Ghost 19

Chapter One

Meritville, New York

1959

NOW

I opened my eyes when I heard footsteps at the front door. A man’s footsteps. Heavy, slow at first, then slightly hurried.

I did not move. I was curled on the kitchen floor, my knees up, my shoulder aching, my cheek to the vinyl. Light came blue-gray through the high window above the sink. I was wearing a cotton slip and nothing else. My head pounded. My eyes were dry. I kept my fingers curled over the handle of the knife that rested on the floor.

He came through the front door and moved down the hall. I heard him enter the sitting room, pause, then move out again. Looking for me, though he didn’t call out. He paused at the bottom of the steps, and I could practically hear him wonder to himself if he should ascend. If he’d find me in bed, tucked in, happily asleep. That would be an awkward moment, but it would be navigable, familiar, easy to understand. A moment that could happen between any man and woman on any sort of day.

He thought it over, then he turned away from the staircase, and I closed my eyes. How did he know?

It didn’t take him long—the house wasn’t very big. He checked the bathroom, looked out the back window in the sitting room, and then came into the kitchen, his steps coming toward me as inexorably as clockwork. I opened my eyes again and curled my knees higher, my hand gripping the knife a little more tightly. My head was pounding so hard my vision tried to blur.

He paused at the kitchen doorway, undoubtedly taking me in. His feet came into my line of vision, then his lower legs. He wore casual trousers today, dark gray, and his shoes were immaculate. Of course they were.

He hitched his trousers—that unconscious, uniquely male gesture—and dropped to a crouch. My temple gave a sickening throb. I was a picture, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t summon the will to care. I took a cold breath and tilted my head to look up at him, keeping my hand on the knife.

He had draped his forearms over his knees, his wrists dangling. He wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the throat, a jacket, and no tie—he wasn’t in his usual full suit, the armor of a police detective. He was hatless. His hair was tidy and combed back, his dark brown eyes fixed on me. He had shaved this morning. When he’d walked out my door yesterday, I’d thought it would be the last time I would see him. I’d assumed. The clock on the wall behind his shoulder said it was six o’clock in the morning.

He watched me, and I listened to him breathe. He didn’t look at me pruriently, didn’t let his eyes travel my body through the slip. He looked only at my face. Then he reached down, as casual as you please, and put a fingertip to the flat of the knife blade against the floor. With no effort at all, he slid the knife from my hand and further away on the vinyl.

Care to explain? he asked.

I stared at him. I’d been here so long, so many hours, that I no longer knew how to move. My body simply couldn’t. There was something in the cellar, I said, my voice rusty. Last night. Something dead. It tried to come up through the door.

There was not a flicker of surprise on his face, and he moved not a single dark eyelash in condemnation. And that was when I knew that Detective Ian Challis actually believed me.

The clock ticked behind him on the wall.

All right, Ginette, he said. Why don’t you start from the beginning?

Chapter Two

THEN

People have always said there’s something wrong with me. Mother said it, because only women of A Certain Kind became actresses. Some of my directors dubbed me Mad Gin, but theater directors are notoriously mad themselves. Henry believed it, those last days as we fought and fought. What in the hell is wrong with you? Why can’t you just be a normal woman?

After that, the doctors. Nerves. Breakdown. Unstable. That meant pills, and injections, and a quiet room, and more pills. They watched Mad Gin, and they made notes about her, and they asked about her father over and over again—I felt like making up answers, but I knew they’d find me out—and eventually they let me go. You need peace and quiet, they warned me. No excitement. And no, you cannot take any roles.

No excitement, indeed.

I couldn’t live in the city when I got out, but I couldn’t bear to go too far. Emily Cavens, who’d been my roommate with two other girls in a wild apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, came to visit me near the end of my hospital stay. One of the only people from my old life to visit me at all, and only because she was on her way to Connecticut, where she’d met a man who would marry her and take her out of the acting life. He’s nice, she’d said. He offered. I have to. I didn’t blame her. A girl has to do what a girl has to do.

But I told her I was getting out, and I needed somewhere to stay. Her brother had a friend who’d heard of a place in Meritville, just a three-hour train ride from the city, for rent. A quiet little town. Sure, she would set it up for me on her way out of the state. She’d write me the address when it was done. And here I was, on 19 Howard Avenue, to rest and recover.

It was what they call a nice place. Cozy, the rooms as solid and snug as cupped palms, with deep sofas and a big, old-fashioned radio cabinet and a pretty—if uninteresting—painting of horses racing on the wall. There was a grandfather clock, and the kitchen had a framed embroidery that said mother’s kitchen is god’s kitchen. The dark blue curtains on the kitchen window fluttered like clouds passing when you left the window open and gave the room a sleepy hue.

It was nothing like my jangling New York apartment, where from one direction or another you could always hear shouts, laughter, the rumble of traffic, and every window wafted the distinct scent of eau de trash. But for all the sleepy suburban-ness of 19 Howard Avenue, Meritville, New York, I wasn’t fooled. The place had a feel that wasn’t lived-in; the bed linens were impersonal, and someone had bought that awful embroidery from a flea market. I knew a rented place when I saw one, and no one had stayed long enough at 19 Howard Avenue to frame their own photographs or sew their own insufferable embroidery. It didn’t cross my mind to wonder why.

You’d think a woman like me, Ginette Cox, late of off Broadway, would go wild with boredom in a place like this. But the doctors had been very strict. I was to have no overstimulation of any kind. No cigarettes, no alcohol. Social visits were to be kept to a minimum, and definitely no parties. I could go to the movies if the picture wasn’t a prurient one—that left out Rock Hudson, curse it—and I was to avoid television altogether. I was allowed books, and I’d brought a stack of them from New York. The doctors hadn’t said anything about the radio. I’d quickly discovered that the ancient radio cabinet actually worked, and I was able to pick up some current rock ’n’ roll or old Artie Shaw when I wanted.

But my best entertainment was the neighbors. The back of the house, where the sitting room was, looked out over a small patch of green bisected by a walking path. On the other side of the walking path were row houses, connected like the segments of a centipede, the neighbors side by side. The fronts of the houses faced onto the unknown street beyond, and from my window I could see their back gardens, some of them split by trellises or small fences, but none fenced from behind.