The Moonlight (8 page)

“Pretty girl,” he said finally, as if the matter required a lot of thought.  And then he turned the card over and looked at the back again.  “You find this in the attic or something?  You a collector?”

“No.  I’m not a collector.”

“Well, I am.”  The man smiled, rather proudly.  “Sort of a busman’s holiday, you know?  I like the stamp.  They ain’t made those since before World War II.  Looks brand new.  And it ain’t canceled, either.”

“So it didn’t come through here?”

“No.  This was never mailed.  Tell you what—I’ll give you ten bucks for the stamp.”

Phil didn’t answer.  He just scooped up the postcard and walked out.

“Hey, I’ll make it twenty,” the clerk shouted after him.

Outside, in the parking lot, Phil had to keep walking to fight down his rising terror.  He felt nauseated, as if he were about to throw up.

If it was a practical joke, it was a hell of an expensive one—the stamp was probably worth fifty dollars if it was worth a dime.  Why go to that kind of trouble and expense over a detail your intended victim might not even notice?

Like the calendar up on the third floor.  June, 1941.  He couldn’t fight off the idea that for whoever was doing all this it really
was
still June, 1941.

There was a service station around the corner on Old River Road, and Phil stopped there and bought himself a diet 7-up out of the machine, just to rinse the taste of fear out of his mouth.  Directly across the street was the hardware store, and over that Beth’s apartment.

In two and a half hours she would go to work, and two and a half hours is all the time in the world.  She might even be home.  Her roommate might be gone, or still at work, or dead in a ditch somewhere.  He couldn’t think of anything in life that would make him feel better than to crawl into bed with Beth and just have her hold him in her arms.

But if he went over there he would tell her everything.  He wouldn’t be able to help himself.  And then it would be over between them—she would think he was a nut.

So he couldn’t go, because he couldn’t bear the thought of surrendering her.

He started to walk back to the Moonlight.

When he reached the entrance to the driveway he saw his mail still strewn over the ground, so he bent down and picked it up.  The mailbox door was still hanging open, so he closed it.  There was a circular from Grand Union; he decided he would go through it very carefully and make a shopping list.  He wished he had bought a newspaper in town, because then he could have looked over the classified adds.  It was time he found himself a car.

Oddly enough, his panic had left him—or, perhaps more accurately, it had simply grown familiar enough that he could examine it, as if it were something entirely separate from himself, a curious little object he had picked up somewhere.  Or he could put it aside for a while and live his life just as if it didn’t exist.

He looked up at the roadhouse, and it felt almost as if he were looking into a living face. 
“You and I belong to one another,”
it seemed to say. 
“All this time, I have been waiting just for you.”

When he walked in through the kitchen door, he had the eerie sense of being eaten alive.

Sitting at the table, he took the postcard out again and looked it over, front and back.  “Welcom.”  The voice on the phone belonged either to a living man, in which case this whole business was merely a nuisance, or it belonged to some spectral presence, The Ghost of the Moonlight Roadhouse, who was annoyed at being disturbed.  If that was so, then they would just have to get used to each other.  After all, how seriously could you take a ghost that didn’t even know how to spell?

The writing was all block letters, copybook stuff.  A ghost who stole cigarettes and had dropped out of school in the third grade.  Jesus.

He picked up the phone and this time was rewarded with a dial tone—no more tricks.  He dialed Beth’s number, murmuring each digit as he punched the button.  6-6-5-4-7-5-9.  There was a ring at the other end, then another ring, then the click of a receiver being lifted.

“Hello?”  It was Beth’s voice.

“Hi.  It’s just me.  I got my phone installed.”

“Oh—well, good.”  She made it sound like the nicest thing he could have done for her.  “Will I see you tonight?”

“Sure.  I’ll come for a late dinner, around nine thirty.”

“You’ll have bad dreams if you eat that late.”

“No I won’t.”

The sound of her laughter was so beautiful it made him hurt inside.  God but he loved her.  With someone like Beth, there were no bad dreams.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he said, wanting to say more but not quite able to trust himself.  “Bye bye.”

“Bye bye.”

He waited for a moment, hoping she would speak again—perhaps she was waiting too—and then there was another click and the dial tone again.  He put the receiver down.

The manila envelope from Welcome Wagon was on top of the pile of junk mail.  He opened it up and let the contents spill out onto the kitchen table.  Coupons from a car wash, two dry cleaning places, a pizzeria—one entitling him to a free drink at the Lobster Pot.  A free potted plant from a garden supply place, two dollars off a gallon of exterior house paint, a free pineapple with any ten-dollar purchase at the Greenley Produce Company, twenty per cent off the cost of having your carpet steam cleaned . . .

“Well, I know one carpet that needs it,” he said out loud.

He was answered, almost at once, by a burst of cruel, mocking laughter.  It sounded as if it was right there in the room with him.

Beth Saunders had been having it on with Phil in her apartment almost every night for two weeks before her roommate said anything.

“So who’s the new guy?”

It was early Thursday afternoon, and Millie had a night off ahead of her so she was in one of her more cheerful moods.  She was short, dumpy and would never see forty again, but she never seemed to lack for gentlemen friends.  Though no more husbands, she said—three had been plenty.

“Come on, don’t be coy.  I creep into the bedroom at six in the morning, I can smell the sex.  Besides, you haven’t slept this good in a year.”

She grinned, to show she was just taking a friendly interest, and Beth shrugged her shoulders under a blue quilted cotton housecoat that she thought made her look heavy.  After all, it wasn’t a secret.

“His name is Phil Owings, and he’s just come from California.  He’s inherited a house out here.”

“What does he do?”

“I told you—he’s inherited a house.  He’s trying to sell it.”

“So what is he, a playboy?  What’s he like in bed?”

