the candles when the hurricane lamp on the drainboard suddenly leaped into the air and fell to the floor, the chimney shattering, kerosene spilling from the base and bursting into flame. He stamped out the flames, and then felt another draft, and knew without question that something had passed this way.

He would never in his life tell a single soul about what happened next. He would not tell any of the men in the squadroom because he knew they would never again trust a certified lunatic in a shoot-out. He would not tell Teddy because he knew that she, too, would never completely trust him afterward. He was turning toward where Hillary stood in the doorway when he saw the figure behind her. The figure was a woman. She was wearing a long dress with an apron over it. A sort of granny hat was on her head. Her eyes were mournful, her hands were clasped over her breasts. She would have been frightening in any event, appearing as suddenly as she had, but the terrifying thing about her was that Carella could see through her body and into the small entryway of the house. Hillary turned in the same instant, either sensing the figure behind her or judging it to be there from the look on Carella’s face. The woman vanished at once or, rather, seemed swept away by a fierce wind that sucked her shapelessly into the hall and up the stairs to the second floor of the house. A keening moan trailed behind her; the whispered name “John” echoed up the stairwell and then dissipated on the air.

“Let’s follow her,” Hillary said.

“Listen,” Carella said, “I think we should—”

“Come,” she said, and started up the stairwell.

Carella was in no mood for a confrontation with a restless spirit looking for a John. What did one do when staring down a ghost? He had not held a crucifix in his hands for more years than he cared to remember, and the last time he’d had a clove of garlic around his neck was when he’d had pneumonia as a child and his grandmother had tied one there on a string to ward off the evil eye. Besides, were you supposed to treat ghosts like vampires, driving stakes into their hearts and returning them to their truly dead states? Did they even have hearts? Or livers? Or kidneys? What the hell was a ghost? And besides, who believed in them?

Carella did.

He had never been so frightened since the day he’d walked in on a raving lunatic wielding a hatchet, the man’s eyes wide, his mouth dripping spittle, someone’s severed hand in his own left hand, dripping blood onto the floor as he charged across the room to where Carella stood frozen in his tracks. He had shot the man six times in the chest, finally dropping him an instant before the hatchet would have taken off his nose and part of his face. But how could you shoot a ghost? Carella did not want to go up to the second story of this house. Hillary was already halfway up the stairs, though, and neither did he want to be called chickenshit. Why not? he thought. Call me chickenshit, go ahead. I’m afraid of ghosts. This goddamn house was carried here stick by stick from Salem, where they hanged witches, and I just saw somebody dressed like Rebecca Nurse or Sarah Osborne or Goody Proctor or whoever the hell, and she was wailing for a man named John, and there ain’t nobody here but us chickens, boss. Adios, he thought, and saw Hillary disappear around the corner at the top of the stairs, and suddenly heard her screaming. He pulled his gun and took the steps up two at a time.

Hillary, courageous ghost hunter that she was, had collapsed in a dead faint on the floor. An eerie blue light bathed the second-story hallway. The hallway was icy cold; it raised the hackles at the back of his neck even before he saw the women standing there. There were four of them. They all were dressed in what looked like late-seventeenth-century garments. He could see through them and beyond them to the window at the end of the hallway where snow lashed the ancient leaded panes. They began advancing toward him. They were grinning. One of them had blood on her hands. And then, suddenly, a sound intruded itself from someplace above—the attic, he guessed. He could not make out the sound at first. It was a steady throbbing sound, like the beat of a muffled heart. The women stopped when they heard the sound. Their heads moved in unison, tilting up toward the beamed ceiling. The sound grew louder, but he still could not identify it. The women shrank from the sound, huddling closer together in the corridor, seeming to melt one into the other, their bodies overlapping and then disappearing entirely, sucked away by the same strong wind that had banished the specter below.

He squinted his eyes against the wind. It died as suddenly as it had started. He stood trembling in the corridor, Hillary on the floor behind him, snowlight piercing the window at the farthest end, the steady throbbing sound above him. No, it was more like a thumping, the slow, steady thump of—

He recognized the sound all at once.

Someone was bouncing a ball in the attic.

