Phantoms Read online

  There was no answer.

  The only light in the house was at the far end of the hall, beyond the open kitchen door.

  Jenny put down the suitcase and switched on the hall light. “Hilda?”

  “Who’s Hilda?” Lisa asked, dropping her suitcase and the book bag.

  “My housekeeper. She knew what time we expected to arrive. I thought she’d be starting dinner about now.”

  “Wow, a housekeeper! You mean, a live-in?”

  “She has the apartment above the garage,” Jenny said, putting her purse and car keys on the small foyer table that stood beneath a large, brass-framed mirror.

  Lisa was impressed. “Hey, are you rich or something?”

  Jenny laughed. “Hardly. I can’t really afford Hilda—but I can’t afford to be without her, either.”

  Wondering why the kitchen light was on if Hilda wasn’t here, Jenny headed down the hall, with Lisa following close behind.

  “What with keeping regular office hours and making emergency house calls to three other towns in these mountains, I’d never eat more than cheese sandwiches and doughnuts if it wasn’t for Hilda.”

  “Is she a good cook?” Lisa asked.

  “Marvelous. Too good when it comes to desserts.”

  The kitchen was a large, high-ceilinged room. Pots, pans, ladles, and other utensils hung from a gleaming, stainless-steel utility rack above a central cooking island with four electric burners, a grill, and a work area. The countertops were ceramic tile, and the cabinets were dark oak. On the far side of the room were double sinks, double ovens, a microwave oven, and the refrigerator.

  Jenny turned left as soon as she stepped through the door, and she went to the built-in secretary where Hilda planned menus and composed shopping lists. It was there she would have left a note. But there was no note, and Jenny was turning away from the small desk when she heard Lisa gasp.

  The girl had walked around to the far side of the central cooking island. She was standing by the refrigerator, staring down at something on the floor in front of the sinks. Her face was flour-white, and she was trembling.

  Filled with sudden dread, Jenny stepped quickly around the island.

  Hilda Beck was lying on the floor, on her back, dead. She stared at the ceiling with sightless eyes, and her discolored tongue thrust stiffly between swollen lips.

  Lisa looked up from the dead woman, stared at Jenny, tried to speak, could not make a sound.

  Jenny took her sister by the arm and led her around the island to the other side of the kitchen, where she couldn’t see the corpse. She hugged Lisa.

  The girl hugged back. Tightly. Fiercely.

  “Are you okay, honey?”

  Lisa said nothing. She shook uncontrollably.

  Just six weeks ago, coming home from an afternoon at the movies, Lisa had found her mother lying on the kitchen floor of the house in Newport Beach, dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The girl had been devastated. Never having known her father, who had died when she was only two years old, Lisa had been especially close to her mother. For a while, that loss had left her deeply shaken, bewildered, depressed. Gradually, she had accepted her mother’s death, had discovered how to smile and laugh again. During the past few days, she had seemed like her old self. And now this.

  Jenny took the girl to the secretary, urged her to sit down, then squatted in front of her. She pulled a tissue from the box of Kleenex on the desk and blotted Lisa’s damp forehead. The girl’s flesh was not only as pale as ice; it was ice-cold as well.

  “What can I do for you, Sis?”

  “I’ll b-be okay,” Lisa said shakily.

  They held hands. The girl’s grip was almost painfully tight.

  Eventually, she said, “I thought... When I first saw her there ... on the floor like that ... I thought ... crazy, but I thought ... that it was Mom.” Tears shimmered in her eyes, but she held them back. “I kn-know Mom’s gone. And this woman here doesn’t even look like her. But it was ... a surprise ... such a shock ... and so confusing.”

  They continued to hold hands, and slowly Lisa’s grip relaxed.

  After a while, Jenny said, “Feeling better?”

  “Yeah. A little.”

  “Want to lie down?”

  “No.” She let go of Jenny’s hand in order to pluck a tissue from the box of Kleenex. She wiped at her nose. She looked at the cooking island, beyond which lay the body. “Is it Hilda?”

  “Yes,” Jenny said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jenny had liked Hilda Beck enormously. She felt sick at heart about the woman’s death, but right now she was more concerned about Lisa than about anything else. “Sis, I think it would be better if we got you out of here. How about waiting in my office while I take a closer look at the body. Then I’ve got to call the sheriff’s office and the county coroner.”

  “I’ll wait here with you.”

  “It would be better if—”

  “No!” Lisa said, suddenly breaking into shivers again. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “All right,” Jenny said soothingly. “You can sit right here.”

