Read More: A brief Q&A with James Ulmer
I.
The glass doors parted in front of him as he approached, and Professor Tristan Dietrich stepped into the brightly lit interior of the Walmart Superstore. He glanced up to the right to observe his own ghostly image, flickering and faint, in the monitor of the store’s aging security system. Head turned away, stepping fluidly into the interior of the cinderblock building, his image seemed the perfect equivalent of what his life had become in recent weeks: grainy, colorless, and insubstantial.
Dietrich was looking for Katelyn Hicks, a former student who worked in the store. He’d seen her there often in the ten months since she graduated, though in all that time, he had never spoken to her. For her senior project, Katelyn and her associate, fellow psychology major Evan Matheson, had done research and a presentation on parapsychology. Dietrich had listened to their unsubstantiated assertions with strained impatience, and he’d made no secret of his opinion of their project or their subject matter, so he wasn’t at all sure that Katelyn would be willing to speak to him now. But he had to try.
Dietrich walked slowly along the checkout lines, looking for the short red hair of Katelyn Hicks, the bright color an easy marker in the fluorescent glare of the Walmart.
Three months earlier, his daughter Mallory, his only child from a marriage that had ended long ago, had died suddenly from a brain tumor. She was only nineteen, still a freshman at the college in town where Dietrich taught. Her diagnosis, sharp decline, and death had happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that her absence from his life seemed like something he’d imagined. Sometimes, when he arrived home distracted by a busy day at work, he still expected to find her there, tripping down the stairs to greet him, and the unnatural silence and emptiness of the house descended on him with a crushing weight.
The day after the funeral, seven nights after her death, he had a vivid dream.
Mallory appeared at the foot of his bed. He woke to see her standing there, enveloped in an oval of white light bordered by a wreath of bright red poppies and violet gentians so dark they were nearly black. He could smell the thick, sweet odor of the flowers in the room. Mallory wore the pale blue hospital gown she had died in, but all trace of suffering was gone from her features. She was radiant, transformed.
Another instant and the room went dark. She vanished suddenly, as if someone had switched off a light, and the intoxicating scent of the flowers had vanished with her.
Dietrich lay awake for hours. At last, a faint light leaked in through the blinds, and he glanced around at the pale walls growing more distinct, the hardwood floor with its strip of Persian carpet, the teak nightstand crouching at his elbow – trying to grasp the notion that this familiar space had been the scene of a revelation. The dream wasn’t repeated, but the image of Mallory smiling at him so familiarly, enwreathed, her entire form backlit with a brilliant white light, had opened a possibility in his life that he’d never felt before. He had to know more; and so, as the weeks went by, he found his thoughts turning to his eccentric former student.
He spotted her now on the other side of a divider, the asymmetrical cut of her short red hair bobbing awkwardly above the half-wall as she limped past to help a customer. Dietrich came around the corner as she arrived back at her station by the register. In her blue Walmart vest, her fire-colored hair sticking out and sprayed into position, Katelyn Hicks looked oddly out of place in the artificial glare of the Walmart Superstore among distracted customers, their carts loaded with groceries, inexpensive clothing, and toys. To Dietrich, it would’ve made more sense to encounter her stepping wordlessly out of a black line of trees in a mountain forest at night.
The two of them seemed suddenly encased in silence, the noise of the store around them muted and far away. He took a deep breath to steady himself and stepped toward her.
“Hello, Katelyn.”
She looked up at him, an eyebrow raised quizzically.
“Hello, Dr. Dietrich.” Her green eyes glanced down to her feet, then lifted again to Dietrich’s face. “I heard about your daughter. Sorry.”
Tentatively, he took a step toward the thin, gangly young woman in front of him.
“Are you and Evan still doing investigations?
She eyed him suspiciously.
“Yes. Why?”
“Because, if you’d let me, I’d like to go with you some time.”
He watched her putting the pieces together. Given how dismissive he’d been on the subject of the paranormal, she would’ve been justified in aiming a little sarcasm or anger in his direction, or at least a few pointed questions. But she was kind enough to spare him that.
“We’re going back to the Cranley house this weekend,” she said. “You’re welcome to join us if you’re free.”
He thanked her. He was.
