The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) (12 page)

I breathed out hard as I put the phone down.
 

Despite the whirl of questions and 'what ifs' stampeding through my head, I didn't feel any fresh hurt from Gemma's death, only a sense of relief that she’d died instantly. I understood a little of what Ed meant about how bad it is to wonder what happened but never actually to know. No surprise the need for justice or revenge, whichever it was he wanted, was eating away at him.
 

Gemma's murderer had been waiting specifically for her, of that I was positive. He'd picked a spot to shoot from and made sure he could get down to her car quickly. There’d been no audible shot, which suggested the gun had been small caliber or else silenced — probably why the round hadn’t gone far after it hit — and he’d only needed to fire once, even though it was growing dark and she was a moving target. He’d known to search for the bullet and take it away, and he’d done a fair job of making it look like it went clean through. He’d shut off the engine to make the car harder to spot and tidied up before he’d left. He’d come and gone on foot, which meant he’d either had a vehicle stashed nearby, or he’d been willing to hike miles in the snow and the dark. In any case, he’d been familiar with the area.
 

And someone had told him she was coming.

When I crawled off the couch next morning there was light coming in through the windows, but that didn't mean anything much. The clock on the mantel was flickering as if the batteries were low. I tried to work out how many days had passed since I got here, but I couldn’t get the same answer twice.
 

Outside, the town looked dead, deserted. Glancing both ways down West Road I saw maybe one or two cars still in people's driveways, but no more than that, and no one on the street. Everyone else must have already left for work. I checked my jacket twice, once for the keys, once more for the gun.

I’d started to understand the whole thing a little better since hearing the recording again. The preparation the killer must have done to get both the time and place right and to make a clean escape afterwards. The fact that he’d known where she was driving from and where she was heading. He’d known what car she was in and must have had some inkling of when she'd pass his position.

Altmann would’ve known all of that. He'd been to the house before and he could have checked her shift schedule. Anyone else working at the hospital could also have known, as might, perhaps, any regular work contacts outside the hospital. Her neighbors might also have known enough to make them possibilities, though the ones I’d spoken to didn’t seem to know a damn thing. The voice I’d heard on the recording didn't sound like Dr Altmann, although I only had one word to go on and that was at some distance from the phone. What bothered me most, though, was still motive: why did the guy kill Gemma?
 

I had no idea of the exact route I’d taken to North Bleakwater in the dark, so I just followed the road down to the lakeshore and then cut around the edge of the frozen water, tracking the shoreline for a half hour or so until I saw the first broken shells of buildings looming through the snow-shrouded trees.

Maybe the murderer had been a pro working to hire, in which case the information needed to ambush Gemma would’ve come from his employer and all bets were off in terms of alibis and voices. Motive, then, was still an issue though;if anything an even bigger one. Maybe he’d been a nut who saw himself as an assassin. A local backwoods psycho would have a familiarity with the area, but what about the shooting skill? And why was Gemma the only shooting victim in the area for years if the guy was pathological?

Unless Gemma wasn’t his only recent victim. Stephanie Markham had last been seen heading up the same stretch of road. Maybe there was someone out in the woods who regarded it as his territory, and death to trespassers. But even that didn’t sit right; why shoot her driving through it and leave all the other traffic on the same road at the same time alone?

Nevertheless, the killer couldn't have hiked miles to the scene. So he’d either hidden his vehicle nearby, or else he lived in town. And where better to hide your car than the overgrown, barely-used track that led to North Bleakwater? It joined the highway maybe a half mile south of where Gemma died. Whoever had broken into the house the other night had hidden their car in the town itself. If the intruder was connected to the murder, maybe even the guy who’d done it, then presumably they'd have been happy to use the same place. If the killer had paid regular visits for long enough, maybe Stephanie Markham had encountered him on a detour from her hike, off looking at the old ruins, and saw something she shouldn’t have. Even the Haleys — they were tourists, just the sorts to make the trip to a genuine ghost town.