  “Oh, Jeez,” Lisa said miserably. “The way she looked ... all swollen ... all black and b-blue. And the expression on her face—” She wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand. “Why’s she all dark and puffed up like that?”

  “Well, she’s obviously been dead for a few days,” Jenny said. “But listen, you’ve got to try not to think about things like—”

  “If she’s been dead for a few days,” I isa said quaveringly, “why doesn’t it stink in here? Wouldn’t it stink?”

  Jenny frowned. Of course, it should stink in here if Hilda Beck had been dead long enough for her flesh to grow dark and for her body tissues to bloat as much as they had. It should stink. But it didn’t.

  “Jenny, what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be scared. There’s no reason to be scared.”

  “That expression on her face,” Lisa said. “It’s awful.”

  “However she died, it must have been quick. She doesn’t seem to have been sick or to have struggled. She couldn’t have suffered much pain.”

  “But ... it looks like she died in the middle of a scream.”

  3

  The Dead Woman

  Jenny Paige had never seen a corpse like this one. Nothing in medical school or in her own practice of medicine had prepared her for the peculiar condition of Hilda Beck’s body. She crouched beside the corpse and examined it with sadness and distaste—but also with considerable curiosity and with steadily increasing bewilderment.

  The dead woman’s face was swollen; it was now a round, smooth, and somewhat shiny caricature of the countenance she had worn in life. Her body was bloated, too, and in some places it strained against the seams of her gray and yellow housedress. Where flesh was visible—the neck, lower arms, hands, calves, ankles—it had a soft, overripe look. However, this did not appear to be the gaseous bloat that was a natural consequence of decomposition. For one thing, the stomach should have been grossly distended with gas, far more bloated than any other part of the body, but it was only moderately expanded. Besides, there was no odor of decay.

  On close inspection, the dark, mottled skin did not appear to be the result of tissue deterioration. Jenny couldn’t locate any certain, visible signs of ongoing decomposition: no lesions, no blistering, no weeping pustules. Because they were composed of comparatively soft tissue, a corpse’s eyes usually bore evidence of physical degeneration before most other parts of the body. But Hilda Beck’s eyes—wide open, staring—were perfect specimens. The whites of her eyes were clear, neither yellowish nor discolored by burst blood vessels. The irises were clear as well; not even milky, postmortem cataracts obscured the warm, blue color.

  In life, there had usually been merriment and kindness in Hilda’s eyes. She had been sixty-two, a gray-haired woman with a sweet face and a
grandmotherly way about herself. She spoke with a slight German accent and had a surprisingly lovely singing voice. She had often sung while cleaning house or cooking, and she had found joy in the most simple things.

  Jenny was stricken by a sharp pang of grief as she realized how very much she would miss Hilda. She closed her eyes for a moment, unable to look at the corpse. She collected herself, suppressed her tears. Finally, when she had reestablished her professional detachment, she opened her eyes and went on with the examination.

  The longer she looked at the body, the more the skin seemed bruised. The coloration was indicative of severe bruising: black, blue, and a deep sour yellow, the colors blending in and out of one another. But this was unlike any contusion Jenny had ever seen. As far as she could tell, it was universal ; not even one square inch of visible skin was free of it. She carefully took hold of one sleeve of the dead woman’s housedress and pulled it up the swollen arm as far as it would easily slide. Under the sleeve, the skin was also dark, and Jenny suspected that the entire body was covered with an incredible series of contiguous bruises.

  She looked again at Mrs. Beck’s face. Every last centimeter of skin was contusive. Sometimes, a victim of a serious auto accident sustained injuries that left him with bruises over most of his face, but such a severe condition was always accompanied by worse trauma, such as a broken nose, split lips, a broken jaw ... How could Mrs. Beck have acquired bruises as grotesque as these without also suffering other, more serious injuries?

  “Jenny?” Lisa said. “Why’re you taking so long?”

  “I’ll only be a minute. You stay there.”

  So ... perhaps the contusions that covered Mrs. Beck’s body were not the result of externally administered blows. Was it possible that the discoloration of the skin was caused, instead, by internal pressure, by the swelling of subcutaneous tissue? That swelling was, after all, vividly present. But surely, in order to have caused such thorough bruising, the swelling would have had to have taken place suddenly, with incredible violence. Which didn’t make sense, damn it. Living tissue couldn’t swell that fast. Abrupt swelling was symptomatic of certain allergies, of course; one of the worst was severe allergic reaction to penicillin. But Jenny was not aware of anything that could cause critical swelling with such suddenness that hideously ugly, universal bruising resulted.

