The Return of the Black Widowers (41 page)

"I then spent what I can only describe as a delicious two weeks working on my book, with my papers, notes, and reference materials scattered about me. No one disturbed me, and the weather, except for one dreary day of rain and wind, was fine. When the time came to leave, I was quite regretful."

Gonzalo said, "Don't leave yet. What about the haunted cabin?"

"I'm getting to that. Each evening, except for the rainy one, I'd walk to the village and back, partly for exercise, and partly to buy perishables. I exchanged a few remarks on the weather with any locals I met and they replied noncommittally. They were polite, if not communicative.
Except
in the matter of the haunted cabin. There they unbent as far as a Vermonter could unbend.

"They were willing to point out its location, for instance. I asked them what the haunting consisted of. They didn't know, or wouldn't say. Apparently 'city fellows' had occasionally spent time in the cabin and one old local man said he had heard tell that strange noises and sounds could be heard in the cabin.

"I was suspicious of the whole deal but did my best not to show it. For one thing, the cabin was old but not
very
old. It was not in a dilapidated state. For another, there were no stories to account for the haunting and I considered that very odd. Your haunted house invariably comes with a dark tale of lust, cruelty, murder, or betrayal to account for the haunting, and the deeds almost always date back at least two centuries. Without it, I suspected bald-faced fakery."

Avalon said, "Why? What kind of fakery?"

DaRienzi smiled grimly. "I felt quite firmly that the whole thing was homegrown and of recent vintage. It was invented by the natives themselves as a kind of tourist attraction. I later found out that the village inn had prospered greatly in the last several years, and the Burlington newspapers had run several articles on the haunted cabin. The thing was their Loch Ness monster, if you know what I mean."

Gonzalo snapped his fingers in frustration. "Damn! Then you're saying there was no haunted cabin, after all."

"Of course not," said DaRienzi. "Did you think there would be? Even if the cabin were an old dilapidated wreck and had once been owned by a wicked farmer who abused and killed his innocent wife, do you think it would be haunted?
Really
haunted? — Besides, I haven't finished the story.

"On the last evening there, I intended to inspect the so-called haunted cabin. The storekeeper had the key and he surrendered it to me at my request early in the day, with as near a smile as his habitually dour expression permitted. 'Here you are, sir,' he said. I'm sure he then spread the story and the locals looked forward with anticipation to scaring me and having another story for the Burlington papers, and another infusion of wealth for the village.

"I inspected the house quickly and superficially by day. I didn't want any spying local to get too suspicious about the professionalism of the kind of search I might make. It was very ordinary, with the usual air of quiet and loneliness that long-deserted houses have. I found nothing unusual. After nightfall, I returned. There was no electricity, of course. You can't have that in a haunted house. Ghosts are, in any case, the children of the wavering, flickering shadows of the hearth fire. The steady light of electric bulbs is sure death to ghosts. It was necessary to investigate the house by flashlight, but I had a good one.

"I now gave the house a
real
inspection, foot by foot and inch by inch. I had no trouble discovering the wiring and the microphones. I suppose the local TV repairman had set it up and was
under the impression he had done a good job, but he could scarcely expect to fool the trained and practiced eye."

Gonzalo said, "Then it was just as fake as you expected. And an obvious fake, too."

"Why are you surprised?" asked DaRienzi. "All haunted houses are fakes, but very few, I admit, as obviously so as this one."

"I suppose," said Drake, looking thoughtful, "that there was no point in lingering after that."

"On the contrary," said DaRienzi. "I felt it important to stay the night. I was curious as to the sort of manifestations they would manufacture for me. Surely they hadn't wired the place for nothing. And it's a good thing I did, because, as I told you at the beginning, they did startle me. I took off my jacket and shoes and sat in the one chair that looked as though it would bear my weight and be reasonably comfortable. Then I waited."

"Staying up all night is no fun," muttered Trumbull.

"I didn't stay up all night," said DaRienzi. "The manifestations came long before the night was over."

"What were they?" asked Gonzalo eagerly.

"Nothing more than my name," said DaRienzi. "There was an eerie whisper, with just a trace of sound that told me it was coming in over a microphone. 'Marcellus DaRienzi, Marcellus DaRienzi,' then a pause, then again. It was repeated four times altogether and the last repetition of my name was allowed to die away into a third screech that sounded like 'Beware.' It was all very primitive.

"When I decided the show was over at about two
a.m.,
I got up, left, went to Harry's, and slept the rest of the night in comfort. By midmorning I was cleaning up and packing, and by midafternoon I left for New York."

Drake said, "Did anyone ask what had happened the night before?"

"No. They saw me and knew I was alive, but they knew what had happened. And I didn't feel any great need to discuss it."

Gonzalo writhed in his seat and finally said, "I don't want to insult you, but that's a pretty dull ghost story."

DaRienzi didn't seem the least insulted. "Actually," he said, "the ghost story had not yet begun. I was some twenty miles away from the village when it suddenly struck me like an alarm in the night. I had to pull the car over to the side of the road and start thinking."

Avalon frowned. "Thinking about what, Marc?"

"Don't you get it, Jeff? Once you found out your wife was all right, you suddenly realized you had to get to the true point: who had poked you? And once I found out that the house was a patent fake, I suddenly realized I had to get to the true point, too."

"Which was?" said Gonzalo.

"Which was: how did they know my name?"