Beth considered the question for a moment.

“Enthusiastic,” she said, and then added, “grateful.”

This made Millie laugh—her own tastes seemed to run to truck driver types who left bruises.

“What does he do, lick your hand?  Or does he just lick anything he can find?  God, how I love a man with imagination!”

They both burst out laughing then.

“He’s nice,” Beth replied at last.

“Which means that he
doesn’t
have any imagination?”

“He tries hard to please.  He’s been married, but I don’t think he’s had much experience.”

Suddenly, for no reason she could precisely define, she was embarrassed.  Millie was never embarrassed, but for her sex was just a kind of indoor sport—like ping pong, except not so serious.  Phil wasn’t like that.

“He’s invited me over to his place for tonight,” Beth said, almost as if she were offering an apology.  “I think he was just waiting until he found a car he could afford.”

“Then how’s he been getting here?”

“He walks.”

“What is he, a health nut?”

“No, nothing like that.”  Beth smiled, feeling safer.  “His place is only about a mile from here.”

Millie was instantly suspicious.  “Which place?”

“He calls it ‘the Moonlight.’”

“The old roadhouse?  Oh Fuck.”  Millie shook her head and shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her pink terrycloth bathrobe.  “Christ, you sure can pick ’em.  I wouldn’t spend the night in that place, not for anything—not if I could have Burt Reynolds in bed with me.”

“You probably wouldn’t even like Burt Reynolds.  He probably doesn’t smell bad enough for you.”

But the joke fell flat—Millie didn’t even seem to be listening.

“I’m giving you good advice,” she said, somehow no longer willing to look Beth in the face.  “Stay away from that place.  Make him take you to a motel—let him move in here.  Just stay away from that place.  Bad things happen at the Moonlight.”

. . . . .

Bad things happen at the Moonlight.
  Well, maybe not anymore.

Because when Millie, who was usually the chattiest woman alive, could finally he brought to spell out what she meant, it just ended up sounding silly.

“You haven’t lived here long enough to know,” she said, as if excusing Beth for her ignorance, “But I was already working at the Grand Union when Harve Wickham hanged himself up at the Moonlight.  The policeman who cut him down was a drinking buddy of my third old man, so I got to hear all the gruesome details.  I would have anyway.  It was all anybody could talk about for a month.

“And there’s more.  The place was a motel back when I was in high school. You know the type, where they don’t expect you to come with luggage—hell, half the girls I knew lost it up there.  And then some guy slashed his girlfriend into thin strips in one of the rooms, and they closed the place down.  It was real bad.  The newspapers ran pictures of the room where it happened—bloodstains the size of a bathtub.  God, that scared me.  I think I probably kept my cherry for an extra six months, just because of that.

“And then, about twelve years ago, some little girl was found dead up there.  I was working on Number Two then, and living in Stamford, so I just read about it in the papers.”

“So what?  It’s a place, not a person.  You aren’t telling me it’s haunted, are you?”

“Who knows?  But I will tell you this:  whenever anything really bad happens in this town, it always seems to happen at the Moonlight.  You stay away.”

Well, Phil was a nice guy, and it didn’t seem to be doing him any harm to be living there.  He hadn’t said a word about things that go bump in the night.

And that was the important thing, that Phil was a nice guy.  She liked him.  She had liked him from the first time he walked into the restaurant, looking like he expected to be asked to leave.  And she liked making love with him—not because he was such a high-powered stud, but just because he liked him.  She had reached the stage in her life when she had decided that liking a man was more important than loving him.  If you liked him, if he was nice and made you feel good, then love would take care of itself.

All she had to do was to think about her own marriage to feel confirmed in her theory.  At seventeen she had dropped out of school and messed up her life, just because she didn’t think she could draw breath if she didn’t have Pauley Koontz sitting across the kitchen table from her every morning.  She wasn’t even pregnant.  She had been that stupid.

And for a while it had been great.  They had spent the first three or four months screwing like a couple of weasels, until they had started to fight all the time.  Money, sex, the number of nights a week Pauley took off to drink beer with his buddies—they spent their third anniversary living apart.  They had just been too young, that was all.  That was the whole thing.  That, and the fact that Pauley was a dumb ox.

So she had gone back to her maiden name and to pick up where she had off.  Except it didn’t work that way.  All of her friends were married, and some of them even had children.  She didn’t belong with them and she didn’t belong anywhere else.  She had gone to work as a waitress—waitress, grocery clerk, salesgirl at Woolworth, what else was there?—and she had started falling in with guys who just wanted somebody to party with and take to bed.  Pauley had made her feel like an idiot and a shrew, and the ones who followed had made her feel like a tart.

So at last she had given up on men.  They weren’t worth the hassle.

And then in walked Phil.

He was different.  For one thing, he was lonely—just like her.  You could see it in his eyes.  For another thing, he was a little in awe of her.

So, that night at Rumbles she had made a snap decision and had taken him home with her.  It had been a big success.  For once she had made the right move.

And today she was going to see the Moonlight.  She didn’t care a damn about Millie’s stupid stories, she wanted to see it because it belonged to Phil.  She wanted to spend the night in Phil’s bed—the
whole
night—and to get up the next morning and cook him breakfast.

When Millie was gone, off for a day at the beach with her latest ape man, Beth took a bath and got ready for work.  Thursday was a big night at the Lobster Pot, and she usually did a little better on tips.

At eleven o’clock Phil would have his new car parked behind the hardware store and, after she had changed out of her working clothes, they would drive to his place.  He hadn’t said anything about the next day, but tomorrow was her day off and she hoped she could stretch it out until Saturday.  Maybe, if she made it comfortable enough for him, he would say something like, “Why don’t you just not go back?”  That was what she really wanted, for Phil to ask her to move in with him.