  And even if the swelling wasn’t simply classic postmortem bloat—which she was sure it wasn’t—and even if it was the cause of the bruising, what in the name of God had caused the swelling in the first place? She had ruled out allergic reaction.

  If a poison was responsible, it was an extremely exotic variety. But where would Hilda have come into contact with an exotic poison? She had no enemies. The very idea of murder was absurd. And whereas a child might be expected to put a strange substance into his mouth to see if it tasted good, Hilda wouldn’t do anything so foolish. No, not poison.

  Disease?

  If it was disease, bacterial or viral, it was not like anything that Jenny had been taught to recognize. And what if it proved to be contagious?

  “Jenny?” Lisa called.

  Disease.

  Relieved that she hadn’t touched the body directly, wishing that she hadn’t even touched the sleeve of the housedress, Jenny lurched to her feet, swayed, and stepped back from the corpse.

  A chill rippled through her.

  For the first time, she noticed what lay on the cutting board beside the sink: four large potatoes, a head of cabbage, a bag of carrots, a long knife, and a vegetable peeler. Hilda had been preparing a meal when she had dropped dead. Just like that. Bang. Apparently, she hadn’t been ill, hadn’t had any warning. Such a sudden death sure as hell wasn’t indicative of disease.

  What disease resulted in death without first progressing through ever more debilitating stages of illness, discomfort, and physical deterioration? None. None that was known to modern medicine.

  “Jenny, can we get out of here?” Lisa asked.

  “Ssssshhh! In a minute. Let me think,” Jenny said, leaning against the island, looking down at the dead woman.

  In the back of her mind, a vague and frightening thought had been stirring: plague. The plague—bubonic and other forms—was not a stranger to parts of California and the South-west. In recent years, a couple of dozen cases had been reported ; however, it was rare that anyone died of the plague these days, for it could be cured by the administration of streptomycin, chloramphenicol, or any of the tetracyclines. Some strains of the plague were characterized by the appearance of petechiae; these were small, purplish, hemorrhagic spots on the skin. In extreme cases, the petechiae became almost black and spread until large areas of the body were afflicted by them; in the Middle Ages, it had been known, simply, as the Black Death. But could petechiae arise in such abundance that the victim’s body would turn as completely dark as Hilda’s?

  Besides, Hilda had died suddenly, while cooking, without first suffering vomiting, fever, incontinence—which ruled out the plague. And which, in fact, ruled out every other known infectious disease, too.

  Yet there were no blatant signs of violence. No bleeding gunshot wounds. No stab wounds. No indications that the housekeeper had been beaten or strangled.

  Jenny stepped around the body and went to the counter by the sink. She touched the head of cabbage and was startled to find that it was still chilled. It hadn’t been here on the cutting board any longer than an hour or so.

  She turned away from the counter and looked down at Hilda again, but with even greater dread than before.

  The woman had died within the past hour. The body might even still be warm to the touch.

  But what had killed her?

  Jenny was no closer to an answer now than she had been before she’d examined the body. And although disease didn’t seem to be the culprit here, she couldn’t rule it out. The possibility of contagion, though remote, was frightening.

  Hiding her concern from Lisa, Jenny said, “Come on, honey. I can use the phone in my office.”

  “I’m feeling better now,” Lisa said, but she got up at once, obviously eager to go.

  Jenny put an arm around the girl, and they left the kitchen.

  An unearthly quiet filled the house. The silence was so deep that the whisper of their footsteps on the hall carpet was thunderous by contrast.

  Despite overhead fluorescent lights, Jenny’s office wasn’t a stark, impersonal room like those that many physicians preferred these days. Instead, it was an old-fashioned, country doctor’s office, rather like a Norman Rockwell painting in the Saturday Evening Post. Bookshelves were overflowing with books and medical journals. There were six antique wooden filing cabinets that Jenny had gotten for a good price at an auction. The walls were hung with diplomas, anatomy charts, and two large watercolor studies of Snowfield. Beside the locked drug cabinet, there was a scale, and beside the scale, on a small table, was a box of inexpensive toys—tittle plastic cars, tiny soldiers, miniature dotts—and packs of sugarless chewing gum that were dispensed as rewards—or bribes—to children who didn’t cry during examinations.