Fitting Gemma into the equation was still the hardest part, but I had time to work on that if I found anything here.

I passed the L-shaped remains of a small factory of some sort. Two rows of high, narrow windows in the brickwork, post holes to suggest where one story had ended and another had begun. The interior was a mess of stonework and wood broken here and there by stunted black trees and a couple of remaining iron workbenches, all covered in a layer of snow. A crumbling edifice of cracked grey stone that might once have been a kiln or large oven of some sort, now just a shapeless mass, leaning against the collapsed remains of the building that had housed it. The space beneath the bivouacked ruins was dark, a treacherous maze of crawlspaces half-filled with dirt and ice. I could see the town's overgrown former main street running into the trees to the southeast, away from the lakeside and bound for nowhere.
 

Past the newer industrial additions to North Bleakwater, I came once more to the bridge over the dried-up bed of Echo Stream, the open space around it, and the hotel on the far side. The decaying structure had lost some, but not all, of the majesty it possessed after dark. In the grey light of day the signs of neglect were far more obvious — dark patches of damp-riddled wood, runnels of brown-red from metal fittings, holes where bugs had made a meal of the boards.
 

A lone figure in a puffy red winter coat and an insulated hunting hat was sitting on a pile of old timber outside the building. He saw me coming and said, “Morning, Alex.”

“How's it going, Ed?”

“OK,” he said. “It's going OK. I guess I should apologize for last night. I didn't have any call to go flying off the handle like I did.”

“That's all right, I understand. Why are you out here?”

“What you were talking about last night got me thinking, I guess. So when I woke up this morning, I thought I might head out to the old town and see what I could see. You know, maybe jog a memory or something. How about you?”

“I’m checking out the hotel. Someone's been here and I thought I'd find out what they were looking for. It might be nothing. You're welcome to come along.”

He nodded and climbed stiffly to his feet. Said, “Sure.”

The trail of crushed foliage at the back of the hotel was just as clear as last time I was here. I looked at the hard-packed ice. "What do you reckon?” Ed said.

“Hiking boots, I think. The older marks aren't too clear with the fresh snowfall, but from the tread that's what I'd say they were.”

“That doesn't narrow things down any, not in this area at this time of year.”

There were at least two sets, one smaller and narrower, that might have been made at the same time — a couple of people walking side by side. There were also other prints of a different sort, ordinary shoes, but there wasn’t a lot I could tell from them. A man's, probably, about the same size or a little larger than mine. There might even have been two sets of these too, overlapping. All four print groups came and went the same way. If there was a backwoods territorial psycho out here, he must have had a bunch of friends.

I was expecting a squeal of rusty hinges when I pushed the back door inwards, but all I got was a faint grating as the wood scuffled against the floor. The air was a little musty but not wholly stale; the gaps between boards and the occasional missing window had seen to that. I felt like I’d dived down to the wreck of the Titanic and gone for a walk inside. There was the same sense of opulence gone rotten over the years, the same eerily empty feeling being inside a monument to the past.
 

Ed whistled. “Would you look at all that.”

“They must have closed this place without selling everything off first. Just shut it down, let it rot.”

We were looking into what had obviously been the hotel's dining room. Most of its original fittings were still here. A dozen tables or so, half of them overturned or leaning against the walls, another two or three little more than sodden firewood. Mildew-eaten carpet that must once have been a deep red was now black with damp. The wallpaper around the room had bubbled and burst with decay, drooping in strips like jungle fronds. There were a handful of paintings still in the crumbling remains of their frames. Years of rain and snowmelt had all but cleaned the canvases and paint ran in colored smears down the walls beneath them. A pair of baroque brass chandeliers lay in verdigris-clad heaps in the middle of the wreck. In the far corner of the room a grand piano still sat forlornly, broken strings dangling underneath and a sheen of frozen damp or slime running along its sides.
 