Three days later, on Friday, March 6, Dietrich found himself in the back seat of Evan Matheson’s rusting 1965 Chrysler Newport headed north to Camden, Arkansas. Evan was at the wheel, his dark hair spilling over the collar of his blue jeans jacket. Katelyn sat in the passenger’s seat directly in front of Dietrich, abstracted, staring out the side window at the dark pines and the hills rising beyond them.
For the past few days, the weather had seemed to signal the end of the lingering winter. Bradford pears had opened their white blooms at the edge of the woods and in the front yards of the farmhouses they passed, and the borders of the highway were embroidered with bright yellow patches of daffodils. But a cold front was advancing into the state from the northwest, dropping temperatures rapidly as it arrived, and now the cold air, as they sped north, was already filtering into the area. Heavy clouds the color of iron loomed over the pastures and stretches of forest, and a thick mist began to weave between the pines and reach its cool white fingers across the road. By the time that Dietrich and his two companions were halfway to their destination, snow began to fall. It fell steadily and silently in the windless cold, falling into the open, uplifted throats of daffodils and ghostly paperwhites.
Evan switched on the windshield wipers as the snow continued to fall. The rhythmic sweep of the blades across the glass broke the awkward silence in the car.
“So,” Dietrich said, “tell me about this house we’re going to.”
Evan’s dark eyes flicked up to regard him in the rearview mirror.
“The Cranley place?” he said. “You’ve never heard of it? It’s part of local legend.”
“Not my field of study,” Dietrich responded.
Evan nodded, remembering, perhaps, his former professor’s derision.
“The house was built in 1904. Cranley was a cotton merchant. Bales of cotton would come down the Ouachita to Camden from all over the state, where it would be sold and then shipped downriver to New Orleans. Camden was a thriving city back then, before the boll weevil wiped out the state’s cotton crop and the river began to silt over.”
Dietrich made an effort to keep any trace of irony out of his voice.
“So where does the ghost story come in?”
“Not a ghost story exactly,” Evan told him. “More of a mystery that’s never been solved.
Esther Cranley, the granddaughter of the original owner, inherited the place shortly after World War II. She was a lawyer, one of the first female lawyers in the state. One night in October, 1962, Esther was alone in the house. Her husband was out at a local bar, and she was sitting by the fire in the back parlor. Her dog, a collie, was with her, and she was shelling a bowl of peas. When her husband came home at about eight-thirty, Esther was gone.”
“What do you mean gone?”
Evan was silent for a moment while he negotiated a curve, the black trunks of the pines looming suddenly in front of them. When they came around the bend, a deer, a buck, stood motionless at the edge of the road in the falling snow, antlers raised, a front hoof lifted, waiting to step into invisibility.
The car sped past.
“She wasn’t in the house,” Evan continued. “The husband found the bowl of peas on the couch where she’d been sitting. The fire was still burning in the grate, and the collie was asleep on the hearth. No sign of a struggle. He found her purse on a kitchen counter, nothing missing, with two hundred and fifty dollars in cash still in the wallet.” His eyes lifted to the mirror to meet Dietrich’s. “Her husband thought that maybe she had gone to bed, so he looked upstairs. The house was completely empty.”
“What happened to her?’
Evan shrugged. “No one really knows.”
Katelyn woke from her apparent trance, swung around, and fixed her green eyes on Dietrich.
She said, “Some people think she had some sort of a meltdown, went into a fugue state, and simply walked away from her life. That happens, I guess. But it’s unlikely that she would’ve walked out without taking any clothes or money. Or her car, which was found locked in the garage behind the house. Also, Esther Cranley had a successful law practice with a lot of clients and responsibilities. She was well connected, wealthy, respected in the community, and there were no apparent problems in her marriage. She wouldn’t have just walk away from these things, not after she’d worked so hard for so long to get them.”
Dietrich agreed. On the surface of it, that didn’t make much sense.
“Then there’s the more sinister theory,” Katelyn added.
Dietrich felt his attention sharpen.
“Esther was friends with Bobby Kennedy. He was Attorney General at the time, and he was going after the mob. Some people think that Esther was kidnapped to silence Kennedy and stop the investigation. But there was never any threatening phone call, and the investigation continued unimpeded. So that theory really doesn’t hold up.
