Page 64 of A Talent for Murder

Suddenly she was tugging down her skirt and looking over at him accusingly and their eyes met and Alan turned away, feeling a red flush move up his neck. He paid up and left the brewpub, wandering for a while, looking for a different kind of bar, maybe one where the women weren’t so stuck-up. He eventually did find a college bar, sat at a small booth to the back, drinking stouts and watching the college girls. Those girls were definitely up for it, practically begging for it, but not one of them even looked his way.

Back at the conference hotel he thought of getting one last beer at the bar, but as he was walking across the lobby carpet he stumbled a little and had to stop. “You okay?” a woman asked, and took hold of his arm.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.

He made it up to the seventh floor to his room but couldn’t find his key card anywhere. So he went all the way back down to the lobby to get a new one. By the time he was finally in his hotel room, his mind was fuzzy and the room was gently spinning. He took his shoes off, but that was all he removed before climbing onto his bed and falling into a hole of sleep.

The voices—or maybe it was only one voice—didn’t wake him up, but the hand on his face did. At first it was tapping gently, and he thought it might be Martha telling him he’d overslept, or Gilbert wanting to be fed, but then it felt as though he’d been slapped. Lightly, but still a slap. His eyes opened.

She was straddling him on the bed, a pale woman in a tight dark winter hat. “Hi, Alan,” she said.

“Who are you?” His voice sounded gummy in his own ears.

“You don’t know me. I was a friend of your wife’s from a long time ago.”

His eyes were closing again, and the woman held him by his cheeks and shook his head until he said, “How did you... ?”

“I just need to ask you a few questions, okay, Alan?”

“Okay,” he said, suddenly happy to answer questions. It was a dream, obviously, what was happening, and he wasn’t scared of dreams. He was relaxed, floating.

“Do you remember Josie Nixon?” the woman said. She was pale, all right, and her breath, so close to his, didn’t smell of anything. There was something familiar about her, but only a little. Maybe he’d dreamt of her before.

“Are you a ghost?” Alan said.

“If you’d like,” she said, and Alan was pleased that she said that. It was a friendly dream he was having. “I’m a ghost that wants to know about Josie Nixon.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” Alan said.

“But you did, you did hurt her.”

“I threw her off a balcony.”

“Why did you do that? Do you remember?”

He did remember, but the words weren’t moving very well from his head to his mouth. Eventually he said, “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay,” the ghost said. “We all have our reasons.”

“Why are you here?” Alan said.

“I’m here to kill you.”

He knew her words should be scary, but somehow he wasn’t frightened when she said them. Maybe because it was all a dream. Or maybe because he wasn’t scared of death. Maybe he hadn’t been scared of death for a while now.

“How are you going to do it?” he said.

“That’s up to you. You do know there’s a balcony in this hotel room, don’t you?”

“It was the first thing I saw,” Alan said. And now the words were coming out of his mouth without having to think about them first. They were flowing.

The ghost helped him off the bed—it was easier than he thought it would be—and she brought him out to the balcony. Alan could hear the wind but couldn’t really feel it. “So many stars,” he said.

The ghost helped him over the balcony railing—it wasn’t easy—but he lowered himself down onto the narrow lip of concrete just on the other side of the rail. Now he could feel the wind. It was cold, but it was also soft. She touched his shoulder, but he turned around and said, “No, I don’t need your help.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m a grown man. I can do this on my own.”

It was the first time he saw her smile, her teeth like little moons. And then, without any help from her, he stepped into the quiet, yielding air.