The Girl in the Attic Read online

  The Girl in the Attic

  (Originally released as Night Caller by Daniel Ransom. This edition updated and heavily revised)

  By Ed Gorman with Patricia Lee Macomber

  Digital edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / Ed Gorman

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Cover images courtesy of:

  http://piratelotus-stock.deviantart.com/

  http://fairiegoodmother.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY ED GORMAN & PATRICIA LEE MACOMBER

  Novels:

  Nightmare Child

  Serpent's Kiss

  Shadow Games

  Showdown

  Robert Payne Series

  Blood Moon

  Hawk Moon

  Voodoo Moon

  Harlot's Moon

  Sam McCain Series

  The Day the Music Died

  The Jack Dwyer Series:

  Murder in the Wings

  The Autumn Dead

  A Cry of Shadows

  Novellas:

  The End of It All

  Out There in the Darkness

  Survival

  Cast in Dark Waters (with Tom Piccirilli)

  PATRICIA LEE MACOMBER:

  Stargate Atlantis: Brimstone

  Intermusings

  The Call of Distant Shores

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  For my friend and agent, Ray Peekner, and his new bride, Barbara

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to June Oberholtzer for her help with this book.

  1996

  ANNE EDMONDS FOUND GUILTY; PLACED IN MENTAL HOSPITAL

  Twelve-year-old Anne Edmonds, only daughter of local hotel owner Carleton Edmonds, was found guilty today by a Haskett County jury of killing her mother and four residents of her father's hotel during their sleep.

  At one point in the trial, District Attorney R. Kenneth Smythe said to the jury, "I know what I'm about to say will shock you, but as God is my witness, I wish we could put her in the electric chair.

  "She is an evil child. It's almost enough to make you believe in possession."

  Carleton Edmonds, the girl's father, wept openly as the jury foreman rose and read the guilty verdict to the judge.

  "I can only say that my daughter is not the terrible little creature the press has done its best to portray," Carleton Edmonds told reporters after county jail officials let him visit briefly with his child.

  TODAY: CHAPTER ONE

  1

  In fifteen minutes on this hot August morning, only one car had passed by: a Jeep filled with teenaged boys littering the old two-lane blacktop with beer cans. When they saw the stalled Focus, they didn't even slow down. They just made a few dirty remarks about the pretty blond woman standing next to the open hood of the car. In her china-blue summer dress, her hair done up in a loose chignon, she seemed an unlikely candidate to fix whatever was wrong with the car.

  "Boy, what adolescents."

  Sally Baines looked down at her thirteen-year-old daughter Jamie and smiled. "Your favorite word again."

  Jamie grinned-despite herself. "Are you really going to make me pay you a dime for that?"

  Sally leaned over and fluffed Jamie's fine blond hair, her father's hair. Sally made note of the fact that when she thought about her dead husband, the physical response was not as profound as it had once been. There was no perceptible change in heartbeat, no instant sweat beading on the face and arms, no tightening of the stomach. Maybe Dr. Borglund was right, after all. Maybe the passage of time would help her cope with her loss . . .

  "No, I wasn't being serious about making you pay a dime. I just meant that you're starting to use 'adolescent' a little bit too much." But Jamie had turned around and was looking at the engine.

  "Maybe I should take auto mechanics next year," she said.

  "What with the school play, and you being editor of the seventh-grade newspaper, it's unlikely you'll have time for much else." Sally wanted to discourage her daughter from taking on too many activities. She had begun to realize that that was how Jamie was handling the death of her father—by keeping herself so busy she didn't have time to confront her pain.

  "Could be the distributor," Jamie said, still examining the motor. In her Maroon 5 t-shirt and Diesel jeans, her hair pulled back into loose braids, she managed to look both tomboyish and fetching. Judging by the increasing number of phone calls she'd been getting over the past year ("I think I'll take that one upstairs," she always said whenever it was a boy), a lot of young men her age were making the same discovery.

  "Distributor? Where did you learn that?"

  "Oh, one day something happened to the car—remember the Pontiac we had?—and Dad said it was the distributor. Dad really knew about cars."

  "He sure did, honey."

  "I always wondered why he wasn't a mechanic instead of a lawyer."

  "Well, he came from three generations of lawyers, and tradition is sometimes hard to break."

  Jamie looked at her closely. "You'll never say it, will you, Mom?"

  "What?"

  "That you don't like Granddad because he forced Dad to become a lawyer."

  Sally looked away from her daughter and spent a moment surveying the countryside so she could give a properly rehearsed answer.

  They had pulled off the Interstate because Sally had thought it would be a good idea, at least once on their two-week vacation, to see the real Midwest close up. Sally had grown up in a small town complete with a cast of characters as likeable as those on the "Andy Griffith Show," which Jamie always watched on cable. So when she saw a sign announcing HAVERSHAM, 6 miles, she decided to be impulsive and stop for lunch there.