“The most likely explanation,” Katelyn continued, “at least the one that’s not as easily dismissed, has to do with a client of Esther’s, an old lady who inherited twenty million in oil money. Esther found out that the nephew of this client was trying to have her committed so he could get power of attorney over the estate. Esther was working on this case when she vanished, so naturally, a lot of people blamed the nephew, though there wasn’t a shred of evidence connecting him to the disappearance. And really, it doesn’t make much sense for him to have risked killing Esther. He inherited the money anyway – two years later when the old lady died of natural causes. All he had to do was wait.”
Dietrich had to admit, he was impressed. These two had certainly done their homework.
“So what do you think happened to Esther Cranley?”
Katelyn looked across the seat at Evan, and again the driver’s eyes shifted from the road to regard their passenger in the mirror.
“What happened,” Evan said, “is something that no one so far has even come close to imagining. It’s as if she walked through a doorway and disappeared. She may not even be dead in the usual sense that we mean that word.”
What the hell does that mean? Dietrich asked himself. But before he had a chance to respond, Evan went on.
“So, to come back to your original question, how did the house come by its current reputation? I suppose it’s inevitable, given the story we just told you, that some kind of superstition would attach itself to the place. The husband lived there by himself until his death in 1978, by which time Esther had been declared legally dead. My own belief is that things were happening in the house all along, but the husband never said anything. Maybe he liked the thought that his wife was still with him. In any case, the property passed on to the next generation, and that’s when the stories began to circulate. Footsteps heard upstairs when the house was empty. Figures glimpsed from the corner of your eye that aren’t there when you turn to look. The Cranleys still own the house, and they keep it in pristine condition, but no one in the family will live there anymore.”
Katelyn said, “We investigated the place back in January, and we got some amazing evidence. They agreed to let us come back.”
An edge of alarm sharpened Dietrich’s curiosity.
“What kind of evidence?”
“A few photographs,” Evan said. “We’ll show them to you when we get to the house and set up the laptop. And one of the best damn EVP sessions I’ve ever heard.”
“You lost me,” Dietrich said.
“Electronic voice phenomena,” Katelyn explained. “It’s a voice you hear on a recorder that you couldn’t hear when you made the recording. The voice of someone present that you couldn’t see. Your ear doesn’t catch it, but the recorder does.”
Snow ticked steadily at the windshield.
“You mean the voice of a dead person.”
“Right.”
Dietrich was stunned. Had they actually recorded the speech of the dead? He took a moment to compose himself. When he looked up, Katelyn’s heavy green eyes were weighing his reaction.
“You want to hear it?” she asked.
“Damn right I do.”
She rummaged in her purse and drew out a slim, handheld device, smaller than a cell phone, the word Sony across the top, a red button marked record.
Evan pulled into the rest stop on their right. Snow fell steadily in the early dusk. Other drivers had gotten off the road to get home and shut out the cold: theirs was the only car in the lot. In front of them stood the dark brick restroom with its dim overhead lamp. Beyond the building, pine branches interlaced to block the declining light. Night rose from the floor of the forest, the wall of trees in front of them black and impenetrable, though the sky overhead still glowed with a blue, snow-reflected light. The result was eerie, unsettling, as if two worlds were present at once.
Katelyn held out of the recorder, careful to keep her palm from blocking the speaker, and with one slim finger pushed the play button.
Static. Then a voice came over the speaker.
“Is there anyone here with us?”
Dietrich recognized Evan’s voice. After a moment, the voice repeated, “Is there anyone here?”
Here, a faint voice, a woman’s, echoed. It sounded as if it arrived from a long way off, as if a whisper had somehow carried across a wheat field.
“Tell us your name. What happened to you?”
Sobbing. The emotion raw, unappeased. Dead, the whisper breathed. Dead, dead…
Listening, Dietrich felt vaguely faint, disoriented, as if a part of himself had come unfastened and was drifting away. A soft click followed as Katelyn turned off the recorder. The three living people in the car were completely silent. Almost imperceptibly, the falling snow ticked against the roof and hood, as if a hundred soft fingers tapped at the body of the rusting Chrysler.
