The Ghost Wore Yellow Socks - lanyon Josh. Страница 15

He turned off the lamp and listened.

Nothing.

Maybe he had dreamed it.

He turned on his side. Slowly he drifted out on the tide.

When the dragging noises began again, Perry was too deeply asleep to hear.

* * * * *

Monday afternoon found Perry sitting in a small room at the Fox Run Gazette studying the projected images from pages of back issues as they appeared and disappeared on the dingy walls.

Negro Students Sit At Woolworth Lunch Counter read the headline for the February 2, 1960 issue of the Gazette.

Perry sighed. He clicked the projector. He had nothing else to do. He was officially on vacation with nowhere to go. The dream he had centered his life around for the past months was over. The memory of those imagined Sunday brunches and walks along the beach, the anticipated trips to museums and art galleries…recalling those treasured fantasies was even more painful than the humiliating reality.

Which was saying something.

In fact, he had never felt less like a holiday. He couldn’t even work up enthusiasm for painting -- the one refuge that had never before failed him. He was too anxious to work. Too uneasy. Between Marcel and his overstrained finances…he needed something to occupy his mind, and in a weird way, the eerie occurrences at the estate provided a useful distraction.

Jane had dropped by his room for breakfast that morning. Ostensibly, she was there to borrow a cup of milk, but he suspected she thought he needed cheering up. Actually, maybe Jane was the one who needed cheering up, because once settled on his sofa she had seemed to have nothing to say, restlessly surfing the TV channels with the remote control.

“Aren’t you going to work today?” he asked, surprised. He’d never known Jane to call in sick to the realtor’s office where she worked.

She lifted a negligent shoulder. “They can do without me for a day or two. I don’t like the look of those clouds. I’d hate to get stranded on the other side of the bridge. In fact, if I were you, I’d think twice about going into town if you don’t have to.”

She did have a point. The bridge occasionally flooded out, but the idea of sitting around in Watson’s rooms all day…no thanks. He’d prefer sleeping in his car.

Watching Jane impatiently clicking buttons on the remote, he asked on impulse, “Did you ever hear of the ghost of Witch Hollow?”

Jane tore her gaze away from truTV. “Ghosts before lunchtime? Oh, sweetie!”

“But didn’t you tell me something about this place being haunted?”

“How irresponsible of me,” Jane murmured. “You don’t believe everything I tell you, do you?”

“About a third.”

Jane laughed. “Smart kid.” She pressed the remote control again, and a channel blasted Christmas gift ideas as it flashed by. She glanced at Perry. “I seem to recall reading something in the newspaper last year. One of those local color articles,” she admitted.

“It specifically mentioned the Alston Estate?”

Jane squinted as though she were looking into the distant past. Or perhaps she had a hangover. She didn’t look well, now that he noticed. Maybe she was ill but just couldn’t admit to needing a sick day. There were people like that; tiresome people who made a crusade out of never calling in sick and then infecting all their coworkers with the plague. Perry was sensitive to this, being one of those people who always caught whatever plague was circulating.

“I want to say yes,” Jane mused. “It was back in the twenties. Or maybe it was the forties. There was a murder or something. But it’s an old house; naturally, there’s history.”

“I never heard about any murder,” Perry said doubtfully.

“MacQueen’s hush-hush about it. Afraid it will scare prospective tenants, I guess. You know the older generation.”

If Mrs. Mac was anything to go by, the older generation was capable of licking the younger generation blindfolded and with one arm tied behind its back.

“It’s different for people of her generation,” Jane clarified. “Murder was a big scandal then.”

“Right,” said Perry, puzzling over the idea that murder was no longer a big scandal. “And so this ghost was the victim of a murder?”

Jane pressed the remote control again. “You’d have to check that out, sweetie. My memory’s a little vague.”

So that’s what Perry had decided to do. Check it out. After all, he’d read enough detective novels to know nobody ever solved a mystery sitting on his butt watching the rain strip the leaves off the trees.

He pressed the projector button and another slightly fuzzy page flashed on the wall. It could take hours or even days to find what he was looking for; if it even existed. Jane’s memory was notoriously faulty. He scanned the enlarged image for any mention of the Alston Estate, or any other historical homes in the area, and then squeezed the button once more.

This was dull work, but it gave him something to do. Something to think about besides Marcel.

He wondered how Nick was doing in Los Angeles. He wondered if he’d had his interview yet. He wondered if Nick would get the job and move to California.

Reaching the end of the reel, Perry rose, threaded the next strip of microfilm into the projector. Sitting down, he refocused the print on the wall and scowled at it. Detective work was a lot more interesting in the pages of authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Granted, he was just as glad that he didn’t have to deal with lantern-jawed tough guys beating him to a pulp, or sloe-eyed dames trying to slip him Mickey Finns.

He pressed the button.

It was starting to look like the last event of real interest at Fox Run had been the Revolutionary War. He clicked again.

And then, just as he was getting fed up, Perry came across an article concerning the local Preservation Society’s efforts to renovate homes in the area. In the same issue was a story about yuppies moving into the valley and purchasing older homes. The newspaper was about five years old.

Perry leaned forward on his elbows, reading eagerly.

Vermont’s long and colorful history can be found in the microcosm of Fox Run located in the Northeast Kingdom. Some of the area’s oldest buildings are preserved for posterity on the property formerly known as the Hennesey Farm. Now part of the Alston Estate, the 18th-century farmhouse boasts an icehouse, a dovecote, and a sun porch.

Bingo, thought Perry. He began to jot down notes.

The house was built in 1780 by Colonel Geoffrey Hennesey as a wedding present for his new bride. Hennesey, a commander in the Continental Army, died a month after the house was completed. His widow lived there alone until her own death in 1800. The lonely spirit of the lovely young widow is said to confine her nocturnal ramblings to the original structure.

Which part of the house is the original structure? wondered Perry.

During Prohibition the house sold to the investment banker Henry Alston, who extensively renovated the structure. The house was the setting for many gala society gatherings. In 1923, Alston married one of Ziegfeld’s Glorified Girls, silver-screen legend Verity Lane, and old money met new in a clash of Titans. Typically, most evenings’ amusements included hot jazz, bootlegged alcohol, and illegal gambling for the Alston’s wealthy and famous friends. The house gained notoriety during the winter of 1932, when the notorious gangster Shane Moran and his gang descended on a private party, stealing over a million dollars worth of jewels and valuables from the wealthy partygoers.

Perry whistled soundlessly. Hard to believe the dusty, dark halls of the old house had ever been alive with laughter and music.

Moran was killed by G-men in a shoot-out less than a week following the robbery. The whereabouts of the loot remains a mystery to this day.