“What are you doing, Jude?” she cried, pulling free at last, stumbling away from him.
“Shut up.”
She hit him in the shoulder with her left hand, then slugged him in the back with her right, the hand with the infected thumb. This hurt her more than it hurt him. She made a sick gasping sound and let him be.
He still held the doorknob. He listened to the corridor. It was quiet.
Jude eased the door back and looked through a three-inch opening, ready to slam it again, expecting the dead man to be there with his razor on a chain.
No one was in the hallway.
He shut his eyes. He shut the door. He put his forehead against it, pulled a deep breath down into his lungs and held it, let it go slowly. His face was clammy with sweat, and he lifted a hand to wipe it away. Something icy and sharp and hard lightly grazed his cheek, and he opened his eyes and saw the dead man’s curved razor in his hand, the blue-steel blade reflecting an image of his own wide, staring eyeball.
Jude shouted and flung it down, then looked at the floor, but already it wasn’t there.
11
He backed away from the door. The room was filled with the sound of strained breathing, his own and Marybeth’s. In that moment she was Marybeth. He couldn’t recall what it was he usually called her.
“What kind of shit are you on?” she asked, in a voice that hinted at a hillbilly drawl, faint but distinctly southern.
“Georgia,” he said, remembering then. “Nothing. I couldn’t be more sober.”
“Oh, the hell. What are you taking?” And that subtle, barely-there drawl was gone, receding as quickly as it had come. Georgia had lived a couple years in New York City, where she’d made a studied effort to lose her accent, didn’t like being taken for a cornpone hick.
“I got off all my shit years ago. I told you.”
“What was that in the hall? You saw something. What’d you see?”
He glared a warning at her, which she ignored. She stood huddled before him in her pajamas, her arms crossed under her breasts, hands tucked out of sight against her sides. Her feet were spread slightly apart, as if, should he try to move past her into the rest of the bedroom, she would block his way—an absurd prospect for a girl a hundred pounds lighter than he was.
“There was an old man sitting out in the hall. In the chair,” he said at last. He had to tell her something and didn’t see any reason to lie. Her opinion of his sanity didn’t trouble him. “We walked right by him, but you didn’t see him. I don’t know if you
“That’s lunatic bullshit.” She said it with no special conviction.
He started toward the bed, and she got out of his way, pressed herself to the wall.
The dead man’s suit was spread neatly across his side of the mattress. The deep, heart-shaped box lay on the floor, the black lid resting next to it, white tissue paper hanging out. He caught a whiff of the suit when he was still four paces away from it and flinched. It hadn’t smelled that way when it first came out of the box, he would’ve noticed. Now it was impossible not to notice it. It had the ripe odor of corruption, something dead and spoiling.
“Christ,” Jude said.
Georgia stood at a distance, a hand cupped over her mouth and nose. “I know. I was wondering if there was something in one of the pockets. Something going bad. Old food.”
Breathing through his mouth, Jude patted down the jacket. He thought it very likely he was about to discover something in an advanced state of decomposition. It would not have surprised him to find that Jessica McDermott Price had stuffed a dead rat into the suit, a little something extra to go with his purchase, at no additional charge. Instead, though, he felt only a stiff square of what was maybe plastic in one pocket. He slipped it out for a look.
It was a photograph, one he knew well, Anna’s favorite picture of them. She had taken it with her when she left. Danny snapped it one afternoon in late August, the sunlight reddish and warm on the front porch, the day swarming with dragonflies and glittering motes of dust. Jude perched on the steps in a worn denim jacket, his Dobro over one knee. Anna sat beside him, watching him play, her hands squeezed between her thighs. The dogs were sprawled in the dirt at their feet, staring quizzically up at the camera.
It had been a good afternoon, maybe one of the last good afternoons before things started to go bad, but looking at the photograph now brought him no pleasure. Someone had taken a Sharpie to it. Jude’s eyes had been marked out in black ink, covered over by a furious hand.
Georgia was saying something from where she stood a few feet away, her voice shy, uncertain. “What did he look like? The ghost in the hall?”
Jude’s body was turned so she couldn’t see the photograph, a lucky thing. He didn’t want her to see it.
He struggled to find his voice. It was hard to get past the unhappy shock of those black scribbles blotting out his eyes in the picture. “An old man,” he managed at last. “He was wearing this suit.”
“He just sat there?” Georgia asked. “Nothing else happened?”
“He stood up and showed me a razor on a chain. A funny little razor.”
On the day Danny took the picture, Anna was still herself, and Jude thought she’d been happy. Jude had spent most of that late-summer afternoon beneath the Mustang, and Anna had stayed close by, crawling under herself to pass him tools and necessary parts. In the photo there was a smear of motor oil on her chin, dirt on her hands and knees—an appealing, well-earned grime, the kind of filth you could take pride in. Her eyebrows were bunched up, a pretty dimple between them, and her mouth was open, as if she were laughing—or, more likely, about to ask him a question.
Anna had not asked him why he was sending her away, however, when it was over. Not after the night he found her wandering the side of the highway in a T-shirt and nothing else, people honking at her as they went past. He hauled her into the car and pulled back his fist to hit her, then slugged the steering wheel instead, punching it until his knuckles bled. He said enough was enough, that he was going to pack her shit for her, send her on her way. Anna said she’d die without him. He said he’d send flowers to the funeral.
So: She at least had kept her word. It was too late to keep his.
“Are you messing with me, Jude?” Georgia asked. Her voice was close. She was creeping toward him, in spite of her aversion to the smell. He slid the picture back into the pocket of the dead man’s suit before she could see. “Because if this is a joke, it sucks.”
“It isn’t a joke. I guess it’s possible I’m losing my mind, but I don’t think that’s it either. The person who sold me the…suit…knew what she was doing. Her little sister was a fan who committed suicide. This woman blames me for her death. I talked to her on the phone just an hour ago, and she told me so herself. That’s one part of this thing I’m sure I didn’t imagine. Danny was there. He heard me talking to her. She wants to get even with me. So she sent me a ghost. I saw him just now in the hall. And I saw him last night, too.”
He began to fold the suit, intending to return it to its box.
“Burn it,” Georgia said, with a sudden vehemence that surprised him. “Take the fucking suit and burn it.”
Jude felt, for an instant, an almost overpowering impulse to do just that, find some lighter fluid, douse it, cook it in the driveway. It was an impulse he immediately mistrusted. He was wary of any irrevocable action. Who knew what bridges might be burned along with it? He felt the slightest flicker of an idea, something about the awful-smelling suit and how it might be of use, but the thought drifted away before he could fix on it. He was tired. It was hard to pin a solid thought in place.
His reasons for wanting to hold on to the suit were illogical, superstitious, unclear even to himself, but when he spoke, he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for keeping it. “We can’t burn it. It’s evidence. My lawyer is going to want it later, if we decide to build a case against her.”
