“That’s who I think it is wandering around this house in the night,” Cavender Marsh said, his deep bass voice booming down the table from his place in the host’s chair. “I think the old man couldn’t bear the idea of shutting himself up in this place alone, so he got himself a hired companion, and then one day she wanted to leave and he decided to cut her throat and stuff her body in the well. And her soul has been here ever since, trying to take revenge.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Tasheba Kent said, in a wavery voice, from her own end of the table. “Now, don’t any of you people worry about a thing. Cavender doesn’t even know if old Josiah Horne ever had a companion living out here with him at all, never mind a lady companion that he used for a mistress and then murdered. And we’ve had all the wells checked out at least three times since we moved here, and nobody’s ever found a body or a skeleton in one.”
“If the place is haunted, I’d think it would be haunted by Josiah Horne himself,” Carlton Ji said. “From what Miss Dart told us on the boat, he sounds strange enough to haunt a place all on his own.”
“This is just some game they’re all playing,” Hannah Graham announced scornfully, “to keep us off balance. There aren’t any ghosts, here or anywhere else. I’m not going to let them scare me.”
Geraldine Dart was sitting at the end of the table on Tasheba Kent’s left, close enough to cut the old woman’s food and help her with her utensils if she needed help. She was wearing a plain black dress and a long necklace of black glass beads and a terrible pair of glasses that went up into points at the outside corners, like the kind of thing divorcees wore forty years ago. Now she took the glasses off and put them down on the table next to her wineglass.
“You know,” she said in a slow careful voice, “I really was telling the truth on the boat this morning. There really is a ghost, and I really have seen her. Three times, as a matter of fact. In the main family wing, upstairs near the bedrooms.”
“Miss Dart is always telling us all about it,” Cavender Marsh boomed cheerfully.
“It can’t be Josiah Horne because it’s most definitely the ghost of a woman,” Geraldine Dart continued. “And she can’t be a recent arrival because she’s dressed in an old-fashioned dress. Long to the floor with a high collar. That sort of thing.”
“Does she talk?” Richard Fenster asked curiously.
“She’s never talked to me,” Geraldine Dart said. “She just stands at the window at the end of the hall up there, looking out. Then when she hears me, she turns to see who I am. Then she just fades away.”
“I think I’m disappointed,” Carlton Ji said. “I think I’d prefer to have chains rattling and blood dripping from the ceiling, like in that Shirley Jackson novel.”
“I think I’d rather have a love story,” Mathilda Frazier said. “You know, she sets herself down in front of the portrait of her lost lover and pines away for him.”
“She couldn’t be pining away for him,” Kelly Pratt said reasonably. “She’s already dead.”
“Well, I don’t know what she’s doing,” Geraldine Dart told them, “but she seems to be harmless enough. One minute to twelve midnight exactly, when she comes. Some of you ought to go up there tonight and see if you can catch sight of her.”
“Maybe we will,” Bennis Hannaford said.
Down at the middle of the left side of the table, Hannah Graham shot out of her seat, wadded her blue linen napkin into a ball, and sent the ball flying at the nearest candelabra. She almost hit it. If she had, she would have set something on fire.
“You little bitch,” Hannah snarled at Geraldine Dart. “Don’t think I don’t know what kind of shit you’re pulling. Don’t think I’m going to let you get away with it, either.”
Then Hannah Graham kicked her chair over backward, so that it hit the floor with a crash, and went marching out of the dining room.
CHAPTER 5
1
FOR CARLTON JI, THE great questions of late-twentieth-century existence—if the races would ever be able to learn to live with each other; whether a cure would be found for cancer or AIDS; how the world was going to be supplied with the technological comforts it wanted without poisoning itself in the process—could be boiled down to a single proposition, the quintessential interview question for Personality magazine: How does it make you feel when you think about these things? There were people even at Personality who knew that this question was idiotic. How an immunologist felt about AIDS was far less important than what he knew about it. No matter how miserable the contemplation of race hatred made you, it would not tell you how to solve the problems of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Feelings, though, were what Personality dealt in, especially the mushily maudlin feelings of well-heeled people about their miserable childhoods. It was amazing how many highly successful television actresses and bankable movie stars—none of whom had ever been known to shut up for fifteen seconds on any other subject—had suffered in silence for decades on the subject of their mothers’ shopping addictions or their fathers’ love affairs with emotional coldness and the National Football League. Personality used to publish revelations far more powerful and far more inflammatory than either of those, but they had had to give it up, because they kept getting sued. It turned out that you could not print accusations about an ordinary, nonpublic person if you could not prove them to be true. It also turned out that “somebody said so,” even if the somebody was the hottest romantic comedy lead since Carole Lombard, did not constitute proof.