  A large, scarred, dark pine desk was the centerpiece of the room, and Jenny guided Lisa into the big leather chair behind it.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said.

  “Sorry?” Jenny said, sitting on the edge of the desk and pulling the telephone toward her.

  “I’m sorry I flaked out on you. When I saw ... the body ... I ... well ... I got hysterical.”

  “You weren’t hysterical at all. Just shocked and frightened, which is understandable.”

  “But you weren’t shocked or frightened.”

  “Oh, yes,” Jenny said. “Not just shocked; stunned.”

  “But you weren’t scared, like I was.”

  “I was scared, and I still am.” Jenny hesitated, then decided that, after all, she shouldn’t hide the truth from the girl. She told her about the disturbing possibility of contagion. “I don’t think it is a disease that we’re dealing wi
th here, but I could be wrong. And if I’m wrong ...”

  The girl stared at Jenny with wide-eyed amazement. “You were scared, like me, but you still spent all that time examining the body. Jeez, I couldn’t do that. Not me. Not ever.”

  “Well, honey, I’m a doctor. I’m trained for it.”

  “Still...”

  “You didn’t flake out on me,” Jenny assured her.

  Lisa nodded, apparently unconvinced.

  Jenny lifted the telephone receiver, intending to call the sheriff’s Snowfield substation before contacting the coroner over in Santa Mira, the county seat. There was no dial tone, just a soft hissing sound. She jiggled the disconnect buttons on the phone’s cradle, but the line remained dead.

  There was something sinister about the phone being out of order when a dead woman lay in the kitchen. Perhaps Mrs. Beck had been murdered. If someone cut the telephone line and crept into the house, and if he sneaked up on Hilda with care and cunning ... well ... he could have stabbed her in the back with a long-bladed knife that had sunk deep enough to pierce her heart, killing her instantly. In that case, the wound would have been where Jenny couldn’t have seen it—unless she had turned the corpse completely over, onto its stomach. That didn’t explain why there wasn’t any blood. And it didn’t explain the universal bruising, the swelling. Nevertheless, the wound could be in the housekeeper’s back, and since she had died within the past hour, it was also conceivable that the killer—if there was a killer—might still be here, in the house.

  I’m letting my imagination run away with me, Jenny thought.

  But she decided it would be wise for her and Lisa to get out of the house right away.

  “We’ll have to go next door and ask Vince or Angie Santini to make the calls for us,” Jenny said quietly, getting up from the edge of the desk. “Our phone is out of order.”

  Lisa blinked. “Does that have anything to do with ... what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenny said.

  Her heart was pounding as she crossed the office toward the half-closed door. She wondered if someone was waiting on the other side.

  Following Jenny, Lisa said, “But the phone being out of order now... it’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”

  “A little.”

  Jenny half-expected to encounter a huge, grinning stranger with a knife. One of those sociopaths who seemed to be in such abundant supply these days. One of those Jack the Ripper imitators whose bloody handiwork kept the TV reporters supplied with grisly film for the six o’clock news.

  She looked into the hall before venturing out there, prepared to jump back and slam the door if she saw anyone. It was deserted.

  Glancing at Lisa, Jenny saw that the girl had quickly grasped the situation.

  They hurried along the hall toward the front of the house, and as they approached the stairs to the second floor, which lay just this side of the foyer, Jenny’s nerves were wound tighter than ever. The killer—if there is a killer, she reminded herself exasperatedly—might be on the stairs, listening to them as they moved toward the front door. He might lunge down the steps as they passed him, a knife raised high in his hand ...

  But no one waited on the stairs.

  Or in the foyer. Or on the front porch.

  Outside, the twilight was fading rapidly into night. The remaining light was purplish, and shadows—a zombie army of them—were rising out of tens of thousands of places in which they had hidden from the sunlight. In ten minutes, it would be dark.

  4

  The House Next Door

  The Santinis’ stone and redwood house was of more modem design than Jenny’s place, all rounded corners and gentle angles. It thrust up from the stony soil, conforming to the contours of the slope, set against a backdrop of massive pines; it almost appeared to be a natural formation. Lights were on in a couple of the downstairs rooms.

  The front door was ajar. Classical music was playing inside.

  Jenny rang the bell and stepped back a few paces, where Lisa was waiting. She believed that the two of them ought to keep some distance between themselves and the Santinis; it was possible they had been contaminated merely by being in the kitchen with Mrs. Beck’s corpse.

  “Couldn’t ask for better neighbors,” she told Lisa, wishing the hard, cold