Ghost Story

'You're doing it right now. Coming here and talking to me is part of getting to the other side. Going to Cornell will be another big part of it. You'll have so much work to do that you won't be able to brood about Milburn.'

'Can I see you again? After I'm in college?'

'You can come to see me anytime at all. And if I'm not in Milburn, I'll write to let you know where I am.'

'Good,' Peter said.

23

Ricky sent him postcards from France; Peter continued to visit, and gradually Don saw that the boy was beginning to let the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn fade into the background of his experience. In warm weather, with a new girlfriend who was also going to Cornell, Peter was beginning to relax.

But it was a false peace, and Don still waited. He never let Peter see his own tension, but it grew every week.

He had watched new arrivals to Milburn, had managed to look at all the tourists who checked into the Archer Hotel, but none of them had given him the thrill of fear Eva Galli had projected across fifty years. Several nights after drinking too much, Don dialed Florence de Peyser's telephone number and said, 'This is Don Wanderley. Anna Mostyn is dead.' The first time, the person at the other end simply replaced the phone in its cradle; the second time, a female voice said, 'Isn't this Mr. Williams at the bank? I think your loan is about to be recalled, Mr. Williams.' The third time, an operator's voice told him that the telephone had been switched to an unlisted number.

The other half of his anxiety was that he was running out of money. His bank account had no more than two or three hundred dollars in it-now that he was drinking again, enough for only a couple of months. After that he would have to find a job in Milburn, and any sort of job would keep him from patrolling the streets and shops, searching for the being whose arrival Florence de Peyser had promised.

He spent two or three hours every day, now that the weather was warm, sitting on a bench near the playground in Milburn's only park. You have to remember their time scale, he told himself: you have to remember that Eva Galli gave herself fifty years to catch up with the Chowder Society. A child growing up unobtrusively in Milburn could give Peter Barnes and himself fifteen or twenty years of apparent safety before beginning to play with them. And then it would be someone everybody knew; it would have a place in Milburn; it would not be as visible as a stranger. This time, the nightwatcher would be more careful. The only limit on its time would be that it would want to act before Ricky died of natural causes-so perhaps it had to be ready in ten years.

How old would that make it now? Eight or nine. Ten, perhaps.

If.

24

And that was how he found her. At first, he was doubtful, watching the girl who had appeared at the playground one afternoon. She was not beautiful, not even attractive-she was dark and intense, and her clothes never seemed to be clean. The other children avoided her, but children often did that; and her air of separation from them, swinging herself in lonely arcs or bouncing up and down on an otherwise empty teeter-totter, could have been a resilient child's defense against rejection.

But perhaps children were quicker at seeing real difference than adults.

He knew he would have to make up his mind quickly: his account had shrunk to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But if he took the girl away and he was wrong, what was he: a maniac?

He started wearing the Bowie knife strapped to his side beneath his shirt when he went to the playground.

Even if he was right and the girl Ricky's 'lynx,' she could stick to her role-if he took her away, she could damage him irreparably by not revealing anything and waiting for the police to find them. But the nightwatcher wanted them dead: if he was right, he did not think she would let the police and the legal system punish him for her. She liked gaudier conclusions than that.

She seemed to take no notice of him, but the child began to appear in his dreams, sitting off to one side, observing him expressionlessly, and he imagined that even when she was sitting on a swing, seemingly absorbed, she peeked at him.

Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic's desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold.

He became a fixture in the park, a motionless man who never had his hair cut and seldom shaved, after some weeks as much to be expected at his place on the bench as the swings were in their places. Ned Rowles had done a short piece about him in The Urbanite in the early spring, so he was recognized, not molested or chased away by a deputy. He was a writer, presumably he was thinking about a book; he owned property in Milburn. If people thought he was odd, they liked having a well-known eccentric in their town; and he was known to be a friend of the Hawthornes.

Don closed out his account and took his remaining money away in cash; he could not sleep, even when he drank too much; he knew he was falling back into the patterns of his breakdown after David's death. Each morning, he taped the big knife to his side before walking to the park.

If he did not act, he knew, one day he would not be able to leave his bed: his indecision would spin back into every atom of his life. It would paralyze him. This time he would not be able to write his way out of it.

One morning he motioned to another of the children, and the little boy shyly came up to him.

'What's the name of that girl?' he asked, pointing.

The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said, 'Angie.'

'Angie what?'

'Don't know.'

'Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?'

The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding that he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupping his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. 'Because she's awful.' He scampered away, and the girl swung back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher, uncaring.

Angie. Sitting inside his sweaty clothes under a warm eleven o'clock sun, he froze.

That night, in the midst of some harried dream, Don fell out of bed and staggered to his feet, holding a head which felt as though it had fractured like a dropped plate. He went into the kitchen for a glass of water and aspirin, and saw-imagined he saw-Sears James sitting at the dining-room table playing solitaire. The hallucination looked at him disgustedly, said, 'It's about time you straightened out, isn't it?' and went back to its game.

He returned to the bedroom and began throwing clothes into a suitcase, taking the Bowie knife from the top of the dresser and rolling it up in a shirt.

At seven o'clock, unable to wait any longer, he drove to the park, went to his bench and waited.

The girl appeared, walking across the damp grass, at nine. She wore a shabby pink dress he had seen many times before, and she moved swiftly, wrapped as ever in her private isolation. They were alone for the first time since Don had thought of watching the playground. He coughed, and she looked directly at him.

And he thought he understood that all of these weeks, he sitting rooted to his bench and fearing for his sanity, she obliviously, concentratedly playing by herself, had been part of her game. Even the doubt (which still would not leave him) was part of the game. She had tired him, weakened him, tortured him as she had surely tortured John Jaffrey before persuading him to jump from the bridge into a freezing river. If he was right.

'You,' he said.

The girl sat on a swing and looked across the playground to him.

'You.'

'What do you want?'

'Come here.'

She stood up off the swing and began to march toward him. He couldn't help it-he was afraid of her. The girl paused two feet in front of him and looked into his face with unreadable black eyes.

'What's your name?'

'Angie. Nobody ever talks to me.'

'Angie what?'