He stood just outside the door to the story above, debating whether he should go up there, thinking maybe somebody was working tricks with lights and wind machines, causing apparitions to appear, a theater of the supernatural, designed to cause a psychic to faint dead away and an experienced detective to stand shaking in his sodden loafers. He told himself there couldn’t be anything like ghosts—but he had already seen five of them. He told himself there was nothing to fear, but he was terrified. Fanning the air with his pistol, he made his way up the steps to the attic. The stairs creaked under his cautious tread. The ball kept bouncing somewhere above him.

She was standing at the top of the stairs. She was no older than his daughter April, wearing a long gray dress and a faded sunbonnet. She was grinning at him. She was bouncing a ball, and grinning, and chanting in tempo with the bouncing ball. The chant echoed down the stairwell. It took him a moment to realize that she was repeating over and over again the words “Hang them.” The ball bounced, and the child grinned, and the words “Hang them, hang them” floated down the stairwell to where he stood with the pistol shaking in his fist. The air around her shimmered, the ball took on an iridescent hue. She took a step down the stairwell, the ball clutched in her fist now. He backed away, and suddenly lost his footing, and went tumbling down the stairs to the floor below. Above him, he heard her laughter. And then, suddenly, the sound of the ball bouncing again.

He got to his feet and turned the pistol up the steps. She was no longer there. On the floor above he could see a blue luminous glow. His elbow hurt where he had landed on it in his fall. He dragged Hillary to her feet, held her limply against him, hefted her painfully into his arms, and went down the steps to the first floor. Above he could still hear the bouncing ball. Outside the house he carried Hillary to where he’d parked the car, the snowflakes covering her clothes till she resembled a shrouded corpse. He heaved her in onto the front seat and then went back to the house—but only to pick up their coats. The ball was still bouncing in the attic.

He heard it when he went outside again, stumbling through the deep snow toward the car. He heard it over the whine of the starter and the sudden roar of the engine. He heard it over the savage wind and the crash of the ocean. And he knew that whenever in the future anything frightened him, whenever any unknown dark terror seized his mind or clutched his heart, he would hear again the sound of that little girl bouncing the ball in the attic—bouncing it, bouncing it, bouncing it.

It was close to 10:00 when they got back to the hotel. The night clerk handed him a message over the desk. It read: Calvin Horse called. Wants you to call him at home. Carella thanked him, accepted the keys to both rooms, and then led Hillary to the elevators. She had been silent from the moment she regained consciousness in the automobile. She did not say a word now on the way up to the second floor. Outside her door, as she unlocked it, she asked, “Are you going straight to bed?”

“Not immediately,” he said.

“Would you like a nightcap?”

“I have to make a call first.”

“I’ll phone room service. What would you like?”

“Irish coffee.”

“Good, I’ll have one, too. Come in when you’re ready,” she said, and opened the door and went into the room. He unlocked his own door, took off his coat, sat on the edge of the bed, and dialed Hawes’s home number. He debated greeting him as Mr. Horse, but he was in no mood for squadroom humor just now. Hawes picked up on the third ring.

“Hawes,” he said.

“Cotton, this is Steve. What’s up?”

“Hi, Steve. Just a second, I want to lower the stereo.” Carella waited. When Hawes came back on the line, he said, “Where’ve you been? I called three times.”

“Out snooping around,” Carella said. He did not mention the ghosts he’d seen; he would never mention the ghosts he’d seen. He shuddered involuntarily now at the mere thought of them. “What’ve you got?”

“For one thing, a lot of wild prints from that pawnshop counter. Some very good ones, according to the lab boys. They’ve already sent them over to the ID Section; we may get a make by morning. I hope.”

“Good. What else?”

“Our man took another shot at it. This time he tried to hock the gold earrings with the pearls. Place on Culver and Eighth. They’re worth close to six hundred bucks, according to Hillary Scott’s list.”

“What happened?”

“He was prepared this time. Wouldn’t show a driver’s license, said he didn’t drive. The broker would’ve accepted his Social Security card, but he said he’d left that at home. He produced a postmarked letter addressed to him at 1624 McGrew. Name on the envelope was James Rader. The broker got suspicious because it looked like the name and address had been erased and then typed over again. He wouldn’t have taken it as identification anyway, but it alerted him, you know? So he went in the back room to check our flyer. When he came out again, the guy was gone, and the earrings with him.”

“Anything on James Rader?”

“Nothing in the phone directories, I’m running the name through ID now. It’s most likely a phony. I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’ve also sent the envelope to the lab. There may be prints on it they can compare against the others.”