  Unfortunately, a few miles after leaving the Interstate, their small car had started to cough and sputter; finally, it died. Sally had tried her cell phone and would have called for help. . . IF she had remembered to slip it into her purse the night before. It was still on the charger at home, right where she had left it for two days straight. The importance of cell phones seemed to have escaped her.

  Now they stood on the side of the road, walled in on either side by beautiful green corn that was at least six feet high. Distantly, there came the sounds of a tractor busy at work and those of cows and horses somewhere behind the line of corn. In the ditch to their right, overgrown with milkweed and wild ginger weed, rabbits hopped playfully. The sky was a cloudless blue. You could smell new-mown hay mingled with the scent of hot sunlight on the car oil left behind from trucks that had passed by here. Sally loved it, all of it.

  "You're thinking up a good one, aren't you?" her daughter asked, and the question brought her back.

  "I—I just got caught up in all the beauty."

  "Sure, Mom," Jamie said sarcastically. Then she grinned. "It's all right if you don't like Granddad. I don't much like him, either."

  "You don't? Really?"

  "No, actually I think he's kind of pompous. And I know one thing for sure."
r />   "What?"

  "That Dad really would have liked being a mechanic instead of being a lawyer." She studied her mother's face. "He really wasn't very happy, was he? Dad, I mean."

  Sally hugged her daughter to her, smelling the clean hair and the perfume she had started to wear. "No, he wasn't, honey."

  Jamie didn't leave her embrace but she looked up at her. "It was because of Granddad, wasn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "He sort of ran Dad's life, didn't he?"

  "I'm afraid he did."

  "That's why I'm glad we're not rich. Rich people are like that a lot."

  Sally fluffed her hair again. "How do you know so much about rich people?"

  "The internet, duh!"

  "Oh, I can see why that would make you an expert, all right."

  "You're being sarcastic, Mom, but it's true. Everybody who’s anybody has a website and a blog. And there are tons of millionaires and movie stars that have Facebook accounts. For real."

  "And just how do you know that?"

  "Mom," Jamie said, as if Mom was not quite bright, "I friended a couple of them."

  Sally pretended to scoff. "I think you need a good dose of Net Nanny."

  "Mom no! Please? If I couldn’t Skype with my friends, I’d just die." Jamie looked back at the car engine. "You think anybody's going to come along here?"

  Before letting her go, Sally Baines gave her daughter a very tight squeeze. Then she looked gratefully around at the lovely countryside and said, "I certainly hope so, Jamie."

  2

  Hanratty wondered what the boys and girls at CBS would think if they could see him now.

  He pulled his head back from the Sony camera he had trained on one of the windows across the street, yawned, and reached for a fresh pack of Winstons. If you were going to get the big C from smoking, David Hanratty figured, you might as well enjoy the cigarettes you smoked.

  He pawed at the stubble on his face. The growth was spiky enough to cut paper. He needed a shower and a shave, and after that, a fish dinner from the restaurant out on the edge of town. They served speckled trout there that was maybe the best he'd ever had. But dinner wasn’t his only need.

  He also needed some proof of certain things or the International Tattler would cut off his expense account within the next two weeks

  He went over to the bed and lay down. He'd been here two months but he'd never gotten used to this room. The lace doilies that were everywhere, the scarred blond furniture from the fifties, the shared bathroom down the hall, used also by other residents, mostly old people filled with loneliness and phlegm. . .

  How the hell did a bona fide (or "bona fidee," as the word was pronounced in these parts) CBS star reporter ever end up in Haversham doing a freelance assignment for the International Tattler?

  The answer was simple enough: cocaine. By the end, his habit had cost him $300 a day, not to mention his wife, his dignity, and ultimately his job.

  In the industry, word spread quickly. People like Katie Couric could leave—by mutual agreement—a show like "The CBS Evening News" and go back to whence they had come (in Couric’s case, "The Today Show"), and you were still talking prestige and large dollars. It wasn't because Couric had been a cokehead.

  Hanratty jabbed out his cigarette in an ashtray whose glass bottom sported a decal of the 1939 World's Fair and then punched on the digital recorder next to his bed.

  Static rolled by for nearly half a minute and then a very bad recording of a young girl's voice came on. ". . . I can remember finding the ax in the attic. And I can remember the phone call."

  "Tell us about the phone call, Anne," a man said. He had a soothing, professional tone.

  "It was the voice."

  "The voice you told us about earlier?"

  "Yes."

  "The voice of the dead woman?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know where she was calling from?"

  There was a pause. You could hear the young girl sighing. "The graveyard, I guess."

  "St. Bonaventure's Cemetery?"

