A Winter Haunting

FOUR

THERE was more than a shower in the basement. Dale had forgotten that Duane had more or less lived in the basement of this farmhouse.

When Dale had been a boy in Elm Haven, he had been terrified of his own basement. It had been a labyrinth of small rooms with the coal bin far in the back of the maze, and he’d been frightened every night when he had to go down and shovel coal into the hopper.

The McBride basement could not have been more different. Essentially it was one large room—the huge furnace taking up much of the south end—but clean, tidied up, with workbenches along one wall, an old washing machine with wooden rollers, coils of clothesline, a huge jerry-rigged shower tapping into the plumbing under the first-floor bathroom, an old-fashioned but complete darkroom setup near the water pipes, and Duane’s corner.

Dale remembered that he had been in Duane’s home only once—breaking in through one of the six narrow windows set high up on the cement walls here—after Duane had died. He had come for Duane’s private notebooks, and he still had them—wrapped and secure out in the Land Cruiser. Thirteen thick, spiral notebooks filled with Duane’s small, almost illegible shorthand script.

Duane’s “room” was still there: a corner of the basement partitioned off by a quilt hanging on a clothesline—the quilt smelled freshly laundered to Dale as he stood next to it—and by various crates piled high and filled with paperbacks. Dale slid back the quilt.

Duane McBride had assembled an old brass bed down here, and the thick mattress looked more comfortable than the smaller daybed in the parlor upstairs. All around the bed were more bookcase-crates, filled with paperbacks and old hardcover books, and on top of most of the crates were radios: clunky 1960 transistor radios, complicated receivers obviously made from kits, simple crystal sets, several Bakelite 1950s models, and even a huge Philco floor radio against the wall near the foot of the bed. At a small desk between the bed and the Philco sat a real shortwave radio—able to send as well as receive—with antenna wires running up and out the narrow window.

“I forgot that Duane had been a ham radio operator,” Dale said softly, almost whispering.

“We don’t know if it still works,” whispered Sandy Whittaker. “But Mrs. Brubaker kept everything clean down here as well.”

“I’ll say she did,” said Dale. “This basement is cleaner than my ranch in Montana.”

Sandy Whittaker did not know what to say to that, so she pursed her lips and nodded.

“Seriously,” said Dale, gesturing around the large basement, “there’s more light here than upstairs.” Besides the six uncovered basement windows—working almost like clerestory windows set high on the wall—there were four hanging lightbulbs illuminating the open space and two small lamps that still worked next to Duane’s old bed. The place was actually cozy.

Sandy Whittaker glanced at her watch. “Well, I just wanted to make sure that everything was ready for you. I’d better get back to the office.”

They paused in the kitchen. The snow had stopped, but it was still cloudy and cold outside. “I wish I had something to offer you,” said Dale. “Maybe a glass of water?”

Sandy Whittaker frowned at the tap. “We think the water is all right—it’s well water, not city water—but you might consider bringing in bottled water to be safe.”

Dale nodded, smiling again. He had not heard the phrase “city water” for more than four decades. All of the implications came back to him now: Elm Haven’s tap water had been sulfurous, gritty, nasty, undrinkable. Even people in town had used backyard wells.

The Realtor was handing him several pieces of paper: a receipt for the checks he had mailed her for damage deposit and first and last months’ rent—he planned to stay nine months; a list of emergency phone numbers, most of them in Oak Hill, he noticed; her number; the addresses of a medical clinic in Oak Hill, a dentist, and various stores.

“I need to do some grocery shopping before nightfall,” said Dale. “I noticed that the A & P and Corner Pantry were gone. Where do people in Elm Haven shop these days?”

Sandy made a gesture and Dale noticed how dainty her wrists and hands were, even with such plump arms. “Oh, most people drive to the old Oak Hill grocery store a block from the park or into the west side Peoria Safeway. Or, if they’re in a hurry, out to the KWIK’N’EZ.” She spelled it for him. “It’s that travel convenience store built onto the Shell station out at the I-74 interchange,” she explained. “Bread, milk, that sort of thing. Prices are ridiculous, but it’s easy to get to.”

“KWIK’N’EZ,” repeated Dale. He hated chain stores and convenience stores only slightly less than he hated TV evangelists and World War II–era Nazi war criminals.

Dale accompanied Sandy Whittaker out to her huge black Buick. The woman paused by the car. “Do you hear from any of your old friends from the old days, Dale?”

“Elm Haven pals, you mean?” said Dale. “No. I wrote letters for a while after we moved back to Chicago in 1961, but I haven’t heard from any of the old gang for years. Any of them still live here?”