“How about the address?”

“Nonexistent. McGrew runs for six blocks east to west, just this side of the Stem. Highest number on the street is 1411. He pulled it out of thin air, Steve.”

“Check for Jack Rawles,” Carella said. “The J. R. matches, he may be our man. If there’s nothing for him in the city, check the Boston directories for a listing on Commonwealth Avenue. And if there’s nothing in those, call the Boston PD, see if they can come up with a make.”

“How do you spell the Rawles?” Hawes asked.

“R-A-W-L-E-S.”

“Where’d you get the name?”

“He was renting the house Craig described in his book.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Maybe nothing. Check him out. I’ll be up for a while yet, give me a ring if you get anything.”

“What do you make of all this running around trying to hock the jewels?” Hawes asked.

“Amateur night in Dixie,” Carella said. “He needs money, and he doesn’t know any fences. What’d he sound like?”

“Who?”

“The guy who tried to pawn that stuff,” Carella said impatiently. “James Rader or whatever the fuck his name was.”

“Steve?” Hawes said. “Something wrong up there?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Can you reach those pawnbrokers?”

“Well, they’ll be closed now. It’s close to—”

“Try them at home. Ask them if the guy had a rasping voice.”

“A rasping voice?”

“A rasping voice, a hoarse voice. Get back to me, Cotton.”

He hung up abruptly, rose from the bed, paced the room a moment, and then sat again and dialed Boston Information. In the room next door he could hear Hillary ordering from room service. Carella gave the Boston operator both names—Jack Rawles and James Rader—and asked for a listing on Commonwealth Avenue. She told him she had a listing for a Jack Rawles, but that it was not for Commonwealth Avenue. He wrote down the number anyway and then asked for the address. She told him she was not permitted to give out addresses. He told her testily that he was a police officer investigating a homicide, and she asked him to hold on while she got her supervisor. The supervisor’s voice dripped treacle and peanut butter. She explained patiently that it was telephone company policy not to divulge the addresses of subscribers. When Carella explained with equal patience that he was an Isola detective working a homicide case and gave her the precinct number and its address, and the name of his commanding officer, and then his shield number for good measure, the supervisor said, simply and not so patiently, “I’m sorry, sir,” and hung up on him.

Angrily he dialed the number the operator had given him for Jack Rawles. In the hallway outside, Carella could hear someone knocking on Hillary’s door. He was about to hang up when a woman answered the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Mr. Rawles, please,” Carella said.

“Sorry, he’s out just now.”

“Where is he, would you know?”

“Who’s this, please?”

“An old friend,” he said. “Steve Carella.”

“Sorry, Steve, he’s out of town,” the woman said.

“Who’s this?”

“Marcia.”

“Marcia, do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No, I just got back myself. I’m a flight attendant, I got stuck in London. There’s a note here for my boyfriend, says Jack had to go down to the city, won’t be back for a couple of days.”

“What city?” Carella said.

“The city, man,” Marcia said. “There’s only one city in the entire world, and it ain’t Boston, believe me.”

“By your boyfriend…who do you mean?”

“Jack’s roommate, Andy. They’ve been living together since the fire.”

“What fire was that?” Carella said.

“Jack’s place on Commonwealth. Lost everything he had in it.”

“What’s he doing these days?” Carella asked.

“When did you last see him?”

“We met here in Hampstead, three summers ago.”

“Oh. Then he’s doing the exact same thing. He must’ve been at the Hampstead Playhouse then, am I right?”

“Still acting?” Carella asked, taking a chance and hoping Jack Rawles hadn’t been a stage manager or an electrician or a set designer.

“Still acting,” Marcia said. “Or at least trying to act. In the summer it’s stock. In the winter it’s zilch. Jack’s always broke, always scrounging for a part someplace. The only time he ever had any money was just before that summer in Hampstead, and he blew it all to rent that house he was staying in. Two thousand bucks, I think it was, for a television commercial he did in the city. I keep telling him he should move down there. What’s there for an actor in Boston?”

“I don’t remember him mentioning a fire,” Carella said, circling back.

“Well, when did you say you’d met? Three summers ago? The fire wasn’t until…let me think.”

Carella waited.

“Two years ago, it must’ve been. Yeah, around this time, two years ago.”