I’d brought a pocket flashlight, and I had to use it as we crossed the room and moved away from the weak tendrils of watery light that leaked through the cracked and smeared windows. Shining the beam at the rotting carpet I saw a line, or maybe several lines, of footprints running towards a set of double doors at the far side. They opened, creakily, on to the hotel's main hall. The level of decay in the hallway was the same as in the dining room. When my beam flashed over the old reception desk, tucked away at the side, I saw where insects or rodents had gnawed at the wood and paler fresh splinters glittered white. The tracks trampled in the carpet ran to the stairs. Ed looked at them, then back at me. “Is it safe, do you think?”

“Without the tracks, I wouldn't want to risk them. But someone's been up and down them, so they've got to be reasonably sound.”

“After you, then.”

I led the way gingerly at first, then with more confidence. As we climbed I said, “Do you remember Stephanie ever talking about coming here?”

“I don't recall. Can't remember anything at all about where she used to go, what she used to see.” Ed sighed. “You can't hold on to the little things like that, no matter how hard you try. When you lose someone, you tell yourself you'll preserve every detail, the tiniest little elements of every waking moment you spent with them. It's like trying to hold a handful of water — it all slips away, it don't matter how tight you grip. All you're left with are a few drops, just the big events, the stuff with a bit more staying power. And even they fade over time.”

“Butterflies,” I said. “I think of them as butterflies.” As I said it, for one moment I could smell the meadow scent again. Hear Gemma’s laughter.

“Uh-huh. Same deal. I keep watching, waiting, hoping I'll find the guy who took Steph away, but I can't recall exactly who I'm avenging, not any more, not the details. All I remember clearly are my own feelings since it happened. It leaves you kind of hollow.” Ed looked and sounded like a decade or two of wear had just hit him all at once. “Take it from me, you want to find whoever killed your girlfriend before you get to where I am. Get your justice while you can still remember all she was. It'll make the forgetting a whole lot easier when it comes.”

There was nothing I could say to that so I didn’t try. There was a breeze blowing down from on high, cold and clammy. On the first floor landing I came across the stairwell’s former chandelier lying twisted and corroded in the plaster-spattered ruins of a reading table. It looked like the weight of it had become too much for the ceiling to bear and it had scythed down on its electrical cord like a miniature wrecking ball. The footprint trail cut around the carnage and headed north, away from the stairs, and we followed through a door that opened on to a short corridor with suites at both sides. The tracks didn't deviate into any of these, but continued straight ahead until they came to another, much narrower stairwell. I shone my flashlight up, and from the height of it I guessed we were in the tower that jutted from the western end of the hotel. As I swung the beam back to my feet to follow the trail upstairs, there was a sudden burst of noise from below.
 

Wood, splintering. Tiles, or a pile of other detritus, clattering and sliding against each other as they were disturbed. A dull thud, a brief glimmer of daylight and a high-pitched yelp. “Jesus,” Ed said, hand over his chest. “Goddamn animal scared by the light. Nearly gave me a heart attack.”

I breathed out and took my fingers away from the handgrip of my gun. Then I brought the flashlight beam back to bear on the steps, gave Ed a reassuring grin, and resumed climbing.

“I know what you meant back there, about forgetting,” I said. “My parents were killed five years back. Hit-and-run car crash while I was driving them to a restaurant.”

“That's rough. You find out who did it?”

“In a roundabout way, yeah, eventually. But I don't want to wait that long this time. You were wrong when you told me I got to say goodbye to Gemma when we buried her. I can’t say goodbye, and I won't start forgetting, not until I know whoever killed her has got what's coming.”

“And you think there's a chance what happened to her had something to do with what happened to Steph?”

“It's possible, sure. Vermont’s not the Bronx. People don’t just die in the same small area like that.”

“How does this place fit in?”
 

“I’m not sure it does yet. A guy broke into Gemma's house the night before last and I chased him back here. He had a car waiting for him. The old town would make a good hiding place if you needed one, and maybe he’d used it before. It’s just a theory, but someone’s been here for sure.”