Ghost Story

mouth full of intricate tastes, Lewis thought that Otto represented a kind of alternative Chowder Society- a less complicated, but equally valuable friendship.

'Let's go out and see that dog,' he said.

'Let's see the dog, hey? Lew-iss, when you see my new dog, you will go down on your knees and propose marriage to her.'

Both men put on their coats and left the office. Outside, Lewis noticed a tall skinny boy of roughly Peter Barnes's age up on the loading bay. He wore a purple shirt and tight jeans, and he was piling up the heavy molds for pickup. He stared at Lewis for a moment, then ducked his head and smiled.

As they walked toward the kennels Lewis said, 'You hired a new boy?'

'Yes. You saw him? He was the poor boy who found the body of the old lady who kept the horses. She lived near you.'

'Rea Dedham,' Lewis said. When he glanced over his shoulder, the boy was still looking at him, half-smiling; Lewis swallowed and turned away.

'Ya. He was very disturbed, and he could not stand to live near there anymore, he is a very sensitive boy, Lew-iss, and so he asked me for a job and got a room in Afton. So I gave him a broom and let him clean the machinery and stack the cheese. It is good until after Christmas, then we cannot afford him so much anymore.'

Rea Dedham; Edward and John; it pursued him even here.

Otto let the new dog out of its kennel, and was hunkering down beside it, rubbing his hands up and down its coat. It was a hound, lean and gray with muscular shoulders and haunches; the bitch did not yip like the other dogs or leap around with joy to be out of the kennel, but stood attentively beside Otto, looking about with alert blue eyes. Lewis too bent to pet it, and the hound accepted his hand and sniffed his boots. 'This is Flossie,' Otto said. 'What a dog, hey? What a beauty you are, my Flossie. Shall we take you out now for a liddle while, my Flossie?'

For the first time the bitch showed animation, tilting its head and swishing its tail. The well-schooled animal, Otto jug-eared and happy beside it, the nearness of the trees and the pervasive odors of cheesemaking, all of this seemed to swing Lewis in an arc away from the blue-jeaned boy behind him and the Chowder Society which lurked behind the boy, and he said, 'Otto, I want to tell you a story.'

'Ya? Good. Tell me, Lew-iss.'

'I want to tell you about how my wife died.'

Otto cocked his head and for a moment absurdly resembled the hound kneeling before him. 'Ya. Good.' He nodded, and reflectively ran a finger around the base of the hound's ears. 'You can tell me when we go up in the woods for an hour or two, hey? I'm glad, Lew-iss. I'm glad.'

Lewis and Otto called what they did when they went out with rifles and a dog coon-hunting, and Otto chortled about the possibility of seeing a fox, but it had been at least a year since they had shot anything. The rifles and the dog were chiefly an excuse to go rambling through the long wood which lay above the cheese factory-for Lewis, it was a sportier version of his morning runs. Sometimes they shot off their guns, sometimes one of the dogs treed something: Lewis might have tried to shoot it, but at least half the time Otto looked at the banded, angry animal up on the branch of a tree and laughed. 'Come on, Lew-iss, this one is too pretty. Let's find an ugly one.'

Lewis suspected that if they tried anything like that this time, they'd have to clear it with Flossie first. The sleek little animal was wholly businesslike. She did not go after birds or squirrels like half the other dogs, but padded along in front of them, tilting her head from side to side, her tail switching. 'Flossie is going to make us work,' he said.

'Ya. I paid two hundred dollars to look like a fool in front of a dog, hey?'

Once they were up the valley and into the trees Lewis felt his tension begin to leave him. Otto was showing off the dog, whistling to make it go out on a wide tangent, whistling again to call it back.

Now they were moving through thick woods. As Otto had predicted, it was colder and dryer up here than in the valley. In exposed territory melting snow made rivulets, and marshy ground beneath the remaining snow sucked at their boots, but under a curtain of conifers it was as if the thaw had never come. Lewis lost sight of Otto for ten minutes at a time, then caught flashes of his red jacket between green fir needles and heard him communicating with the dog. Lewis lifted his Remington to his shoulder and sighted down on a pine cone; the dog switched and skirmished up ahead, looking for a scent.

Half an hour later, when she found one, Otto was too tired to follow it. The dog began baying, and streaked off to their right. Otto lowered his blunderbuss and said, 'Ach, let it go, Flossie.' The dog whimpered, turned around to stare disbelievingly at the two men: What are you clowns doing, anyhow? Then it lowered its tail and walked back. Ten yards off, it sat down and began licking its hindquarters.

'Flossie has given up on us,' Otto said. 'We are not in her class. Have a liddle drink.' He offered Lewis a flask. 'I think we need to be warm, hey, Lewis?'

'Can you build a fire around here?'

'Sure I can. I saw a liddle deadfall back a teeny bit -lots of dry wood in there. You just scoop a hole in the snow, get your tinder and presto. Fire.'

Seeing that the hill came to its rise only twenty yards above them, Lewis climbed up while Otto went back to the deadfall to collect dry wood and tinder. Flossie, no longer interested, watched him stumble upward toward the ridge.

He did not expect what he found: they had come farther than he had thought and below him, down a long forested slope, was a streak of highway. On the other side of the highway the woods resumed again, but the few cars traveling the highway were a despoliation. They ruined his fragile mood of well-being.

And then it was as if Milburn had reached out even here, to point at him on the crest of a wooded hill: one of the cars moving rapidly down the highway was Stella Hawthorne's. 'Oh, God,' Lewis muttered, watching Stella's Volvo cross through the space directly before him. It, and the woman driving it, brought the night and the morning back to him. He might as well have pitched a tent on the square; even out in the woods, Milburn whispered behind him. Stella's car traveled up the road; her turn indicator flashed, and she pulled onto the shoulder. A moment later another car pulled in beside her. A man got out and went around to Stella's window and rapped until she opened her door.

Lewis turned away and went back down the slippery hill to Otto.

He had already started a little fire. At the bottom of a hole scooped in the snow, on a bed of stones, a flame licked at tinder. Otto fed it a larger twig, then another, then a handful, and the single flame grew into a dozen. Above this Otto built a foot-high tepee of sticks. 'Now, Lew-iss,' he said, 'warm your hands.'

'Any schnapps left?' Lewis took the flask and joined Otto on a fallen log dusted of its snow. Otto dug in his pockets and withdrew a homemade sausage sliced neatly in half. He gave half to Lewis, and bit into his own half. The fire leaped up into the tepee and warmed Lewis's ankles through his boots. He extended his hands and feet and around a bit of sausage said, 'One night Linda and I went to a dinner in one of the suites of the hotel I owned. Linda didn't live through the night. Otto, I think the same thing that got my wife is after me.'

4

Peter stood up beside the stables, crossed the court and peeked in the kitchen window. Pans on the stove, a round table laid for two: his mother had come for breakfast. He heard her footsteps as she went further into the house, obviously looking for Lewis Benedikt. What would she do when she found out he wasn't there?

Of course she isn't in danger, he told himself: this isn't her house. She can't be in danger. She'll find out Lewis isn't here and then she'll go back home. But it was too much like the other time, he looking in a window and waiting at a door while another person prowled within an empty house. She'll just go home.

He touched the door, expecting it to be locked; but it swung open an inch.

This time he would not go in. He was afraid of too much-only part of it was the possibility of meeting his mother in the house and having to invent an explanation for his being there.

But he could do that. He could say that he wanted to talk to Lewis about-about anything. Cornell University. Fraternities.

He saw Jim Hardie's crushed head sliding down a mottled wall.