  "Yes."

  "You visited the cemetery looking for her once, didn't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you find her?"

  Another pause. "Do I have to answer?"

  "I wish you would, honey."

  Silence. The scratchy, over-copied recording rolling on. Then, "The ground kind of shook, I guess."

  "You'll have to explain that for me, Anne."

  "I found her gravestone. I went and stood by it and I—I sort of felt the earth shaking."

  "What do you think that meant?"

  "The earth shaking like that?"

  "Yes," the male voice said.

  "I guess she was just trying to let me know that she had power over me."

  "So you're sure she did have power over you?"

  The girl's voice was almost a whisper. "Yes, yes, she did."

  Now the male voice paused. "Anne, I want to ask you a question, but I want you to take your time answering it. I want you to think very hard before you give me an answer, all right?"

  "All right."

  "Do you think you would have picked up the ax and carried it downstairs if you hadn't gotten the phone call from the dead woman?"

  Suddenly she started crying, and no matter how many times Hanratty heard the tape, he never failed to be moved by her tears. She sounded so confused—lost—and now, crying, she sounded completely without hope.

  "I—I'm sorry for what I did."

  "I know you are, Anne," the man said. Then, "But I wish you'd answer my question, Anne. Do you remember my question?"

  "Yes."

  "Then would you answer it?"

  She made sniffling sounds. Finally, she said, "I told you about the glow, didn't I?"

  "Yes, but tell me again, Anne."

  "Well, there was this glow... in the attic, I mean. Sometimes I saw it at night and sometimes I saw it during the day, too. It was always in that window under the captain's walk. That's why I started going up to the attic in the first place. That's where I discovered the phone: in the attic. It was an old-fashioned phone, one of those long, skinny ones. When I'd see the glow I'd go up to the attic to see what was going on, and sometimes the phone would ring and I'd pick it up and she'd be there. The dead woman, I mean."

  "All right, honey. That's enough about the glow for now. Concentrate on my question. Do you think you would have thought of picking up the ax if the dead woman hadn't started calling you?"

  "I—I don't think so," Anne said.

  The man apparently decided he'd gotten all he was going to get for that particular session. He said, "You're tired, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "How about if I walk you back to your room and you lie down?"

  "I'd like that."

  "Good, then, that's just what we'll do."

  With that, the recorder was switched off. Hanratty blew smoke at the small machine, smoke that was blue-white in the hot sunlight streaming through the west window and its lace curtains.

  He stood up and went to the video camera.

  He hadn't checked it since dawn. He stopped the RECORD phase and switched to PLAY. While he waited for the recording to start he leaned against the window and stared sullenly at the Royal Hotel across the street.

  More precisely, he stared at the attic window, the window the little girl, Anne Edmonds, had described in the tape to her psychiatrist, Dr. Samuels.

  The window where she reported seeing the glow.

  If Hanratty could prove that she had indeed seen that glow, and maybe had even talked to a dead woman, then his former job as a first-string CBS Evening News reporter would have been nothing compared to the rewards he could reap now.

  Book royalties alone would give him an income that even Dan Rather would envy.

  When the recording finally started, he flipped open the viewing screen and punched FAST FORWARD.

  He kept his eye fixed on the attic window.

  In the first part of the vid
eo, everything was very dark. He'd started recording around eleven o'clock last night. Gradually, as the recording sped forward, sunlight began to play off the hotel and the window.

  But one thing remained dark constantly: the window. There was no glow to be seen.

  "Shit," he said, slamming off the machine.

  He stood up and started pacing. In a few days he wouldn't be able to afford even this crummy room, let alone the sort he'd become accustomed to before drugs had done him in.

  He went over to the bed, sat on the edge, and buried his face in his hands.

  He wished he was one of those men who could cry when they needed to.

  That would be so damn nice.

  3

  The van came from the east, a sedate blue Chevrolet van with black walls and mud flaps.

  The closer it got, the better Sally Baines could see that driver fit van perfectly.

  He looked to be in his mid-sixties, with one of those craggy faces framed with snowy white hair that put you at ease immediately. He appeared to be wearing bib overalls and a white t-shirt. He had a straw fishing hat set back on his head and a piece of straw sticking out from between his teeth. From his open windows came the strains of a country-and-western station.

  Sally and Jamie both waved frantically at him, and the man wheeled the van over to the side of the road.

  "Come on, honey, I think we've finally got our ride," Sally told her daughter.

  They ran to the van, and the man pushed the passenger door open for them. Sally took the long step up. Once she was seated, she reached out and pulled Jamie up, too.

  That was when she noticed the man's strange gaze fixed on Jamie's face.

  Jamie noticed it as well. She looked at her mother and then back at the man. "Hi," Jamie said to him.