There was a general look of surprise about the table (and a fleeting smile crossed Henry's face).

Trumbull put the general thought into words, growling, "Why shouldn't they know your name?"

"Because I never gave it to anybody in the village," said DaRienzi, "and not one of them ever asked. I told you I've made a fetish of anonymity in connection with my work all my professional life. I was there to write my book, not to publicize myself. I told no one my name. I regretted allowing anyone to see me, even.

"Do you see the problem this creates? The true believers of psychic phenomena are sometimes forced to admit fakery is involved, but they are then likely to insist that true paranormal effects are produced even in the midst of trickery. Well, then, despite all the wiring, despite the microphonic equipment, did something really paranormal take place? How could anyone have known my name?"

Trumbull said, "I don't think there's much mystery, Marcellus. You must have told someone your name."

"Rely on me,” said DaRienzi stiffly, “I didn't tell anyone my name."

"In that case," said Trumbull, "someone must have recognized you."

"I can't believe that. I have very few photos of myself and none at all for distribution."
Halsted said, "They might have seen
you,
not your photograph. After all, you must give talks about your labors, and if you ever gave a talk in Burlington someone from the village may have happened to—"

DaRienzi registered annoyance. "You haven't listened to me. I hold my anonymity sacred. I don't give talks, and I certainly never talked in Burlington."

Rubin said, "Yours is not a common name, so they couldn't have made a lucky guess."

"It's unthinkable that they would."

Rubin said, "Was the name pronounced correctly?"

DaRienzi's face relaxed into a smile. "Good for you. Actually, both names were mispronounced. Marcellus was stressed on the first syllable rather than the second, while DaRienzi was given a long 'i' sound at the close."

"Which means," said Rubin, "that the so-called ghost saw your name but had never heard it pronounced."

"Exactly," said DaRienzi. "I came to the same conclusion."

"Which leads me to think," said Rubin, "that someone broke into your friend's summer house and ransacked your papers and belongings for your name."

"I'm sure that isn't so," said DaRienzi. "They couldn't have ransacked the house without disturbing my papers and I would have noticed that at once. Besides, as it happened, I didn't have my name on anything there."

"Well, then," said Gonzalo, with more than a trace of satisfaction, "you're in Jeff's position. You're forced to consider the paranormal."

"I'm more in Jeff's position than you think, Mario, for, like Jeff, I solved the problem—or at least I found a satisfactory solution that involved nothing beyond the natural."

"And what was that?" asked Avalon.

DaRienzi said cheerfully, "Do none of you see it? It's much simpler than Jeff's solution and doesn't involve personal quirks that no one but the solver would be expected to know."

There was a longish pause, and Drake shook his head. "I'm afraid you've got us. Unless Henry has a suggestion."

"Henry," said Gonzalo abruptly, "what's the answer?"

Henry, from his quiet station at the sideboard, said, "If I may be permitted to say so, gentlemen, the solution was obvious from the start."

"Was it?" said DaRienzi a little captiously.

"I'm afraid so. At the beginning of your stay in Vermont, you bought two weeks' supplies and more at the village store. At today's prices, it may well have come to a sizable bit of money."

"It did," said DaRienzi, beginning to smile.

"And surely, considering our plastic culture, you did not pay in cash."

DaRienzi broke into a roar of laughter. "Got it! You got it! Of course I didn't pay cash. I shoved over my credit card—"

"And your name was on it," said Henry. "And your signature had to be placed on the slip they stamped, and it was so common and ordinary an action that you thought nothing of it, and didn't recall it at once later on. I'm afraid it is much more difficult to be anonymous in our modern society than we imagine."

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he man looked down at his hand and said to the waiter who was standing at the head of the stairs, "The Milano Restaurant, Fifth and Eighteenth, second floor. Right?"

"Perfectly correct, sir," said the waiter smoothly. "And you, I take it, are Mr. Halsted's guest."

"That's right. Roger invited me." He handed his umbrella to the waiter, together with his hat and so on, and carefully removed his coat. "You won't mind checking these for me, Waiter?"

"Not at all. We have a small cloakroom for the special use of the Black Widowers on the occasion of their monthly banquet."

"Good, good—I hope I'm not too late."

"Not at all, sir. The Widowers are all here, but they are still in the cocktail hour. May I bring you something to drink?"

"A dry martini, if you don't mind. —In there?"

"That's right, sir."

The man walked in and Roger Halsted, who was obviously on the lookout, said, "Ah, there you are, David. I was going to give you five more minutes before I started worrying."

"No need," said the guest. "I had absolutely no trouble except for the traffic. It's a little slushy outside and there's something about even a trace of wet snow that seems to slow everything up."

"So it does," said Halsted. "Here, let me introduce you, David. Fellow Black Widowers, this is my friend, David S. Rose, and you will have to forgive him if, after I introduce all of you, he doesn't remember your names. David is the most absent-minded person I know.

279
"David, this tall drink of water with the ferocious eyebrows is Geoffrey Avalon, a patent attorney. This short drink of water with a beard he should be ashamed of is Emmanuel Rubin, a mystery writer. This fellow with the grayish-white hair and the scowl is Thomas Trumbull. He works for the government in something he's too ashamed to describe. This one with the little moustache that looks like a smear of dirt is James Drake, a retired chemist. Finally, there's this one who's dressed to kill, and whose color combinations sometimes make us sick. He's Mario Gonzalo, an artist."