Chapter 3 Ghost Story
Ryan
The manager was waiting for us in the parking lot of his own store, hugging a clipboard to his chest, and the first thing he said, before names, before anything, was that the ghost had struck again.
“Struck how,” I said.
“The beds.” He said it the way other men say fire. “Come see the beds.”
Murphy had dropped the file on my desk an hour earlier.
The owner of Farnsworth Furniture on Queen East had called the division four times in two weeks about an intruder that no camera could find and no lock could keep out, and the complaint had worked its way down through the building until it landed on us.
“You two are good at weird,” Murphy said, and left.
It wasn’t a compliment, exactly. It also wasn’t wrong.
The manager’s name was Perlman, and he walked us through the showroom at a pace that suggested the beds might not keep.
Farnsworth sold floor models and liquidation stock, sofas in long rows, dining sets with laminated SALE tents on them, a wall of recliners facing a dead television.
It smelled like carpet and lemon spray. At the front window sat a queen bed made up with pillows and a folded throw, the display kind, meant to look like somebody could live there.
“Every morning for five months,” Perlman said, “somebody has slept in a bed. Not the same bed. It rotates. And here is the thing nobody believes me about.” He stopped and put his hand out at the queen like a man presenting evidence to a jury.
“Whoever it is makes the bed after. Better than my staff make it. My senior salesman has worked here eleven years, and he cannot produce corners like these.”
“Anything taken?” Luke said.
“Food. Lunches, from the staff fridge. And this is the other thing nobody believes me about.” He lowered his voice. “They leave money taped to the fridge door.”
I looked at Luke. Luke did not look at me, because one of us had to stay professional at all times and it was never me.
“Your alarm’s never gone off?” he said.
“Never. No broken window, no forced door, nothing. The alarm company sends me a report every week that says all clear.” Perlman’s voice went up.
“All clear. Meanwhile a ghost is in here every night making beds and buying sandwiches, and two of my staff won’t work evenings anymore, and my wife has started sending me articles about spirits with unfinished business. ”
“And the radio,” said a voice from the recliner wall. A big man in a Farnsworth polo, arms crossed, the look of a man who had been waiting to be interviewed his whole life. “Tell them about the radio.”
The radio in the office got retuned overnight, every night, to a big-band station.
The big man was Dario, the senior salesman with eleven years and inferior corners, and he had opinions about that too, and about the cold spot by the loading dock, and about the one-star review the store had gotten last month from a customer complaining that the mannequin they let sleep in the window bed was in poor taste. Farnsworth did not own a mannequin.
The night janitor, Denny, had gone further. He’d left a voice recorder running in the showroom overnight and played us the result on his phone, holding it up with both hands. Forty seconds of hum, then a long low moan.
“It’s a streetcar,” Luke said.
“That’s what they want you to think,” Denny said.
We split the interviews. Luke took the staff one at a time at a floor-model dinette, unhurried, letting them talk themselves from ghost theory back down to facts, which he did better than anyone I’d ever watched work.
I took Perlman and the paperwork. It was a good morning.
It had, in fact, been a good week, and standing in a furniture showroom listening to a janitor defend his moan recording, I let myself appreciate it.
Here’s what I had been braced for, a week and a half ago.
Anonymous envelopes. Photographs. Wright finding small reasons to stand near Luke, or Luke going quiet and gray the way he had that first morning in Murphy’s office.
I’d watched for all of it, because watching was the thing I was actually trained at, and for the first few days I’d paid attention to the mail on both our desks and felt stupid doing it.
Nothing came. No envelopes, nobody following anybody, nothing moved on my desk or his, no threats, no mysterious messages.
And Wright had been, by every measure I had, a good sergeant.
Not showy about it. He took the duty swaps nobody wanted.
Chen, who did not hand out praise, allowed in my hearing that the overtime sheet added up for the first time in a year.
When a file went well he pushed the credit down onto whoever had done the work, and when the ghost assignment came up at the morning briefing he’d laughed along with everyone else and said if it turned out to be a real ghost, the overtime forms were going to get complicated.
It was a decent line for that hour of the morning.
Around Luke he kept a distance you could have measured with a ruler, and it never once looked pointed.
