Stolen Away

“My dear,” Evalyn said to the maid, “you must have had a dreadful night!”

Inga said nothing.

“Serve yourself, dear,” Evalyn told her, “and join us.”

Sullenly, Inga did. Her blonde hair hung in strings as she poked at her food. Suddenly she looked up, her eyes as wide and haunted as Evalyn’s had been when she entered my room the night before.

“Madam, if it is just the same to you, could I please change my room tonight?”

“Why, dear?”

“Somebody kept pulling the sheets off my bed every time I went to sleep.”

“Inga,” I said, “is there a lock on your door?”

“Yes—and I used it.”

“And your windows are boarded up, like mine?”

“Yes.”

Evalyn leaned forward, her blue eyes piercing. “You mean to say, Inga, that someone pulled the sheets off your bed when you were alone in the room, with the door locked and the windows boarded up?”

“Yes. Several times this happened. I hardly sleep.”

“You don’t think anybody was hiding in your room or anything?” I asked.

“I had a flashlight,” she said. “I looked under the bed, and in the closet. I was alone.”

“I’ll take that room tonight,” I told her.

For the first time Inga smiled at me. “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”

“With any luck,” Evalyn said, cheerfully, “before then, Means will show up and we’ll take delivery of ‘the book’ and be well out of this funhouse.”

But Means didn’t show.

We spent most of the day, Evalyn and I, walking the weedy, snow-patched grounds, threading through the tall bony naked trees, following paths Evalyn’s mother had traced. Often we held hands, like kids going steady; maybe, in a way, that’s what we were.

That afternoon, elderly, lanky, grossly mustached Gus—who chewed tobacco that he smelled just a little worse than—opened the door to the long-unused third floor. Gus claimed to have the only key, and the door seemed not to have been used in a while—and the caretaker had a hell of a hard time working the key in that rusty lock.

There were no ghosts on the third story other than a few more pieces of sheet-covered furniture. A layer of dust coated the floor, undisturbed by footprints.

Evalyn, standing just behind me, her fingers on my arm, said, “I must have just heard noises the wind made.”

“Must have,” I said.

I didn’t believe in haunted houses, of course, but then lately I’d been exposed to the likes of Edgar Cayce, Sister Sarah Sivella and Chief Yellow Feather, and I was starting to think we ought to start looking for Lindy’s kid in a magician’s top hat.

That evening was just as cold as the previous one, and we again huddled in the kitchen, drinking coffee, wearing blankets, waiting for either Means to show up or the phone to ring or at least some goddamn ghost to materialize. Nothing did.

Evalyn and I spent the night in the room Inga had abandoned. We sat up virtually all night, when we weren’t otherwise entertaining ourselves; Evalyn smoked a pack of cigarettes, and I ran out of Sheiks. It was a long, tiring, memorable night, but no ghosts showed, no footsteps sounded in the hall or on the stairs or on the ceiling, and nobody, flesh or vapor, pulled the covers off.

She had fallen asleep in my arms, both of us half-sitting up, pillows behind us, blankets sheathing us. Light seeped through the cracks of the boarded-up windows. The long night was over.

As I was getting out of bed, I heard something fall heavily to the floor; I jumped, and Evalyn jumped awake.

“What…?” she began.

I stood, frozen, looking at a small table against the side wall, where four or five books were in the process of tumbling to the floor, from between two secure bronze horse-head bookends.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

Our eyes would’ve been right at home in a minstrel show.

I walked slowly over to the table. The books were on the floor, in an ungainly heap. The bookends stood alone, on the table but flush against the wall, as had been the books, before they fell. It was as if someone had shoved them on the floor; only the wall was where the books would have to have been shoved from.

I shrugged, said it was nothing, started getting my clothes on. Evalyn nodded, shrugged, padded down the hall to her own room to dress. We said nothing more about it, not over breakfast anyway; we said almost nothing at all, actually, except to comment on what a nice sunny day it was for a change.

Shortly after breakfast the phone jangled out in the hall and scared the hell out of all of us. The rings echoed through the big, mostly empty house, as Evalyn rushed to answer.

She held the receiver sideways so I could stand next to her and listen.

“Hogan speaking,” said the voice of Gaston Means. “Who is this?”

“This is Eleven,” Evalyn said.

“Eleven, we couldn’t get through with the book last night. We had a close call.”

“A close call?”

“Listen carefully: come to my home at Chevy Chase this afternoon. Be very, very careful of your movements; make certain you’re not followed. I’ll see you there at half past two.”

And we heard the click of him hanging up.

She looked at me, phone still in her hand. “I’m going, of course.”