House.
I was coming up on the man now, and I could discern that he was, as I had feared, quite an old-looking man.
Then another strange impulse came to me. Despite my sudden anxiousness, I must talk to this old man. I must find out who he was.
I saw him turn his head to watch the last of my approach, no doubt distracted by my scuffing of leaves. I felt guiltily intimidating, a grown man in a horror mask, but also safely hidden behind it. Anonymous, my true self shrouded.
Luckily I didn’t have to begin a casual conversation. He started.
“Little big for trick-or-treating, aren’t ya?”
I came within a few paces of him. “Ah, I’m on my way to a masquerade party.” I was surprised that my voice was shaky, like when I’d first asked Pammy out.
The old man glanced down into my plastic pumpkin. “Looks like you been trick-or-treating to me.”
“Friends’ houses…as a joke,” I stammered. I was defensive, as if interrogated, pulled over by a patrol car. “How about you? You trick-or-treating?”
“Ha,” the old man laughed, “I could, with this mug, is that what you mean?”
“Oh no…I didn’t mean that. We all get old, right?”
“I suppose.” The man became serious. His eyes looked like they wanted to get through my eye holes. My eyes, thus exposed, felt vulnerable.
“You live here in old Ed Phillips’s place?” I asked. Supposed to sound casual. My voice broke.
I
“Don’t I know you? You look familiar,” I lied. The only face that reminded me of this man was the one I had on.
“Lived in town until 1960,” the man replied. “Then moved on to Shrewsbury. I used to be chief of police here…”
“
“That’s me. You know me?”
“Oh…no…not personally. I know of you.”
“You a townie?”
“Yes.”
“Your family must’ve known me. I’m seventy-seven now.” McGee looked at the Yellow House again and wagged his head, dumbfounded, as if he had aged from the thirty-seven of 1950 to the seventy-seven of 1990 all at once, just before I walked up to him. “Seventy-seven,” he repeated, his breath coming out in ghostly steam.
I was much less nervous now, much more intrigued. “You know a lot about this place. Ed Phillips’s place.”
“Nobody knows a lot about Ed Phillips’s place, son. Nobody
“I’m pretty interested in the place, myself. You must be. You were staring at it a minute ago.”
“I come here about every Halloween night, boy. Just like everybody else does. Like the place ain’t here except on Halloween night. It is but it ain’t.”
“Very true. But why do you come…to look?”
“I look.” The old man was lost in his staring again. He appeared troubled. Uncertain. Afraid. “I best be moving on,” he mumbled to himself. “It’s cold…”
“A lot of funny stories.”
“What’s so funny? You wouldn’t think it was funny if you seen those cages in the cellar.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what about them.”
“You think he was up to no good?”
“Absolutely, boy. We don’t want to know what he was up to.”
“Yes we do. We both do…that’s why we’re here. But I thought you were the one who said that Phillips couldn’t have had anything to do with the disappearance of those two old guys. That’s what I always heard.”
“You heard right.” McGee was able to look at me again, away from the house. “I didn’t think it was him, at first.”
“But you did later?” No answer. “If you suspected him later then why didn’t you take him in for questioning?”
“Because by the time I believed it he was gone.”
“So is that why he ran off? He found out you were onto him?”
“He didn’t run off.” McGee started at a child’s scream of laughter down the street. He shuddered and tucked his head into his shoulders. “I been drinking and I’m old and tired. I gotta go home now and forget the past until next year if I’m still here. And I suppose I’ll come to look then, too. Almost every year, even when I lived in Shrewsbury…”
“You never told anyone that you changed your mind about his innocence?”
McGee squinted at me. “Who are you? Do I know you?”
“No. I was a little boy when you left town.”
“You want to know why I changed my mind? Do you? Well, you wouldn’t believe me. Drunken babblings, you’d say. And that’s just what they’d have said back then, if I told them what I saw.
“See who?”
“Phillips. Ed Phillips. I saw him that night.”
“What night?”
“I never told them.”
“
“The baby,” he interrupted, “was wrapped in men’s pajamas, left on the step with no note, bawling its head off. Little boy. Doc Sullivan thought he heard someone pounding on the door. When he came down, nobody was there but the baby—the person who left it musta ran off, he figured. But he coulda sworn he heard someone yelling, ‘Help me, help me’ in a strangled kind of voice when he heard that pounding. Just a trick to get him to come down and find the baby, he figured. So they put it in the papers but nobody ever identified the baby, and this couple came and adopted it, couple here in town. So that was the end of that…so they all think.”
“But…”
“Let me finish. I can tell you now—hell, what can they do, take away my badge? What do I care, I’m seventy-seven…”
“You saw Ed Phillips that night?”
“I was sittin’ in my cruiser down the reservoir with a bottle. Heat on. Relaxing. I had too much, I admit it…I had a problem then…”
“But you saw him? After he’d supposedly disappeared already?”
“He came out of the woods, right in front of me. Damn near had a coronary. He looked at me. We just stared at each other a minute. I should’ve gotten out, I should’ve…I didn’t. I sat there. I couldn’t get out. Then he just stumbled off in the dark and I lost sight of him. I didn’t go after him. I didn’t call it in.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid, boy. I was plain paralyzed afraid. It was his face. His hair all sticking out, his eyes…sticking out. Like a crazy man. And he was twitching all over, and jerking, like he was having a fit the whole time. Scariest damn thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t really explain it now thirty-three years later. And I never told a soul.”
“And that same night the baby was left on the doctor’s doorstep?”
“The same night. The next day I found out about that. I saw the baby, and the pajamas it was wrapped in.