It looked like a man keeping a distance he himself had asked for.
I’d hated him on sight, in that office. I’d told Luke so, and made it a joke, the jealous boyfriend, no evidence required.
A week and a half later the joke was starting to embarrass me.
Whatever I’d been waiting for him to be, he hadn’t been it, and I could only keep my hackles up so long about a man whose worst documented act was fixing the overtime sheet.
So I was, that morning, in a furniture store, on a ghost case, something close to happy. The week had been ordinary, and I’d earned it. I was ready to enjoy it.
The search took the rest of the afternoon and turned up nothing, until Luke stopped in the middle of the stockroom aisle and looked up.
“Mezzanine,” he said.
There was a storage loft over the back offices, seasonal stock and dead fixtures, reachable by a rolling ladder that had last been oiled around the time I made detective.
I went up first, on the theory that I was the charming one and charm should lead, and I got my reward when I put my flashlight over the top shelf and a pigeon came off it straight into my face.
I said several things that don’t belong in a report.
Below me, Luke made a sound I chose to interpret as concern.
“It’s a bird,” he said, when I’d finished. “You’re an experienced officer.”
“It came at my eyes.”
“It’s a pigeon, Ryan.”
Behind the Christmas stock, in the far corner of the mezzanine where the ceiling came down to meet the wall, we found the ghost’s house.
A cot, made up tight, corners squared. A folding chair.
A kettle sitting on a board laid across two paint cans, with a mug and a biscuit tin beside it.
A milk crate of paperback westerns, and when I opened the top one there was a library slip in it with a due date two weeks out.
Work boots lined up under the cot, heels together.
And thumbtacked to the stud above the pillow, a photograph, old, square, a woman laughing in a kitchen with her hand half up to block the camera.
Neither of us said anything for a second. Nobody was haunting Farnsworth Furniture. Somebody was living there, and living carefully, and by the look of the due date, planned to keep on.
“Five months,” Luke said. “Perlman said it started five months ago.”
“January.” I looked at the boots. “Cold month to start sleeping rough. Warm building, though.”
We didn’t tear it out. That was Luke’s call and he made it without discussing it, the same way he’d let Denny play the whole moan recording to the end. We photographed it, went back down the ladder, sent Perlman home with his keys and instructions, and turned off the lights.
Then we sat down on a floor-model sectional in the dark to wait for closing time to do its work.
It was a good sectional. I said so. Luke said it was overpriced and the cushions would go flat in a year, and then he put his arm along the back of it behind me anyway, and we sat there in the quiet of a big empty store after close, streetlight coming through the window displays, the fridge in the staff room humming somewhere behind us.
“I made a decision this week,” Luke said. Low. “About Adam.”
I kept my eyes on the window. “Okay.”
“I spent the first week braced. You saw it. Waiting for him to revisit our old story.” He let a second go by. “I can’t do a year of that. It’d wear me down worse than anything he ever actually did. So I stopped. He does his job, I do mine, and I’m done bracing.”
There was a time, not long ago, when a speech like that from Luke would have taken three weeks and a crowbar. He just said it, in the dark, unasked. That was the part of us I’d have defended with my teeth: not the couch or the kissing, the fact that he said things now.
“Good,” I said. And I meant it. All the way down, no reservation I could find. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re right. There’s nothing there. He’s a good sergeant and the worst thing I have on him is that he’s never once had a bad day, which is annoying, but it’s not a charge.”
Luke huffed, almost a laugh. His hand came off the back of the couch onto my shoulder, and we sat like that, on furniture we had no intention of buying, waiting for a ghost.
The ghost came out at closing time plus about an hour. A shuffle first, back by the offices, then the click of the stockroom door, and then a man crossed the edge of the showroom in the streetlight carrying a kettle, and he was wearing slippers.
Luke turned on the lamp beside the sectional. Just the lamp. The man stopped where he was and stood very still, an older man in a cardigan, gray hair combed even at this hour, the kettle held in both hands.
“Oh,” he said. Then, with the resignation of a man who had thought about this moment for five months, “You’ll be the police.”
“Detective Hawley. This is Detective Carlson.” Luke’s voice stayed at the lamp’s level, low and even. “What’s your name, sir?”