II.
Fifteen minutes later, the car wove slowly up the icy street to the crest of a bluff overlooking the Ouachita River. It swung left and rolled down Washington Street past mansion after mansion behind the veil of snow, an occasional yellow window glowing in the twilight. It turned right and plunged into the narrow back streets of the historical district, moving slowly now on hilly roads already covered in an inch or more of snow. The travelers passed a stone wall surmounted by a wrought iron fence and veered uphill on the drive toward an imposing white pillared house, a single lamp burning on the second-story balcony.
The car pulled up in front.
“Welcome to the Cranley House,” Evan said.
The sight of the house rising behind the static of falling snow made Dietrich instantly uneasy. He told himself it was absurd, but he felt as if the house looked down disdainfully at the three travelers in the idling Chrysler. He felt suddenly cold, frozen, as if he’d been standing out in the weather for days. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t.
Stone steps rose to a broad front porch, two Ionian columns standing on each side of a heavy wooden door framed by two thin transoms, their frosted glass etched with lilies and backed by translucent white lace curtains, a clear transom directly over the door. A pair of tall windows rose on each side of the entrance, smaller windows above them on the second floor, and carved bays jutted from both sides of the house. Even in the quickly fading light, Dietrich could see that the place was immaculate, the white paint fresh and the windows clean and gleaming. He couldn’t account for his anxiety, his black dread at the sight of the place.
Evan swung around from the wheel to face him.
“You see houses like this all over the old part of town,” he said. “But most of them aren’t this well preserved.”
Dietrich regarded the young man, perplexed. Why was he speaking? Didn’t he feel it –the darkness, the threat? If they were silent, they might go unnoticed.
“There are slight differences in design,” Evan continued, “but the basic idea is the same. Essentially, this is a Victorian house – you’ll see what I mean when we get inside – but they stuck a Georgian façade on the front of it, the columns and the triangular portico, to make it look like an old plantation house. The Camden cotton merchants were trying to call back the glory days when they didn’t have to pay their work force.”
Katelyn had sat silent, her pale face turned to the house, since they’d first pulled up. To Dietrich, she looked like a marble statue in a deserted garden – attentive, focused, as if she were hearing music from another world.
Finally, she spoke.
“We need to get our things inside and some lights on before it gets dark.”
Moments later, Dietrich stood in the hall, stamping the snow from this thin leather shoes.
Their gear lay stacked on the floor in front of him: three suitcases, a cardboard box of canned goods and coffee, a laptop, some additional electronic devices he didn’t recognize, and two voice recorders like the one in Katelyn’s purse. With a low rumble, the furnace fired on. The front door swung open, and Katelyn limped in carrying one end of a large polyethylene cooler, Evan trailing her on the other end.
Dietrich’s pushed away his apprehension and followed them down the hall past a staircase that rose to the second floor. Beyond the stairs, on the right side of the hall, Katelyn rolled a pocket door into its recess, and then, with the same spare hand, felt on the wall for the light switch. A soft yellow glow spilled into the hall. Stepping into the room after them, Dietrich found a chandelier shining over a polished walnut table surrounded by six matching chairs, one on each short end of the table and two on each long side. Two additional chairs were angled into the near corners of the room, and on the wall between them, in a gold-painted frame, a heraldic English setter, head raised, posed with a duck in its jaws.
Beyond this room, through a second door, lay the kitchen.
The parlor at the back of the house couldn’t be entered from the hall. They had to roll back the heavy pocket door in the library, the walls lined with Esther Cranley’s law books, to gain access to the back room. Dietrich entered to find a silk-upholstered couch adjacent to a rose-colored marble fireplace with a scrolled ormolu mirror centered above it. He understood at once what he was seeing, and again his uneasiness crowded in on him.
“Is this the room where Esther Cranley disappeared? Is that the same couch?”
Katelyn looked at him and nodded.
“Probably,” Evan added. “We don’t actually know where she disappeared, but she had definitely settled down here on the night it happened. All the furniture in the house is the same. From what the family tells us, nothing here has been changed since 1962.”
Dietrich imagined the woman sitting there, calmly shelling peas with the dog at her feet and the fire crackling in the grate the moment before something unimaginable had happened.
