“Joe Wear,” asked Margaret. It was a shock to hear the word crippled, to realize that’s what Joe was to other people.
The man took out a tiny book, and opened it to reveal notes written in a barbed-wire cursive. “He was in love with some hired girl who got fired by the family, and the crippled man decided to avenge her.”
“Me?” said Margaret.
“Not you,” said the man, “a long time ago. No, you’re far too young.” He peered again into the notebook. “‘The pins fall over for no reason.’”
Margaret had known that the police had suspected Joe Wear of setting the fire. The two men had been at loggerheads—whatever loggerheads were; Margaret saw Joe and Dr. Sprague like lumberjacks standing on fallen trees gliding down the river, each wanting to go first—no, not loggerheads, they plain hated each other. But Joe Wear had never been in love with her. She knew that much. Didn’t she?
She said, “Subsidence.”
The man looked out over the lanes. “Possibly. Is that man dead?”
Margaret turned to look—a spirit? A ghost? But it was only Jeptha Arrison, sleeping on the pinboys’ shelf. Margaret was about to explain, but then she saw him, on his stomach with his head turned toward them, gray in the face. They stared at him for a long while. He gave a rattling sigh, and rolled over. Since the war had started it was nearly impossible to hire pinboys, but then again there weren’t many men around to bowl. You couldn’t hire little boys any longer. That was illegal.
“Only Jeptha,” she said. “I’m Margaret Truitt.” She stuck her hand out for a shake.
Just like that the man’s eyes were filled with tears. He caught her hand between his. “My late wife’s name was Margaret,” he said. “I won’t need a thing from you. I’ll take some photos. Then, depending on what we find, perhaps some moving pictures. I understand, you say, We don’t have spirits or we don’t want spirits or how do we get rid of spirits if we got ’em. Customers don’t like ghosts, you might think, but they do. Look at Salem! Look at the Continental Hotel!” He nodded at the photo of the hotel elevator; he was still holding her hand. “You may find business better than it’s ever been.”
She didn’t want the man to find a ghost but she also didn’t want him to go. He was a big man, and Margaret loved big men the way some women loved big dogs. Their very presence comforted her; she thought she particularly knew how to talk to them. “Well,” she said. “We could use the business. You start looking. Find me a ghost. Make it a good one.”
Arch spent the week following the Ghoster, whose name—he thought—was Cadey. He’d imagined a ghost seeker’s instruments would be astonishing, made of whiz-bang plastics and fireproof glass and plutonium, with knobs and screens, automatic pens and a clock with luminous hands that had the ability to go spinning back through history. Maybe all that material had gone to the war effort; after all, they had torn down the cast-iron ball returns for scrap and replaced them with wood. What the man carried: an ordinary Brownie camera and a scrapbook filled with snapshots and clippings, a small tape recorder. Similarly, the words ghost hunter had conjured up in Arch’s head a man of energy, excitability. But Cadey was slow, dolorous, piscine. He seemed to swim through the alley.
“Hetty Dubois,” he said, pointing to a page from a magazine. “Died of a plunged elevator. Not in it, under. Murdered, but by who?” Arch looked. A figure knit of light: he could see it, her head, her beaded dress, her flat kid shoes, feathered hat. “Here’s the Peddler of Ogunquit, Solomon Kamp. Here’s little Bobby Kent, hanged in a barn. The Dark Lady of Union Station—we don’t know her name, alas. Still a mystery. Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t moved on. But here she is. See? In front of the newsstand. Her head. Her arm.”
“They’re people,” said Arch.
“Of course they’re people,” said Cadey. “Were. What else?” He looked across the alley. “The thing is, you don’t know that you’ve got the ghost till you develop the film.”
“But what do you think?” asked Arch. “What do the readings say?”
Cadey shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. You got a historical case of spontaneous combustion, that’s for sure. But whether there’s a haunting—” He saw the look on Arch’s face. “I’ll take more pictures this week. Then we’ll know.” Cadey tilted his head and pointed his nose at the ceiling.
Arch tried to feel a ghost. His father, or a fraction of him, something glowering and clumsy. He looked at his mother to see if anything had come over her: peace, or unease. He didn’t know which his father’s presence would induce in her. Cadey touched his own nose as though to adjust it.
“You smell something?” Arch asked.
“Beer,” said Cadey, giving Arch a sideways look. “No, I’m divining. The tip of the nose is a sensitive instrument. Why it succumbs to frostbite.”
“You feel something, then.” Arch examined the air in front of Cadey’s face, but all he could really see was the man’s nose twitching in a circular way like a dog’s. Arch’d only drunk one beer that day, left behind by an old man on lane one, and suddenly he understood that to the old man, Arch was a ghost: a beer-thieving phantom.
Cadey sneezed, but angrily. He gazed along the back wall. Jeptha knelt oddly on the pinshelf, glowering at them like a gargoyle.
Grief was what made him handsome. A doleful beauty. Still Margaret thought he was overdoing it. In his camera bag he carried his wife’s childhood teddy bear. “Sweet!” said Margaret, and the man pulled out the bear and displayed it. Out in the open the bear wasn’t sweet; it was a haunted object, one eye replaced with a horn button, the other glass and accusing, a slip of pink tongue reattached in some battlefield surgery, belly fur worn away to warp and woof. As though only he had evidence of loss in this world.
“Poor love,” said Margaret.
“Me or the bear?” asked Cadey. He danced the bear up Margaret’s arm.
“You need to stop,” she said to him. “The photography, I mean.”
“Can’t. I’m writing a book.”
“Write a book about something else.”
“What else is there?”
“I don’t know. Marry again, big handsome man like you.”
“Ah no,” he said. He gave her a dazzling, woebegone smile. She knew it was pity; it felt like love. “I’m done with that.”
He was done with lots of things, he told her. Restaurants, candy, newspapers, parties, cars, airplanes, living in houses. He slept in hotels and traveled by train.
What he needed was to fall in love with another woman, but she saw he was too vain. Ordinary happiness would be a dent in his armor. Happiness was everywhere, like dropped coins. You might feel lucky to pick it up and put it in your pocket, but what could it really buy you?
To be haunted! That set you apart.
Close ’em,” Cadey said to Arch. He gestured. “The blackout curtains.”
The blackout curtains were floor-to-ceiling black velvet weighted down with metal at the hem, intended to shut out not the outside light from the bowling alley, but the bowling alley light from the outside, in case of enemy attack. Salford held air raid drills all the time, according to the whims of Norman Riker, the air raid warden, who liked—he wouldn’t deny it—to make the whole town seem to fall dead at one time, the citizens in their houses or caught in their cars. Did they feel dead themselves, or did they only seem dead to him?
Close them, Cadey called, so Arch went to close them. They were so heavy it felt like the end, the very end, every time you drew them.
“Now shut the lights.”