The Realtor thought for a second. “Not that group you were with—Mike O’Rourke, Kevin Grumbacher, those boys, right?”

“And Jim Harlen,” said Dale with a smile.

“Oh, well, maybe you know that Jim Harlen became a U.S. senator from Illinois.”

Dale nodded. Harlen had been in the Senate twenty years before a sex scandal had ruined his chances for reelection in 2000.

“The O’Rourkes—the parents—still live in the same house,” said Sandy.

“My God,” said Dale, “they must be a hundred years old.”

“In their eighties,” said Sandy. “I haven’t spoken to them for years. I understand that Michael was hurt real bad in Vietnam and then became a priest.”

“That’s what I heard as well,” said Dale. “But I can’t find any trace of him on the Internet.”

“And Kevin Grumbacher. . .” continued Sandy, not listening to him. “His parents died, you know. The last I heard he was working for NASA or some such.”

“Morton Thiokol,” said Dale. He noticed the lack of comprehension in her eyes. “That’s the company that builds the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle. I found some old articles—evidently Kevin was working for them during the Challenger disaster in 1986 and blew the whistle on them. . . testified about the fact that the company knew about the faulty O-rings.”

Sandy Whittaker still stared blankly at him.

Dale shrugged. “Anyway, he resigned in protest in ’86 and I couldn’t find any other articles or listings about him. I think he lives in Texas.” He felt uncomfortable talking about his old friends with this woman, even though he was curious about what she knew. To change the subject, he said, “What about your old school friends from Elm Haven? Still in touch with Donna Lou Perry?”

“She’s dead,” said Sandy. “Murdered.”

Dale could only blink.

“A long time ago,” she said. “Donna Lou married Paulie Fussner in. . . I think it was 1970. . . and she tried to get a divorce in ’74, I think it was. He tracked her down and beat her up. She went back home to live with her folks in Elm Haven, but he waited for her one morning and shot her.”

“That’s terrible,” said Dale. Donna Lou was the one female from his childhood here whom he’d hoped to run across, to apologize for something that had happened on the baseball diamond forty-two years earlier. Now he never could. “Jesus,” he said.

Sandy nodded. “It’s been a long time. The new century makes me feel like we’re all ancient, talking about people and things from the middle of the last century and all. Who else was in that group of yours?”

“Cordie Cooke,” said Dale, still thinking about the murdered Donna Lou.

“Don’t know what happened to her.”

Dale did—he had found out through the Net that the moon-faced little white-trash Cordie Cooke had become a millionaire a hundred times over, had sold the largest waste management company in America a few years ago, and was currently running an expensive rehabilitation center for cancer victims on the Big Island of Hawaii. He didn’t take time to share all this with the Realtor.

“There was some other boy in your bunch,” said Sandy.

Dale thought for a moment. “My kid brother Lawrence?”

“No, someone else. . .”

“Duane McBride?” he said.

Sandy Whittaker actually blushed. “Yes, I guess that’s who I was thinking of.” She got in the car and started the engine.

Dale stepped back, preparing to wave good-bye, but Sandy rolled the window down. “Oh, I meant to tell you, Dale. My cousin’s boy—Derek—when he heard you were renting the place, he said he knew all about you.”

Oh, Christ, thought Dale, a Jim Bridger: Mountain Man fan.

“Derek’s sort of a. . . well, a problem child, I guess you could say, though he’s nineteen now, so not really a child. Anyway, my cousin Ardith says that Derek knew your name from his Internet friends. That they’d sent your photograph and articles out to all the others.”

“Articles?” said Dale. “Do you mean novels?”

“No, the articles that were in some Montana newspaper.”

“Oh, Christ,” Dale said aloud. “Do you mean the editorials on the Montana Militia?” At the height—or depths, to be more accurate—of his clinical depression a year earlier, he had written a series of editorials about the right-wing militias. “I thought those were only being routed around to other neo-Nazi groups and skinheads.”

Sandy bit on her lower lip. “I don’t think Derek is a whatchamacallit Nazi, but he does hang around with skinheads. Heck, he is a skinhead. Anyway, I wanted to tell you. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Derek and his friends.”

“Sounds like I already have,” said Dale. He folded his arms. Great beginning to my sabbatical. It was starting to rain again.

“Call me if you need anything,” said Sandy Whittaker. She rolled up the window, ponderously turned the huge Buick around in the muddy lot, and drove down the long driveway in the rain. In the dim daylight, the dead crabapple trees looked even sadder and more skeletal.

Dale shook his head, went over to the Land Cruiser, and started hauling his boxes of junk—his life—into the McBride farmhouse.