They carried their bags with them to the second floor. The hallway there ran the length of the house, from the balcony in front to a window at the far end of the hall with a thin-legged table perched under it. Midway on the right was an open sitting area. The other five rooms were bedrooms, the doors opening on the hall. Evan and Katelyn took adjoining rooms, Evan in the front of the house next to the balcony and Katelyn in the room behind him closest to the stairs. Dietrich claimed the bedroom at the back right of the house.
Stepping into his new quarters, Dietrich swung his valise onto the bed and looked around critically. Cream-colored wallpaper with fluted vases and trellises of blue flowers, a queen bed with a blue comforter and a dark wooden nightstand, an armoire of the same dark wood. Opening a door, he found a small private bath with a claw-footed tub and a separate sink rising from the encaustic tile like a white porcelain lily. He stepped to the window and looked out at the snow-covered back yard: the freestanding garage where Evan had parked his Chrysler, the leafless oak with snow clinging to its branches. At the back of the property, near the wrought iron fence, a granite birdbath held its tiny frozen lake. Small icy flakes, the kind that can fall for hours, ticked steadily at the glass, the snow gradually obliterating the outside world, erasing edges, boundaries.
As Dietrich left the room to join the others, he made it a point to leave his bedside lamp on. He felt as if he had left a single candle burning in a dark sanctuary.
Evan said, “Esther Cranley may be in the house somewhere in some form, but I don’t believe she’s haunting this place. Not in the usual sense that we mean that word.”
Dietrich looked across the dining room table at Evan Matheson, the angles of the young man’s face highlighted by the glow of the chandelier suspended above them, his dark curly hair almost black in the dim light. Dietrich found it strange beyond words to be engrossed in a conversation like this, a conversation that would’ve been unthinkable for him a few short weeks ago. Still, he couldn’t deny that being in the house was affecting him, particularly now that the night had sealed them in and the snow continued to pile up noiselessly on the roof and drift against the walls. Katelyn had been nearly silent since they’d arrived, and when Dietrich glanced across the table at her face, her fear was plainly visible, and he understood how urgently she wrestled with it.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said.
Evan slid a manila folder across the gleaming table.
Dietrich opened the folder to find a black and white photograph of a woman in her fifties. She was dressed conservatively, short hair in a wave, a strand of pearls on her high-necked dress, matching pearl earrings. Underneath the photo was a Xerox of a page from The Washington Post dated June 10, 1962, showing the same woman talking with Robert Kennedy.
“I assume this is Esther Cranley?” Dietrich said.
“Right. Now let me show you something else.”
Evan opened the laptop in front of him and began tapping at the keys. Katelyn rose wordlessly and stood behind Evan to watch. Dietrich followed her example, coming around the table to view the screen.
“These are the two photographs I told you about,” Evan said. “The ones we got the last time we were here.”
He clicked on a file and the first picture appeared on the screen. In the silence that followed, Dietrich could hear the snow tapping the windowsill. Beside him, Katelyn stared at the screen, immobile, not breathing.
It was a photograph of her, taken, Dietrich realized, in the second-floor sitting room. Katelyn wore her usual: jeans, a tee shirt, her sweatshirt hoodie unzipped, her hair sticking out in all directions like a picture of alarm. She looked directly at the lens, a questioning expression on her face. Over her right shoulder, a second face appeared, staring at the camera, a faint smile on its mouth: a man, pale, his hair white, the lips colorless – as if a grainy, black-and-white image had been pasted into the vibrant color shot.
“Did you take this?” he asked.
“Yes,” Evan responded. “When I took it, we’d both heard something, but there was no one visible in the room except Katelyn. We only saw the face later, when we examined the picture.”
Dietrich slid his eyes to Katelyn. She’d grown paler, her features fixed, bloodless, a hand on one cheek as she stared at the screen. He glanced back at the photograph. The face hung over Katelyn’s shoulder like a death mask.
“Who is this?” he asked. […]
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James Ulmer’s most recent collection of stories, The Fire Doll, was awarded the George Garrett Fiction Prize from Texas Review Press. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The North American Review, The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, New Letters and elsewhere. Ulmer is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Southern Arkansas University.