Ghost Story

grimaced at Lewis. 'You don't look so good, pal. Maybe you ought to go home and get some rest.'

Lewis was even more puzzled than before by this remark. If he had struck the girl and if they knew about it, the sheriff would not just let him go home. 'Oh,' he said, 'I get restless at home. I'd feel a lot better if people stopped telling me I looked terrible.'

'Well, it's a miserable business,' Rowles said. 'I guess we'd all agree to that.'

'Hell, yes,' Hardesty said, finishing off his beer and pouring another. Ned's face was set in a painful expression of-what? It looked like sympathy. Lewis splashed more beer into his glass. The fiddler had switched to guitar, and now the music had become so loud that the three men had to bend over to be heard. Lewis could hear fragments of lyrics, phrases bawled into the microphones.

wrong way out, baby… wrong way out

'I was just thinking of the times when I was a kid and used to go see Benny Goodman,' he said. Ned Rowles snapped his head back, looking confused.

'Benny Goodman?' Hardesty snorted. 'Myself, I like country. Real country, Hank Williams, not the junk these kids play. That's not country. Take your Jim Reeves. That's what I like.' Lewis could smell the sheriff's breath-half beer and half some terrible foulness, as if he'd been eating garbage.

'Well, you're younger than I am,' he said, pulling back.

'I just wanted to say how sorry I was,' Ned interjected, and Lewis looked at him sharply, trying to figure out just how much trouble he was in. Hardesty was signaling to Annie, the Viking, for another pitcher. It came within minutes, slopping over when Annie set it on the table. When she walked away she winked at Lewis.

Sometime during the morning, Lewis remembered, and sometime during his drive… bare maples… he had been aware of an odd, dreamy clarity, a sharpness of vision that was like looking at an etching-a haunted wood, a castle surrounded by spiky trees-

wrong way out baby, you're on the wrong

-but now he felt muzzy and confused, everything was strange and Annie's wink was like something in a surreal movie-

you're on the wrong

Hardesty bent forward again and opened his mouth. Lewis saw a spot of blood in Hardesty's left eye, hovering below the blue iris like a fertilized egg. 'I'll tell you something,' Hardesty shouted at him. 'We got these four dead sheep, see? Throats cut. No blood and no footprints either. What do you make of that?'

'You're the law, what do you make of it?' Lewis said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the band.

'I say it's a damn funny world-gettin' to be a damn funny world,' Hardesty shouted at him, and gave Lewis one of his Texas hard-guy looks. 'Real damn funny. I'd say that your two old lawyer buddies know something about it, too.'

'That's unlikely,' Ned understated. 'But I ought to see if one of them wants to write something about Dr. John Jaffrey for the paper. Unless you'd like to, Lewis.'

'Write about John for The Urbanite?' Lewis asked.

'Well, you know, about a hundred words, maybe two hundred, anything you can think of to say about him.'

'But why?'

'Jesus wept, because you don't want Omar Norris to be the only one-' Hardesty stopped, mouth open. He looked stupefied. Lewis craned his neck to see Omar Norris across the crowded room, still waving his arms and babbling. On the bar before him sat a row of drinks. The feeling of something bad nearby which had dogged him all day intensified. An out-of-tune fiddle chord went through him like an arrow: this is it, this is it-

Ned Rowles reached across the table and touched Lewis's hand. 'Ah, Lewis,' he said. 'I was sure you knew.'

'I was out all day,' he said. 'I was-what happened?' A day after Edward's anniversary, he thought, and knew that John Jaffrey was dead. Then he realized that Edward's heart attack had come after midnight, and that this was the anniversary of his death.

'He was a leaper,' Hardesty said, and Lewis saw that he'd read the word somewhere and thought it was the kind of word he should use. The sheriff took a swallow of beer and grimaced at Lewis, full of self-conscious menace. 'He went off the bridge before noon today. Probably dead as a mackerel before he hit the water. Omar Norris there saw the whole thing.'

'He went off the bridge,' Lewis repeated softly. For some reason, he wished that he had hit a girl with his car-it was only a moment's wish, but it would have meant that John was safe. 'My God,' he said.

'We thought Sears or Ricky would have told you,' Ned Rowles informed him. 'They agreed to take care of the funeral arrangements.'

'Jesus, John is going to be buried,' Lewis said, and surprised tears came up in his eyes. He stood up and clumsily began to edge out of the booth.

'Don't suppose you could tell me anything useful,' Hardesty said.

'No. No. I have to get over there. I don't know anything. I've got to see the others.'

'Tell me if I can help at all,' Ned shouted over the noise.